The victim—Thatcher Wilberforce or Wilberforce Thatcher, Captain Bishop wasn’t certain which—was also running well ahead of Jones and Farrell at the moment. By design, Bishop suspected; the duo would find it amusing to let him get flushed with success, with his judgment clouded by celebratory drinks, then descend like crows on carrion.

Hah, she thought, masking her contempt with an expression of vacuous amiability. Move along, there’s no dead meat for you here. I’ll give you two something to think about, I will.

First, though, she had to get rid of Thatcher, or Wilberforce, or whatever his name was. Captain Bishop suppressed a pre-battle grin and set her plan into motion by turning to the young man.

“You have all the luck tonight,” she told him, doing her best to sound aggrieved. “I can barely keep up, and they”—she waved a hand at Jones and Farrell in an expansive gesture—“are floundering.”

Thatcher blinked. “Luck has to change sometimes. Not their turn to win, I suppose.”

Captain Bishop kept her face straight with some difficulty. Lord, this one was not only drunk, but none too bright. Fleecing the likes of him should be illegal, like shooting a protected species, she thought.

“Maybe it is their turn to lose,” she said. “But whose turn it is to win—that’s the question.”

Thatcher smiled the happy smile of the naive and stupid. “Looks like mine, doesn’t it?”

Bishop put on a thoughtful expression. “Oh, I don’t know.” She waved a hand at her own pile of chips. “I’m not doing so bad myself tonight.”

“Not so good as me.”

“Exactly the point I was about to make,” she said. “Your good luck is getting in the way of my good luck, and it’s going to cut me out of the action when they”—she gave yet another wave, at Jones and Farrell this time—“go down.”

The woman with the hidden knife looked up suddenly. “Hey, wait a—”

Bishop rounded on Jones with an air of sudden belligerence. “Hush. Thatcher and I are discussing who gets to take you to the cleaners later.”

She could see Jones itching to make a quarrel of it—here was another one, she thought, who’d learned the game somewhere that wasn’t well lit and well behaved—but saw her swallow the intended retort and back down. The hunt was still on, after all, and nobody wanted to startle the prey.

Bishop turned back to Thatcher and said, “The way I see it, somebody’s going to take their money tonight, and it’s going to be either you or me.” She gave the young man a confiding, semi-tipsy smile. “I’ve got a proposal for you.”

“What sort of proposal?” asked Thatcher. He was not yet so drunk, apparently, that he couldn’t at least fake caution.

“We cut the cards,” she said. “High card stays in the game, low card takes his or her money and leaves the table.”

Thatcher looked dubious. “I don’t think—”

No, you don’t, Captain Bishop said to herself, and that’s why these two are set to clean you out. Aloud, she said, “That way we don’t waste our good luck on each other.”

He was wavering now, she could tell. Jones and Farrell weren’t looking at each other, but Captain Bishop could feel them thinking that whatever the outcome of the cut, one mark would be as good as the other. No matter who won, the duo would have their fun tonight.

Good, she thought. Keep on believing that for a little while longer.

To Thatcher she said, “I’ll put fifty stones on it.”

That brought a spark to the young man’s eyes. “Fifty stones and a seat at the table?”

“You got it,” she said.

“You’re on.”

Captain Bishop picked up the deck of cards, shuffled and squared it, then slid it over to Thatcher for his cut. He turned up the two of diamonds. She retrieved the deck, shuffled again, and made her own cut. Not feeling the need to be ostentatious, she gave herself the jack of spades.

When it came to cards, there were more kinds of skill than just one. Captain Bishop had staved off boredom, on Addicks and elsewhere, by picking up most of them.

“Sorry about that,” she said to the young man—not so young, really, perhaps even slightly older than she was herself, but Lord, he made her feel ancient. “Maybe you’ll get your turn another night.”

Captain Bishop watched with an expression of amiable dimness as Thatcher collected his winnings and left the tourist lounge. Then she turned to Jones and Farrell with a different expression altogether.

“Well, that takes care of him,” she said. She picked up the cards and began shuffling them. “And now, my friends—let’s play an honest game of poker.”

3

Gymnasium at the New Barracks

Tara

Northwind

November 3133; local winter

The gymnasium at the New Barracks in Tara was considerably more than its name implied. The sprawling complex, larger than many commercial arenas, existed in order to serve the physical training of all the Northwind Highlanders stationed at the fort or elsewhere in the city of Tara, in addition to providing a headquarters for the various regimental sports teams. The gymnasium’s wide, domed roof covered not only the main arena but also a number of more specialized facilities—rooms with pools for swimming and diving, rooms for working out with weights and exercise machines, rooms filled with mats and bars and mirrors in which the regiment’s soldiers could practice skills ranging from fencing to folk dancing.

Countess and Prefect Tara Campbell of Northwind and Paladin Ezekiel Crow currently occupied one of the smaller training rooms. The two of them were alone—the benches along the walls of the room held no spectators or fellow athletes, only the tote bags of bottled water and exercise gear that Crow and the Countess had brought with them. For propriety’s sake, Tara had left the door to the room standing open.

The Countess, a petite woman with short platinum-blond hair, was wearing loose white trousers and a wraparound top secured with a black belt. The Paladin was dressed similarly, though less formally. He’d shed the quilted jacket he’d worn against the November chill, though not yet the thin leather gloves he’d worn with it. Underneath the jacket, his dark shirt and trousers, cut with enough room in them to move freely in all directions, could nevertheless have served in a pinch for everyday casual wear.

Except, Tara thought, that Crow was never casual. His plainer garments carried no explicit or implied markers for level of skill and training—which was, she suspected, exactly the point. She didn’t think he was covering up a lack of proficiency, since nobody made it all the way to Paladin of the Sphere without being good at fighting both with and without weapons; so he was probably very good indeed.

Good, and devious about it as well.

Tara decided she approved. She’d used the “don’t hit me, I’m cute and harmless” act a few times herself against opponents who were stupid enough to fall for it. She smiled at Crow.

“I have to thank you for agreeing to this. I need the practice, and it’s hard to find someone who can forget for a while that I’m the Prefect and the Countess—at least for long enough to give me a decent match.”

“I’ve gone too long without exercise myself,” Crow said, limbering his body by twisting it. “And for much the same reasons. So you’re doing me a favor as well. What do you say… five minutes, first fall, or over the line?”

“Going over the line,” Tara said. With a wry smile, she added, “Given the burdens of rank and command, it’s the only way I’m likely to be doing it for the foreseeable future.”

Crow gave her a little bow. “You know yourself, I suppose. And the line will be?”

With some difficulty, Tara kept her expression politely unrevealing. Inwardly, though, she was smiling. Crow had responded in kind to her teasing comment—meant to put him off balance—which suggested that he might, indeed, not hold back out of misplaced courtesy in the match to come.