As soon as they were alone Bernicia turned on her brother. “Why?” she demanded. “Why are you doing this?”

  “Why am I defending our city? Isn’t that my duty?”

  “Rushing into this mad expedition is not defense. If you fail we will have no defense.”

  Mercutio considered his sister, searching for the right words. “Can we – should we – just do nothing?”

  Bernicia heard something in her brother’s voice she had rarely heard there before. He was serious, deeply so.

  He went on: “The world is falling apart day by day. Do you know I dread messengers now? They ride up to the palace and my heart sinks. All the news is bad or worse. Another town taken by tribesmen, another ship captured by pirates. A rumor of great armies on the steppes, or giants in the mountains. Giants! We thought they were stories to frighten children, but now they terrorize the miners of Abazzano.

  “Look at us! We rule only half of our own city. The rest swarms with our own dead, cursed to live on human flesh. Look at the walls of this room!” Pointing to his left, he said, “There is a painting two hundred years old, showing the city in its glory, with the temples and towers shining in the sun and the great villas of the rich merchants lining the shore.” Pointing to his right he said, “And there is a painting done by a man whose funeral you and I attended, showing the fleet of two hundred ships sailing out past the lighthouse for the war with the Delta pirates. Two hundred ships! That was not five years before you were born, but it might as well have been in another age. We are a shrinking remnant of what we were in living memory.

  “And when we try to rebuild, to stage a festival like in the old days, what happens? A bunch of mad monks attack us, so instead of a harvest dance we will have a mass funeral. And you think I should do nothing?”

  Bernicia tried to match her brother’s seriousness. This moment, she thought, this moment deserves the best attention we can give it. She breathed deeply and said, “Only one man in that room has ever done what you propose to do, attack a city from the sea. And he said you should wait. Yes, he is old, but he is no coward. He sits at your right hand, as master of war. Should you not listen to him? You know what the fight in the outer harbor means to him, that he brought up to urge you to caution. Should you not at least meet with him, give him time enough to explain his reasons?”

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  “I suppose I must,” said Mercutio. “We will spend much time together this week and next, planning. I will listen to him.”

  Bernicia hesitated. “I wish you would think of the risk. What we have achieved. What we might lose.”

  “Ships? Men? We can build more ships, and this year we have more people than will fit within our walls. Arandia and Aemone are worse, surrounded by great camps of hill people with nowhere else to go. I am not afraid to lose men.

  “What I fear is losing spirit. That if we sit all winter doing nothing, reading bad news from the hills, watching storms blow over, our courage will rot. That by the time the skies clear in spring we will have no courage to strike back, and we will find some other reason to delay and then another until summer is here and fall and then we are in this exact spot again.

  “I have dreams like this. Some matter is brought to me for a decision, and we agree to put it off, and it comes back again, exactly the same, and no one but me seems to realize that we faced the same thing the day before, and they all give me the same reasons to put it off, and even though I rage inside I go along with them, and it comes back over and over until I wake in terror.”

  “Have you been too much with our mother, that you are now ruled by dreams?”

  “No,” said Mercutio, shaking his head. “The dream is only my own fear, rising from my liver to my hippocampus, or whatever the doctors say. But I do not think I am a coward. People tell me that I am brave. Maybe they flatter me, but they never tell me I am wise, or good. Courage is the virtue they see in me.

  “So I think, if I am afraid, if fear haunts my dreams, how does the rest of my city feel? Even you, my wise sister, think only of what we have lost and what we might lose. Surely many people lie awake in terror, afraid to sleep because of what their dreams will bring.”

  Bernicia swallowed and pushed back the memory of her own dreams. “What I fear is losing you,” she said. “Our father is dead, our mother wandering in the stars. You are all I have left. All Calyxia has left. If you die, what will become of the rest of us? You will have escaped, gone off wherever heroes go. I will be here, stuck between the Admiral and the Procurator, in a town full of refugees and men who despise me as a vain little princess. What would I do? What would Calyxia do?”

  “How does it do with me? I see it shrinking every month. I look to the future and I see it shrink to nothing.”

  “In the hills it shrinks, but at sea it grows. We have more ships every year, more sailors, more goods in the market.”

  “Yes, ships are our strength. So we must use them.” Bernicia started to answer then, but Mercutio cut her off. “Sister,” he said, “I need your counsel. You are the clever one. I need your help to do this thing. Because I must do something and this is all I can think of to do.”

  Bernicia took his hand. “You will always have my counsel, and anything else I can do to aid you. You know that.”

  “Then help me punish these monks for what they did to our city.”