Kip wasn’t looking for a lesson. “I looked back as far as my grandfather and gave up in disgust,” he said. It was the best insult he could slip around the thick knot of fear blocking his throat.

“A weaker man would say I owe you, Kip. For what you did on that ship about my … surfeit of red. But I’m not that man. I respect that you have the strength to not be groveling at my feet. However. Defiance is initially interesting, but it grows tiresome quickly.”

“I’d love to hear about the family,” Kip said snidely. The mere fact that he could say ‘the’ family and not ‘your’ family was a huge victory.

“You’ve killed my desire to reminisce. Let it be enough to say that I earned everything we have. By my generation, we were wool merchants—wool merchants with debts and a worthless title that my drunken wastrel older brother nearly sold to pay them. Everything we are—even you, little bastard who’s weaseled his way into legitimacy—is because of what I’ve made us.”

“You wrested control of the family from your brother?” Kip asked, incredulous.

“Wrested? I’ve had more trouble with a bowel movement. I handed Abel a stack of papers for his signature when he was hungover. He barely glanced at them. I paid his own steward a few danars to countersign as a witness, saying it was contracts for warehouses. He didn’t read them either. I seized all the accounts, and my brother didn’t even have the money to pay a solicitor to bring it to a magistrate. Nor the friends willing to lend him such sums.”

Kip reached out for the brandy, unthinking, and this time Andross let him take it. “Oh, thanks,” Kip said automatically.

Andross grinned, as if this too were a victory.

“You’re telling me that three generations of Guile brothers have been at each other’s throats?” Kip asked.

“Three? No. Six that I know of. There was a tale that a witch cursed us when Memnon Guile wed her and then, as we Guiles do, cheated on her. Or more precisely, she found out that he was already wed back home. He left her brokenhearted and wandered the world, having adventures, and when finally he arrived home years later, he was murdered by his brother, who had taken to … comforting his wife in his brother’s absence. Since then. That was six hundred years ago, though I personally doubt that our blood has even a drop of that Guile’s blood in it. Many other families have taken the names of the heroes of old; I’m not sure why we would be different. Not that such a thing bears repeating in public, yes? Regardless, the tale held enough force that it was said in our family that if your wife was older, and you already had one son, not to have any more children, lest you end up with two boys. Not that a son and a daughter guaranteed any better. Selene Guile the First had more mercy than most of the men in our family—or less, depending on what you value. She exiled her brother Adan Guile, after castrating him so that he would have no heirs. She managed to get one of the kings of her era to make the family name and title matrilineal. Which it stayed for a hundred and fifty years, until an enterprising Guile son managed to wrest control back.”

Kip took a drink. He barely noticed the burning. “And you think that’s an acceptable way for families to act?”

“Acceptable? One doesn’t reason with lions. One doesn’t accept reality. One adapts to it.”

“But you aren’t like my father, you didn’t adapt to a situation where your brother was betraying you. You were the betrayer.” The words had sounded so logical, so reasonable in Kip’s head before he said them. But as they came out the blunderbuss that was his mouth, they expanded into a razor cloud.

Andross Guile’s expression froze, his knuckles whitened on his brandy glass, showing the hit. It was with visible effort that he contained his rage. He hadn’t become the Red—of all his colors—by accident. “How is it to be you, Kip? Cocooned in layers of protective ignorance thicker than your blubber, a blundering whale with sperm for your brains and unintentional ruins all around? Abel thanked me for saving this family. He thanked me for saving him from a burden he was ill fit to bear, and a string of failures that drove him to self-destruction.”

“So he forgave you. That tells me something about him. What does it tell me about you? Except perhaps—”

“Insolent boy!”

“—that you would destroy a good man who swam seas you wished to call your own? That you are a sea demon, mindless in your territorial rage, destroying your enemies, true, but also driving away even—”

Stop, Kip! Stop before—

“—your own family. Even finally your own wife.”

Oh. Shit.

Andross’s eyes glittered, and Kip’s training took over. His eyes darted back and forth from the whites of Andross’s eyes to his hips: the first places he would be able to detect danger, whether magical or mundane. Then out to his hands, one of which held the crystal brandy glass, which could be flicked toward Kip as a distraction, the other of which could be used to signal Grinwoody.

“Took you long enough,” Andross said. “Finally reached the bottom of your rhetorical toolbox, have we?”

“Huh?” Kip asked. His sense of impending doom hadn’t relaxed one whit, but Andross didn’t look dangerous. Everything Kip’s gut was telling him was contradicted by what Andross’s eyes were saying.

“Bringing up my departed wife. Such an obvious target that I wondered if you were either stupider than I’d imagined, or more self-controlled—and therefore more dangerous—than I’d believed. Turns out I was right about you after all.”

“Did you even—”

Andross raised a finger, and Kip shut up. He hated himself for it a moment later, but his brain must have realized that raised finger was a lifeline, and, for once, had taken control from his tongue.

“Something you should realize,” Andross said. “Merely because a target’s obvious, and an initial line of defenses stands in place, that doesn’t mean the target isn’t still there, and still soft as an egg in its shell. You understand this, Lard Guile. Your disgusting obesity can withstand one insult, at least to the public eye, but even the slightest brush causes your secret self-contempt and shame to grow. So you’ve found my obvious weak spot. Congratulations for having eyes. Just know this: Grinwoody, if he says one more word about Felia, blow his brains out.”

Kip heard the click-clack of a hammer at his left ear. “With pleasure, my lord,” Grinwoody said.

Slowly, so as not to be thought to be attacking, Kip glanced at the pistol, and the man. Grinwoody was indeed pleased, and the pistol barrel looked huge. Too close to Kip’s eyeball for him to see how good the quality of it was, how likely to misfire. But then, this was Andross Guile’s pistol. It would be the best. Kip was getting faster at drafting, at moving, but he wasn’t this fast. Not yet.

“You wouldn’t,” Kip said. Stupid thing to say. Grinwoody was even standing off to the side so that the gore—and possibly the bullet—wouldn’t fly from Kip onto Andross.

“If you think I’m bluffing,” Andross said, leaning forward to pour himself more brandy, “say her name.”

The moment stretched between them like a lazy cat. Kip knew already that he was going to fold. Andross knew it, too.