Cornelius Hickey robs graves. Wouldn't you?

The cause is long since lost. Richard Stoker's life as measured out in documents.

August, 1388: Richard II of England has been dead for seven years, and his cousin the Prince of Wales is having a hard time.

No man has aught of what he leaves.

India takes the cup. (Or: people disappear all the time, but seldom to such scenic locales.)

"You would not hurt me," is what he says, careful, caged in. "You could never hurt me."

This, they have argued to a stalemate of irreconcilable disagreement; could so continue to press in unwinnability until the Heavens broke open overhead and the mountains crashed down astride them. But Sui Zhou serves to live as much as a man as he does a blade, and in that he is long intimated with the lay of blame for a tool in the wield of a hand.

Tang Fan is not a simple man, by any means.

Susan and the man in black make a palaver.

Hal gets stabbed; Hickey gets invasive.

Ding Rong, in his narrowed dagger-keen focus on his task, is unsure of the time when he is first made aware of Wang Zhi’s approach. He knows only by the dark of his workroom, dim-lit by his low-burned candle, that it is well into the evening. He knows only that it is no other visitor but Wang Zhi, circling into his periphery, portended by a flutter of draping fabric, because no other but Wang Zhi would dare to come unannounced.