I didn't know your identity, but I had an impression of who my opponent was, being surrounded by things you made.

It is a matter of perspective, the difference between opponent and partner," Tsukiko says. "You step to the side and the same person can be either or both or something else entirely. It is difficult to know which face is true.

She turns her head, Bailey catches her eye, and she smiles at him. Not in the way that one smiles at a random member of the audience when one is in the middle of performing circus tricks with unusually talented kittens but in the way that one smiles when one recognizes someone they have not seen in some time.

Good and evil are a great deal more complex than a princess and a dragon . . . is not the dragon the hero of his own story?

I have absurdly vivid dreams.

Trespassers Will Be Exsanguinated.

Have you tried the cinnamon things?" Poppet asks. "They're rather new. What are they called, Widge?" "Fantastically delicious cinnamon things?