[b]Alina![/b]

It’s late morning, and the room is full of the smell of Eupheria making pancakes in the attached mini kitchen. The shawl wrapped around your shoulders is peacock green, which clashes with your violet silk pajamas. You’re perched on the arm of a plush chair with a mug of iced sweet tea in your hands.

Welcome back to the House of Hospitality.

“So now that he’s lost all of his kids,” Jess is saying, lying on the couch with her head in Momma’s lap, “and he failed to get the Caduceus... he’s out of cards to play, right? So you should wait. Let me go back home and rally some of the pegasus riders, bring some more princesses back, and when we show up at his creepy jungle lair, it won’t matter how many awful things he can turn into.”

“I doubt he remained,” Momma says thoughtfully. “If I were him, I would have gone to ground the minute I saw Alina take the Caduceus. If he has any sense, he’s a moth hiding in a tree, or a snake curled up in a log right now.”

“He’s not like that,” Jess says, frowning. “He doesn’t believe he can lose. Right, Lina?”

***

[b]Kazelia![/b]

The answer to [i]so who talks first[/i] is Ninian.

“Crazy, huh?” She looks at you, then at Azora, then at you. She’s got her hair up in a bun today, and is wearing — of all the things — navy blue overalls. “The three of us on the same team!”

What nobody at the table has breached yet is whose team, exactly, it is. Azora is studiously not looking at you, sawing through a sausage with surgical precision, her fork and knife moving on their own.

She’s going to try and take your spot on the team. She has to be in the spotlight. You know that and she knows that. So the question really is...

Who makes the first move?

***

[b]Adila![/b]

“I am proud of all of you,” Adila I says, softly. It’s the first sign of honest, unguarded emotion she’s shown in her whole speech thus far. “And I know I will be proud of all of you for as long as you stand by the tenets and ideals of the Watch. As our founder... I hereby dissolve the Watch, taking its arsenal into my custody with the intent of dissolution or concealment within the Labyrinth. You are, one and all, freed of the Bronze.” She hesitates, a moment, and you see the twitch of her lips. “I would dismiss you, but I have given up that right. Do as you see fit. That is all.”

The parade ground erupts into quiet, frantic conversation. Already some of the younger recruits are swinging their packs onto their shoulders and heading out for the gates, but most are clinging around the Old Bastards.

Who approaches you, looking for support, Princess Adila Formerly Of The Watch?