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wiped warm wetness from her eyes and took a breath to steady herself. Everything the old baker had ever taught her, every instinct he’d instilled, rose up as if to choke her. She swallowed it down. “My name’s not Duchess, but I guess you knew that.” He was silent, watching her. “Everything I told you about how I came to live with Noam was a lie, too. The old man pounded it into my head to never, ever tell anyone the real story. Gods , I spent so much time being Duchess that for a long time I forgot I was anything else.” She clenched her hands into fists, watching her knuckles turn red, then white. “Before I came to the bakery I lived in Scholars District. With my sister, and my brother, and my father. He was a scholar himself. His name was...Marcus Kell.”
    Lysander’s eyes went wide. “ The Marcus Kell? The War-of-the-Quills Marcus Kell?” He sat back, mouth dropping open.
    She nodded, trembling. “He had three children, and I’m the youngest. My name – my real name – is Marina.” She paused. “I know this must sound strange, but...” She trailed off as a rueful grin split his face. “What?”
    “Actually, it explains a lot,” he admitted. “Of course I knew from the day we met that you were no cobbler’s daughter. How many of their like are friends with Minette?” He sat beside her. “And all that history you knew, emperors and empresses and laws passed a hundred years ago...sometimes it was like talking to a scholar!” He laughed gently. “I figured you for some noble’s by-blow that he hid in the Shallows from a jealous wife. I never imagined...” He shook his head. “Marcus Kell’s daughter. Mayu’s mercy. How did you wind up in Noam’s bakery?”
    And so she told him. The night of the fire, and the hurried trip with Nurse Gelda to the Shallows and Noam’s bakery. The years of silence as she learned to be not Marina Kell but Duchess. The mysterious letter and the coin. The realization, spurred by Minette, that Marcus Kell had not been killed by the Deeps gangs he’d unleashed on the city but by his own hand. And, finally, about the whispers of the old Domae woman on the Godswalk of He Who Devours and that moment in the tunnels when she was certain He’d found her. By the time she was finished the candles had burned down to pools of wax, and the windows were pale with dawn.
    Lysander was silent through it all, drinking in every detail and not interrupting with questions. When she was done he sat quietly for a long time, looking into the empty hearth as though seeing her tale there, played out by mummers only he could see. Finally, he smiled. “We’ve stayed up all night before, but this is the first time I didn’t greet the morning by vomiting on my shoes.” Duchess giggled and threw her arms around him, and when he returned the embrace her laughter dissolved into tears.  
    “In a way, I fell in love with you that day,” he said, against her hair. A tremor ran through his body. “With all of you. The part of you that left me on the stairs included.” He gently disengaged from her grasp. “And now I know Steel better, and Duchess too. And now Marina, I guess.” He smiled. “You have more names than Iris Davari, and that woman’s been married and widowed twice.” She giggled again, feeling as though a great weight had fallen away, and her heart sang. He did know her better, and if that meant understanding certain hard truths, so be it. They were not children any more, and she was not his keeper, nor was he hers.
    They sat in companionable silence for a long time, while dawn stole in through the dirty windows and the Shallows came to life outside. “Your father’s city house burned,” he said, out of nowhere, “but you said he had a country estate, right?”  
    She nodded, uncertain where this question had come from. “We spent every summer there, regular as fog. It was called...the Freehold, I think.” How long had it been since she’d thought of that