[One evening--after internal debate and an afternoon of wine, ostensibly for courage, but really just because he loves wine--Nikos decides, abruptly, to contact his cousin before she contacts him. Or before she is somehow used against him. His second cousin? Third? Fourth? What is a family tree but a morass, curated largely so those who care about title and inheritance can move about their pieces on the board.

He almost loses himself in that thought before he remembers. Sidony Venaras. Eight, nine, ten years younger. Nevarra City. He can picture the exterior of the Venaras home, Nevarran in its architecture and in the color of the stone used to build it, its gardens trim around it. His father, pointing it out to him as the carriage went past. Maybe he saw her at a holiday, a party, an interchangeable cousin bedecked in finery.]

All right-- [Heavily, like he's picking up a conversation when they never started a conversation in the first place--a habit of his, she'll find, if they take up any sort of regular correspondence--] --you're Sidony Venaras of Nevarra City. I'm Nikos Averesch. We're related, somewhere, somehow.

Now it's been acknowledged.