Skandra supposed it was unreasonable to expect Ithacles to have a sense of humor about the injury of his sister. Or about all the men who were going to swing. It was one thing to hang a traitor and make a spectacle of it. How many of the seven hundred odd would be decorating a platform before the month was out? Did it matter? He'd done something that would probably be written about by historians, and his name might even come up as the instigator of the entire series of events that led to an assassin being flung from the heights to his death, but it wasn't as though Skandra was searching for perspective. Ithacles didn't agree with them because he couldn't.
On the other hand, Skandra felt for them.
If the soldier who most exemplified honor was Vedette then they were all in trouble. Even the traitors had been willing to cast aside their weapons and fight not to the death, but to something else. Equally as important. Everyone had a chance to stand for something, but everyone in that corridor save Vedette had known what the stakes were. The true test was not going to be in a hallway. It was going to be Ithacles against whomever they'd sent to murder his father. Skandra thought he would have taken any of those traitors over Vedette to watch his back.
She was a monster.
"I've been hanged," and even saying it aloud made him touch his neck. "Sure as hell ain't much fun. But I think I'd rather be hanged than spend another day with that pretty little viper of yours. Haven't met many people as hateful as her, friend. You should get a new nanny."
Then again, maybe Ithacles didn't see her as a nanny. Maybe to him she was a soldier. Hard to imagine a soldier doing what she'd done, when the rules of the thing were clear. What was worse - that she'd done it at all, or that nobody would care? He rolled his shoulder - only one of them was prepared for that sort of nonsense - and grimaced in Ithacles' direction. Maybe the prince would just pretend that he'd said nothing.