“I’m not running for prime minister,” said Lillian, looking into the rippling black mirror of her coffee cup. “My best option is to keep my past quiet and do my best in the here and now. My parents did it—not with the Ospies, but they made their way after Grandmama and the Spice War. It’s a matter of compartmentalization. And humility. You take what you can get, do it well, and strive for better, all the while making people like you now instead of hating who you used to be.”

Frye made a tch noise, tongue behind her teeth. “That must chafe.”

“It comes more naturally to me. My brother has always had a much harder time.” As the words left her, she felt the same horrified inevitability of watching a glass fall from a table, a child run in front of a car. Time slowed. She had made a grievous error.

“Forgive me,” said Frye, disconcertingly casual. “I did know you had a brother, only … I was under the impression he had died? I remember reading something, several years ago…”

Lillian’s lungs felt atrophied, unable to pull in air. Her hands on the saucer and coffee cup went numb. “Yes,” she said. “I did. I mean, I do.” Breathe. In Porachis she had learned how to escape a pit of quicksand—a problem sometimes in the upper waters of the Shadha. Once it had you, struggling would only pull you further in. Calm was the key to escape.

“When I … exited the foreign service,” she said, weighing each clause carefully, “the Ospies made a lot of my family’s missteps. My brother had been pressed into collusion. Blackmailed, really. Threatened. We were all under the impression they had executed him, in the end, but happily—” an inadequate adjective, which failed to convey any of the myriad complications Cyril’s reappearance had occasioned, including this one “—those rumors have proved false.”

“That must have been a surprise,” said Frye. “He just … showed up?”

“He did,” said Lillian. “And in the middle of the worst possible time. But that’s how he’s been since he was born. Mother went into labor when she was in the middle of a closing argument.”

This got Lillian another small laugh. A modicum of tension went out of her shoulders, and she could feel the warmth of porcelain through her fingertips again.

“Born a nuisance?” ventured Frye. She was smiling. Lillian began to breathe normally.

“That’s Cyril. But like I said, I’m not running for prime minister. I can afford nuisances. You can’t. Or, if you’ve got them, you have to make people look the other way.”

“And what do you suggest?”