The long, curving bathhouse window framed black and gray cliffs and ice-sheeted peaks. On one far end, just the smallest corner of the house we were staying in. The guests here must have prized this place for its vistas—few if any Radchaai would have thought to make an entire wall of a bath into a window.

The walls that weren’t window were light, elaborately carved and polished wood. In the stone-paved floor was a round pool of hot water, bench-lined, in which one sat and sweated, and next to it a chilled one. “It tones you after all the heat,” said Sirix, on the bench in the hot water, across from me. “Closes your pores.”

The heat felt good on my aching hip. The run had, perhaps, not been terribly wise. “Does it, now?”

“Yes. It’s very cleansing.” Which seemed an odd word to use. I suspected it was a translation of a more complicated one, from Xhi or Liost into Radchaai. “Nice life you have,” Sirix continued. I cocked an interrogatory eyebrow. “Tea the moment you wake up. Clothes laundered and pressed while you sleep. Do you even dress yourself?”

“Generally. If I need to be extremely formal, though, it’s good to have some expert help.” I myself had never needed it, but I had provided that help on a number of occasions. “So, your forebears. The original Samirend transportees. They were all, or nearly all, sent to the mountains to pick tea?”

“Many of them, yes, Fleet Captain.”

“And that annexation was quite some time ago, so as they became civilized”—I allowed just the smallest trace of irony to creep into my voice—“they tested into other assignments. That makes perfect sense to me. But what doesn’t make sense is why there are no Samirend working in the fields here. Or anyone but Valskaayans. And there are no Valskaayans working anywhere but in the fields, or one or two on the grounds. The annexation of Valskaay was a hundred years ago. No Valskaayans have made overseer in all that time?”

“Well, Fleet Captain,” said Sirix evenly, “no one’s going to stay picking tea if they can get away from it. Field hands are paid based on meeting a minimum weight of leaves picked. But the minimum is huge—it would take three very fast workers an entire day to pick so much.”

“Or a worker and several children,” I guessed. I had seen children working in the fields, when I’d run by.