The whole thing seemed less like something the attendant was doing than something that was happening to her. And I hadn’t noticed anyone saying kind things to her. But my attention had strayed from the kitchen, and now I saw that one of the field overseers, the one who had met us the day we’d arrived and had seemed completely oblivious to the field workers’ ability to speak and understand Radchaai, was now kneeling next to the chair where the still trembling, moaning attendant sat. “You should have called me sooner!” the overseer said sharply, and someone else said, “We only just saw her!”

“It’s all to stop the spirit speaking,” said Sirix, still standing beside me in the corridor, still disgusted and, I was certain now, ashamed. “If it speaks, likely it’ll curse someone. People will do anything to stop it. One petulant person can hold an entire household hostage for days that way.”

I didn’t believe in spirits or gods to possess anyone, but I doubted this was something the attendant had done consciously, or without a true need of whatever the reaction of the other servants might provide for her. And she was, after all, constantly subject to Raughd Denche with very little real respite. “Sweets?” I asked Sirix. “Not just honey?”

Sirix blinked once, twice. A stillness came over her that I’d seen before, when she was angry or offended. It was as though my question had been a personal insult. “I don’t think I’m interested in lunch,” she said coldly, and turned and went back into her room.

In the main kitchen, the head cook, clearly relieved by the presence of the overseer, took firm charge of the dismayed, staring servants and managed to admonish and cajole the rest of the work from them. Meanwhile the overseer put fragments of honey cake into the attendant’s mouth. Each one fell out onto her lap, but the overseer doggedly replaced them. As she worked, she intoned words in Liost, from the sound of it. From the context, it must have been a prayer.

Eventually, the attendant’s moans and shaking stopped, whatever curse she might have uttered unspoken. She pled exhaustion for the rest of the day, which no one, servants or family, seemed to question, at least not in Eight’s hearing. The next morning she was back at her post, and the household staff was noticeably kinder to her after that.

Raughd avoided me. I saw her only rarely, in the late afternoon or early evening, on her way to the bathhouse. If we crossed paths she pointedly did not speak to me. She spent much of her time either in the nearby town or, more disturbingly, over the ridge at the field workers’ house.