“The mushrooms!” exclaimed Tisarwat, in frustration. “Nobody will tell me where they’re growing them. I’m not sure what they’re afraid of. Sometimes I think everyone here must be growing them in a box under their beds or something, and that’s why they’re so anxious about Station Maintenance coming into their quarters.”

“They make money off the mushrooms, don’t they? And if the chief of Horticulture got her hands on them, you know she’d figure out a way to keep them in the Gardens and charge outrageous prices for them.”

“But they could still grow them here,” Tisarwat argued, “and still sell them themselves. So I don’t know what the problem is.” She gestured dismissal of her irritation. “Speaking of mushrooms. Shall I send Nine out for something to eat?”

On Mercy of Kalr, Seivarden sat in the decade room with Sword of Atagaris’s Amaat lieutenant. Sword of Atagaris’s lieutenant had brought a bottle of arrack. “Very kind,” Seivarden said, with barely detectable condescension. The other lieutenant did not seem to see it at all. “With your pardon, I won’t have any. I’ve taken a vow.” It was the sort of thing someone might do for penance, or just an occasional spiritual practice. She handed the bottle to Amaat Three, who took it and set it on the decade room counter, and then went to stand by the Sword of Atagaris ancillary that had accompanied its officer.

“Very admirable!” replied the Sword of Atagaris Amaat lieutenant. “And better you than me.” She picked up her bowl of tea. Three had begged Kalr Five for permission to use the best porcelain—still packed away in my own quarters on the ship, because Five hadn’t wanted anything to happen to it—and thus humiliate the Sword of Atagaris lieutenant with an obvious show of my status. Five had refused, and suggested instead that Amaat Three come around from the other direction and serve the lieutenants from my old, chipped enamel set. Three had been briefly tempted, remembering, as the entire crew did, Sword of Atagaris’s threat when we’d entered the system. But propriety had won out, and so the Sword of Atagaris lieutenant drank her tea unconscious of her narrow escape from insult. “Seivarden is a very old-fashioned name,” she said, with a joviality that struck me as false. “Your parents must have loved history.” One of Anaander Mianaai’s allies, before she had grown beyond the confines of the Radch itself, had been named Seivarden.