Raughd turned. Took three long steps over to the tea set on the stand. Picked the box up, raised it over her head with both hands, and threw it to the ground. Glass shattered, blue and green and gold fragments skittering across the floor. Kalr Five, standing by the door, made the smallest noise, audible to no one but her and me.

Then silence. No one moved, no one spoke. After a few moments a servant appeared in the doorway, drawn, no doubt, by the crash of the tea set. “Sweep this mess up,” Fosyf said, catching sight of her. Her voice was quite calm. “And dispose of it.”

“You’re throwing it away?” I asked, partly because I was surprised, and partly to cover another very small noise of protest from Five.

Fosyf gestured unconcern. “It’s worthless now.”

The magistrate turned to Queter, who had stood straight and silent this whole time. “Is this what you wanted, Queter? All this heartache, a family destroyed? For the life of me I don’t understand why you didn’t put your obvious determination and energy into your work so that you could make things better for yourself and your family. Instead, you built up and fed this… this resentment, and now you have…” The magistrate gestured, indicating the room, the situation. “This.”

Very calmly, very deliberately, Queter turned to me. “You were right about the self-deception, Citizen.” Evenly, as though she only remarked casually on the weather. In Radchaai, though she might as well have used Delsig, which she knew I understood.

Her remark wasn’t meant for me. Still I replied. “You were always going to speak if you could, whether you thought it would do any good or not.”

She lifted one sardonic eyebrow. “Yes,” she agreed. “I was.”

18

From the moment we had left Fosyf’s sitting room, Sirix was tense and silent, and she did not say a word nearly all the way back to Athoek Station. This was a particularly impressive length of silence because Sword of Atagaris’s injury meant we’d be taking up more seats on the passenger shuttle from the elevator to the station than we ought, and so we had to wait a day for a flight with the available extra space.

Sirix didn’t speak until we were in the shuttle, an hour from docking with the station. Strapped into our seats, Five and Eight behind us, their attention mostly on Queter’s sister, who’d had a miserable time the whole flight, among strangers, missing home, disoriented and sick to her stomach in the microgravity but refusing to take any medication for it, upset further by the way her tears clung to her eyes or broke free into small liquid spheres when she wiped her face. She had finally fallen asleep.