Sirix had accepted the offered meds, was therefore more comfortable physically, but she had been troubled since we’d left the mountains. Since before, I thought. I knew she didn’t like Raughd, had, on the contrary, good reason to resent her, but I suspected that she of all people in the room that day had understood what Raughd must have felt, to hear her mother speak so easily, so calmly, of disinheriting her. Had understood the impulse that had led Raughd to smash that ancient tea set that her mother clearly valued highly, took pride in. Citizen Fosyf had not changed her mind, about her daughter or about the tea set. Kalr Five had retrieved the box from the trash, and the fragments of gold and glass, the shattered remains of the bowls and the flask that had survived undamaged for more than three thousand years. Until now.

“Was that justice, then?” Sirix asked. Quietly, as though she was not speaking to me, though no one else would have heard her.

“What is justice, Citizen?” I replied with my own question. “Where did justice lie, in that entire situation?” Sirix didn’t reply, either angry or at a loss for an answer. Both were difficult questions. “We speak of it as though it’s a simple thing, a matter of acting properly, as though it’s nothing more than an afternoon tea and the question only who takes the last pastry. So simple. Assign guilt to the guilty.”

“Is it not that simple?” asked Sirix after a few moments of silence. “There are right actions and wrong actions. And yet, I think that if you had been the magistrate, you would have let Citizen Queter go free.”

“If I had been the magistrate, I would have been an entirely different person than I am. But surely you don’t have less compassion for Citizen Queter than for Citizen Raughd.”

“Please, Fleet Captain,” she said after three long, slow breaths. I had made her angry. “Please don’t speak to me as though I’m stupid. You spent the night at the field workers’ house. You are apparently familiar with Valskaayans and fluent in Delsig. Still, it’s quite amazing that you walked to the house and came back the next morning with Queter. No protest, no difficulty. And before we even left the house—before the magistrate left—the field workers had sent Fosyf a list of demands. Just at the moment Fosyf can’t depend on the magistrate’s unquestioning support.”

It took me a moment to understand what she meant. “You think I put them up to it?”

“I can’t believe it’s merely fortuitous, that uneducated and uncivilized field workers, who for ten years and more could not find the resources to strike, choose to do so now.”