“Do you think it will go all right for her?”

“No reason to think it won’t. Though there are things to check sooner rather than later. Position of the kid, that sort of thing. Maybe she’s already had all that looked at.” Sorcha yawned. He rolled over to face me. “She is a lovely girl.”

“She’s a Qin apologist,” I said.

“Is she really?”

“She is. She really is.”

He idly ran his fingers through my hair. “She’s got no idea who I am.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, it’s…it’s not bad, exactly. I knew that going in. But it is strange, you know. I keep thinking she’ll figure it out. Me and Lor—Dirva—we both look like Ma. What’s his story now? He has a Qin pa?”

“Yes. A Qin father and Semadran mother; both were caravaners. He grew up in Mahlez and worked as a translator in a caravan himself before reassignment to the Rabathan Office of Foreign Relations. His Qin father was in a lost caravan and is presumed dead. His mother died three years ago of an injury sustained in a Mahlez factory. He had no brothers and sisters.”

“And you’re his family now,” Sorcha said.

I winced when he said it. “I’m sorry, Sorcha.”

“It is what it is, I guess. And, hell, at least he’s got you. Don’t know why he had to push the rest of us away, but at least he’s got you. I don’t understand him. All these lies he’s wrapped himself up in. I got to get out of this house, though. I’m going to go stir crazy here.”

“We should go to the markets.”

“We got no money.”

“The gold elves are there.”

Sorcha gave me an odd look. He sighed and tucked his face into the hollow of my shoulder. “Maybe I could stake out a spot to play. I got to do something, though. I got no clue how to be around Dirva.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No harm.”

Sorcha and I spent a lot of time at the markets in the weeks that followed. I stole poems from the gold elves, but Sorcha never stayed with me very long when I hung around the live goods. There are slaves in the City, but only in the Qin quarter, and even then they’re rare. City slaves exist in an ambiguous legal gray area—slaves cannot be bought or sold in the City walls, though they can be transported through it. Slavery was not a thing he was used to. The sight of them troubled him. The fact that we could do nothing for them troubled him more. He disapproved of my fascination with them, the way I lurked on the outskirts of their lives. He left me at the slavers’ platforms to play his violin on street corners instead.