Dirva had pulled strings. I found out later he pulled as many strings as he could find, as hard as he could. It was not a simple thing to get me out of the border captain’s clutches: I was a young elf of no reputation whom no one particularly cared about. There was no reason to ruffle feathers to get me freed. The razehm who’d come with him, who had issued this order, did so knowing there would be raised eyebrows, gossip, and possibly an investigation. He was not friends with Dirva. They did not speak, not once, the entire trip to the Tarquintia train station. There was no warmth between them. I can only surmise that this Qin judge owed Dirva something, but whatever his motivations, they were never revealed to me.

The orders issued by that silent razehm on the camel next to me, a man who never so much as looked in my direction, were reassignment orders. He had, for undisclosed reasons, had the concerns of disloyalty stricken from my papers, and he had assigned me to a teaching position at Ralah College in Rabatha. I was to take over Dirva’s linguistic instruction classes.

* * *

There is no such thing as a private car for elves on the Imperial trains, but there is such a thing as private conversation in a language just you and another speak. Early in my training, Dirva taught me a dialect of Vinkenti—Vahnan—specifically for this purpose. We elves were packed into our car tight—you couldn’t breathe without brushing against a foreign body. Dirva and I whispered to each other in Vahnan, our voices low and drowned out by the sounds of bodies shuffling, vying for space, the sighs, the cracking knuckles. “Thank you, Dirva,” I said. My voice held within it reverence and devotion. All the bitterness from before had drained away.

“You got yourself detained, Ariah. Why did you do that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where is your sense, Ariah?”

“I don’t know. But I…I don’t regret it. I wish I hadn’t been detained, but I don’t regret it.”

He sighed. He squeezed my shoulder. “There are ways to resist where you keep yourself safe. You can’t barrel in like that. You have to have leverage. The Empire is not the City.” He paused. “The City isn’t what you think it is. It is no haven.”

“I know that.”

“I hope so. I don’t mean to lecture you. I have no right to; I’m not your mentor anymore. But be more careful from now on. If you must court attention, make sure you’ve got a way out of trouble.” He pulled a stack of letters from his bag. “These are from your parents.”