I held my tongue admirably well. I had no option but to hold my tongue. If I was reassigned due to complaints, I knew it would be to somewhere unsavory. The best I could hope for was a factory. The worse—and probably more likely—scenario was reassignment back to the border. I went into the lecture hall cowed and defeated. I was there early that day, so I had a chance to look through the roster. The only Semadran name on it was Shayat Bachel’Parvi. Shayat herself came in shortly after I’d discovered her name, some minutes before the arrival of any of the other students. “Good morning, professor,” she said. The way she said it was a mockery. I gave her a curt nod and refused to look up at her.

“Is this all the classes are to be?” she asked. “Just lectures?”

“That is how the Qin conduct them, yes.” At least, that is how Dirva conducted his classes, and he had had no complaints as far as I knew.

“What a stupid way to do it. How will you know we’ve learned anything? How can we learn a language if all you do is explain it to us in Qin?” It was a good point. I looked up at her and told her as much. She smiled. “I’m not just here for the attendance records,” she said. “I do want to come out of this farce actually able to speak it.”

I smiled back. I was on the verge of asking her how she thought that would work, what she thought would make the class useful, and then she splintered what little ease I had with her. She pointed at me and raised her eyebrows. “Weren’t you wearing this yesterday?”

I blushed. I frowned at her and went back to studying the roster. I told her it was none of her business.

“You still have chalk on your shirt,” she said.

“Perhaps I have more than one chalk-covered shirt,” I snapped.

“Perhaps, but I doubt you have more than one chalk-covered City shirt with the same exact badly-sewn patch on the left elbow.” She wrote something down on a slip of paper and handed it out to me. “My father is a tailor. I’ll get you a good price.”

She was right about me: I was still very young, and very green, and because of that I took offense instead of seeing it as the offering of help it was. I petulantly ignored her. At the end of the class, she dropped the address of her father’s shop on my podium as she walked by.

Late that afternoon, Dirva and I discussed how the day had gone. We sat on the floor of his apartment facing The Reader, each armed with a steaming cup of tea. “You should go see that tailor,” he said.

“I will not give that woman the satisfaction,” I said.