“Please don’t treat me as if I’m stupid,” she replied with a tone of censure. “Up until a week or two ago the two of you seemed like newlyweds. Now it’s as if you want to be together and can’t.”

“He is not married to me,” I said softly. “So it seems we’ve at last caught up to the reality of our situation.”

She caught my hand. “I know you a great deal better than I know Maram, Amani. I even like you—it would help us maintain a friendship if you were honest.”

She was right. I had become friends with her and gained her trust. The least I could do was repay that trust in kind.

“He followed me to the meeting with Arinaas,” I said. “And his discovery of what I did in secret…”

Time away from him had not made it any easier. Idris was one of the kindest people I knew—to imagine that he could stand idly by while our whole planet suffered violence and indignity made my stomach turn. I knew the cost was high, but I knew too that if we did nothing, the cost would only grow.

“He could not stomach it,” Rabi’a finished for me.

I shook my head. “He won’t tell anyone, but—”

“But he would rather you lived than risk your life for freedom.”

“You sound like you agree.”

“I don’t, else-wise I would not be sitting here with you. But I understand the sentiment—such a sentiment kept my mother alive and my family prosperous.” She looked at me thoughtfully. “The difficulty is in knowing when you have waited long enough, and when just surviving becomes untenable.”

She poured tea in the following silence. I expected her to say something—a criticism or agreement. But nothing came. She uncovered the dishes and set the platter of bread between us, and we began to eat.

“What news, then?” she said a little while later.

I hadn’t breathed a word of my next assignment to anyone. I wrapped both hands around my tea glass and fixed my eyes on the way the light played on the tea’s gold surface.

“They’re going to kill the king,” I said, looking up.

She was a practiced courtier, so there was little change—a minute shift, barely noticeable, in the tightness around her mouth.

“You are frightened?” she asked.

“No. And yes. The stakes are high. The cost of failure…”

“Is incalculable. But the reward for success…” Her voice trailed off as she thought. “It is cleverer than open war.”

“Cleverer?”

“No one knows how many cavaliers the Tazalghit have—and with the armies of Tayfur, and the support of the Salihis and their sworn houses, the force would be quite formidable.”

“But?”