“But it’s not easy for you. You want to help people, even strangers”—and she tapped her own chest, below the collarbone—“of debatable character. But that way of life means sacrifice. You don’t belong to yourself. You live in, you know, connections. Duty.” She broke off, shook her head. “Listen to me. As if I know what I’m talking about. I’m the wrong woman to offer advice. Life sucks, especially for good people.”

“I knew that already,” Izza said.

“Sure.” Cat sat beside Izza on the bedroll. “It’s not like the world comes down to one neat choice—help myself or help other folks. Survival and duty. More like, every day we make a hundred little choices, and sometimes they contradict. Hells.” She lay back, arms crossed behind her head, and stared up at the ceiling. “Now you see why I suck at being a priest.” She sniffed. “Food smells good.”

“Plantain,” Izza said. “With chicken.”

“Thank you.”

“Have you ever had one of those clear choices? Between duty and survival?”

“Yeah. I guess.”

“What did you choose?”

Cat didn’t speak for a long time. At last, she shrugged. “I came here.”

Chapter 16

16

Cat took long walks every morning around sunrise. Izza followed her for the first time a few weeks after the affair of the purse, the Penitent, and the poet. Let the tables turn for once. She hung back a block, hiding in crowds and behind rubbish bins, and watched.

Cat strolled south along Dockside, warehouses to the left and wharfs to the right. Tongues and odors mixed on the air: Iskari and motor oil, sweat and leather, Camlaander and Archipelagese and some Shining Empire dialect like silk-muffled cymbals. Oxen strained each step to pull cargo-piled wagons. Old fishermen perched on the edges of docks, still points amid the surge of traffic. Thin long bamboo fishing poles bent under their own weight, and the line’s, and bait’s.

No fish yet.

Cat moved stiff and sore. How much of that was injury and how much withdrawal, Izza could not say. Pieces of both, likely so intertwined Cat herself could not judge. The woman kept her hands in her pockets, her head down. She stopped every few blocks to sight the distance to Kavekana’ai with her thumb, then knelt and scribbled figures on the sidewalk with a piece of chalk. Izza couldn’t make the figures out; every time Cat moved on, she erased the marks with a swipe of shoe or palm. Only an illegible smudge remained.