“Ask Cerisa,” Pakt said. “It was her daughter.”

There was a long moment of silence, while the blueskins contemplated their sandwiches, unable to take another bite, and the guldmen reviewed the bitter past. Melina was the first to recover, shaking her head as if to dislodge a clinging ghost. “But that was twelve years ago,” she said. “So much has changed since then.”

“Has it?” Colt said.

“We have made progress, certainly,” Pakt said. “But there is no true equality between races. I have lived long enough to wonder if there ever will be. Not in my lifetime, I’m afraid.”

“And a guldman may still be arrested for taking a woman by the hand,” Nolan said. “We’ve all seen that. But I don’t think he’d be executed. Not today.”

“I want to see the day when he isn’t even arrested,” Colt said. “I want to see the day when it doesn’t matter.”

“You’ll see the day when it happens,” Melina said, in the quietest voice any of them had heard from her. She reached out and laid her fine blue palm over Colt’s large gold hand. None of the rest of them moved; Colt stared at her, unblinking. “But perhaps there won’t ever come a day when it doesn’t matter.”

*   *   *

The next day’s lunch was less eventful, and only involved Nolan and Melina. The topic was again the contretemps at Corzehia’s ball, since word of the incident had spread throughout the city. Ariana Bayless’s response had been to extend the curfew by a week—although, to give her credit, she did issue a statement saying that any indigo caught baiting a gulden would be subject to swift arrest.

“Trying to be neutral,” Melina said, reading over the accounts in the news. She had requested hard copies from both a gulden monitor and an indigo one, saying that was the only way to get a true perspective on events in the city. “But she can’t help but appear to favor the blueskins.”

Nolan had browsed through the gulden news, utterly fascinated. He had never before had occasion to glance at a gulden monitor, let alone pay for a hard copy to read the pages at leisure. He was surprised to find it printed in dual languages and illustrated with clever, colorful graphics.

“Why do they print it in two languages?” he asked Melina. “Don’t all the gulden speak goldtongue?”

“I think it’s a political thing,” she said, glancing up from her own reading. “Proving to any blueskin who takes the trouble to read their news that they can be fair and accurate reporters.”

“Yes, but, unless we could actually read goldtongue as well, we wouldn’t know if the translation is accurate,” Nolan pointed out.

Melina laughed. “True. I’ll have to ask Colt. Maybe they’re not so respectable after all.”