“I did not mean to dishonor you with my stupid questions,” the boy said in a serious voice. “May I still remain at the table for this meal? I will not trouble you again.”

Nolan tried to keep his voice serious. “I’m not used to impertinence from children,” he said. “But I’m willing to overlook it this time if you’ll behave in the future.”

Now the head tipped up and the green gaze met his somewhat fiercely. Where did they get such colors for their hair and eyes? “I said I would,” he replied somewhat reproachfully.

“Wendt,” Pakt said in a warning voice.

“And I will,” Wendt ended, docile again.

“Then by all means, stay and eat with us,” Nolan said.

That settled, everyone was happy again, and the boys and the adults arranged themselves around the table. Nolan noticed for the first time that there were only seven places set, and the men of both races occupied them all. The other two times Pakt had had coworkers to his home, they had had glorious masculine bacchanals, and it hadn’t occurred to Nolan to wonder why Pakt’s wife wasn’t present. But he had expected her to preside over the routine meals that would take place while guests were in the house. Well, perhaps the woman (whose name he could not ever remember hearing) had fed the little girl earlier, and taken her own meal at the same time. Hard to know. He would follow Pakt’s lead.

But it was even stranger than he had expected. Once the men were seated, Pakt’s wife began to serve them—silently, almost invisibly—laying portions of meat and rice on their plates and sidling off to serve the next male. “Thank you,” Nolan said when she served him, but she did not respond, and no one else at the table, not even Pakt, said a word to her. The boys acted as if she was not in the room, as if their food had appeared magically upon their plates, prepared by unseen hands, and no courtesies were due to the cook. Nolan could not believe it. Even in the Higher Hundred households, the servants were thanked or at least acknowledged. He would have expected a man as decent as Pakt to behave at least as well toward his wife, no matter what gulden custom might dictate.

But Pakt was cutting his meat and quizzing Wendt on a school problem. Hiram’s glance intersected with Nolan’s, and the other blue-skin shrugged. Sochin, like the gulden boys, appeared not to notice that anything other than a disembodied spirit had hovered near his head. He was laughing at Wendt’s and Pakt’s conversation, and eating his food with gusto.