“For the first hundred or so miles, rocky but you wouldn’t know it. I mean, there’s enough topsoil to grow houseplants and a few scrubby trees, but there’s solid stone not far under the surface, and you can’t really farm. Actually, nothing in Geldricht is really arable except the valley. They graze sheep in the mountains—and they also mine about a dozen products—and then once you get to the coast, it’s mostly fishing and harvesting sea kelp. If you were asking about major industries.”

“Just—I don’t know much about Geldricht. Just asking questions. So that’s what they live on? Sheep and fish and a few grains from the valley?”

“Well,” she said dryly, “there’s trade.”

“With the blueskins?”

“More than there used to be, but about three-quarters of the trade is foreign.”

That jerked his head around so he was staring at her. “Geldricht trades with foreign nations? Trades what?”

His surprise made her irritable. Hadn’t he ever read a history book? “Gold, silver, copper, diamonds, coal. Those are the big ones. In return, they buy spices, some foods, some textiles. Almost all the silk you’ll find in the city was imported by Geldricht. You didn’t know that?”

“I never had a reason to ask about it.”

“Well, what kind of industry did you think they had in Geldricht?”

“I didn’t—I don’t know. I guess I assumed they were all farmers or something.”

“They’re all farmers in Inrhio. That’s where the fertile land is,” Kit said tartly. “Remember? The indigo usurped the gulden cropland during their great march westward.”

“That was hundreds of years ago.”

“The races immigrated here hundreds of years ago,” she corrected. “In roughly equal numbers. And both races first settled on the eastern edge of the continent. But gradually the indigo appropriated more and more of the land, until the Kaelian War and the resulting treaty which split the continent—”

“I’m familiar with the history,” he said.

“Well, you don’t seem to know too much about anything else, so I wasn’t sure this was one of the things they taught you in your obviously inadequate school courses.”

“We did focus more on indigo heritage,” he admitted, “and the glorious achievements of the First Mothers of the Higher Hundred.”

She could not help it; he made her smile again. “So anyway. Pushed to the western coast, the gulden adapted. They found metal, so they began to experiment with electronics. They found an ocean, so they sailed it. They found friendly nations on the other side of the sea, so they began trading. Actually, these days they don’t trade in products so much as technology. Chay’s cousin has set up an overseas operation in the country of Dournier where he’s helping construct some incredibly complex transit system. It’s going to make him the head of one of the richest families in Geldricht.”