As it happened, they were about evenly matched, which meant the game was fairly dull. Then again, there was little else to do, so they continued playing in a halfhearted fashion. When she corrected him once (“No, you can’t move your choifer there”) he picked up the offending piece.

“How is this called in goldtongue?” he asked.

“Choifer. Same word. It’s a gulden game.”

“Then teach me something else.”

“Do you really want to learn the language?”

“It seems more productive than anything else I could be doing.”

“All right. Let’s see. I’ve never taught anyone words before … Kokta, Braeta. Man, woman. Can you say that?”

He repeated the words back to her, then the words for all the other objects in the room. Then she tried colors, but he began to get confused. There were ten synonyms for red, and nearly as many words for all the other hues. And who needed to know those things?

“Teach me verbs,” he said. “And then important sentences. Like ‘How are you this morning, Chay Zanlan?’ and ‘Have your scientists analyzed my reports?’ ”

“Those seem a little complicated,” she said.

“How about ‘Thank you for the purple tunic’?” he said, growing facetious. “Or teach me to say, ‘I am so pleased with my guest quarters. I am learning choisin so well.’ ”

“ ‘I am an honest man,’ ” she said quietly.

He paused, all the silliness leaving him, and shrugged faintly. “That, too,” he said.

“I will teach you only true things,” she said. “That way you can never lie in goldtongue.”

“I rarely bother to lie anyway,” he said.

“I know,” she said, and he wondered how she knew. “But this time you will have no choice.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Kit had never tried to teach anyone anything before, not language, not math, not manners. She couldn’t tell if Nolan was a quick study or not. He seemed to be. He seemed genuinely interested in learning. He listened closely to her syllables and her inflections, then parroted back whatever she said.

“I am,” she taught him. “He is. We are.”

“I am. He is. We are,” Nolan said gravely.

Her brain wildly completed the sentences, in both of the languages she knew. I am completely intrigued by him. He is like no blueskin I have ever met. We are strangers, and yet, and yet …

Why had he come here, burdened with a murderous knowledge, risking his own safety to tell an unfriendly stranger the most explosive secret? She could not imagine Jex doing the same for Ariana Bayless, had the situation been reversed. No, Jex would have been more likely to commission the virus that would destroy the blueskins; he surely would not have tried to save them.

But that was a terrible thing to believe about the man she loved. Jex would never conceive of such an awful thing.