She could think of a dozen guldmen who would have done what Jex had done, if they had had the nerve and the skills. More—she could think of twenty, of fifty. But she knew other guldmen who would never condone the terrorist acts Jex had engineered. Jex was a product not only of a violent society, but a reckless personality. He had learned courage and discipline from Chay, but he had also been much indulged; he knew that anything he wanted, he would eventually be able to get. He had not been above much scheming, as a child, to get his way. He was still scheming, but the stakes were so much higher.

She could not forgive him just because she loved him. She could not forgive him just because she understood him. She could not forgive him just because he was a guldman, and his race had been abused by the indigo, and he had some reason for his anger and his attitudes. There was still no justification for his actions.

“I hope. I hoped. I have been hoping.”

But was he any worse than the indigo, when it came to that? What had Ariana Bayless done—conspired to destroy the entire gulden race? Jex’s random slayings seemed insignificant in comparison. Could Kit, after all, judge Jex and abandon him when there was so much greater evil in the world—and in power?

But how many blueskins would condone Ariana Bayless’s actions? Not Sereva or Granmama, certainly. They would rise up in horror and denounce her, they and all the Higher Hundred. They had no love for the gulden, but they would never endure such inhumanity. For so long, Kit had been used to thinking of the blueskins as violent and the gulden as victimized, but she could see now that it was not always so. The races each had their own crimes and their own criminals, but it was not their skin that made them behave so. It was the individual brain that made the individual choice; it was the heart that outlined its own dictates. She could not just embrace the one race and reject the other. It was going to be more difficult than that.

“I fall. I fell. I am falling. I have fallen.”

And then to judge a man on his own merits, you must consider everything about him. What he believed, what he was taught to believe, and whether he examined those teachings with the cold searchlight of adult reason. How he behaved when it was easy, how he behaved when it was hard. When he was cruel. When he was thoughtful. Whom he valued more than himself.