“And he is even now in the city, doing the bidding of my son,” Chay added. “Which means his own life may be forfeit before long. In which case care for my family will fall into other hands.”

He was so calm, as he had been yesterday when Nolan had told him the dread news. He had always been a man able to meet trouble with an unmoved demeanor, but Kit marveled at his control now. Catastrophes beset him from every side; it was hard to choose the most wretched circumstance.

“What will you do?” she asked, because she could not help it, because she herself could see no way out of the mess. Any of the messes.

“I will wait,” he said, “for the pronouncement of the doctors.”

“And then? How will you confront Ariana Bayless, how will you revenge yourself upon her?”

“The survival of the gulden nation would be revenge enough, I think,” he said. “But I will consider my other options.”

She stared at him, struck by an unexpected insight. “You aren’t going to tell anyone, are you?” she asked. “About the virus. About its creation. You’re just going to say—you got sick in the city. You aren’t going to say how.”

“To spread that information,” he said seriously, “would be to light a match to tinder that will burn to ashes. There would be no way I could stop the clans from arming and storming into the city for murder. There would be a civil war that would destroy all of us. Not a gulden man or woman would be left standing. I have spent my life avoiding that. I have yielded land that I could have defended. I have suffered insults that no one has overheard. I have preached concession when every man around me wanted aggression. And why? Because Geldricht would lose that battle. We have technology that the indigo do not have, and we could make bloody inroads on their people and their land. But they have the numbers, and they have the geography, and they have the land. They cannot be starved out—they cannot be attacked on any front but one, and that one can be guarded till the world ends—and there are twice as many of them as there are of us. Civil war would annihilate the Geldricht nation as surely as this disease could. And my entire goal, my entire life, has been the survival of the race.

“No, I am not going to inform the gulden of Ariana Bayless’s treachery. If I could, I would tell the indigo, for I think they would rise up in fury and oust her from power. But they would not believe me, guldman that I am.”

“Then I’ll tell them,” she said swiftly.