“Having children matters, if you do it right,” he agreed. “If you raise them to be honest citizens with kind hearts and uncompromising ethics. Otherwise, you’ve made the world a worse place, not a better one. But marrying? I don’t know that in and of itself it’s something that improves the world.”

“But love always improves the world,” Kit said. “It—it loads the scale on the side of good. It’s a counterweight to all the sadness and deceit and just plain evil that make the world so wretched.”

“If you marry for love,” Nolan said quietly.

She had no easy reply to that. “So what will you tell Leesa,” she asked at last, “about your adventures in Geldricht? What will she think?”

“I don’t know that I’ll tell her any of it,” he said. “I don’t think—I really don’t think—she would condone the genocide of the entire gulden race. But I don’t think she would seriously consider it a bad thing if the whole nation died out through some mysterious, innocent infection. And she wouldn’t understand why I found it important to save Chay if I could. She would not have harmed him herself, you understand, but she would not have considered it her responsibility to warn him, either. It would not seem important enough to her.”

“That will be a very big secret to keep from her the rest of your life,” Kit said gravely.

He shrugged and smiled. “From everyone, I imagine. At least if I want to attempt to try to live any kind of normal life.”

Kit shook her head. “How strange. Here I am, wanting to shout of Ariana Bayless’s treachery to the whole city, and you and Chay are thinking of how to conceal it. Is she to be allowed to get away with this, then? Perhaps to try something worse another time? Is no one going to bring her to justice?”

“I thought Chay would do all that.”

“He says not. He wants to avoid civil war.”

Nolan closed his eyes and passed a hand over his eyes. Kit took the opportunity to study the lines of his jaw and cheekbone. He was such a common-looking man, attractive enough but undistinguished. How had his features come to seem so extraordinary to her? How was it she could close her own eyes and call up the exact shade of his skin, delineate the double scallop of his brows? When had he become so familiar, when had he become so exceptional?

“Well, I’ll have to think about that some more,” he said, and he sounded tired. He dropped his hands to his knees.

She wanted to reach over and comfort him. She wanted to say, You have done enough. Let someone else take up the banner. But she sat where she was, clasping her hands in her lap, and said nothing.