“Because it is a war,” Chay said in a very gentle voice, “and I have almost no weapons to hand.”

Kit turned to Nolan, who had not moved, not even to yank her hand away from Chay’s, as he so desperately wanted to do. He had traveled all this way, gambled his entire life, to save this man; and now all he wanted was to claw out the guldman’s heart with his fingernails.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered to Nolan. “I’m sorry for everything. I didn’t want to hurt you this way. I didn’t even want you to know.”

“I knew,” he said, his voice no louder than hers.

There was a moment’s complete silence. Chay, startled, had dropped Kit’s hand. She stared at Nolan with disbelieving eyes. The room seemed to have been sucked clean of air.

“I knew,” Nolan said with renewed energy. “I heard the story of Casen Solvano’s life among the gulden. I wondered who he had found to bear his only son. There are not many indigo who would follow such a man to Gold Mountain—Roetta Candachi might be the only one in sixteen generations. So who was Anton Solvano’s mother if not a gulden woman?” He pointed an accusing finger at Kit, who stood with one hand pressed against her mouth, gazing at him. “I knew all along you were gulden, if that’s the secret you were afraid to tell me. It made no difference to me. I fell in love with you anyway.”

“Nolan,” Kit said through her fingers, and shook her head.

Chay recaptured her hand and did not look likely to let it go anytime soon. The look on his face was part anger, part determination. “Then we have no secrets between us anymore, which is best among civil men,” he said in a voice far less genteel than his words. “She is still my hostage to your medications.”

Nolan laughed, surprising even himself. “Kit won’t fall ill, Chay Zanlan,” he said scornfully. “How stupid do you think I am? She’s had a full course of vaccines in the past nine days. I started dosing her before we left the city.”

Kit’s hand spasmed in Chay’s hold, as if she would jerk herself free. The guldman’s grip tightened; the hostility in his gray eyes was impossible to miss. “Then she is only as safe as the rest of us,” Chay said. “And you, Nolan Adelpho, must be the judge of just how safe that is.”

“As safe as I could make her. As safe as I could make any of you,” Nolan said. “I have no fears for her on that score. But I worry about her safety in the hands of a man who could use her as a choifer in such a mortal game.”

“You have been playing choisin,” Chay said.