He seemed reluctant, but he responded to the note of command in her voice and turned away. She remained upright, propped against the wall, learning that she had remembered, during this exchange, the proper way to breathe. She watched him walk away, saw him joined in a few moments by a blueskin woman who glanced back at Kit with knowing, scandalized eyes. Fine; let them gossip about her. She cared little about what the Higher Hundred thought of her antics. She did not belong to them—would not go to them even if they invited her.

But she did not belong with the gulden either—or not with the gulden she had loved her whole life. That much seemed plain. Slowly, because her legs would no longer hold her, she collapsed to the floor again and laid her cheek across her up-drawn knees. But this time she did not cry. She would wait here till Patrin returned, but she would not cry.

*   *   *

Sereva commented that night on her unusual quietness, but Kit had regained enough poise to merely shrug. This was not something she could discuss with Sereva, with anyone. She had inherited self-control from her Candachi forebears and learned silence from the gulden matrons. She knew how to keep her own counsel and guard her sorrows.

Two days later, she returned to her grandmother’s house, where it was even easier to brood in secret. She still had not decided what to do, what to say to Jex if she ever saw him again (though surely she would; surely this cold stone that had become her heart would thaw and flutter again). She moved through the days automatically, thoughtlessly, and shut down her interior vision because she could not bear the view.

Two days after the debacle at the Complex, a note came for her at the charity bank. She knew before she opened it that it was from Jex, and her heart began that painful, noisy pounding that made it hard for her to hear. “Thank you,” she said to the courier who had brought it, and took it to a corner of the room where she could face the wall in case she could not school her expression.

The note was brief. “I have an hour visitor’s pass for tomorrow at noon,” Jex had written in bluetongue. “Come see me.” There was no apology. There was no word of affection. No indication that they had quarreled and needed repair.

She found a pen on Del’s desk. “I can’t,” she wrote on the outside of the note, and signed it. “Could you take this back to Jex?” she said to the courier in a colorless voice. “Thank you.”