A chilly heaviness lodged in her gut. A private conversation, was it? She felt certain she knew what he wanted, and had been fearing it for days. Axamis Dorza, saddled with the feeding of two people who should have not been his responsibility, was going to try to marry her off to young Nikos, to bind her properly to his household so that she could be set to work. Qinnitan had no doubt it was Tedora’s idea. If, as she suspected, Dorza had another family back in Xis, he would be more than willing to do it, just to keep the peace here in his Hierosoline harbor. The thought made her heart as cold as her stomach.

“You asked to speak to me?” she said as the flimsy door fell shut behind her. It was dark in the room, only a single small oil lamp burning atop the large sea chest Dorza used as his captain’s table. The shape there stirred, but so slowly and strangely that for a moment Qinnitan had to fight back an urge to scream, as though she had found herself locked in with a savage animal.

The captain looked up. His face, normally as clean-lined as a ship, seemed to have lost its bones, chin sunk against his chest, eyes almost invisible under his brows. “I have been…talking,” Dorza said slowly. “With men newly come from Xis.” She could smell the wine on his breath from halfway across the small room. “Why did you not tell me who you were?”

A different kind of chill descended on her now. “I have never lied to you,” she said, although that was another lie. She wondered if sacred bees were dying in the Temple of the Hive, as a few were said to do whenever one of the acolytes abused the truth or thought an impure thought. If that’s so, I must have killed at least half of the poor bees by now. What a sinner I have become in this last year, in the simple matter of saving my own life!

“You did not tell me all. I knew you were…” He lowered his voice. “I knew you were Jeddin’s woman. But I did not understand…”

“I was never Jeddin’s woman,” she said, anger overcoming even her fear at Axamis Dorza’s strange, grim mood. “He thrust himself upon me, put my life in danger. He did not lay with me, nor has any man!”

“Well, no matter that,” said Dorza. He seemed a little surprised by her claim. “The knot at the center of the thing is this—you are fled from the autarch’s own Seclusion.”

She took a breath. “It is true. It was that or be handed over to Mokori the strangler, although I had done nothing wrong.”

Dorza lurched to his feet, swaying. “But you have murdered me!” he roared.

“I’ve done nothing of the sort, Captain Dorza. You have done nothing wrong, and can say so. You gave a young woman passage on your master’s order, without knowing your master had fallen out of favor—and certainly without knowing anything of the woman herself…”