“No. She was guilty of treason. Anyway, you would have kept her in a cell, and tested her to madness.” Baru talked to Apparitor but she was speaking to herself, trying to bargain down her scream. “This was the most humane option.”

Humane. The word you use when you put down an animal. Why would she compare Hu to an animal? That was the wrong word. The wrong word.

“She certainly loved you,” Apparitor said, with terrible resignation. “I’m sure of it.”

“Oh, I slept with her once. Hardly a marriage.”

“Fuck you,” he said.

To lie like this! To lie about Tain Hu, about what lived between them! It was so anathema and yet so necessary: it felt like a razor unraveling her, one cut all the way from her anus to the back of her neck, degloving her whole body and turning her inside out so her secrets were on the outside to become her lies. “I was curious about her, and I always satisfy my curiosity. But of course it didn’t last. Isn’t that the nature of love between women? Unnatural and transient?”

Apparitor slugged her.

She deserved it, she did deserve it, she greeted his pale fist with her cheek and her upturned face. His knuckles tore the tip of her nose and Baru’s body fired Naval System combat reflexes like lines of rocket fuel igniting—brace your back foot! Roll with the hit! Eyes open, Baru, no matter how much it hurts you keep your eyes open.

You watch the strike come in.

*   *   *

TRUTH, as hard as the fist:

Apparitor had his own lovers. He’d confessed it to Baru: sodomites get hot iron, but we do not envy tribadists the knife. And he remembered his men fondly, too. When she’d awakened from her coma after Sieroch, she’d seen him drawing a beautiful Stakhi man, nude, brooding. He drew men differently than the classicists. He put more thought in their faces.

Apparitor could never have killed his lover.

That was why the Throne possessed him, the way it possessed parents who couldn’t drown their illicit children in vinegar, seditionists who couldn’t recant their books and smash the presses, religionists who refused to abandon their gods.

Falcrest offered its Imperial agents a beautiful poisonous choice: a life of blackmail and control, or the death of your dearest deepest reason to exist.

Damn them. Damn them damn them damn them. Baru called on all the powers she could name for their damnation. Caldera gods, I am your daughter Baru, and I beseech you to awaken your molten stone and burn them. O ykari Himu, and Wydd, and Devena who stands between you, I call on your high virtues to punish Falcrest with storm, and with cancer, and with the excess of moderation which is called weakness.

Tain Hu wanted to live a free life.

Falcrest could not abide it.