Baru chewed on her tongue. “You want us to pirate an Oriati diplomatic ship.”

“Oh no, we won’t have to use force, not at all! My people—” Baru could have shuddered at the way Iraji said it, for she knew that tone, my people. Tinged with mockery, lest it be thought he loved his home too much. “My people are kind, and they’d be eager to aid us.”

“What do you mean ‘your people’? You mean the entire Oriati Mbo with its four great federations and hundred-odd nations, they’re all kind people?”

“Well put, my lady”—he bowed his head—“but one thing unites them all. Mbo means a thing that is whole because it is connected. To be Oriati, in the classical sense, is to live a life bound by trim, the art of connectedness. Trim will oblige them to help you.”

Vaguely Baru remembered trim as a sort of spiritual ethics. Aminata had been very skeptical of it, and so Baru had been, too. “Fine. What makes you think we could even find an Oriati diplomatic ship? We’re in northern waters, as far as you can get from their home.…”

“We are at the edge of war, my lady. Diplomats will be sailing to Falcrest, and the trade winds carry them past Aurdwynn.” He hid his head in the book for a moment, and Baru sniffed a hidden truth, the same secret she’d smelled on Apparitor.

“I’ll trouble your lord about the idea,” she said, and settled back to her own reading.

“Perhaps you should go to the bowsprit at sundown,” Iraji suggested, “with a bottle of his special whiskey and two cups. He’d like the company.”

“After he flogged his favorite cook for me? I doubt he’d like mine—”

“He would like the company,” Iraji repeated, almost, but not quite, snapping.

He wanted Baru to cheer Apparitor up.

It hadn’t occurred to her that she had any power to do so.

*   *   *

THE dinner bells called the day shift down. Baru went up to the deck and climbed out onto the bowsprit, where a fan of ropes converged on Helbride’s hummingbird prow. Apparitor sat out there, straddling the steep bowsprit, kicking his legs like a boy on a horse.

“Hello.” Baru chimed a tin cup against the bottle of whiskey she’d stolen. “Drink with me?”

“Mm,” Svir grunted, but he patted the bowsprit by his side.

They sat together on the bowsprit, two wary feet from each other. She said, recklessly, “How did you meet him?”

“Hm?” Apparitor glanced over, one coil of his hair pressed between his lips, like an idle child. “Ah. You mean my man.”

“Lindon Satamine.”

“Yes, yes, stop looking so smug. Are you here to tell me our love is unnatural and doomed?”

“No!” Baru cried, caught by her own awful lie. “No, I—I promise I’m not.”