“And then sent to Aurdwynn, a laboratory for suffering. You think all the sodomites and the tribadists live like you. Hidden and secretive.”

“How else would we live?” Baru asked, and she hid her bitterness under a camouflage, the placid acceptance of a well-conditioned woman. Mostly, at least, she hid it.

“Well, Agonist, I suggest you sail on a long expedition some day, where the officers are mostly women, and the sailors are mostly men, and fraternization between officer and sailor can get you keelhauled.” Apparitor leaned in laughingly. “What’s Hesychast’s word? Ah, yes: everyone goes a bit isoamorous on a long voyage.”

“People don’t change like that,” Baru protested. “I’ve always known—my taste.”

“Maybe you’re different from most people.”

“A ship wouldn’t change me.”

“No?” He patted Helbride’s long prow fondly. “People unfold themselves at sea. They get more complicated. Say a man has a wife ashore, but he goes to sea, nine weeks off the edge of the map. So he takes up calligraphy with the other junior lieutenant. Friends and companions for the journey, with a little sodomy. Then he goes home and he folds himself into his marriage again.”

“He’s lying to himself,” Baru said, “he’s always been that way, drawn to men and women both. He only gets a little freedom on the ship.”

“Maybe. I think most people are like slushy water. Pour them into a new vessel and they’ll change their shape.”

Rage slashed at her, like a knife across the knuckles of her hand. How accomodating of these men to accept that their love could only exist on the edge of the map. Go home, accommodating men, and ask your hygienist about your loves. They will tell you that you are tainting the germ line with sterility, helping to bring on the degenerate doom of all humanity.

Cowards. How dare they be content. If they were real, they would suffer as she had suffered.

“Is that,” she asked, with more acid than she meant to reveal, “why the navy hates your man? Because he’s a sodomite?”

“Oh, no. You think Ahanna Croftare cares about who he fucks? No, she hates Lindon for a simpler reason.”

“Because he’s never been in a war.”

“Exactly. And Ahanna has never lived for anything else.”

She’d met Ahanna Croftare once, during her first days in Aurdwynn, when Croftare commanded the province and their pursuer, Juris Ormsment, was still a rear admiral. Croftare was true salt, a shark-leather sailor with bitter eyes and an old woman’s wiry strength. You could see the muscles in her arms, small and hard, straining against thin brown skin. Baru had studied her cooly, answered her questions competently, and relished a thrill of forbidden lust. On Taranoke you weren’t supposed to notice people outside your decade.

“Svir,” she murmured.

“What?”