She was in the school at Iriad, and the halls were not of ash-concrete or coral but deep warm brown panels of koa, Taranoke’s warrior wood. Koa had a black grain that swirled like ink in water and made strange symmetrical shapes like narrow moth wings. Here some artist had used brushed ink to emphasize parts of the grain, teasing out Aphalone characters, as if the Taranoki trees had grown Falcrest’s language. In this school the mingling of cultures was encouraged, as fuel is encouraged to go into a fire. The passage was crowded with bookshelves. Farrier’s school served a banquet of texts for its gifted students, and everywhere Baru went she was tempted by the titles. This was a school that let you choose your own studies as you pleased … for what it taught was the correct way to choose.

She was going to an assignation. She could feel it in her heart and in her thighs. But when it came it was over almost before she recognized it: by impulse (that was how the decision would plead, like a guilty trafficker, before the judges of memory—It was only an impulse!) she took a roundabout way to her class, so that she would pass second cousin Lao coming back from her graces, the special lessons where Lao learned how to avert her eyes and attention from those she wanted to smite with her beauty and her charm. Indirection, the teachers taught her, indirection and passivity; you create the opportunity for them to choose to admire you, and they will never know they are in your power.

Lao came this way to think without eyes on her. In this dream she had been taught early and well to mind her eyes. There had been no accusation of incipient tribadism, and no prescription of “manual stimulus”—even in the dream Baru knew it was rape—to rejoin Lao’s pleasure with the image and scent of a man. (A useless task, as well as abhorrent, for Lao was never only a tribadist). But she did not seem surprised to find Baru in her side corridor.

Baru looked at the floor. There came that moment, that wordless tension, when it was right to raise her eyes and say hello—

But Lao was not looking at her. She turned a little as she passed, to peer up at the shelves, where a beam of sunlight through clear hive glass illuminated a Manual of Expedition. She reached up to brush the spine with her fingers, walking for a moment on her bare toes, so the sheer full-body modesty veil drew up over her calves. For a moment she was in the sunlight, poised beneath the translucent veil. And Baru knew she was using her grace in invitation.