“Behold!” they said. “Behold the people on Prince Hill, chosen to rule! We voted your families to give birth to our lords, and we are very satisfied with those young lords, oh, what else would we be? We are a satisfied people, the Oriati, a smug people, we do everything best. Don’t we?”

There was a hesitant cheer. Hooray? We are the best?

The satirist rose up nobly, their chin to the sky. “It is best to raise our Princes on a high hill away from the city, away from the fields and the grasslands where our people do their labor. Far away from the sickness and the filth of the cities, where we have invented new ways to debase and ruin ourselves. Up here our Princes can concern themselves only with trim and taboos! Up here our Princes can play games of principle instead of working in the fields and the filth! Today the taboo is against going uphill too quickly! That is the most important thing!”

The crowd murmured. Abdumasi put a worried hand to his mouth. Kindalana frowned in thought. Farrier made a note in his book.

The satirist took a huge stilted step, struggling to mount an invisible slope, and almost fell on their face. “My trim!” they howled. “Oh, my trim! Oh Princes, aid me, aid me! I do not have malaria or any rent to pay! I have good water and I am free of bandits and ugly spouses with rotting teeth! But my trim is wounded, for if it were not I would grow bored, and pick fights with little cities far away! Help me avoid boredom, oh Princes!”

The crowd began to revolt. “This isn’t satire!” an Abd housekeep yelled. “You’re just saying horrible things!”

Kindalana had pulled her clerk-friends closer, and she was muttering to them with an expression of deep thought. Tau-indi wished they’d brought some clerk friends to hold close, too. Maybe three clerk friends, instead of two.

Why did they feel this way? Why had their own mood had been hooked to Kindalana and Abdumasi, like a plow dragged behind a horse, splitting the earth to wet soil and worms?

They saw Kindalana’s father, Padrigan, looking at Tau’s mother, Tahr, with nervous longing, admiring the green star on her throat and the snake of jewelry that curved across her bare stomach.

But Tahr was looking upward, pensively, at the sky.

She had been to Falcrest.

“I sense a certain barrier of class,” Farrier said, and took another note.

14. Is the Oath Kept?

14

IS THE OATH KEPT?

SHE woke in the captain’s suite of her new flophouse, alone, angry, still tangled in a dream about money.

She had been a child. She was showing Cairdine Farrier her butterfly collection, her killing jar. She had a gorgeous monarch in the jar, and it was beating its wings of paper money against the glass as it died.