“Look, da,” she said, “I’ve caught money.”

“Don’t be stupid,” her mother said, giving Baru’s head an affectionate scrub with her knuckles. “If you keep money in a jar, it’s just a piece of paper. It’s worthless without the people who value it. You cannot capture money. It lives only as it moves.”

“That’s right,” Farrier said, giving her mother a kiss on the cheek. “Remind you of anything?”

It did. It reminded Baru of the Llosydanes. How could you treat a culture as separate from its connections? How could you draw a circle around it and say, “This, this is the culture, and so it will remain?” A culture wasn’t a final product, like a cup of coffee in alabaster, or a sordid climax in an execution alley. People didn’t have culture, they did culture. In fact, culture was like a mill: it accepted knowledge and people, and it changed them in certain ways, and it even redesigned itself in the process. Change was intrinsic to culture.

How could you draw a preserve around the Llosydanes and say, “They shall not be altered,” if intercourse and dialogue between cultures was culture?

And if that were true—

Then what right did Baru have to “save” Taranoke?

How could she pretend that the culture of her childhood was the right one, the one that had to be preserved, rather than the culture of a hundred years before or a hundred years after? How could she deny the arrival of Incrasticism, when her own people were the descendants of Maia arrivals on distant shores?

Cairdine Farrier had called Falcrest’s ascendancy as inevitable as the rising tide.

How could Baru fight the tide?

She rose up from her appallingly soft covers, stretched, growled, looked out the window, and saw her cousin Lao standing in the sooty, fire-touched square outside.

Baru gaped in shock. Could it be Lao? What obscene unlikeliness would put her on the Llosydanes? But the woman did have Maia skin, and those rapturously long full legs, and strong swimmer’s shoulders that Lao might have trained into, if she decided to bulk up. She wore a diver’s costume, a tightly knotted strophium, a breechcloth, an ankle knife. As divers in Aurdwynn did, she’d even shaved herself seal-smooth from head to toe except for a cap of black hair.

Baru dashed the cup of freshwater over her face, tied herself up, and wiggled back into her trousers. Someone rapped at her door. “What!” Baru called.

“Secretary of the Trade! Open up!”

Oh fuck. Baru shrugged into her jacket, snapped up her purse, and shouted, “Uh, what about?”

“We want to ask you some questions about yesterday’s events in the currency trade!”

“Right. Just a moment, I’ve got to wake up my whores!”