There was a murmur at the door. “Would you let them go in peace, please?” Baru shouted. “Just step away a minute so they can have their dignity?”

While the Secretary of the Trade waited, she got out the window, spider-climbed down the loose mortar and stone, and dropped to the flagstones. “Lao!” she called, almost laughing. “Lao, over here!”

Lao stood there watching her quietly. Baru would’ve expected more surprise. With a thrill of unease Baru fetched up on her toes, staring, trying to remember—

It wasn’t Lao.

Before the massacre at Haraerod, Baru had called a priestess to her tent. She had to confess something and so she called for someone to listen. Everything I’ve done. For Taranoke. But I’ve come too far …

The woman had been a diver, and a midwife, and she’d sat with her long legs beneath her while Baru thought how much she looked like cousin Lao.

Her name was Ulyu Xe. The ilykari priestess of Wydd who Tain Hu had teasingly implied might be Baru’s lover. She had soothing eyes, and a summer-ice calm. She might be in her thirties.

So she had gone with the rest of the rebellion to Sieroch. So she had been captured with Tain Hu’s other companions and dispatched to the Llosydanes for interrogation.

But she was not under interrogation. She was here, and she was wearing a knife, and she had every reason to murder Baru on the spot, a killing which Yawa could deny any part in.

“Oh shit,” Baru said, and would’ve run—

—except that the woman who wasn’t her cousin fell gracefully to her knees, prostrated herself, and said, in Aphalone as wonderfully accented as Tain Hu’s, “Your Majesty. I am your sworn companion.”

*   *   *

“LET me understand,” Baru said. “Yawa found you yesterday.”

“Yes. And we refused to speak with her.”

“And you were at this Morrow Ministry station. But the station chief, he just lets you run around like chickens? He lets you try to buy passage off the islands? That’s the stupidest interrogation protocol I’ve ever heard.”

“Is it?”

Baru shook her finger at Ulyu Xe, very nearly prodding the other woman in the throat. “Stop that. Stop that Wyddish ‘everything’s a question’ horseshit, I can’t stand it.”

Xe smiled and drank her beer. Behind her a Maia journeywoman sawed away at her gut fiddle and sang of green-gold Aurdwynn and its lonely lads. This was a tavern called the Floating Island, full of Aurdwynni expatriots, and they called out to Ulyu Xe her in the homeland accent, ulYou shee, not the mangled Aphalone Ullyu zee.

Baru tried, again, to prod at the bruise. “You’re not horrified I’m here?”