“Occasionally lovers,” Xe said, as if this were a slightly less serious commitment than friendship, and then she smiled. “She was a good woman. Impossible to teach. A very good woman.”

“She’s dead,” Baru croaked.

“I know.”

“How?”

“She told me that if you ever cared for her, you’d kill her. And if you didn’t kill her, she’d die before she let herself be taken to Falcrest for reconditioning.”

“Yes,” Baru said, now trembling too, and not with exhaustion, “yes, she was right. She convinced me what I had to do. She was magnificent.”

But the pure awe of Hu’s death was tainted now. The call of the frigate birds over the drowning-stone rang false with laughter, Farrier’s laughter, his venom was in this story now. Falcrest is saved! He had celebrated Tain Hu’s death and somehow by doing it he had slithered back into her and seized her choice and made it his own.

Baru couldn’t talk about this anymore. She threw a coin at a small and heavily defaced statuette of the late Hasran Cattlson.

“What happened when Yawa found you?”

*   *   *

OUT west and down south, past the bridges that bound the twelve civilized islets together, there stood a tall tower islet called Moem, too stony for agriculture, covered in scrubgrass and wildflowers. But an old Falcresti man named Faham Execarne had set up a little farmhouse there.

Execarne was the Morrow Ministry’s station chief on the Llosydanes.

He had simple rules for prisoners. If he didn’t make regular signals that he was well, all his guests would be killed. Other than that they had their freedom. They might row over to one of the other islets and work a trade. They might try to hire a ship off the Llosydanes. Of course they’d have no papers, so no legitimate trader would take them on, and even smugglers would hesitate—the navy paid very well for the names of captains who transported fugitives.

He would prefer if his guests stayed with him, helped him keep his chickens and work his fields. He cooked a mean fishsteak. He could put a little weed in their pipe and a little leaf in their cheek. And if his new field hands decided to talk a little about their past as insurrectionists, that was their business, in their own time.

“It’s a pleasant life,” Xe said, equitably, “and some of us want to stay. Although I miss my daughter.”

Baru, of course, stumbled obliviously past this invitation to ask after Xe’s family. “Do the Oriati spies ever trouble him?”

“No, no. I believe Execarne’s good friends with their spymaster here.” She fell into a gravelly imitation: “‘A collegial exchange of information helps keep the peace.’”