But we can compare the hash to a list, and guess at the meaning.

We come to a house full of those we betrayed most hideously, and they do not act as we expect. They have given us a strange cartouche and we can only guess what it means.

And we realize—I realize—that I haven’t given Ake Sentiamut enough thought.

She’s been so many women to me. How did I never notice? She taught me the arts of makeup and disguise, so I could survey Treatymont’s slums. She was the regent I left behind when I took her people to war. She was Tain Hu’s friend who taught her to read Aphalone. But—I must remember!—the women she has been to me aren’t all of her. No, I never knew Ake when she was a wife, or when she became a widow, or a spy.

Ake is an adept in the technocratic arts. She organized the other survivors of Tain Hu’s house. She made them into a committee.

Why?

Because a committee has dignity and power. A committee solves problems by sitting down and talking, not by beating and knifing each other. If I deny that the people at this table are a committee, then I deny the form Ake has imposed on this awful reunion.

And then they return to the protocol of shouting, beating, and knifing. Starting with me.

This had to be a negotiating table, because it was the only sane way they could face Baru with any self-possession and self-respect.

“Very well,” Baru said, coolly. “Let’s negotiate.”

And she sat at the stool Ude had prepared for her.

*   *   *

ULYU Xe was the stenographer, of course, and little Run was the page boy who brought water and supplied the ink. Ude Sentiamut wore a forester’s jerkin, even if he did not have his bow; Yythel the herbalist had adopted a simple dress of coarse-spun wool, not much different from the one she’d been wearing on the morning of death at Sieroch, when she was with Xate Olake; and the cook Nitu wore an Oriati-style khanga, which she must have taken from Execarne’s wardrobe.

Dziransi and Ake sat side by side at the far end of the table from Baru. “Representing the rebellious duchies of Aurdwynn,” Ake said, crisply, “I am Ake Sentiamut, regent for the duchess Vultjag. Representing the Stakhieczi Necessity, Dziransi of the Mansion Hussacht. And representing the Faceless Emperor of the Imperial Republic of Falcrest…”

“Agonist,” Baru said, and, at the glares and exhalations from the table, with a mote of defensive pride, “it’s my work-name.”

“You are an Imperial agent. That was made clear to us at Sieroch.”

“Yes,” Baru said.

“Is it true, as our duchess supposed, that your—theft—of our rebellion was a gambit to secure that Imperial agency?”

“Yes,” Baru said, high-chinned. “Yes.”