“In Falcrest I certainly am. But if your plan works, we’ll be going aboard an Oriati Prince-ship. We need Oriati protection for an Oriati place. We need a bond of trim.” Iraji held out the tile. “You come from Sousward, you must know the word. How do they say it in the Whale Words? Trim is a power that connects people.”

He offered her the card again, with a long, elastic patience that would soon, Baru felt, snap back against her. Iraji had grown very bold with her. Perhaps he felt he’d earned her attention when he saved her life.

“We already have a bond of sorts,” Baru admitted, “don’t we? You saved my life at the Elided Keep. You saved my life again, from Munette.” And maybe pinched Baru’s ledger of secrets before he did. But wasn’t that a sort of favor? Keeping Tain Hu’s coded trust far from Baru’s precarious heart?

“I was doing my duty.”

“And you did it very well.”

“Did I? You think I did a good job of breaking my friend Munette’s arm?”

“Well, you didn’t faint, at least. Why are you always fainting?”

He made an expression of extreme patience, extremely tested.

“I’m sorry,” Baru offered. She was sorry, she had great reserves of sorrow, it was not hard to make some of it fungible and grant it to Iraji. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be difficult. I’ve just been in…”

She did not want to talk about pain. Instead she reached out and took the tile with the woman’s face from his hand. “What do we do?”

“We learn to play Purge,” he said, and grinned suddenly. “Oh, I love this game.”

*   *   *

HE dealt a deck of wooden cards faceup, then poured out a pile of dry beans. Baru knelt to help him separate them into piles of ten. She remembered the night she’d looked up cryptarchy with Muire Lo, dictionaries and thesauri scattered around them. She’d known by then that he would, in all statistical likelihood, come to love her. She was a fair enough young woman and he spent a lot of time with her. There were Incrastic charts one could use to obtain the resulting odds of love.

She had failed to prevent that. Lo had died.

Maybe when Iraji said he had to create a bond of trim, he meant she had to care for him. Maybe that was his magic, an Oriati magic, concerned entirely with the connections between people.

But like all requirements, such a bond could surely be falsified.

“You think I’ll like this game?” She turned over one of the face cards. On the back, tiny inscribed Aphalone letters read, THE PRINCE-AMBASSADOR, and then, handwritten, Tau-indi Bosoka.

He hummed as he counted beans. “Your tastes aren’t hard to cater to, my lady.”