Was goodness still good if you hewed to it out of tactical necessity? Was there, Baru wondered, any difference between being good and pretending to be good for your own gain, if you took the same actions in the end? Was there any difference between telling the truth unconditionally, and deploying the truth in service of your agenda, if you told the same truth?

Maybe the Oriati thought so.

Maybe the difference between truth-for-itself and tactical truth was the only difference that mattered. Maybe the most crucial and subtle distinction in life was the difference between someone who was truly good and someone playing at goodness to gain power.

Could she distinguish those two tendencies in herself?

Another wave crashed against the windows, dark and silty with lightning-burnt kelp. Tau-indi sat cross-legged and open-armed, open-faced, and again Baru saw them as a candle-flame, steady despite the wind. They were waiting her answer.

“I’m going to prove my honesty,” Baru said, “on your terms.”

“How so?”

“With trim.”

They looked at her in wonder. “Will you?”

“If I get the three of us out of here, that means I’ve passed your test of trim, right? I’m a real person. I’m connected. We’re like—” She grappled at the air, trying to find a metaphor. “We’re like spiders, reeling in our thread to get back to the web. And I cannot get us back to that web if I was never bound to it.”

“Yes,” Tau-indi said, smiling. “That’s how it works.”

“Good.” Baru wrestled the folded dining table out of the closet. “I’m going to build a diving platform for you and Iraji. And when it works, and all of us are safe on Helbride, you’re going to help me track your friend Abdumasi Abd.”

“You have a lead on him?” Tau cried eagerly.

“I know where to find a woman who helped him on his way.” And from that woman Baru would find the Cancrioth, and whatever she could gain from them—power to overthrow Farrier and Hesychast, power to crush Falcrest by war, power to free Taranoke and Aurdwynn.

Immortality, perhaps. If that was necessary to see the work complete.

And along the way she would find some way, some fucking way, to be sure she was not under Farrier’s control.

*   *   *

HELBRIDE smashed into Cheetah, and Tau-indi fell.

A wine bottle shattered beneath them, red glass starbursting. They shouted in pain, and Baru pounced on them, searching for the wound. The wine bottle had cut them: a long, thin slash up the skin of their back. The golden khanga parted shyly around the blood.

“It’s beginning,” the Prince said, with real fear.

“She’s going down.”

“Yes—believe me, your navy taught us all about how ships sink.” A chuckle. The Prince thought they were very funny.