Baru felt as if she’d stepped onto a needle, a cold needle tall as a mountain. And if she slipped it would run her through from sole to spine. Abd had been active on Taranoke? Of course he had. Where else would a merchant with a grudge against Falcrest strike first? Why hadn’t she thought of it? Oh, Wydd, she was no savant, she was a fool. She’d drawn the Oriati into a trap without even realizing it, and now she had destroyed her own home’s chances of resistance!

And she kept putting off opening her parents’ letters—

—had she known? Had she been trying to deny what she’d done?

Baru sat paralyzed by anguish. The blanket, left too long on the stone, began to steam. Tau spoke carefully. “Presumably, if he’s under navy interrogation, he’s betrayed the names of his contacts on Taranoke.”

Mother. Father. No.

“Maybe he hasn’t cracked yet,” Baru said, and changed the subject as hard as she could, lest she erupt on the spot. “Did the people I sent to you on Moem reach safety?”

Tau looked happy that she’d reached for a mutual connection. “They’re all safe. The boy, his guardian, the diver, the herbalist, and the pale man. I interviewed them, gave them papers and money, and left them to charter passage. Things were … unsettled on the Llosydanes.”

They had not mentioned Nitu the cook. “Unsettled how?” Baru asked, to avoid that guilt.

“There were some riots. A portion of the date crop burnt down. Some killed.”

Baru had sauntered onto those islands, sent their markets into a panic, scooped out their pockets, and walked away with Abdumasi Abd’s name. She hadn’t even paused to think about what she’d left behind. Oh Himu, all that money she’d made! Why hadn’t she invested it in something? A charity? A school? Some sort of trust for development?

Tain Shir said she was going to kill Baru’s parents.

What if Abdumasi Abd had cracked under Aminata’s torture, he had named Solit and Pinion as insurrectionists, and they were even now in Tain Shir’s possession—

“Baru?” the Federal Prince murmured. They reached for her hand. “What did I say?”

She stood paralyzed. Maps of action and consequence unfurled from her lips and her fingertips, the possibilities of all she might do and say, but on the horizons of these maps she saw only Cairdine Farrier’s laughing mask and the blood-caked brute indifference of Tain Shir.

“Baru?” Tau put down their soup. “Baru?”

“Do I know that voice?” A slurred call: Baru shivered out of reverie. Through the Oriati came a Falcrest man, dowdy old brown sparrow among the tall chattery blackbirds, Faham Execarne with a pipe of weed and dressings on his wound. “Who’s that I hear preaching the dubious but comforting metaphysics of trim? Can it be the sacred hermaphrodite of Lake Jaro?”