So they dressed carefully and painted on the gold paint and green stars of their station from breast to nose. When honeycomb and raspberry water was arranged they sent sentries out to request a palaver between Their Highness Tau-indi Bosoka, Federal Prince, and the two Falcresti hostages.

Cosgrad Torrinde arrived first and threw himself prostrate across the packed earth floor. “Your Federal Highness! I am humbled, humbled.” He was so young! He’d said he was turning twenty-three, but that he didn’t want to celebrate his birthday, because to celebrate the fact of a birth was royalist.

“Please,” Tau-indi said, talking from their stomach, trying desperately to keep their voice from cracking. “Stand. Why would you bow before us? Don’t you hate royalty in Falcrest?”

“Oh! I don’t bow? I wasn’t sure, I thought I might, it’s how we met Princes in the books about old Falcrest, which I always loved.” He leapt to his feet and put out his left hand, then, blanching, his right, trying not to grin but grinning anyway. “I’m so happy to speak to you, Your Highness. I feel that I have everything to learn.”

Tau-indi felt a little warmth, deep down in their gut, for this poor man. All his time on Prince Hill he’d been questioned and interviewed and plied for stories of the far northeast—but what had he been allowed to do for anyone else?

His trim must be in a terrible snarl.

Tau took the man’s hand and smiled through his incredible grip. Oh, he was strong. “We are here to ask you to be our tutor.”

“Oh, no no, there’s been a mistake.” Cosgrad pumped Tau-indi’s hand twice, up and down. “Didn’t Miss Bosoka tell you? I’m the one who needs a tutor, I need a guide, I’m the one who should be at your door asking for your help!”

Tau-indi smiled generously at the Falcresti man. He had a strange face, didn’t he? His pale skin made him seem as if he’d been emptied out, or never filled: awaiting the breath of life, the gust of storm wind out of the east.

“The first thing you should understand about us,” they said, “is that we are mbo people, bound together, and that we are always happiest when helping someone else get what they want.”

Cairdine Farrier arrived a few minutes later. He begged Tau’s forgiveness, for he’d thought there was a directional taboo today, and he’d taken a long route around the lake. “I’m surprised you care,” Tau said, quite struck by Farrier’s conscientiousness. “The calendar taboos have been rather sliding out of practice these past years.”

“I want to learn everything about you,” Farrier panted, “and be as good at it as you are! Can’t slip up now.”

“Hello, Farrier,” Cosgrad said, warily.