“No. No.” He gripped his skull like a boy with meningitis, curled up in wrack. “They don’t know I am Cancrioth. Cancrioth aren’t people. They’re wounds in the mbo, and they have to be stitched up.”

“Yes. The wounds have to be stitched shut. The Prince will try to befriend and care for you, to sew you back into trim. As they tried to befriend me.”

“No. Not me. The old power is in me, the uranium light … I’ll be bound up. They’ll stitch me shut. Every hole. Mouth and nose and eyes and ears and ass and prick. Shut.”

“Out of superstition? No, Iraji, no, nothing so cruel.…”

“Superstition? Superstition?” A hysterical crack in his voice. “What if I’m full of cancer? What if it leaked out of my body, somehow, into the aquifers, and the children drank it, the children who get sick so easily, and they all woke up one day chanting ayamma, ayamma, a ut li-en, it grows in us! They’ll bury me in concrete, Baru, they’ll bury me alive in wet concrete!”

Baru thought for a moment, but in her heart she already knew the answer. She couldn’t bear to expose Iraji to more danger. Not even to find the Cancrioth. Tain Hu had consented to the danger of rebellion, yes. But Iraji had never wanted anything but his happiness with Svir.

“Can you draw?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said, warily. “Svir taught me. Why?”

*   *   *

TAU arranged a reception at the Oriati embassy, where they would begin their search for Unuxekome Ra by consulting the embassy’s intelligence resources.

But the embassy was also very beautiful, Tau said, and worth visiting just to see. It stood on a busy pavereef named Hara-Vijay, a peculiarity of the kypra, shallow coral rings filled with concrete and rubble and built up into artificial lagoons. The embassy stood on pilings in warm blue water.

The name was a peculiarity, too—Hara-Vijay meant “wheat scout” in the Invijay dialect of Urun—and Tau explained, frankly and apologetically, that this name was the relic of a mania, some decades ago, for the performances of a Lonjaro griot who’d romanticized the Invijay horse-tribes in her work. “We would rename it if we could, but the Kyprananoki have taken to the name, there being few Invijay here to complain.”

“Why would they complain?”

“Wheat scouts are sacred. No one likes their sacred names used thoughtlessly.”

Baru rolled her eyes. “Are you sure you aren’t romanticizing the ‘sacred traditions’ of these ‘foreign tribes’?” She didn’t believe the Invijay were all born on horseback to a life of raiding, as Falcrest seemed to think, but nor was she ready to accept the Oriati narrative of the Invijay as peaceful matriarchal irrigationists corrupted by Falcrest’s machinations. Probably the Invijay were complicated and everchanging, with a history full of grandeur and shame. Like everyone else.