Baru arranged herself. “Let’s go find out. Shao, why don’t you button up?”

“Why?”

“It’s formal, that’s all.”

Shao Lune stared at her former admiral with petty serpentine hate. The woman who had complicated her career, Baru thought, the woman who had endangered Shao’s very favorite thing, which was herself.

“Let her think we’re fucking. Let her think I’ve gone mad. It’ll make her sloppy, to see one more of her sailors lost to you.”

*   *   *

AMINATA tipped the griot a silver piece. The girl kissed the coin in delight, wished bright bells and soft scars on Aminata, and danced away in glee. Aminata, feeling very bittersweet, sighed.

“She thought we were from the Mbo, didn’t she,” Lieutenant Faroni whispered. “That’s cute. It’s like we made her a real griot.”

“They don’t even have a griot school here,” Aminata groused. “I bet she hasn’t learned eidesis, even. It’s all fake.”

“So are we,” Gerewho said. And he was right. Aminata’s little party had come disguised as Oriati spiritists trying to sell Captain Nullsin’s good whiskey, and thereby secured themselves a vantage as the reception kicked off. Aminata’s interrogation of Ake Sentiamut and her fellow rebels had left her and Captain Nullsin in a bitter bind. The rebels said Ormsment was a mutineer, on a mad mission of revenge against Baru. But they themselves were rebels, traitors, left behind by Baru’s design. Aminata couldn’t take their word alone.

She needed a glimpse of how Baru and Ormsment reacted to each other.

When Baru walked in arm in arm with a cruel-looking navy woman, Aminata hired one of the local “griots” to keep an ear on Baru’s party and learn the woman’s name.

Her name was Shao Lune, the griot reported. Aminata’s files said that she was Juris Ormsment’s staff captain.

Aminata covered her eyes and groaned in horror.

All the signs seemed to confirm what Aminata had most feared. Baru was building a mutiny inside the navy. A mutiny that would draw in unreliable officers to be purged … all part of Cairdine Farrier’s grand plan to provoke Oriati civil war and insinuate his agencies into the Mbo. Yes, Ake Sentiamut and her friends insisted that Juris Ormsment was on a mutinous mission to kill Baru … but here was Baru, dangling Ormsment’s staff captain on her arm.

Which made it very hard to believe they weren’t in league. Just as Baru’s letter to Aminata had suggested: I intend to recommend you to Province Admiral Ormsment … And who else was with them? Oriati Mbo’s ambassador to Falcrest, Tau-indi Bosoka.

Tau-indi whose ship had been lost at sea. Aminata had fished a cabinet full of Cheetah dishes out of the water herself. The destruction of a Prince-ship would be a tremendous goad to war. And where better to begin that war than here on Kyprananoke?