She knew she would never return to this city, and her melancholia brought out the beauty in Treatymont. The flowers were coming up with the corpses. The houses bloomed with hyacinth and cherry blossom, early magnolias, deadly nightshades in medicinal plots. Climbing vines opened small white flowers that attracted fat bumblebees. The morning sun glinted off the mast-top mirrors of the ships in the Horn Harbor. Far out the two burnt towers stood like empty tooth-sockets. You would hardly know, looking at this city, that it could drive a navy flag officer to grand treason.

“Juris,” a woman called, taking the opportunity of the disguise to skip her rank. “Juris, you should go.”

Her aide came up the hill from Arwybon Plaza. Shao Lune, oh, you sharp-toothed weasel: a viciously perfect specimen of the Republican ideal, immaculate in her work, intimidating in her aspect. One of those people Juris had never been, people who did everything with enormous sprezzatura, the casual and effortless grace of the superior.

“She’s not here,” Shao said. “You should go back.”

“I can’t,” Juris said. Physically, yes, it would be possible to call everything off. Morally it was impossible. She embraced her aide like a wayward daughter, though it was, actually, very hard to imagine Shao as anyone’s child, at least unstrangled. “You’ll draw everyone’s attention while I make the meet.”

“She’s not going to show,” Shao insisted.

“She’s coming, Staff Captain. I know she’ll come.”

Shao Lune sneered, quite enchantingly, her face like a wonderful painting of your worst enemy. For a very long time Juris had wanted to court-martial her for insubordination and consign her to a fish-patrol corvette. But the more angry Juris became, the less she cared about the tone of Shao’s loyalty, and the more the quality of her work.

“You could still go back to Sulane,” Shao said, “and save our lives.”

No chance of that. The dead cried out against it.

*   *   *

SHAO Lune buttoned herself up and went out to sit in the sun with high-chinned dignity. A suitor arrived to dare her: a Stakhi man in a broad-shouldered tabard who offered olive oil.

Ormsment had claimed a public bench (a Falcresti project, of course) on the south end. It was early yet, before the plaza filled with Aurdwynni merchants, mistresses-of-house, master sewers, cranksmen, collimators, caseworkers, stevedores, dog-runners, butchers, bastardettes, and other feudal traffic. She watched, amused but worried, as Shao Lune’s suitor tried, too late, to withdraw. Was he here to court a child bride, Shao asked him? No? Then why had he written poetry for illiterate idiot babies? Oh, begging his pardon, of course he had tried his best. He should show her around the plaza. He must know all the local excitements, the very best backlogged gutters, the most fascinating decay.