“And there’s no sign of your father ever coming home.”

“No.”

“Manata, I think that’s why you’re lonely.”

It was 910 Federation Year, one decade into the Glass Century. Not so long ago mother Tahr had left Prince Hill to visit Segu Mbo.

She was representing young Tau at a summit concerning a small nation called Falcrest, which, of late, had begun to think itself a crocodile instead of a crane.

*   *   *

TAU-INDI’S family lived in a fine compound of stone alongside a towering termite colony, which they tended out of a desire to help Tau seem a little conservative. Abdumasi’s family the Abds, led by his mother Abdi-obdi, lived in a compound of brown and black wood with high banners, and Tau-indi often went over there to fly kites off the south slope. Abdumasi called Tau-indi Your Federal Highness, and Tau-indi called Abdumasi obscene names like You Rich Bastard and Cancer Eater and Horn Eye, too young to understand the obscene weight of these epithets.

And when it was too hot to stand the earth or air they went down the hill to the honeybee compound of the third house on Prince Hill.

It was not technically a proper House, for it had no rate and did not belong to one of the kingdoms of the Thirteen-in-Three-in-One which was Lonjaro Mbo. Rather it was named for the Prince who lived in it, Kindalana of Segu, who had come to be raised near the great city of Jaro.

Tau and Abdumasi pretended they needed Kindalana’s permission to go swim in the lake, but this was just an excuse to get Kindalana. She was the rarest of them, the most bound to her studies, the most reticent with her praise and favor, the most cutting in her indictments of failure, and thus the most precious.

“They’re inseparable,” Tau-indi’s mother, Tahr, once said to Kindalana’s father Padrigan, “those three.”

“No, not at all. They are often separated!”

“How so?”

“Your laman is thirteen, and my daughter and Abdi-obdi’s boy are sixteen, which means they’ll argue about anything, throw a tantrum, insist they’re grown-ups and don’t want to talk about it, and then sulk.” Padrigan placed a pawn down on the game map. The two parents were playing Rule, a foreign game which had burst up in Jaro like a summer carnation. They spent so much time together that everyone thought they must be having an affair, and they lied to themselves that it was their faith to their missing spouses (Tahr’s husband vanished while exploring Zawam Asu, Padrigan’s almost-wife returned to the gold speculation business she preferred) which kept them apart. In fact it was Kindalana.

“But,” Tahr said, kissing her next pawn in thought, “they always come back to each other. That’s better than being inseparable, I think. To be separable, but bound.”