Bellis was hungry to be alone. She had spent every minute of the day with others, and it exhausted her. So when the day’s tasks had ended, and the scientists were talking together, trying to agree on a direction for the next day’s research, she slipped briefly into the smaller side room, thinking it empty. It was not.

She made an apologetic noise and turned away, but Uther Doul spoke quickly.

"Please don’t leave," he said.

She turned back, grasping the bag she carried, painfully aware of the weight of the box Silas had given her at the bottom of it. She stood by the doorway, waiting, her face immobile.

Doul had been training. He stood in the room’s center, relaxed, holding his sword. It was a straight blade, thin and edged on both sides, something over two feet long. It was not big or ornate or impressive, or carved with puissant signs.

The blade was white. It moved suddenly, flickered like water, soundless and impossible to follow, in a sudden murderous formation. And then it was sheathed, too fast for her to see.

"I’m done here, Miss Coldwine," he said. "The room is yours." But he did not leave.

Bellis nodded thank-you and sat, waiting.

"Let’s hope that unfortunate killing won’t sour our relations with the mosquito-men," he said.

"It won’t," said Bellis. "They hold no grudges when their womenfolk die. They remember enough to know it’s necessary." He knows this, she thought suddenly, incredulous. He’s making conversation with me again.

But even suspicious as she was, the details she had been told were so ghastly and fascinating that she wanted to share them; she wanted to make someone else know them.

"They don’t know much history, the anophelii, but they know that the cactacae-the sapwalkers-aren’t the only people across the sea. They know about us, the bloodwalkers, and they know why usually none of us visit. They’ve forgotten the details of the Malarial Queendom, but they have a sense that their womenfolk… did wrong… centuries ago." She paused to let that understatement sink in. "They treat them without… affection or distaste."

It was a melancholy pragmatism. They bore their women no ill will. They coupled with them eagerly enough once in the year, but they ignored them where possible and killed them if necessary.

"She wasn’t trying to feed, you know," Bellis went on. She kept her voice neutral. "She was full. They’re… they’re intelligent. It’s not that they’re mindless. It’s the hunger, he told me. It takes a long, long time for them to starve. They can spend a year without feeding, screaming ravenous for all those weeks: it’s all they can think about. But when they’ve fed, when they’re full-really sated-there’s a day or two, maybe a week, when the hunger abates. And that’s the time they try to talk.