“As you wish, Your Highness.” Simo nodded at Kem. “Novice Kem, it is our custom to discuss or debate some subject at table, as a means of pedagogy. Do you have a question you wish to ask?”

The boy glanced at Elen with an angry frown. She tensed. Was he going to expose her, condemn her, take his revenge?

He looked away. “I beg your pardon, Captain. After such a long day, I find myself very hungry, and eager to eat more of this delicious food. Might I just listen and thereby learn?”

Simo smiled in an avuncular way. “Of course. This is all new to you. What of you others, then? What shall we speak of?”

33 EVEN IF THEY DO NOT LOOK IT

“I have a topic of conversation,” said Ipis, leaping in so eagerly that stiff-necked Jirvy looked offended.

“You always do,” Jirvy muttered.

“At least she has something to talk about and questions to ask, instead of just offering objections or brooding silence,” retorted Xilsi.

Simo tapped a hand emphatically on the tabletop. “His Exalted Highness need not be exposed to our trivial disputes. Pray conduct yourselves with proper dignity in his presence.”

They pressed hands to hearts. Kem, seeing the gesture, hurriedly copied it, but the instant they all released their hands, he went back to eating the pancakes with an expression of astonished delight.

Ipis addressed Luviara. “On our walk to the dining hall, I could not help but hear the Worthy Interlocutor speaking of the aivur. When my Manor sent me to Warden Hall, I hoped to see aivur in the City of Heart’s Peace. I was so disappointed, I must confess.”

Jirvy interrupted, “Our current gracious emperor banned all aivur from the heartland, even the ones that settled in the foreigners’ quarter during the reign of the Jasmine Emperor.”

“Yes, I think Ipis knows that,” said Xilsi with a laugh. She seemed to take pleasure in baiting Jirvy, who scowled at her. “My blessed grandmother was born during the reign of the Jasmine Emperor. She never knew the city without the aivur in it, not until the bans. She always says she thought of them as locals, and not as outsiders.”

“How about you?” Ipis asked. “You’re born into one of the Six Noble Manors.”

“I was raised in a western branch of our Manor. No aivur in Elegant City. But I heard my grandmother’s stories every day when I was a child. I was excited that one day I’d get to see, for myself, aivur walking the avenues of the capital. There were aivur ambassadors and merchants and philosophers and artisans and poets and dancers and bards, so she told us. Even grim-faced mercenaries. But then I was sent up to Warden Hall the very same year that the Magnolia Emperor expelled all the aivur from the heartland. So I never got to see them.”