Lovisa was surprised to receive a rebuke from a foreigner, and a guest. “Isn’t it impolite for you to control our minds?” she asked dryly.

“I’m merely protecting myself from being stared at.”

Lovisa understood such an instinct, though she couldn’t imagine how anyone like Hava could hope not to be stared at. “If I could do what you do,” she said, “I’d do it all the time. How are you doing it?”

Hava flicked those unmatching eyes at her again. “I change what people think they see.”

“Is that a Grace a lot of people have?”

“No,” said Hava, shortly.

“Can you teach me?”

“Could one of your foxes teach me to read minds?”

“Ah, so, is that what it’s like?”

“I don’t know what it’s like. When I want it to happen, it happens.”

“Of course you know what it’s like.”

“What’s it like to have a beating heart?” Hava retorted. “What’s it like to be alive? I guess you have a lot to say on those topics?”

Lovisa had plenty she could say on those topics. Being alive was like a game, a race. She was going to win. “What’s your office?” she asked instead.

“Office?” said Hava, wrinkling her nose at the Keepish word.

“What is your role in the Monsean royal court?”

“Oh,” said Hava, instantly seeming confused, and distressed, and fuzzier at the edges. “I—” She flickered into a sculpture and back again, while Lovisa watched, fascinated.

Giddon suddenly turned to face them and broke into their conversation, speaking quietly, in Keepish. “Hava is uniquely situated to aid the queen, in a broad range of situations,” he said, polite, bland, and firm. “Do you hope to enter politics, Lovisa?”

Lovisa thought it was interesting how different he was now, talking to her. No tears or sadness; he spoke like a politician, using a lot of meaningless words to make her stop pushing. Uniquely situated. Broad range of situations. And in Keepish too, which he’d claimed not to speak well.

She also thought she understood suddenly why a person who could disappear in plain sight might be useful to a queen.

“Are you a spy?” she asked Hava. “Like a blue fox?”

“I’m not like a blue fox,” said Hava, with a touch of scorn.

An argument erupted suddenly, halfway down the table. “We had him!” someone cried. “We bent over backward to get him! How did we lose him?”

“Dev Dimara is an opportunist, like all Scholars,” someone else said in a disgusted and familiar voice—her professor Gorga Balava.

“Now, Gorga,” said Lovisa’s mother, in that particular tone of condescending forbearance that made one ashamed of one’s outburst. “This is a dinner party.”

“Papa?” Lovisa said, touching her father’s arm, interrupting his conversation with Mara. “What are they fighting about?”