“No,” Lovisa said. “Of course not. We would come out for dinner. She would wait for my dinner to be served. Then, before I could eat it, she would take me away from the table and put me upstairs, in this room in the attic where she took us for punishments.”

“And your father would sit at the table?” Nev said. “And watch you go?”

“Yes,” Lovisa said, startled by the question. “But he wasn’t the one I’d crossed. It was my mother, you understand?”

At the sudden, soft sorrow in Nev’s face, Lovisa went quiet, thinking. Then gradually, inconsolably, sad.

“Oh,” Lovisa said. “I see.”

Chapter Forty-five

Lovisa was sitting on a bench Nev had shown her after Lovisa had complained that there was no place to think in Ledra. The bench was at the Cliff Farm, overlooking the water.

“I sit there sometimes and look for silbercows,” Nev had said.

So now Lovisa sat there too, occasionally smelling a whiff of manure that reminded her of Nev’s home in the north. The light was falling, stars beginning to prick the violet sky. Lovisa had used to sit in the dorm foyer and watch people, pulling information into herself to consider later, to fit into the puzzle of who was doing what, and why. She still did that. But now she also sat here, looking out across the sea and sky. Like the dorm foyer, this cliff was a place on the edge of something.

Lovisa had gone to Gorga Balava, her professor, after class on Monday, demanding an explanation from him about zilfium pollution.

“Surely you’ve read the studies, Lovisa,” he’d said, squinting at her with a puzzled expression. On his arm, his silly fox was wearing a hat with two ear holes and a pom-pom, tied with a ribbon under her chin. “You should talk to a scientist, or a Scholar.”

She’d gone to Gorga exactly because he was an Industry rep, not a Scholar. “I’m not asking you to explain what pollution is,” she said scornfully. “I’m asking you to explain why you don’t care about it.”

“I do care about it.”

“Just not enough to do something about it?”

“What should I do, Lovisa? Let Winterkeep’s industries fall behind the advances of the rest of the world? So that no one will trade with us, no one will send students to our schools, or take our opinions and resources into account when larger decisions are being made?”

“You could insist on research into other fuels besides zilfium,” said Lovisa. “You could try to get the rest of the world to care about the problem. You could break the Varanas’ monopoly on varane production. You could ask someone other than your self-interested Ledran friends for ideas. You could try to inspire people!”