Jainan found himself at a loss. He’d thought it was common knowledge that they’d unified when the Resolution recognized Iskat’s control of the link, the gateway to the rest of civilized space. There had been no shots fired, but Iskat’s tariffs for foreign ships were prohibitive. Iskat was a generous trading partner with its vassals, its royalty was mainly pageantry, there was a parliamentary check on the Emperor—the clans had agreed unification was the best option.

Nothing was ever perfect.

“Would that have made things better?” he said.

“If we’d taken over the link.”

“That’s absurd,” Jainan said sharply. The sector had once boasted two links, but the nearby one had collapsed in on itself last century, as they sometimes did, leaving only the inconveniently far-flung one past the Outer Belt, and the resulting skirmishes for control of the remaining link had formed the Empire in the first place. Thea had stayed out of the conflict. It had little military capability; Theans were latecomers to the sector and had focused mainly on agriculture. Jainan could easily imagine the outcome of Thea pitted against the rest of the Empire. They would be blown off the face of their own planet. “Who are you getting these lines from?”

“They’re not lines, ” Gairad said, sounding offended. “I’ve got friends back in Bita. We have a right to our opinions. Did you know the Ambassador tried to make me attend Unification Day? He was trying to say it’s a condition of my scholarship. Hah.”

Jainan had his share of younger relatives, and there were always pockets of radicalism at universities, but he hadn’t heard any of them talk like this before. It gave him a nebulous feeling of unease. Unification Day was barely a month

away. “Unification Day is necessary. The Resolution won’t deal with us separately now that we’ve signed up to Iskat’s treaty. We need to maintain goodwill.”

“Goodwill,” Gairad said derisively. “Iskat runs a Tau field for interrogating noncitizens.”

“They don’t,” Jainan said. He could see he wasn’t getting through to her; his spike of frustration surprised him. You live on Iskat, he wanted to say. You can see they’re not all monsters. “The Tau field was never used on a Thean. It’s being surrendered to the Resolution with the rest of the remnants. War dramas are not documentaries.” This was the kind of misunderstanding his marriage had been meant to solve. He had done nothing to help, had he?

“Why wasn’t it surrendered before?” Gairad said. “They renew that treaty every twenty years. The Iskaners have had the Tau field for way longer. Have you got a clever answer for that?” When Jainan said nothing—he was disturbed to find he didn’t know—she grimaced. “Whatever. You still abandoned your planet.” She got up and paced back over to the samovar to refill her coffee.

“Now you’re going to get me in trouble for this.”

Jainan let out a breath that was almost a laugh. “That isn’t something I’m in a position to do.”