“Mmm,” Niko said, and left the room.

15

The days continued. Before her life as it was now, Atlanta had awakened every morning and consulted with her advisors before the official beginning of each day, which was the sweet chime that swept the palace and its outbuildings each sunrise, its echo sounding again in the evening as the sun slipped below the horizon.

Most of these sessions were devoted to either court gossip and maintaining her status in the face of a court with an elaborate etiquette and favor system. She had never been good at it; she forgot sometimes to do the thing prescribed for her by social mores, usually procrastinating on it to the point where she was embarrassingly well known for skipping thank-you presents after particularly significant interactions. She had never been good at building ties in the way one was supposed to, a web of flattery and favors. That was something she liked about the crew around her. They did not seem to be reckoning some system of points, of checks and balances, but simply accepted that there were ways sentient beings were expected to behave, for the good of the universe overall. Lassite had tried to explain his Golden Path to her, but as far as she could gather, its end was cloaked in mysticism: things worked out as they were supposed to because they were supposed to.

Still, it was more interesting than seeing who was acquiring public and private favor effectively.

She did not miss court life. It had been dull, every day having the same flavors and textures. There had been no excitement, rather a pleasant medium, a state of complacency as much as anything. Things were so different here—every meal Dabry made for them was different, and he was patient about explaining the origins and particulars of things, like the way he had shown her to take leaves and fold each around a dab of the sour, pungent paste called agrat, then add a dab of sweet syrup and fold again to contain that. It had been a slow meal, the one that began with those, and Niko raised an eyebrow when she saw the leaves, but Dabry had said, “Might as well enjoy them, they’re doing us no good at the present.”

Those words had made Niko flinch at their underlying pragmatism, but then she nodded. They’d all enjoyed the meal, and Atlanta could tell that Dabry had enjoyed them enjoying it. As he’d told her, it was the thing that he liked about being a chef, knowing that he’d hit his mark as precisely as any archer or sniper could. A hit with more to it, even, because it rang on so many levels, where a missile had only one: how much damage it did.