“PEOPLE are always begging me to abandon ship,” Aminata complained, “and I always find, at the last minute, that I don’t really want to.”
Iraji watched her quietly. They sat side by side on the unused bed, a little ways apart.
“I’ve got to go with Captain Lune,” Aminata told herself. “She’s my commanding officer.”
“Is she? Haven’t I seconded you to my service, as an agent of the Throne?”
She tried to smile at him. “I’m not sure the court-martial board will believe I got lawful orders from a Cancrioth magician.”
His eyes were gold and dark like sunken treasure. “We need you here. This is your duty. To make the most difference.”
“Come on.” She tried to laugh him off. “I can’t help here. I don’t know anything about, you know, all this, this…”
“Superstition? Ritual?”
“This Oriati business. I just…” She tugged at the stiff collar of her uniform. She’d only just put it back on, and it itched. “I don’t see what you think is going to happen, Iraji. Captain Lune put up a plague knot. The navy’s going to burn this ship.”
“My place is here,” he said, with a wistful sadness that made her want to shout at him, no, you idiot, your place is where you want it to be, you’re not bound here by your flesh, your blood, your race. “I gave myself to them in exchange for Baru’s freedom. I can’t undo that. I used to faint when I thought about who I really was. I don’t do that anymore. That’s how I know this is the place where I have to be.”
“You don’t need to die here.”
“We’re not going to die,” he said, fiercely. “We’re going to stop the rockets. We’re going to convince the rest of this ship that they will see their home again. We’re going to bring Eternal into safe harbor and find a way everyone can go home alive. It won’t be like Kyprananoke.”
“And then the navy will storm your ship,” Aminata whispered, “and take all of you.”
“Not if Baru stops them.”
“Can she? Will she?”
“She will. Because she cares about the people on this ship.”
“She doesn’t even know I’m alive, Iraji.” And last time she had, she’d used Aminata as a weapon, manipulated her into doing what Baru needed.
“You’re not the only person she cares about, Aminata.”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” Getting up, with a frustration that split her like an axhead: “I have my orders. If I don’t obey Shao Lune, if I choose a ship full of my racemates over my superior’s commands, I’m finished in the navy forever. I’ll give every Oriati sailor a bad name.”
She fled the room. She fled the thing which frightened her most, which was wanting something more than her duty.
“If you stay,” he called after her, “maybe you can get your sword back from the Brain!”
She ran almost bodily into the Eye.
“Aminata,” he said; his ordinary body and ordinary face and ordinary voice, and the immense protrusion from his eye socket which Aminata still found truly disgusting. “Tell me honestly. Is there any chance we’ll leave this island alive and free?”
She was impatient and afraid and therefore she was honest. “Mister Eye, the purpose of Falcrest’s navy is to destroy Oriati. That’s all I’ve ever been taught. Excuse me, please.”
Shao Lune had already packed her notes into a gutsack; she was stripped down to linens, oiling herself with monoi, Taranoke’s blessing to divers. “I stole it,” she said, to Aminata’s unvoiced question about the oil. “These tunks have awful security.” No apology for the epithet. “Strip your uniform off. The water’s warm, and if a current takes us out to sea, you’ll regret every extra ounce.”
The groan of the ship’s alarm sounded through the hull. “They’re ready to attack,” Shao Lune said. “We’ll leave over the stern. Down the same way you escaped, and then we jump. Get your oil on and let’s go.”
Aminata stared at her. The absolute compliance of her, her sharp eyes and small full mouth, the generous body so ready to be constrained and controlled by the uniform, made appropriate, modest, unobtrusive. She made Aminata feel frictional, ill-designed, a thing that rubbed on itself as it moved.
And she ached to be back with Iraji again, the two of them alike in flesh. No, her duty told her, do not be seduced by the homogeneity of race, do not value sameness of flesh.
She thought about where duty had led her lately.
“Lieutenant Commander.” Shao Lune smooth as snakebelly. “I gave you an order.”
“You’re out of uniform, mam.”
“I am your superior officer.”
“You aren’t in my chain of command. I report directly to Rear Admiral Maroyad, mam, who ordered me to find the Cancrioth. And my mission is not complete until this ship takes up harbor and I report directly to her. Mam.”
“Take off your uniform and prepare to leave the ship. You will report to Maroyad only once I am finished with my own report. That is an order. If you disobey me I will see to it that you stand a court-martial.”
“Iraji is an agent of the Emperor. He requires me to stay.”
“If you choose his agency over duty to the navy you betray women everywhere. Have you seen any proper orders from him? Proper codes, proper seals? Have you seen anything from him but superstition and filth and his whore cock—”
Staring at her, listening to her, Aminata crossed some inner threshold, invisible to her until she had already passed it. Like the point where a ship tips too far, and not all the keel and righting moment in the world can keep it from overturning.
“Excuse me, mam,” she said. “I have to go find my sword.”
And she walked out.
Iraji smiled like a signal in the night when he saw her coming back. “Don’t,” she muttered, “don’t. Let’s just do this and have it done.”
MAROYAD lowered her telescope. “Damn good thing you paid to keep one frigate on ready alert, isn’t it? Signal Hawkene into rocket range. Approach from directly astern. Destroy that thing’s rudder with torpedoes. Then burn the hull.”
“Don’t do this,” Barhu warned her. “If you send a ship at them, you’ll force their hand.”
“I’m to wait until they fire cannon on my island? Until they start flinging plague corpses into my fortress, or rockets full of pus into my reservoirs? No.” Maroyad was a flag officer in the full grip of her duty. “There’s a plague knot in those sails! A navy officer aboard that ship risked her life to tell us that we have to destroy it on sight!”
“She has,” Svir murmured, “something of a point.” He stood in grim profile at Barhu’s elbow, and would not meet her eyes.
“Iraji’s aboard that thing,” Barhu whispered to him.
“I remember,” he growled back. “Do you honestly believe that he and I haven’t discussed what we’d do in this situation?”
“We need to strengthen their bargaining position. Give them confidence. Pull back the frigate, Admiral, let them see we’ll give them a chance if they don’t attack!”
“That’s idiotic,” Maroyad insisted.
Barhu turned to Iscend Comprine, who had followed her up to the towertop, still in her ballroom finest. “You’re an actuary, aren’t you? Tell the admiral I’m right.”
“I do not have enough knowledge to decide.” Iscend was wide-eyed with the need to help. “I’m sorry.”
The staff officers behind Maroyad stared at their feet, caught between the Emperor’s will and their own rear admiral’s orders. Barhu decided to force the choice upon them.
“I am invoking the Emperor’s agency. Rear Admiral Maroyad, I will accept responsibility for whatever may occur here. I order you to stand your ship two miles off Eternal and to belay any attack.”
Maroyad seized her by the wrist. “Listen to me! If they get plague onto this island, thousands of Falcresti citizens will die! Parliament will send the navy to punish the Oriati! I don’t care who takes the blame, but if you force me to obey, think of those lives!”
Think of Tau-indi lost in the cancer dark. Think of Aminata, who’d died to save that ship. And of Shao Lune, who Barhu had stranded aboard.
This was the price of attachment. This was the truth Svir had warned her against. We leave people behind.
But that same lesson had two edges, and the other edge said: there are other people in this world, with their own wants and means. And sometimes all you can do is make space for them to work.
The Brain had cast a spell on Barhu. How could she break her own spell? How could she fail to see their bargain through? One way or another, Barhu and the Brain had to meet again.
So the Brain would not attack.
“Hold your ships,” Barhu said. “In the Emperor’s name, you will hold. Someone find a signal lantern. I need to talk to them.”
THE Eye’s mob was smaller, full of sailors and cooks and gardeners and other rough laborers, and a few idealists who had come over simply because Tau-indi was here and they revered the laman as an exemplar of the Mbo’s morality. They wielded rakes, wooden planks, hammers, oars, and laundry paddles. Against them the Brain’s navigators and griots were backed by Termites with powder-flash in their pistols. The onkos herself stood above them all, in the rigging of the foremast, with an impi’s round hide shield in her left hand and her armor bright in the dusk. She looked like a statue of ancient White Akhena, or one of her mau fighters. She had no weapon in her right hand but her light.
The Eye’s people came upon them suddenly, screaming and singing, and drew the Termites away from the rocket stations at the prow. Then Aminata (who had handpicked the toughest-looking of the Eye’s followers) burst up from belowdecks and led her group onto the rocket racks. Some of her people tied themselves to the racks themselves, to prevent their use: others seized plague vivariums and ran for the rail, where they held the glass bottles hostage. No one could ever say these people lacked valor.
Now: impasse.
Tau-indi Bosoka stepped into the space between the lines. Their jade-gold khanga was stained by tar, seawater, and sweat. The jewelry that had once glittered under Kyprananoke’s high sun now glistened with oil tarnish. Their hips moved not with grace but with sore, tottering fatigue.
But Tau spoke.
“Listen! We all came here for the same reason. We came for Abdumasi Abd, my friend, your family. Some of you are afraid that he’ll betray your existence to the whole world. Some of you would like that, I know. Some of you want to die here.”
“Your Highness,” the Brain called down from her foretop. “Falcrest has telescopes trained upon us. When they see our rockets aren’t ready to fire, they will destroy us. Stand aside!”
Tau ignored her. “I allowed myself to believe you weren’t human. My home, my beloved mbo, made the same mistake. We wrote a footnote to our code of dignity. We said, everyone but these ones, they are human; everyone is real, but the Cancrioth are not. We embraced our other enemies. But not you. We hated you. I hated you.”
Lovely green Isla Cauteria shimmered right off the bow. Eighty thousand people under Aminata’s sworn protection. And she was allowing a Federal Prince, foreign royalty, to fight in their defense.
“You’ve sailed far from home to save Abdu,” Tau cried. “So have I. Maybe it seems like we’re all doomed to die here. But I can still save Abdu! We can still save Abdu! We can rescue him together! And then we can rescue ourselves.
“Come home to Oriati Mbo. You will be welcome. See Aminata, there, who sails for Falcrest? She is welcome among us. See Iraji there, who spied for their Emperor? He is welcome. And my friend Abdumasi Abd, who swam with me in Lake Jaro, who took your money and your cancer into him so that he could go to war? I say he is welcome! Will you come home with me?”
“If you have any principles at all, Tau-indi Bosoka,” the Brain called, “you say these things before you have no other choice.”
She pointed up to Annalila Fortress, a panther crouched above its prey. Her hand shone against the dark fabric of her sleeve. “Abdumasi Abd is in there! And if we show that we can answer Falcrest’s weapons with our own, they’ll give him up! For the first time in history, Oriati people dictate terms to Falcrest. We are at their shores, in our ship, with our weapons! This is how it was meant to be! This is the first right thing that happens since the Armada War! The entire Oriati Mbo knows that we defied Falcrest, and they awaken to the need for war!”
“They’ll kill us all,” the Eye shouted back. “You saw what one of those ships did to us at Kyprananoke! Here they have a fleet! Are we not the people of the long thought? Aren’t you Incrisiath, the Brain? Think!”
The Brain denied him with an outflung hand. “We are the people of the long thought, my friend. We’ve thought long enough about Falcrest. They only respect power.” She closed her fist around green ghost light. “They’ve wounded us. They smell weakness. Now we show them we still have strength.”
“Your prissy knife-man Masako shot me in the face, and here I am still,” Osa shouted, to a general ooh of delight from the Eye’s supporters. “You’re surrounded, short on water, damaged, far off your charts! If you come at them with knives out you have no chance!”
“When the shark smells blood, do you go limp and wait for teeth?” Scheme-Colonel Masako cried back. “You don’t understand Falcrest. They’re cowards! They exploit weakness! They bargain only when they fear our strength! Tau wants to make speeches about who’s human and who is not, but Falcrest doesn’t think any of us are human!”
The crew wavered. Aminata saw it in the way the able sailors looked to their seniors, and the seniors looked to the officers. Come so far, through thirst and storm, for one man, one sacred precious man: should they risk war when they were so to close him?
“What about Kimbune?” Tau called. “What about Baru? Will you give them a chance? You put your power into Baru, Incrisiath! Is that not enough?”
“It is enough,” the Brain roared back, “before I am attacked! Before you set the baneflesh on me, carried by an innocent boy! If the bond I put on Baru is broken, then you broke it!”
Her supporters growled and crossed their hands, warding off evil. “Cunning bitch,” Aminata muttered in Aphalone.
The fuck of it was that the Brain and Masako were right. Once the navy saw the plague knot, they would attack. Eternal would burn. And Aminata couldn’t figure out how to avoid that.
Or even if she should. After all, didn’t Baru want this ship for her plans? And wasn’t she a grand traitor?
Maybe Aminata’s duty here was to keep this ship out of Baru’s hands.
“Masako,” the Brain said, sorrowfully. “Load your pistols with small shot. Drive them off the rockets.”
The woman in the Invijay fighting costume, the one with the face dimpled by lines of scar, lifted her fist over a glass vivarium. “Shoot at us and I’ll break this open!”
“Do we now fear death?” the Brain roared. “What use is immortality if we cannot decide where and when our deaths will matter? This is the moment we live so long to reach!”
And then, at last, the Womb spoke.
Aminata had not seen her because she stood to the side, on one of the enormous wooden channels that anchored the shroud lines supporting the nearest mast. Her voice was not as powerful as the Brain’s, or the Eye’s, or even Tau’s.
But when she spoke, they all heard their mother calling.
“I brought a woman aboard this ship on Kyprananoke. Before she left us, Baru arranged safe passage through a minefield, through two waiting Masquerade warships. When one of those warships attacked us, she brought the other to our defense. I made the right choice when I brought her aboard.
“But there was another person I brought to us. I brought Tau-indi Bosoka, because I could not bear to leave them to burn. Listen to them now. Let them keep us from burning. If we wanted to die in a hurry, would we be Cancrioth?”
There was some laughter. Aminata watched the Brain’s eyes narrow. She had to reassert herself, now, before—
Iraji saw something up in the rigging, and stepped forward, frowning, raising one hand to point. He’d spotted the plague knot. He meant only to warn the others.
But the Brain saw him open his mouth and raise up his hands: and she knew he’d been taught sorcery.
She struck.
Her bright hand reached out to seize his attention. “IRA-RYE UNDIONASH,” she said, silently: but loud as a scream to a spy trained to lip-read. The name of Iraji’s mother found him, and he had no baneflesh to protect him from magic now.
Iraji fainted to the deck. Aminata almost caught him but she was too slow and his head cracked against a cleat hard enough to open his scalp. He bled on her.
“You fuck!” she shouted, and raised her bloodied hand. “Look what you’ve done!”
The Eye jeered in En Elu Aumor, words Aminata couldn’t translate but understood nonetheless: shame on you! Shame on you, Incrisiath! A roar of fury spread through the Eye’s crowd. The Brain’s Termites stiffened and raised their weapons.
It was all about to go to shit, one way or another. And here Aminata was, kneeling with Iraji’s blood on her hands, surrounded by magic, helpless to make a difference—
Not helpless. Never helpless.
“Excuse me!” Aminata bellowed. “I have a suggestion!”
BARHU was still figuring out how the sunflash lantern worked when Eternal launched its first rocket. A tongue of white light shot from Eternal’s prow, up across the falling sun, and straight toward Barhu.
“Here it comes!” the watchgirl cried. “One rocket, up high!”
“Get under the shingle.” Maroyad pulled Barhu and Svir together into the shadow of the tower roof. “Hawkene must attack. Give us permission to attack.”
“Just one rocket.” Barhu tugged free of Maroyad’s fingers. “If they wanted to kill us with plague, they’d send more.”
“It’s a ranging shot! They’re testing the wind before the full salvo! Let my ship destroy them before they launch more, damn you!”
“No.” Barhu stood her ground. “You will signal Hawkene to stand off and give Eternal sea room.”
“You’re insane! You’re gambling tens of thousands of lives because you want to make money off a plague ship!”
“I seem insane to you,” Barhu countered, “because I know things you do not. This is why I am given power over you, Maroyad. Will you disobey the Emperor?”
Maroyad groaned in frustration. The lone rocket soared across the sky, closer every moment. There was something wrong with it, Barhu noticed. It was too heavy and too slow to possibly cover this distance—
A ring of sparks jetted from the rocket’s ass end. A piece of it fell off and tumbled into the ocean. Wooden wings snapped into place, and then a second rocket ignited to push the glider forward. A two-stage rocket. Ingenious. Barhu had thought those were purely Falcrest’s invention.
“You should take shelter, Your Excellence,” Iscend whispered.
All around her, flare pistols and signal lanterns awaited her word. “Agonist,” Maroyad pleaded. “Let us attack.”
“No. Hold your fire.”
“It’s coming right at us.” Svir glanced between the fortress wind vanes and the rocket. “They launched a little westerly to account for the wind.”
“It can’t be steered, can it?” Barhu muttered to him.
“There might be an apparatus to keep it on a desired course—like the stabilizers on torpedoes—but to make it so small, I don’t know—”
“Your Excellences, get down!”
Iscend grabbed at Barhu’s belt but she fought back, leaning out to watch, the bomb was right there, skimming in above them with its second engine dead now but sparks still jetting from its tail. A fuse, they’d calculated the flight time and fused it, so it would blow up when it was still in the air—
It’s for bombarding cities, Barhu thought. You can’t use this against a moving ship and expect to land a hit. You can’t fit an explosive aboard that would do any real harm. It’s meant to hit cities. And it’s meant to carry plague.
“Let me fire!” Maroyad screamed.
“I am the Emperor’s will, damn you! Wait!”
A hundred feet above the command tower the glide bomb popped like a firework. The blast echoed in Barhu’s chest.
She and Maroyad looked at each other.
A strange hail began to fall.
Barhu held out her hand, and caught a forked brown chip. All around her tiny brown-white objects pelted off stone and lumber.
“Teeth,” she said. “They’ve sent us teeth.”
The sound of bitten stone chattered all around her.
“It was a dummy payload,” Svir said. “A demonstration. So we know they can hit us.”
“Hold,” Maroyad ordered. “Hold and wait.”
The minutes crawled past.
“There!” the watchgirl called. “Signal mirror on the ghost ship’s bowsprit! It’s in navy code, mam. They want to parley with us for repairs and safe return to their home waters.”
“Don’t call it a ghost ship,” Maroyad growled. “It’s right there. We can all see it.”
Barhu bit down on her tongue to hold in her growl of triumph. She had gambled with all these lives, gambled and won. It would not do to enjoy it. Not for more than a moment.
“NOT one of them comes ashore.” Maroyad pounded her desk. “Not in my fortress, not in my town. A living person’s a damn sight better carrier than a rocket. If you’re going to negotiate with them, you do it somewhere that can be quarantined.”
“Poses some difficulties,” Barhu muttered. The details of rigging and sail aboard Maroyad’s warships were too sensitive to hold a meeting there. A meadow or a patch of wilderness would not have toilets, and would be far too hard to quarantine. And there was secrecy to consider: Barhu wanted to preserve the illusion that Eternal was a huge merchant ship, and that meant keeping it away from curious eyes with nautical experience.
She had only one option left. Remote, yet developed. Nestled in a bay, where Eternal could be hidden. Full of people who could attend a merchant bazaar, as cover for the real negotiations, yet who would not gossip as easily as Falcresti townfolk.
“What’s the Taranoki colony named?” she asked the others gathered in Maroyad’s office.
“Aratene, if I remember right,” Heingyl Ri said. “I wanted to visit.”
“That sounds right.” The Aphalone name Aratene would come from the Urunoki name Iritain, which came in turn from the name of the old harbor town Iriad, Barhu’s home, joined with tain, the Urun word for foreign. The very same root yielded the name Tain Hu: which could be read as great foreigner or foreign bane.
Yawa produced a viciously sweet smile. Something cruel had come into her since the Governor’s Ball. “You want to hold your vital negotiations and prisoner exchange in the Souswardi experimental colony?”
“Taranoki,” Barhu insisted.
“Have you considered how you’ll tell your islanders that you’re about to moor a plague ship armed with hundreds of cannon off their little bayside paradise?”
“I haven’t,” Barhu admitted. “I should speak to the mayor, or the…” She was bitterly embarrassed not to remember what the Taranoki called a council of elders. Muirae? No, she was thinking of Muire Lo. What was the name? “The governing committee.”
Heingyl Ri turned to her handmaidens. “Who are the governors? The ones always shipping coffee samples everywhere?”
“Hyani Coinflower and husband?” Maroyad snapped her stubby fingers. “No, there’s a new couple. Arrived very suddenly a month or two ago.”
“Yes, that’s right,” one of the handmaidens said, “I remember their names from the coffee pamphlet. Solit and Pinion?”
“That’s right,” another handmaiden said, reading from just such a pamphlet, “it says here, Solit Able and Pinion Starmap.”
Barhu was, at first, indignant, embarrassed by her own astonishment: and she came within one breath of blurting out, like a petulant child, the fatal word Mom?
FEDERATION YEAR 912:
23 YEARS EARLIER
IN KUTULBHA HARBOR, BESIDE RUINED KUTULBHA
IN SEGU MBO
SOME of the Lonjaro Princes declared a surrender party on the palace ship Kangaroo Principle. The Princes had to make some joy, right here at the center of the hurt, or the whole generation’s temper would go sore. A celebration was as vital to them as prayer would be to a deist.
But it was so very, very hard.
“It’s not a very good party, is it?” Tau-indi said to their mother, peering around at the fine wines and the casks of beer, the huge swirls of crushed silk and piled velvet. Everyone was drinking and smoking with furious concentration. The dance moved in narrow nervous lines. “You always threw better parties.”
“It’s easy to be joyful when you have joyful principles in the air. This, though, this is work. Sometimes smiling is work.” Mother Tahr took their hands. “Tau! You’ve got painting fat under your nails. Go wash up.”
Tau-indi jerked their hands away, resentful. They’d been a Prince for so many days. Impossible to be a child again. “Mother,” they said, rather stiffly, “you’ve been talking to Cosgrad too much.”
Tahr looked at them with a sad little smile of pride and hope and deep, deep loss, a smile Tau-indi wished they didn’t understand. Tau-indi was ready to leave home and be a Prince, and their mother knew it.
“I have to go find Kindalana,” Tau-indi said.
“Go, then,” Tahr said, meaning not just go find Kindalana, but all the rest. “Go do it well.”
They swept off royally, cleaning their fingernails when Tahr couldn’t see. They got a mahogany bowl full of shrimp and a ceramic cup full of pickle sauce and went up onto the deck, down the length of the ship, out of the mass of Princes, flowing through the clerks and housekeepers and ship crew. And of course they found Kindalana sitting at the stern, wearing a gray halter that left her shoulder blades open to say, with their narrow motions, leave me alone, I am worried, I am thinking.
“I brought you some shrimp,” Tau-indi said.
She had her forehead against the railing. Her legs dangled over the water. She slid over and made room and Tau-indi sat down with her. They looked at her, then out at the lanterns and torches of the other ships, and at the black smoke glow of the city.
After a little while she reached over and took a shrimp.
They each ate the meat and spat the shells into the harbor. “It’s in us,” Tau-indi said, looking toward Kutulbha. “The ash is in us. Forever. I hope I don’t forget that.”
“He was going to set up a new shipping company. Before the family fleet burnt up in the fire.”
“Abdu?”
“Yeah. He was going to send ships to Falcrest.” She took another shrimp and ate it and looked at Tau-indi while she chewed and swallowed. “With mixed crews, so they’d learn each other’s languages. He was going to send eidetic griots to Falcrest to have their stories turned into books, and to memorize the Falcrest books for retelling.”
Her eyes made the claim that Abdumasi was as much a Prince as either of them.
“Poor Abdu.” Tau-indi bit down on the toothache. “I wish he were here.”
“You do?” Kindalana explored them with her eyes. “Really?”
“Sure. Yeah.” They kicked at the side of the ship with their heels. “When I needed someone to remind me life wasn’t all, you know, duty and trim, I’d go to him.…”
She said an edged thing. “And then you’d both come bicker over me. I was always the third one.”
“You came later, Kinda.”
“And I was a woman.”
“Yes,” Tau admitted. “That’s true.” And she understood that a laman was not something halfway between man and woman.
“We were children. We can’t be anymore.” She took a shrimp and peeled the shell with the edge of her thumbnail. “It’s funny, the things that you miss.”
Tau-indi made a shrug with their hands: like what?
“Like Abdu,” Kinda said. “He always wanted to be one of us. I didn’t realize it until that day on the beach.”
“He will be,” Tau-indi said softly. They moved their weight so their hip would brush Kindalana. “If you do marry him. He’ll be husband of a Prince, and that’s like being a Prince.”
“If, if, you say if but there’s no if. I have to marry him. All the families in his household are depending on me to keep them employed.”
“Would you marry him anyway,” Tau asked, “if he still had his money?”
“My answer to that doesn’t matter.”
“It does to him.” A marriage built on obligation might work, but it hadn’t for Padrigan, and it hadn’t for Tahr, and now they were in each other’s beds instead.
“I don’t know,” she said, which Tau thought must mean no.
“I could do it. I could marry him and you could marry Farrier.”
They tried to imagine being married to Abdumasi, rubbing their chin on his stubble when they kissed him, watching him laugh and play big and try to hide his (wonderful, endearing) efforts to be better. They tried imagining Abdumasi’s cock hard in their hand. It was very odd.
Kinda considered them. “Do you mean that?”
“You said … you and Farrier … you said you were trying to seduce him. And if you couldn’t marry him, you said I had to do it. Well, I could marry Abdu, and you could try for Farrier. Do you really want to marry Farrier?”
“No, of course not,” Kinda said. “But I want him to want to marry me.”
“Why?” It felt wrong to Tau. It meant using a basic human need as an instrument of politics.
“So he’ll make mistakes,” Kindalana said, cryptically. “He’s taught me a lot about what mistakes mean in Falcrest. By what he does, and what he won’t do.”
“I don’t like the idea,” Tau admitted. “I don’t like the principles of it. Flirting with him.”
“I’m sorry.” She said it a little bit like a question. “It makes you jealous.”
“No!”
“Not of Farrier, Tau. Of my methods. You think it’s wrong, but for me it’s just … what a Prince does. One’s body is political. Falcrest has peculiar politics, so I do peculiar things. I was making progress on Farrier, very carefully.” She sighed in frustration. “But I can’t leave Abdumasi, I don’t think. He needs my money and he loves me.”
Tau-indi loved Kindalana more for this than for anything before. “That’s good of you. To want to treat him well.”
“Thank you.” She looked as if she wanted to touch their hand again. She didn’t. “But you know I won’t.”
“Treat him well?”
She shook her head. “I have my duty to the Mbo. That will always come before him. And he’ll hate that, eventually. He’ll probably hate me for it.”
“Kinda, that’s unbearably sad.”
“I know. I know.” She sighed. “I’m glad we got to talk.”
“I’m glad, too.”
“It’s over,” Kindalana said. She turned at the waist so that they were facing each other and lifted her chin. All the lines of paint on her throat and chest moved in one liquid bound-together way, like the surface of the sea, like the mbo, and Tau-indi remembered painting the duties of a Prince on her flesh. “I didn’t think about it until now, but this is the end of … you know, of Prince Hill. It’s over.”
They laughed and it came out as bittersweet and papery as the treaty. “I wish you wouldn’t say things so honestly.”
“Sorry,” she said, and then, defying Tau’s wish, “Do you want to kiss me?”
Tau-indi’s stomach leapt. They giggled and then, sitting up very straight, looked at Kindalana, wonderful awful Kindalana, who always solved things too directly. The palace-ship moved under them and they swayed against each other. Kindalana opened her mouth a little, faintly nervous, faintly cheeky, and made a sound like the very first breath of a laugh.
“I don’t think so,” Tau-indi said, although it didn’t feel true until the last word. “Not right now. It wasn’t quite that kind of jealousy.”
She looked at them a while. She nodded. “I didn’t really think so, either.”
“I hope your dad gets better.”
“Me too,” she said. “Can we stay here a while more?”
They did.