Mahit took a breath. Settled back on her pelvis, straightened her spine. She was of a height with Sixteen Moonrise, at least when they were both sitting down. “From your reaction to Special Envoy Three Seagrass and me,” she said, “I would expect nearly anything except you waiting for me, Fleet Captain. What was it you said—the spook and her pet?”
“I did say that,” Sixteen Moonrise agreed, easily enough, and didn’t apologize for it. “She is a spook, and you are—or you certainly were brought here as—her pet. I imagine she told you all sorts of things about how your presence could ensure a diplomatic voice for the Stations in whatever negotiations she ends up conducting with our enemies, yes?”
Not quite, Mahit thought. That would have been transparent. This is Three Seagrass. Transparency is beyond her. Beyond us both. She lifted one hand from her lap, tilted it back and forth—maybe yes, maybe no, go on.
“Mm,” Sixteen Moonrise said, an evaluating noise. “Why are you here, Ambassador Dzmare? I imagined you’d want to be shut of Teixcalaan, after being involved in that mess in the capital three months ago.”
“I like challenges,” Mahit said. “I’m a translator. Who wouldn’t want to be involved in a first-contact scenario?”
“Nearly everyone who has ever been near an alien,” said Sixteen Moonrise. “I don’t believe you, Ambassador Dzmare. Glory-seeking naïveté does not match up with the woman who started this war for us. Your broadcast before Six Direction’s death was masterful, by the way. You horrified me, and I don’t horrify easily.”
“With all due respect, Fleet Captain, it was the aliens who started this war. I alerted the Emperor to it. I considered it an act of good citizenship.”
“You’re a barbarian.”
“Barbarians,” Mahit said, imagining Three Seagrass’s face the whole time she was saying it, “are human beings; good citizenship in the face of existential threats extends beyond the boundaries of sovereignty. Or at least that is what we barbarians are taught, on my Station.”
It wasn’t. Mahit had never been taught anything of the kind. But it made Sixteen Moonrise’s electrum-colored eyes widen, not a smile and not a grimace—but a veritable hit. And it was a useful lie.
Sixteen Moonrise exhaled through her nose, as if in exasperation. “Let me put it this way, Ambassador,” she said. “I’ve watched your work on the newsfeeds during One Lightning’s idiotic little usurpation attempt, which the Fleet really could have done without, by the way. You’re too smart and too much of a politician to be here only as the envoy’s pet—and you’re already having difficulties with the envoy, aren’t you? I notice she isn’t here, and you aren’t on the bridge with the yaotlek. Not to mention that your precious Stations are right next to this sector, which is full of aliens with ship-dissolving spit. One jumpgate away. That’s not very far at all.”
“I’ve seen the holographs of Peloa-2,” Mahit said. “Is it so strange that I’d want to be part of stopping what is happening here? And yes, stopping it from reaching my home as well?” She wasn’t going to talk about Three Seagrass. It was bad enough that Sixteen Moonrise, who was clearly no friend to either of them, had noticed that there was something wrong between them, and noticed from only the evidence of an absence. She wasn’t going to confirm it. Not now, not ever.
“It’s not strange,” said Sixteen Moonrise, lifting one shoulder in a shrug. “It’s merely—interesting. You show up in the most fascinating places, Ambassador. And you seem to be quite convinced by the envoy’s argument that talking to our enemies will deliver the halt to hostilities you so reasonably desire.”
“You think otherwise?”
“Oh, I reserve judgment until an attempt is made,” said Sixteen Moonrise, and for a moment Mahit could see how she would be as a commander: the sort of person who evaluated, and evaluated, and then struck, a flurry of orders and decisions, no hesitation. “But I have lost twenty-seven soldiers in the past week, and I am beginning to be sick of funeral hymns. I have what I would consider perfectly reasonable doubts about the envoy’s efficacy. And yours—at first-contact negotiations, at least. You may be a very skillful barbarian, Mahit Dzmare, and you may have wrapped the Information Ministry around your finger like a satellite caught in orbit, but you’re no Emperor Two Sunspot. And these things aren’t the Ebrekti.”
Mahit found it within herself to laugh—it wasn’t her laugh, exactly, it was some sort of self-mocking amusement that belonged mostly to the younger, half-dissolved Yskandr, his flashfire arrogance and bravado. “They’re worse than the Ebrekti, based merely on their noises—did you know those sounds function as a self-reinforcing amplifying sine wave when played from different directions, Fleet Captain? I thought not. And I am certainly much worse than Her Brilliance Two Sunspot. As a negotiator, and as a person with weight on the world. I would never compare myself to an Emperor of all Teixcalaan.”
It felt good to say. To be vicious in her own despair, to display the wound of her desire in fulclass="underline" No, I will not be Teixcalaanli, I am incapable, I know, let me hold the bleeding lips of this injury open for you to see the raw hurt inside. To say, I would never compare myself to one of you, with full consciousness that she would, and had, and could not stop.
Like a reflection, a shard of memory, hers or Yskandr’s, too blurred to discern: Nineteen Adze saying, It’s a shame you’re not one of us—you argue like a poet. Or had that been Three Seagrass? She couldn’t tell. She wished she could. It might mean something, if she could remember if that had been her or Yskandr, the now-Emperor or the asekreta, wishing for her—for them—to be otherwise than they were.
“Ah,” said Sixteen Moonrise. “And yet you have willingly tried to bring them to a negotiating table.”
“I use,” Mahit said, feeling very tired and very cold, “what skills I have available.”
“As does your Station, I see. What skills, and what people.”
And she doesn’t even know for certain that I’m a spy, Mahit thought. Here for herself, and her Station, surely—and here also for Darj Tarats, in payment for how he would spare her from Heritage’s scans and knives. Her eyes were only her own until she made her first report back to him. And once she did that—once she did that, she might have to choose whether or not she would be a saboteur as well as a spy, to keep being spared.
<This one,> Yskandr told her as her fingers went numb—as her forearms went numb, to the elbow, she’d thought they were getting better, but this was worse, much worse than it had been in a while—<this one doesn’t need to know to have already decided. For her, all barbarians are spies and saboteurs, if they’re somewhere as secret and sacred as a Teixcalaanli flagship of the Fleet. How could they be otherwise?>
“Would you prefer we sent fighter ships rather than ambassadors?” Mahit asked the Fleet Captain. “We have a few. Not nearly so many as Teixcalaan, of course.”
Sixteen Moonrise looked at her, considering and expressionless. “There may be a time, Ambassador, that we need every ship we can find,” she said. “At that time, I’ll remind you of what you’ve said to me. And until then—well. Good luck, with the envoy and the aliens and the yaotlek. I assume Stationers believe in luck?”
“When we need it,” Mahit said.
“You’ll need it,” said Sixteen Moonrise, and left Mahit at the worktable alone, vanishing into the hallway as if she had never been lying in wait for her at all.