Behind her, Nineteen Adze had framed herself in the entranceway like a pillar of white fire, and Mahit could feel the attention in the room shift. She exhaled.
She liked parties—a certain level of extroversion and sociability was a basic part of the aptitude tests that had made her compatible with Yskandr—but she was still grateful for the chance to catch her breath, to make an approach of her own choosing. To not have all those eyes on her in case something went wrong in a more visible fashion than it had done thus far.
“Where to?” asked Three Seagrass.
“Introduce me to someone who writes poetry you like,” Mahit said.
Three Seagrass laughed. “Really.”
“Yes,” Mahit said. “And if they have an official dislike of our most-esteemed ezuazuacat hostess, so much the better.”
“Literary merit and diversifying political options,” Three Seagrass said. “Got it. We are going to have fun, aren’t we?”
“I am trying not to bore you,” Mahit said dryly.
“Don’t worry. The hospital trip was sufficient to relieve me of boredom, Mahit, and this part is what I’m for.” Three Seagrass’s eyes were bright, a little glassy, like she’d drunk too much of Nineteen Adze’s stimulant tea. Mahit worried about her, and wished she had the time or energy to do something about that worry. “Come this way, I think I saw Nine Maize, and if Nine Maize is giving a new epigram tonight, Thirty Larkspur will be there to hear it. All the political diversity you could want.”
Three Seagrass’s friends were a mix of patricians and asekretim, some in Information Ministry cream and some in gleaming court dress that showed no particular affiliation that Mahit could decode—this was what she needed Yskandr for, even fifteen years’ worth of out-of-date fashion observation would be better than it’s all very shiny and a suspicion about anyone wearing purple flowers as a decorative motif. There were too many of them: worked in as embroidery on sashes, made of mother-of-pearl or quartz on jeweled hairpieces and lapel pins, more sophisticated versions of the one that helpful stranger in Central Nine had been wearing. They meant something. Three Seagrass wasn’t commenting on it, which didn’t tip the balance of meaning in any direction at all.
Instead she introduced Mahit formally, and Mahit bowed over her fingertips and was an extremely proper barbarian—respectful, occasionally clever, mostly quiet in the midst of the sharp chatter of ambitious young people. She could follow about half of the allusions and quotations that slipped in and out of their speech. It made her jealous in a way she recognized as childish: the dumb longing of a noncitizen to be acknowledged as a citizen. Teixcalaan was made to instill the longing, not to satisfactorily resolve it, she knew that. And yet it wormed into her every time she bit her tongue, every time she didn’t know a word or the precise connotations of a phrase.
Nine Maize turned out to be a sturdy man with a slim beard, paler than most Teixcalaanlitzlim, his eyes wide set over flat, broad cheeks. Mahit hadn’t seen many people from this ethnic group—northern, cold-weather adapted, blond—in the City. There’d been a few on the subway, and a few in Central Nine, but they were the eighth most common in the census numbers—she’d done her research before she’d arrived. People who looked like Nine Maize might have been born here on the City, or come from a planet with more cold weather and less subtropical heat—or his parents might have. Or his genetic material might have, and had latterly been selected by some City-dweller as being suitably interesting and compatible with their own, when it was time to make a child. Three Seagrass had introduced Nine Maize as patrician first-class—unfashionably pale or not, he was Teixcalaanli.
“Is it true,” Mahit asked him, “that you are reciting a new work tonight?”
“Rumors travel so quickly,” Nine Maize said, looking not so much at Mahit as at Three Seagrass, who blinked at him as if the very suggestion of her complicity made no sense to her.
“Even to foreign ambassadors,” Mahit said.
“How flattering,” Nine Maize said. “I do have a new epigram, it’s true.”
“On what subject?” said another of the patricians eagerly. “We’re due for an ekphrasis—”
“Out of fashion,” Three Seagrass said, under her breath but just loud enough to be heard. The patrician made a little show of ignoring her. Mahit tried her best not to spoil the effect by smiling like a foreigner, wide and genuinely amused. An ekphrasis—a poetic description of an object or a place—did seem to be old-fashioned. None of the Teixcalaanli poetry which had come to Lsel lately had been in that style.
Nine Maize spread his hands and shrugged. “The buildings of the City have been described by better poets than me,” he said, which Mahit suspected was a slightly more politic version of exactly what Three Seagrass had said. “Do you like poetry, Ambassador?”
Mahit nodded. “Very much,” she said. “On Lsel, the arrival of new works from the Empire is celebrated.” She wasn’t even lying—new art was celebrated, passed around through the Station’s internal network; she’d stayed up late with her friends to read new cycles of the latest imperial epics—liking Teixcalaanli poetry was just being cultured, especially when one was barely an adult and still spending all one’s time getting ready for the language aptitudes. Nevertheless she disliked Nine Maize’s acknowledging smile, the condescension in his nod: of course new works were celebrated in backwater barbarian space. For that dislike, she went on, “But I’ve never before had the honor of hearing one of your pieces, patrician. They must not be distributed off-planet.”
The way Nine Maize’s expression shifted—he couldn’t answer that insult, not from a barbarian—was perfectly satisfying.
“You’re in for a treat, then, Ambassador Dzmare,” said a new voice.
“I’m sure I am,” Mahit said automatically, and turned around.
Thirty Larkspur was unmistakable. The multistranded braids of his hair were woven through with ropes of tiny white pearls and glittering diamonds; another strand made up the band around his temples, to imitate the bottommost part of a Teixcalaanli imperial crown. He had the wide Teixcalaanli mouth and the low Teixcalaanli forehead and the deep hook of the Teixcalaanli nose: the model of an aristocrat. Pinned to his lapel was an actual fresh-plucked purple flower: a larkspur.
How obvious, Mahit thought. She should have realized. (And realizing, noticed that she felt no echo of Yskandr while looking at this man: he hadn’t known him, not during the five recorded years her imago had lived here. Thirty Larkspur was a mystery to her: she didn’t even have an emotional ghost to rely on. The dead Yskandr must have known him, but he was dead—and she was both damaged (sabotaged!) and out of date.)