“You’re the new Ambassador from Lsel Station. Why are you here, and not at the party?”
For a child of ten he was distressingly direct. Mahit thought of Two Cartograph, Five Agate’s little Map, with his orbital mechanics at age six. Children learned what they were expected to know. She had. At ten on Lsel she’d known how to patch a hull breach, how to calculate an incoming ship’s trajectory, where her nearest escape pods were and how to use them in an emergency. She’d known, too, how to write her own name in Teixcalaanli glyphs, to recite a few poems; how to lie awake in her tiny safe pod of a room and dream of being a poet like Nine Orchid, having adventures on faraway planets. She wondered what this child dreamed of.
“My lord,” she said to him. “I wanted to see more of the palace. Forgive me if I’ve intruded.”
“The ambassadors from Lsel are curious,” said Eight Antidote, like it was the opening line of an epigram.
“I suppose we are. Is this—do you come here often? All of the little birds are very beautiful.”
“The huitzahuitlim.”
“Is that what they’re called?”
“The ones here are called that. Out where they come from they have a different name. But these are palace-hummers. Lsel doesn’t have birds.”
“No,” said Mahit slowly. This child had known Yskandr. And Yskandr had filled his mind with some vision of what Lsel Station was like. “We don’t. We don’t have many animals at all.”
“I’d like to see a place like that,” Eight Antidote said.
She was missing some vital piece of information. (She was certain she was never supposed to have encountered this child, not alone, not informally.) “You could,” she said. “You’re a very powerful young person, and if you still want to, when you are of age, Lsel Station would be honored to host you.”
When Eight Antidote laughed, he did not sound ten years old. He sounded fey, and bitter, and smart, and Mahit wanted … something, some emotion she couldn’t place. A vestige of maternal instinct. A desire to hold this kid, who knew birds and who had been left alone in the palace without friend or minder. (There was certainly a minder somewhere. Perhaps the City itself, the perfect algorithm, was watching them both.)
“Maybe I’ll ask,” he said. “I could ask.”
“You could,” Mahit said, again.
Eight Antidote shrugged. “Did you know,” he said, “if you dip your fingers in the flowers the huitzahuitlim will drink the nectar right off your hand? They have long tongues. They don’t even have to touch you to do it.”
“I didn’t,” Mahit said.
“You should leave,” Eight Antidote said. “You’re not at all where you’re supposed to be.”
She nodded. “I suppose I’m not,” she said. “Good night, my lord.”
Turning her back on him felt dangerous, even if he was ten. (Perhaps because he was ten, and so used to having people turn their backs on him that it was a thing he could order.) Mahit thought about that all the way down the hall, retreating away from the garden and its inhabitants.
They don’t even have to touch you to do it.
Some kind person, thinking of courtiers and officials on their feet for hours inside the maze of this place, had installed a series of low benches along one of the corridors nearer to the great ballroom and its sun-spear throne. Most of them were occupied, but Mahit found one in a corner that was entirely empty, and sank onto the cool marble. Her hip ached still. She wasn’t in the slightest bit drunk anymore, and she was—exhausted, more than anything else, and every time she closed her eyes she thought of Eight Antidote in his garden with his birds.
Does he miss you, Yskandr? she thought, and again the silence inside her mind was an unfillable gap, a hole she could fall into. She leaned against the wall behind her, and tried to breathe evenly. The voices of the crowd inside the ballroom were audible a good thirty feet away, a dim laughing roar. What did you tell him about our Station?
She hardly noticed when a man sat down on the bench beside her—didn’t open her eyes until he patted her lightly on the shoulder, and she startled upright. It was a Teixcalaanlitzlim (of course it was, what else was there), unremarkable: not from a ministry she could identify by uniform, just a man in early middle age in a multilayered dark green suit covered in tiny embroidered dark green starbursts, with a face she was absolutely sure she’d never remember.
“—what?” she asked.
“You,” said the man, with an air of great satisfaction, “are not wearing one of those horrible little pins.”
Mahit felt her eyebrows knit together, and schooled her face into Teixcalaanli-appropriate expressionlessness. “The larkspur pins?” she guessed. “No. I’m not.”
“Fucking buy you a fucking drink, for that,” the man said. Mahit could smell the alcohol coming off of him in waves. “Not enough people here like you.”
“Are there not,” Mahit said warily. She wanted to get up, but this drunken stranger had wrapped his hand around her wrist and was holding on.
“Not nearly enough. Say—were you in the Fleet, you look like you’re the sort of woman who’s been in the Fleet—”
“I’ve never served,” Mahit said. “Not that way—”
“You should,” he said. “Best ten years I ever gave the Empire, and they’d like a tall woman like you, doesn’t matter there if you’re not City-bred, no one will care as long as you follow your yaotlek and’ll die for your siblings-in-arms—”
“What company did you serve under?” Mahit managed.
“The glorious and everlasting Eighteenth Legion, under the starshine-blessed One Lightning,” he said, and Mahit realized she was being given a recruiting speech. A recruiting speech for the people who stood in the street shouting One Lightning’s name, wanting to unseat the ruling emperor by pure acclamation, by the sound of their joined voices crying out that the attention and favor of the ever-burning stars had turned, and settled on a new person.
“What battles did One Lightning win?” she asked, thinking that she could use this drunkard to try to understand some of the mentality, to find the logic behind the acclamations.
“The fuck kind of question is that,” the man said, apparently deeply offended by her failure to immediately fall over herself in praise of One Lightning, and got up. His hand was still on her arm, gripping very tightly. “You’re—fuck you, how dare you—”
No logic, Mahit thought dimly, just emotion and loyalty, exacerbated by alcohol. He shook her, and her teeth clicked against each other inside her skull. She couldn’t decide if shouting I’m not even one of you! would make him back off or inflame him more, tried, “I didn’t mean—”