Certainly Fosyf didn’t mistake it. She gestured dismay. “I should have realized it would come to this. I’ve protected Raughd for too long. I always hoped she’d do better. But I never thought…” She trailed off, apparently unable to express what it was that she had never thought. “To think I might have left my tea in the hands of someone who could do such things.”
Raughd went absolutely still for a full second. “You wouldn’t,” she said, barely more than an emphatic whisper. As though she could not entirely engage her voice.
“What choice do I have?” asked Fosyf, the very image of injured regret.
Raughd turned. Took three long steps over to the tea set on the stand. Picked the box up, raised it over her head with both hands, and threw it to the ground. Glass shattered, blue and green and gold fragments skittering across the floor. Kalr Five, standing by the door, made the smallest noise, audible to no one but her and me.
Then silence. No one moved, no one spoke. After a few moments a servant appeared in the doorway, drawn, no doubt, by the crash of the tea set. “Sweep this mess up,” Fosyf said, catching sight of her. Her voice was quite calm. “And dispose of it.”
“You’re throwing it away?” I asked, partly because I was surprised, and partly to cover another very small noise of protest from Five.
Fosyf gestured unconcern. “It’s worthless now.”
The magistrate turned to Queter, who had stood straight and silent this whole time. “Is this what you wanted, Queter? All this heartache, a family destroyed? For the life of me I don’t understand why you didn’t put your obvious determination and energy into your work so that you could make things better for yourself and your family. Instead, you built up and fed this… this resentment, and now you have…” The magistrate gestured, indicating the room, the situation. “This.”
Very calmly, very deliberately, Queter turned to me. “You were right about the self-deception, Citizen.” Evenly, as though she only remarked casually on the weather. In Radchaai, though she might as well have used Delsig, which she knew I understood.
Her remark wasn’t meant for me. Still I replied. “You were always going to speak if you could, whether you thought it would do any good or not.”
She lifted one sardonic eyebrow. “Yes,” she agreed. “I was.”
18
From the moment we had left Fosyf’s sitting room, Sirix was tense and silent, and she did not say a word nearly all the way back to Athoek Station. This was a particularly impressive length of silence because Sword of Atagaris’s injury meant we’d be taking up more seats on the passenger shuttle from the elevator to the station than we ought, and so we had to wait a day for a flight with the available extra space.
Sirix didn’t speak until we were in the shuttle, an hour from docking with the station. Strapped into our seats, Five and Eight behind us, their attention mostly on Queter’s sister, who’d had a miserable time the whole flight, among strangers, missing home, disoriented and sick to her stomach in the microgravity but refusing to take any medication for it, upset further by the way her tears clung to her eyes or broke free into small liquid spheres when she wiped her face. She had finally fallen asleep.
Sirix had accepted the offered meds, was therefore more comfortable physically, but she had been troubled since we’d left the mountains. Since before, I thought. I knew she didn’t like Raughd, had, on the contrary, good reason to resent her, but I suspected that she of all people in the room that day had understood what Raughd must have felt, to hear her mother speak so easily, so calmly, of disinheriting her. Had understood the impulse that had led Raughd to smash that ancient tea set that her mother clearly valued highly, took pride in. Citizen Fosyf had not changed her mind, about her daughter or about the tea set. Kalr Five had retrieved the box from the trash, and the fragments of gold and glass, the shattered remains of the bowls and the flask that had survived undamaged for more than three thousand years. Until now.
“Was that justice, then?” Sirix asked. Quietly, as though she was not speaking to me, though no one else would have heard her.
“What is justice, Citizen?” I replied with my own question. “Where did justice lie, in that entire situation?” Sirix didn’t reply, either angry or at a loss for an answer. Both were difficult questions. “We speak of it as though it’s a simple thing, a matter of acting properly, as though it’s nothing more than an afternoon tea and the question only who takes the last pastry. So simple. Assign guilt to the guilty.”
“Is it not that simple?” asked Sirix after a few moments of silence. “There are right actions and wrong actions. And yet, I think that if you had been the magistrate, you would have let Citizen Queter go free.”
“If I had been the magistrate, I would have been an entirely different person than I am. But surely you don’t have less compassion for Citizen Queter than for Citizen Raughd.”
“Please, Fleet Captain,” she said after three long, slow breaths. I had made her angry. “Please don’t speak to me as though I’m stupid. You spent the night at the field workers’ house. You are apparently familiar with Valskaayans and fluent in Delsig. Still, it’s quite amazing that you walked to the house and came back the next morning with Queter. No protest, no difficulty. And before we even left the house—before the magistrate left—the field workers had sent Fosyf a list of demands. Just at the moment Fosyf can’t depend on the magistrate’s unquestioning support.”
It took me a moment to understand what she meant. “You think I put them up to it?”
“I can’t believe it’s merely fortuitous, that uneducated and uncivilized field workers, who for ten years and more could not find the resources to strike, choose to do so now.”
“Not fortuitous at all. And while they may be uneducated, they’re hardly uncivilized. They’re perfectly capable of planning such a thing on their own. They understand Fosyf’s position as well as anyone. Perhaps better than many.”
“And Queter coming with you so willingly, that wasn’t part of any bargain? She won’t ultimately be let off lightly? And in the meantime, Citizen Raughd’s life is destroyed.”
“No sympathy for Queter? Raughd acted from malice and injured pride, and would have destroyed more than me if she had succeeded. Queter was faced with an impossible situation. No matter what she did, things would end badly.”
A moment of silence. Then, “All she needed to do was go to the magistrate in the first place.”
I had to think about that for a few moments, to understand why Sirix of all people thought Queter could or should have done that. “You do realize,” I said finally, “that Citizen Queter would never have gotten within a kilometer of the district magistrate without my having explicitly demanded it. And I beg you to recall what generally happened in the past when Citizen Raughd misbehaved.”
“Still, if she had spoken properly she might have been listened to,” Sirix replied.
Queter had been right to expect no help from the district magistrate, I was sure. “She made the choices she made, and there’s no escaping the consequences of that. I doubt very much she’ll get off lightly. But I can’t condemn her. She was willing to sacrifice herself to protect her sister.” Sirix of all people ought to have approved of at least that. “Do you think that if the Lord of the Radch were here she would have seen through everything, to give each act and each actor’s heart its proper weight? To dispense perfect justice? Do you think it’s possible that any person will ever get precisely what they deserve, no more and no less?”
“That is what justice is, Citizen, isn’t it?” Sirix asked, ostensibly calm, but I could hear that very small tightness in her voice, a flattening of tone that told me she was, now, angry. “If either Raughd or Queter wants to appeal their judgment, there’s no recourse, not cut off from the palaces as we are. You’re the closest thing we have to the Lord of the Radch, but you aren’t the least bit impartial. And I can’t help but notice that each time you’ve arrived somewhere new, you’ve gone straight to the bottom of the ladder and begun making allies. Of course it would be foolish to think a daughter of Mianaai could arrive anywhere without immediately engaging in politics. But now I see you’ve aimed the Valskaayans at Fosyf, I’m wondering who you’re planning to aim the Ychana at.”