The door opened.
“Is there a difficulty, nadiin?” Banichi asked—Banichi, who was lodged next door, and, if there was anyone besides Ilisidi’s chief of security, Cenedi, who was likely to have heard the entire episode, he’d about bet Banichi had the equipment in his baggage and would use it.
“No,” he said. “Thank you, Banichi-ji. Is everyone settled? What’s our schedule?”
“A light dinner at sunset. An early start, at sunrise.”
“We’ll be ready. Thank you, Banichi-ji.”
“Nadi.” The door closed.
“He heard us,” Bren said quietly.
“I thought they took orders from you,” Jase said in a surly tone.
“No. They don’t. One of a great many things you don’t know, isn’t it?”
Another small silence.
“You needto know, Jase. You’d better learn. I’m trying to help you, dammit.”
“I’m sorry,” Jase said then. “I’m just—”
Jase didn’t finish it. Neither did he. He waited.
“I am sorry,” Jase repeated, in Ragi. “Nadi, I was overturned.”
“Upset,” he said automatically and bit his lip. “Overturned, too, with reason. Jasi-ji. I know that. Can we recover our common sense?”
“Nadi,” Jase said, “I wish to see the ocean. Will it be possible?”
“Nadi, you’re very forward to keep asking me. If I were atevi I should be offended. Learn that.”
A small hesitation. A breath. “Nadi, I take your information, but you are not atevi and I wish very much to know and not be surprised.”
“I’ll try to find out,” Bren said. “There are things I don’t understand.” He hesitated to say so, but there were very quiet alarm bells ringing in the subconscious. “Observe a little caution. This is in excess of the conditions I expected. We arepossibly in danger, nadi. One wonders if we have quite left behind the events in the city.”
“Is this part of the lesson?”
Layers, upon layers, upon layers. “No,” he said. “It isn’t.”
“Are you lying to me right now?”
“No,” Bren said. “And of course, if I were, I would say I wasn’t. But I’m not. I’ve turned us over to Tabini’s grandmother, and I don’t know what the truth is. The aiji thought us safe to be here. But I am, however mildly, concerned at the conditions. I can’t say why I’m concerned. I just would expect—somewhat more comfort than we have here, more evidence that someone had some idea of the conditions here beforethe aiji-dowager took guests here.” He wasn’t sure Jase followed that. But there was something ticking over at the back of his brain now that he was no longer focusing on Jase’s potential for explosion. That feeling of unease said that the dowager had security concerns, very reasonable security concerns, as did they. As did Mogari-nai, some distance away across the plain, which one would expect would be a very sensitive area; and they weren’t seeing the security level at this place he had expected.
“Can you ask Banichi?”
“Within his man’chi, yes.”
“Qualified yes.”
“Always. It always is.” It was the truth he gave Jase, and the answer was one that struck deep at what was human and what was atevi. He understood Banichi’s priorities and took no offense at them. He wasn’t in the mood to explain. He wasn’t in the mood now to doubt his own security.
Just the dowager’s.
Not a cheerful thought.
“Can you ask them what the schedule is?” Jase persisted.
“We were just told what the schedule is.”
“For tomorrow, I mean.”
He turned and fixed Jase with a glum stare. “I’ll tell you a basic truth of atevi, nadi. If there were no real need for you to know that, yes, you could go, or I could go, and ask anyone around us. But because there issome question of good will here, and since that’s why you need to know, no, it wouldn’t be prudent to ask. Never make your hosts lie to you, Jasi-ji. Once that starts, you don’t know what to believe.”
“They’re not lying?” Clearly Jase was not convinced.
“Not yet, I think. Not likely. But I haven’t seen Cenedi. I haven’t seen the dowager. I haven’t seen anything but one servant, and our own security.”
“What does that tell you?”
“Nadi, in response to your far too blunt question, it tells me either that people are busy because we’ve come here on short notice and quite clearly they’ve had to move even food up this hill to have anything on hand—or—there’s something going on and they’re too polite to offer us the possibility of a question.”
“Meaning what?”
“Again too blunt, nadi.” He was determined to push, in coldly correct, even kindly atevi fashion, to see whether Jase was capable of holding his temper. “But in response to your question, and in hopes your next question will be more moderate, they may avoid our presence rather than put themselves in the position of lying or us in the position of needing to be polite.” He changed languages. “A new word for you: naigoch’imi. It means feigned good will.”
“ Naigoch’imi. Is that what we’re dealing with?”
“We? Now it’s we? A moment ago you wanted to kill me.”
“I wanted the truth, dammit. And I still don’t know if this includes you.”
“Is that the way they get the truth on the ship? With fists?”
A silence. Several small breaths. “I won’t apologize, Bren.”
“Fine.”
Back into the ship’s language. “Friendship wouldn’t have hurt, you know. From the beginning, friendship wouldn’t have hurt.”
NowJase wanted to talk. He’d had enough from his brother. And he wasn’t in the mood for sentiment, dammit, he’d turned it off between him and Jase at the beginning.
“Frankly,” he said with coldness that amazed himself, “I don’t know that you’ve ever offered any such thing. Not since we first spoke on the radio before you came down here. You were bright, interested, pleasant. But since you landed, since then—”
“I tried!”
“And I have a job to do, which means hammering words into your head, like it or not—no, I’m not always pleasant. I can’t be! Youwere a teacher—I’m not. So I do the best I can, even in the intervals when you had the luxury to be annoyed at me.”
“So I’ve learned. I have learned.”
“So you’ve worked at it. Good for you. You’ve also gotten mad. But I didn’t have the luxury to be mad, no matter what you said, no matter what you did. So I’ve taken it. I’ve taken anything you wanted to hand out, because I know my way around, I have the fluency, and I’m used to being the diplomat in touchy situations.—But friends, no. A friendwould have met me halfway. A friendwould have advanced some understanding that I’m crowding teaching you into the spaces where—never mind my leisure time—the spaces where I was getting sleep, nadi. Friendship wasn’t in the requirements, I haven’t asked it and I damn sure haven’t gotten it!”
“You don’t give me a chance.”
“It was your choice, from the first day you landed. You weren’t pleased with me or anyone else. You’ve made no secret of it. You never have trusted me. Why are we talking about it now? What do you want from me?”
“I expected…” Jase stopped, a need for words, or just a shaky breath. “Things were not what you promised from the moment we landed!”
(Hanks yelling, Don’t trust them! The whole plain afire. Atevi armed to the teeth and clear evidence of an armed conflict.)
“You had some reason to think that, I’ll grant.”
“And they’re not what you said here!” Jase flung a gesture about him, at the stones, the situation. “Every time I trust you! Every damned timeI trust you, Bren, something blows up in my face! You’re the one that keeps the peace between your people and the atevi—but your people aren’t speaking to you, have you noticed that?”