“Why do you do this thing?” a now-familiar voice said, and I only jumped a little as An-Hadrea dropped from the stone wall beside me. I was getting better at reacting when she did this to me, this time trying to turn the shock into a shrug, though her smile suggested she wasn’t fooled.
“Do what, An-Hadrea?” I asked, keeping my tone courteous.
“This thing. Where you eat the Chancellor’s food, and check it for poison.” She met my surprised gaze, guileless, as I blinked, searching for words.
“I … what do you … I don’t know what you mean.”
She blew out her lips in scorn. “Do you think I am stupid? You think I have no eyes?”
“Oh, I know you have eyes,” I murmured. They seemed capable of spying on me at will.
“Well, then. Why do you do this thing?” She fell in beside me, patient, confident of receiving an answer.
“It’s something my family’s always done,” I said at last. “We protect the Chancellor.”
“By eating poison.”
“By proofing,” I corrected, prickling. “Testing for poison. I know the flavors, the smells, the textures, to make sure it’s safe.”
“You protect him by dying in his place? But why would someone highborn do this? Is it not a job for an animal or a servant?”
“No,” I said, annoyed. “You don’t understand. We don’t just die, like some replaceable animal. It takes a lifetime of training. We know poisons—all the poisons.” I forgot that was wrong until it came out. Not all the poisons, obviously. “We have immunities and antidotes. We know how to protect ourselves, and protect them. And this is everything to us. It’s our family’s honor.”
“Honor,” An-Hadrea said. “How is it you are all so obsessed with one half of our creed and you apply it so strangely? You have twisted it into yet another system of rank, a way of measuring who is more valuable than whom. Honor is not a score in a game, Jovan. Honor is about your connection to other people. It is how you show yourself to other people and the regard in which you hold them, which in turn feeds the regard in which they hold you. And honor is only one half of the whole. You have forgotten tah. You understand nothing of the fresken of the land, and you know nothing of the secondworld. But you cannot stop talking about honor. What is honor if you are dead? Or your friends or family are dead?”
It was difficult to explain the notion. “Honor lives on after you die. It’s the mark we carve on the world. It’s living fairly and respectfully. If you don’t live with honor, what’s the point?”
“Fairly? Respectfully? Perhaps I understand these words differently. Where is the honor in how my people are treated?”
I sighed. “You’re right, it is dishonorable. I don’t deny that. But I didn’t know.” It sounded weak because it was, but she had me flustered.
“But you did not spare thought for the people who feed you, here in your shining white city.”
No words came to my defense. I never had thought about the people in the country much. They were just … there, like the landscape—an important part of the infrastructure, but not something to which I’d ever turned my attention. That thought shamed me now. “I didn’t. Honor-down, I wish I had.” I caught her arm, compelled to make her understand. “You always saw this city as greedy and indulgent, so nothing’s changed for you. But I grew up here, An-Hadrea, I grew up here thinking we were the most civilized city in the world, that we were better than all our barbarous neighbors. And then I found out we’re not better, we’re worse, because our foundations are rotten. Don’t you see? My whole city … my whole world, it’s all been built on lies.”
She stared at me, calm as the eye of a storm. “You are right. You poor thing, having to learn what monsters live inside you. You are as much a victim as the people who have been treated no better than valued livestock.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“No, no,” she continued, savage. “Let me comfort you, for it is you who are suffering. Confronting your role in destroying our way of life is truly just as painful as having that life destroyed is for us. Your feelings must be so hurt. Let us focus on those feelings. They are the most important thing, just like everything in the cities is more important than in the estates. Forget that you are murdering the spirits of the land, that you have taken everything from us.”
I dropped her arm, angry and defensive. “Let’s not pretend one side is all to blame here. Is everyone in this city to blame for what their government’s done? Are innocent children supposed to die a violent death for the crime of being born here? Did a peace negotiator sent out to talk in good faith deserve to be murdered for trying to talk and listen? Tearing the very heads off the bodies of our messengers—not even soldiers, just people who could run fast, and dumping them at our gates like refuse? One side doesn’t have the monopoly on honor.”
She looked discomforted but not stunned; clearly the rumors had already reached her about the messengers’ fates. But her tone, if anything, increased in ferocity. “Did I ever say such brutal acts were honorable? No Darfri would do such a thing to their most despised enemy. But there are lesser people within the rebellion, people who would use us for their own ends. Do you not remember my family came here at great risk and cost to help you, because my mother believes that such violence is unjustified no matter what you have done to us? I suppose you have forgotten that?”
I met her furious brown gaze and hated the guilt she was making me feel, hated myself for being angry about it, hated the explosion of feelings like a physical swarm eating me from the inside. But she was right. I couldn’t stop feeling those things—honor-down, there was nothing in the world I was worse at than stopping myself thinking the wrong things—but I could stop blurting them at her and expecting her sympathy.
“I’m sorry,” I said, a little stiffly. “It isn’t your fault or your concern how I deal with my part in all this, An-Hadrea. I know that.” I wanted to say more, but it would just be further justification, and I hadn’t earned the right to expect her to care about it.
We sat in silence for a while. Despite my deserved dressing down, I didn’t want her to go. I strove to think of something conciliatory. “Will you tell me more about tah?” I asked.
She considered me for a moment, and something softer glimmered in her expression. “Come,” she said. Then she sprang away, leading us in the opposite direction, back down the hill toward the lake. It took all my efforts to keep up with her in the dark. Once or twice I thought I’d lost her. Then we almost collided in the grassy space leading down to the shore, and she chuckled, catching my shoulders as she spun around.
“Easy,” she said. “Here, sit.”
Tongue-tied with the usual confusion her sudden changes of mood inspired, I sat beside her on the cool grass, a respectful distance in accordance with her country preferences and my own. She leaned back on her elbows, her gleaming hair half-masking a still profile. Across the dark silky expanse of water, life flickered in the buildings of the lower city. For this quiet moment, it seemed almost as though there was no war, just the shores of the Bright Lake on a warm evening. Sometimes it surprised me how much some parts of the city had not changed.