“I expect they’ll learn,” Sula said.

  “Or not,” said Sempronia.

  Severin turned to Sula. “Is Dr. Gunaydin with you?” he asked. “I haven’t seen him.”

  “He’s at his work,” Sula said. “He got a job at the Glory of Hygiene Hospital.”

  “Good for him,” said Severin.

  Sula had strong-armed the hospital into choosing her candidate. None of the others applying for the position had the recommendation of a prominent convocate, and the hospital directors were only too happy to oblige. Gunaydin had been surprised and delighted to be accepted by the capital’s most prestigious hospital, and at a salary that would actually permit him to live in Zanshaa.

  He wouldn’t have to be anybody’s fancy man, not unless he wanted to.

  The conversation turned to other topics, and eventually Sula noticed that her glass was empty and went to the bar for a refill. She sipped, and suddenly the whole party was too oppressive: too noisy, too crowded, too hot, too frantic, too full of hustle and business, too full of people surnamed Martinez. She left room and found a quiet courtyard with tables, benches, and a fountain, all protected by a glass lattice overhead.

  Sula sighed with relief and sipped her brandy sunflower. She approached the fountain, but the plashing of the water sent a series of small bright shocks to her axons, and she found herself grinding her teeth. Sleet spattered the glass overhead. The relief she thought she’d found dissipated. For some reason the whole afternoon had turned wrong. Undirected anger simmered in her blood.

  “No. No. We crushed the enemy’s rear division before the eight hundred relativistic missiles hit Do-faq’s rear.”

  At the familiar voice, Sula felt her nerves coil into a furious tangle. Martinez had entered the courtyard, striding in like a conqueror, his attention on his sleeve display.

  “The solar missiles were later,” Martinez said, “after I turned the division toward the enemy center. The decision was made by that point.”

  He paused in his march, then looked up at Sula in surprise. Sula gave him a tight-lipped smile and raised her glass in an ironic salute.

  “Any more questions, send them later,” Martinez said. “I’m still at Severin’s party.”

  Martinez brought the conversation to an end. Sula looked at him and raised an eyebrow.

  “Assuring your place in history?” she asked.

  “Vipsania’s doing another video series,” Martinez said. “You’ll be contacted if you haven’t been already.”

  “Good,” Sula said. “I’ll point out how you left my command in the lurch while you charged off to win the war and glory.”

  His mouth twitched as if she’d slapped him. “You seemed to be doing all right,” he said. His tone was resentful. “And you didn’t ask for help.”

  The tinkling of the fountain made Sula want to crawl right out of her skin. “I should have thought the need for help would have been bloody obvious,” she said. “You could have detached a squadron; it would have made all the difference.”

  “You could have asked,” Martinez said. “I felt the main body posed the greater threat and wanted to bring my division to bear where it would have the most effect.”

  Sula drained her glass and balanced it on the edge of the fountain. “We’ll let history decide,” she said as she walked toward the door. She hesitated. “But then, your sister is the one who gets to create the history, isn’t she? I wonder how she’ll play it?”

  Martinez watched as she walked past him, and then spoke before she could make her exit.

  “Are you sure this conversation is over, Gredel?” he asked. “Or do you prefer Margaux?”

  Sula spun to face him, and a small, mean part of Martinez rejoiced at the terror in her glittering emerald eyes, a terror soon suppressed by a visible act of will. She rubbed the pad of scar tissue on her thumb and regarded him.

  “I suppose you think you know something,” she said.

  He stood over her, close enough to smell the brandy on her breath. It felt good, after all these months, to just let it out, to let the tension and suspense and anger drive the confrontation.

  She’d started it, after all.

  “I know you’re not the real Lady Sula,” he said. “I suppose she had an accident or something, and you stepped in.”

  She gave a snort of derision. “If you think I’m not the real Sula, you can check with the Peers’ Gene Bank.”

  “I imagine you fixed the Gene Bank after you stormed the city in the Naxid War. You had wartime powers then. But I remember once you were more touchy on the subject.”

  Once, years ago, he had asked her to marry him. She had seemed delighted at the idea, then hesitated, then started an argument and walked away. It had occurred to him recently, with the force of revelation, that at some point he had mentioned the necessity of donating a drop of blood at the Gene Bank before getting married, and that perhaps that had prompted her hesitation and subsequent flight.

  “I suppose your friend Lamey helped you adopt your new identity,” Martinez said. “And then, on Zarafan, he probably tried to blackmail you. And you . . . dealt with him.”

  She watched him with narrowed, angry eyes. “How can you have everything so wrong?” she asked. Her hands waved. “It’s beyond belief.” Her lip curled with contempt. “I guess you think this gives you some kind of advantage,” she said. “That you can get me to do whatever the fuck you have in mind.”

  Martinez was genuinely surprised at the accusation. “No,” he said. “Not at all. I have no plans to use this information at all.”

  She gave him a skeptical glance. “Then why bring it up?”

  “Because it’s been nagging at me ever since Zarafan. I couldn’t understand why you did what you did . . . So I started looking into things. It wasn’t hard to work out.”

  Her gaze was flat, angry. “Yet I’m supposed to trust that you’ll never use this.”

  He spread his hands. “Why would I? I can’t prove anything—not if you’ve got the Gene Bank covered. So there’s no reason to wrap me in a carpet like Braga and stick my corpse in an abandoned refrigerator.”

  She snarled. “Other than the sheer pleasure of it?”

  Martinez sighed. “We each have a gun at the other’s head. You killed Braga, but I helped you hide him—that makes me an accomplice to homicide.” He raised a hand. “And another point—should something happen to me, it would be entirely possible for an investigator to follow my tracks. You know what my family is like. Don’t give them an excuse to look into my discoveries.”

  “Your discoveries.” Contempt oozed from every syllable. One of her hands made a fist. “Here you are congratulating yourself on how clever you’ve been, and you still have it all wrong.”

  Martinez waved a hand. “You’re welcome to correct me.”

  An angry flush touched Sula’s pale cheeks. “Lamey wasn’t blackmailing me. Lamey was going to blackmail you.”

  Martinez blinked. “Blackmail me? But how?”

  “He was going to tell Terza about us if you didn’t get him money from your family. I couldn’t let that happen.”

  Martinez stared at her. Sula gazed up at him in defiance. “You don’t have anything clever to say? Even though it turns out to have been all about you the entire time—and damned if I don’t know why that wouldn’t please you. You have no comment?”

  He managed to find words. “Apparently I don’t.”

  “I’ve silenced the great Gareth Martinez. I should get a prize.” Her green eyes flashed. “So now is this conversation over?”

  “I won’t stop you from leaving.”

  Her lips twisted in anger. “As if you ever could.”

  She turned and swept to the door. The clicks of her heels on the tiles were an echo of the other times she’d left him, marching away while his heart wept scarlet drops onto the dust.

  Martinez realized that there had been a part of him that still treasured a sliver of precious hope, and that the hope had just evaporated, leaving behind a void that he could never fill.

  He and Sula hadn’t been lovers in months, and yet to Martinez it seemed as if love had just said a last goodbye before striding from the scene, heels rapping on the tiles.

  Sula sat at her desk in the Convocation and listened to the droning of the members—she couldn’t call it a debate, since none of the speakers seemed to have a distinct point of view, let alone a point of view concrete enough to argue with anyone else’s equally vague ideas. They just talked around the topic—whatever the current topic was—a witless chatter so disconnected with reality that it managed to be about nothing but itself.

  Impatience and anger jabbed at Sula like someone’s knuckles grinding into her skin. She was going to spend the rest of her life listening to this sort of drivel. She was going to be trapped in the vast Convocation hall while one Martinez or another told her what to do.

  You know what my family is like, Martinez had said. And alas, she did.

  She looked toward the podium, where Lord Saïd drowsed in his red cloak, his fingers idly dancing along his copper wand of office as if he were silently playing a flute. Saïd, who would soon leave office, and who had perhaps hinted he would prefer that he not be succeeded by a proxy for Roland Martinez.

  Well, Sula thought, if not Roland, why not me?

  She knew the answer well enough: she was too young, too inexperienced, and far too tactless.

  On the other hand, the Sula name placed her at the highest levels of society, and she had talent and boundless energy. She had important friends—Lady Koridun, for one—and her work with the Secret Army had given her contacts all over Zanshaa, including members of the underworld, who in the past had proved useful for one thing or another.

  If she couldn’t become Lady Senior herself, she might be able to form a faction large enough to tip the balance in any election.

  Perhaps it was time to see what she could manage.

  “A careful Caroline,” Gunaydin had said, “is someone new to me.”

  She waited for the discussion to trail away to its end, then voted on the measure convinced that neither the measure nor her vote mattered a damn. Some departments in the Ministry of Public Health were to be reorganized, and in the end be as useless as they were before.

  As soon as the measure passed, she was on her feet asking to be recognized.

  Lord Saïd looked up at her with his sharp eyes. “I am pleased to recognize Lady Sula,” he said.

  “Thank you, Lord Senior,” Sula said. “I would like to introduce a resolution thanking members of the Naxid community, and particularly Lord Nishkad, for the aid given to the Restoration by those Naxids involved in logistics, ship construction, and in crewing vessels of the Fleet.”

  Members stared. She sat down and waited while chaos boiled up around her.

  Most members of the Convocation were unaware that Naxids had been employed during the war, and they were reacting with anger or alarm or both. They demanded answers to their questions, which Sula was pleased to provide.

  “Is it not illegal to employ Naxids on warships?” one demanded.

  “There was no Judge Martial to whom I could refer the matter,” Sula said. “The fact is that we had simply run out of trained Terrans. The need was great, and I decided that the benefits exceeded any possible risk. After all, I earned my reputation killing Naxid rebels, and no one can say I was ever in sympathy with the Naxid cause. In the event, the Naxids proved both loyal and capable and were instrumental to the decisive battle at Toley.”

  Other members wanted assurances that Naxids were no longer employed on warships, and Sula was able to tell them that the Naxids had been returned to their home worlds and mustered out of the service.

  The matter degenerated into a good deal of pointless, angry declarations by one indignant Peer after another. None of them, Sula observed, had taken part in any fighting—unlike Nikki Severin, who very kindly supported her resolution.

  In the end, Roland Martinez rose and smoothly suggested that the matter be tabled until the Convocation could be better informed about what Sula and the Naxids had done, and when.

  She was drinking tea in her office with its view of the Boulevard of the Praxis when Roland arrived. “What the hell was that about?” he demanded. “I’m going to have to spend precious hours calming down the members before we can get on with our agenda.” He ground his right fist into the palm of his left hand. “At least Oda Yoshitoshi is in charge of the censorship. None of this will escape into the media.”

  Sula took a deliberate whiff of her tea’s smoky bouquet. “The Convocation passes such resolutions every day,” she said. “Why can’t we say thanks to the folk who helped us win? Who put you in a position to say who gets thanks and who doesn’t?”

  “Because to half the population of the empire, the Naxids are a pack of murdering rebels!” Roland said.

  “Well,” Sula said, “they’re not, as we both know. I think the rest of the empire should know too.”

  Roland loomed over her desk, big hands, angry eyes. “I don’t want any more such resolutions introduced in the Convocation,” he said. “We’ve got an agenda, and we need to get it passed. Understand?”

  Sula took a deliberate drink of her tea. “I hear you,” she said. Which, as they both knew, did not mean I hear and will obey. He stared at her for a long, angry moment, but she just stared back, as if to remind him that he wasn’t Lord Senior nor one of Severin’s upper-upper-uppers, and she wasn’t subordinate to him.

  If he took the message, he didn’t show it.

  Behind her opaque expression, Sula quietly rejoiced. Roland had just made a mistake.

  Naxid convocates formed something like 8 percent of the voting members of the Convocation. Roland had just thrown them away and given them every reason to offer their votes to Sula.

  After Roland left, Sula sent a message to Lord Nishkad telling him that she had introduced her resolution of thanks, and that it hadn’t gone well, but that she hoped to reintroduce the resolution later.

  Which was an unsubtle way of asking Lord Nishkad for his help without actually asking for it. He could form a Naxid faction faster than she could—and would, because she had made herself a powerful voice for his species—and could not be blamed for placing it at her service.

  Then she gazed out the window at the Boulevard of the Praxis and considered her situation.

  The Naxids were a start, she thought. Roland had just passed on his chance to be patron to the entire Naxid species, and she wasn’t going to make that mistake.

  But still. The Naxids weren’t enough.

  If her plans for the civil service examinations passed the Convocation, she’d have the support of every junior civil servant in the empire. They weren’t votes in the Convocation, exactly, but as the junior civil servants rose to become middle managers, then seniors, they would have a great deal of influence in how legislation was interpreted and put into practice.

  She’d have the numbers in terms of population, then. But Sula knew that she lacked the kind of fortune that would enable her to expand her power base in the Convocation. Lady Koridun would support her, and Koridun had buckets of money, but if Koridun was paying for everything, then it would become Koridun’s faction, not Sula’s. Even if Lady Koridun considered herself a loyal subordinate, ultimately it was the money that mattered, and the power would inevitably shift to her.

  She finished her tea, then put the cup down, triggered her comms display, and asked to be connected to the Lord Senior.

  Saïd answered quickly. “Yes, Lady Sula? How may I be of assistance?”

  Sula heard a hum in her nerves, a knowledge that things were about to change irrevocably. Why not? she thought. Love hasn’t worked out. Might as well go for power.

  She gathered her thoughts and spoke. “I wonder, Lord Senior, if you can tell me a little more about your grandnephew Eveleth.”

  There was a pause, and then Saïd responded. “With pleasure, Lady Sula.”

  Sula sighed. In the near future, there would have to be a very awkward conversation with Gunaydin. She imagined that he would be reasonable.

  And then, she supposed, she would have to get a dog.

  “The most important thing that can happen to a person is love,” Martinez said. “Love with the right person is delightful and fulfilling, and always surprising.”

  He looked out over those attending, most glittering in their dress uniforms, and before him the two people at the center of attention.

  “I have no doubt,” he said, “that Agustin Mpanza and Filomena Juskiene have found in each other the right person, and I would like to celebrate their love by asking all present to raise a glass to their continued happiness.”

  There was a growl of assent from the crowd, and a general raising of glasses. Neither Juskiene nor Mpanza were from Zanshaa, and so the celebration was attended chiefly by friends drawn from the Fleet, mostly warrant and petty officers given leave from their ships to attend. Santana and Banerjee were the only two commissioned officers other than Martinez.

  Mpanza and Juskiene had just returned from the registrar, where the actual wedding had taken place, and now it was time for the celebration. Martinez’s gift to the couple had been this party in a rented room at the Fleet Club, with a buffet dinner and an open bar. After Severin’s, it was the second such party he’d been to in four days, and he hoped to hell it would be the last for a long, long time.

  His head swam with the effort of making his speech, and the glittering company was lost in dazzle. He kissed Juskiene’s cheek and thumped Mpanza on the shoulder, and then slipped out of the room to draw a breath in the corridor.

  The most important thing that can happen to you is love.

  True, but the phrase would mean a different thing to Mpanza and Juskiene than it meant to Martinez. For him, love had been not only the most important thing but also the most devastating thing. The most soul-crushing thing. The thing that exalted him and stirred him and left him wretched and stumbling half-broken into the light of day.