“Maybe it shouldn’t have been,” Gairad said. She’d picked up her cup again and was pretending to fiddle with it, but Jainan could see her glance at him. “Maybe we should have fought them off.”
Jainan found himself at a loss. He’d thought it was common knowledge that they’d unified when the Resolution recognized Iskat’s control of the link, the gateway to the rest of civilized space. There had been no shots fired, but Iskat’s tariffs for foreign ships were prohibitive. Iskat was a generous trading partner with its vassals, its royalty was mainly pageantry, there was a parliamentary check on the Emperor—the clans had agreed unification was the best option. Nothing was ever perfect.
“Would that have made things better?” he said.
“If we’d taken over the link.”
“That’s absurd,” Jainan said sharply. The sector had once boasted two links, but the nearby one had collapsed in on itself last century, as they sometimes did, leaving only the inconveniently far-flung one past the Outer Belt, and the resulting skirmishes for control of the remaining link had formed the Empire in the first place. Thea had stayed out of the conflict. It had little military capability; Theans were latecomers to the sector and had focused mainly on agriculture. Jainan could easily imagine the outcome of Thea pitted against the rest of the Empire. They would be blown off the face of their own planet. “Who are you getting these lines from?”
“They’re not lines,” Gairad said, sounding offended. “I’ve got friends back in Bita. We have a right to our opinions. Did you know the Ambassador tried to make me attend Unification Day? He was trying to say it’s a condition of my scholarship. Hah.”
Jainan had his share of younger relatives, and there were always pockets of radicalism at universities, but he hadn’t heard any of them talk like this before. It gave him a nebulous feeling of unease. Unification Day was barely a month away. “Unification Day is necessary. The Resolution won’t deal with us separately now that we’ve signed up to Iskat’s treaty. We need to maintain goodwill.”
“Goodwill,” Gairad said derisively. “Iskat runs a Tau field for interrogating noncitizens.”
“They don’t,” Jainan said. He could see he wasn’t getting through to her; his spike of frustration surprised him. You live on Iskat, he wanted to say. You can see they’re not all monsters. “The Tau field was never used on a Thean. It’s being surrendered to the Resolution with the rest of the remnants. War dramas are not documentaries.” This was the kind of misunderstanding his marriage had been meant to solve. He had done nothing to help, had he?
“Why wasn’t it surrendered before?” Gairad said. “They renew that treaty every twenty years. The Iskaners have had the Tau field for way longer. Have you got a clever answer for that?” When Jainan said nothing—he was disturbed to find he didn’t know—she grimaced. “Whatever. You still abandoned your planet.” She got up and paced back over to the samovar to refill her coffee. “Now you’re going to get me in trouble for this.”
Jainan let out a breath that was almost a laugh. “That isn’t something I’m in a position to do.”
There were long seconds of silence. They could both hear Professor Audel clattering in the inner room. Gairad seemed to remember she was getting coffee, pressed the wrong hidden button, and cursed as a spray of hot water splashed her hand. At length, she said, “Why do you look over your shoulder when you laugh?”
It took Jainan a moment to find any sort of answer to that. “I don’t,” he said. Did he?
“Both times,” Gairad said. She dabbed her hand dry with a corner of the curtain. “Ugh. At least I can tell the Ambassador I’ve seen you.”
“Don’t—” Jainan started, alarmed, but at that moment Professor Audel came back in, holding up a cube-shaped abacus.
“Found it!” she said. “Good thing I never clear out, eh? Let’s have a look.” She shut down the first abacus and put the new one next to it. “Now, Jainan, why don’t you talk Gairad through the basics of this? And then we can discuss the consultation work you’ll be doing on the project.”
Jainan pried his fingers away from their death grip on the edge of the crate. This, at least, was something he could do. He found himself more grateful for that than he would have thought possible. “Of course,” he said. “Happy to help.”
* * *
When Jainan returned Kiem was in, for once, frowning over a tablet with the expression he got whenever anyone made him do extended reading. It was midmorning on a bright, cold day, and the pale dawn sky had deepened to a porcelain blue. On Thea, birds might have been chirping outside the window, but this was Iskat, so instead there was the occasional sharp tapping as the skeletal predators Kiem and Bel called doves made another attempt on the glass. They made a rattling noise with their beaks whenever they were thwarted. It was starting to become familiar.
Kiem looked up hopefully when the door opened. “Jainan!” he said, brightening up and casting the tablet aside. “You went to the College? How was it?”
That was the helplessly compelling thing about Kiem, Jainan had found: he was always glad to have company, whoever you were. Jainan had to remind himself that it wasn’t him specifically Kiem was happy to see; Kiem still went out of his way to avoid touching Jainan when they were anywhere near each other. Kiem just preferred company over solitude. “It went … well,” Jainan said. It had, on balance. “Yes. Well.”
“Do you like it? Are you going to do the project?”
“Professor Audel has asked for further help. Yes.” Jainan knew this would help Kiem’s leverage in the College, so Jainan expected him to be pleased about that and he was; Kiem was almost transparent when he was pleased about something.
“Let me know if you need anything, okay?” Kiem grabbed his tablet again, though he’d thrown it far enough that this involved an undignified lunge on the couch. “Also! I wanted to tell you. I was researching Thea.”
It was oddly restful, the way Kiem would fill all the awkward spaces just by talking if you let him. Jainan let it wash over him as he sat down, momentarily banishing the ever-present doubts about Taam and Thea. “Mm.”
Kiem waved a hand. “Well, all right, I got Bel to research Thea and send me the important bits. But listen, I was reading up about clans. Your system is really complicated, you know that?”
“Whereas the Imperial family system is very straightforward,” Jainan said.
Kiem’s face cracked into that smile again. “Right! Right. Nothing complicated here. I heard someone once assassinated an Emperor by dropping a full printout of Who’s Who on her.” The corner of Jainan’s mouth quirked with amusement. Kiem was already away again. “But listen, I read in this thing that it’s traditional to have a clan flag on the wall at home. Is that something people actually do?”
“Most people,” Jainan said. He wasn’t sure where this was going. “It’s not a requirement.”
“I thought maybe … there?” Kiem gestured at the blank wall opposite the desk. “I was going to message your ambassador to get one, but I wanted to check with you. This is Feria’s design, right?” He turned his tablet around to show Jainan.