She stared at him for a moment, then shrugged. “Partly your standard sibling rivalry,” she told him. “And the rest is…” She shook her head. “Too long a story. Brey’ll tell you in her own time, I expect.” Sharrow held one of Cenuij’s hands.

“Soon, Cenny; she’ll tell you soon. This nonsense with Dornay should put us on the track of the book; we’ll find it. She’ll be out soon.”

Cenuij looked down, and his hand moved, as though about to take the letter out again. “That’s all I want,” he whispered.

She put her arm round him.

“And you, Sharrow?” he said, twisting away from her to look her in the eye. “What do you want? What do you really want? Do you know?”

She gazed levelly at him. “To live, I suppose,” she said, with what she hoped sounded like sarcasm.

“No good; too common. What else?”

She wanted to look away from his intense, narrow gaze, but forced herself to meet it. “You really want to know?” she asked.

“Of course! I asked you, didn’t I?”

She shrugged. She pursed her lips and looked deliberately away, out into the darkness beyond the windows. “Not to be alone,” she said, looking at him and lifting her chin just a little, as if in defiance. “And not to let people down.”

He gave a harsh laugh and got up from the couch. He stood above her, straightening his robe. “Such a humorist, our little Sharrow,” he said. Then he smiled broadly and put his arm out towards her. “Shall we?”

She smiled without warmth, took his arm and they descended to the party.

There were perhaps a hundred guests. The band was entirely acoustic and by that measure extremely up-to-date; Bencil Dornay’s own kitchen staff had prepared the tables of delicacies themselves. Dornay took her round his guests, introducing them. They were business colleagues, senior staff in his trading firm, a few local dignitaries and worthies, rich friends from nearby houses and some local artists. Sharrow entertained the idea that Bencil Dornay’s guests just happened to be uniformly polite, but guessed that they had been told not to ask any embarrassing questions on the lines, of How does it feel to be hunted by the Huhsz?

“You are very brave, Lady Sharrow,” Dornay said to her. They stood by one of the food-laden tables, watching a juggling troupe perform on a small stage raised in the middle of the reception hall’s dance floor. People had left a discreet clearing round the host and his guest.

“Brave, Mister Dornay?” she said. He had dressed in pure white.

“My lady,” Dornay said, looking into her eyes. “I have requested my guests say nothing about the unfortunate cir-cumstances you find yourself in. Nor shall I, but let me say only that your composure would astonish me, had I not known the family you come from.”

She smiled. “You think old Gorko would be proud of me?”

“It was my misfortune only to meet that great man once,” Dornay said. “A bird cannot land once on a great tree and claim to know it. But I imagine that he would, yes.”

She watched the spinning wands of the jugglers as they flashed to and fro beneath the spotlights. “We believe the Passports my… pursuers require are safe, for now.”

“Thank the gods,” Dornay said. “They appear not to have been initiated but I feared a trick, and we are not so far from their scrofulous World Shrine. I have taken every precaution, of course, but… Well, perhaps I should have cancelled this evening.”

“Ah, now, Mister Dornay, I believe I forbade you…”

“Indeed,” Bencil Dornay laughed lightly. “Indeed. What was I to do? My family no longer exists to serve yours, dear lady, but I am your servant nevertheless.”

“You are too kind. As I say, I believe I am safe for now. And I’m grateful for your hospitality.”

“My house is yours, dear lady; I am yours to command.”

She looked at him then, as the jugglers drew gasps with their complicated closing routine.

“Do you mean that, Mister Dornay?” she asked him, searching his eyes.

“Oh, absolutely, dear lady,” he said, eyes shining. “I am not merely being polite; I mean these things literally. It would be my pleasure and an honour to serve you in any way I can.”

She looked away for a moment. “Well,” she said, and smiled waveringly at him. The lights came up as the jugglers finished their display to decorously wild applause. “I… I do have a favour to ask you.” She had to raise her voice a little to make herself heard.

Dornay looked delighted, but from the corner of her eye she could see guests-released from the spell of the juggling troupe-moving a little closer to her and Dornay and looking expectantly at the two of them. She let him see her gaze flick around the people. “Perhaps later,” she said, smiling.

She stood on the terrace, a drink in her hand, the darkness at her back as she leant against the shoulder-high parapet, the reception room like a giant bright screen in front of her. People were dancing inside. Clouds hid the junklight.

Miz came out, wandering across the terrace, smoking some-thing sweet-smelling from a little cup-kettle. He leant back beside her and offered her the gently fuming cup, but she shook her head.

“Haven’t seen you up dancing yet,” he said, breathing deeply.

“That’s right.”

“You used to dance so well,” he said, glancing at her. “ We used to dance so well.”

“I remember.”

“Remember that dance competition in Malishu? The endurance one where the prize was to go to dinner with the brave and heroic pilots of the Clipper Squadrons?” He laughed at the memory.

“Yes,” she said. “I remember.”

“Hell,” he said, turning round to look out over the dark valley. “We’d have won, too, if the MPs hadn’t arrived looking for us.”

“We were AWOL; taught me never to trust you with dates again.”

“I got confused; we’d crossed the date-line during the party the night before.” Miz looked bewildered and squinted up at the dark clouds. “Several times, actually, I think.”

“Hmm,” she said.

“Anyway,” he said. “Want to try it again?” He nodded back at the hall and the dancing people. “This lot look feeble; give them a couple of hours and they’ll be falling like raindrops.”

She shook her head. “I don’t think so,” she said. “Not right now.”

He sighed and turned round, taking another snort from the cup-kettle. “Well, if it comes to the end of the night,” he said, pretending snootiness, “and you don’t get offered a lift home; don’t come crying to me.” He nodded once, primly emphatic, and headed back to the reception hall, practising his dance steps on the way, drink held out in one hand, the fuming cup-kettle in the other. She watched him go.

She had been remembering a ball in Geis’s father’s house, in Siynscen, when she’d been fifteen or sixteen. Breyguhn had fallen in love with Geis that summer-or thought she had, at least-when they had all stayed at the estate. Sharrow had told her she was silly, and far too young; Geis was almost twenty. What would he want with a child like her? And anyway, Geis was an altogether tiresome person; an awkward, over-eager fool with funny eyes and a plump behind. In fact she herself was quite fed up with him wanting to dance with her at these sorts of functions, and wanting to kiss her and give her stupid presents.

Nevertheless, Breyguhn was determined she would declare her undying love for Geis at the ball, stubbornly maintain-ing that Geis was kind and dashing and poetic and clever. Sharrow had poured scorn on all this, but then, when she had stood in their dressing-room, all fussed around by servants (and enjoying the attention and the luxury of it, because their father had lost a lot of money that year, and had dis-missed all their own staff save his android butler), and seen her half-sister in her first ball-gown (albeit borrowed, like her own, from a better-off second cousin), with her hair piled up like a woman’s, her budding breasts pushed by the bodice to form a cleavage, and her eyes, made-up, glowing with confidence and a kind of power, Sharrow had thought, with some amusement and only a hint of jealousy, that per-haps dear, tedious old Geis might just find Brey attractive after all.