“Your abdication, lady? Your abdication ?”

“It’s nothing — nothing whatsoever—”

A Report on the Proposed Treaty with the Hjjks

“Your abdication, lady?”

“Would you sign a treaty with them?”

“Mother? Mother, are you all right?”

“Your abdication ?”

“Can you hear me, mother?”

“Mother? Mother?”

Taniane looked up. There was a figure at the door of her chambers. That door was always open to any of the citizens of Dawinno, though few of them dared to come to it. Taniane struggled to focus her eyes. She had been in some sort of haze, she realized. Minguil Komeilt? No, no, Minguil Komeilt was a soft, round, timid little woman, and this one was tall and athletic, strong and restless.

“Nialli?” she said, after a moment.

“You sent for me.”

“Yes. Yes. Of course. Come in, girl!”

But she hovered in the doorway. She wore a green mantle casually over one shoulder and the orange sash of the highborn at her waist. “You look so strange,” she said, staring. “I’ve never seen you look this way. Mother, what’s the matter? You aren’t ill, are you?”

“No. And nothing is the matter.”

“They told me a rock was thrown at you in the street this morning.”

“You know about it?”

“Everyone knows. A hundred people saw it, and everyone’s talking about it. It makes me so furious, mother! That anyone should dare — should dare—”

“So big a city is bound to have a great many fools,” Taniane said.

“But to throw a rock, mother — to try to injure you—”

“You have it wrong,” Taniane said. “The rock fell well in front of me. It wasn’t meant to hit me at all. It was simply carrying a message. Some Beng agitator thinks I ought to abdicate. I’ve stayed much too long, is what he said. It’s time I stepped aside. In favor of a Beng chieftain, I suppose.”

“Would anyone really presume to suggest such a thing?”

“People presume to suggest anything and everything, Nialli. What happened this morning is meaningless. Some crank, nothing more. Some agitator. I can tell the difference between an isolated crank letter and the outbreak of a revolution.” She shook her head. “Enough of this. There are other things to discuss.”

“You dismiss it so lightly, mother.”

“Shall I let myself take it seriously? I’d be a fool if I did.”

“No,” Nialli Apuilana said, and there was heat in her tone. “I don’t agree at all. Who knows how far this will spread, if it’s not stopped right away? You should find the person who threw that rock and have him nailed to the city wall.”

They stared tensely at each other. A pounding began behind Taniane’s eyes, and she felt a tightness in her stomach. Congealing juices roiled there. With anyone else, she thought, this would merely be a discussion; with Nialli it was a battle. They were always at war. Why is that? she wondered. Hresh had said something about their being so similar, that like repels like. He had been doing something with little metal bars then, studying how one of them would attract the other at one end, but nothing would happen at the other. You and Nialli are too much like each other, Hresh had said. And that is why you will never be able to exert any real force over her. Your magnetism won’t work on her.

Perhaps so, although Taniane suspected that something else was at work too, some transformation which she had undergone while she was among the hjjks, that made her so difficult. But there was no denying her daughter’s likeness to her. The two of them were cast in the same image. It was an eerie and sometimes troubling thing. Looking at Nialli was like looking at a mirror that reflected through time. They could almost have been twins, mysteriously born some three and a half decades apart. Nialli was her one child, the child of her middle years, conceived almost miraculously after she and Hresh had long since given up hope of bringing any into the world; and there seemed to be no imprint of Hresh anywhere upon the girl, except, perhaps, her stubborn, independent mind. In all other ways she was Taniane reborn. Those elegant legs, those strong shoulders and high breasts, that splendid silken red-brown fur — yes, Taniane thought. She looked regal. She carried herself like a chieftain. There was a glory about her. Not always a comforting thing, that. Sometimes, when she saw Nialli, Taniane was all too painfully reminded of her own aging body. She felt herself already drifting downward into the earth, beckoned by the powers of decay, too soon dragged under by the mass of corroding flesh and softening bones. She heard the flutter of moth-wings, she saw trails of gray dust along stone floors. There were days when there was death in the air.

After a long silence Taniane said, “Must we quarrel, Nialli? If I thought there was something to worry about here, I’d take action. But if someone really wanted to overthrow me, it wouldn’t be done with rocks tossed in the street. Do you understand that?”

“Yes,” said Nialli Apuilana. It was barely more than a whisper. “I understand.”

“Good.” Taniane closed her eyes a moment. She struggled to cast off fatigue and strain. “Now: if we can get down to the matter I called you here to discuss. Which is this supposed ambassador who has come to us from the hjjks, and the supposed treaty that he supposedly invites us to sign.”

“Why all these supposeds, mother?”

“Because everything that we really know about this comes by way of Hresh and the Barak Dayir. The boy himself hasn’t said anything coherent at all, has he?”

“Not yet, no.”

“You think he will?”

“As our language comes back to him, he may. He’s been in the Nest for thirteen years, mother.”

“What about your talking to him in his language?”

Nialli Apuilana seemed uneasy. “I’m not able to do that.”

“You can’t speak any hjjk?”

“Only a handful of words, mother. It was years ago — I was with them just a few months—”

“You’re the one who brings him his food, aren’t you?”

Nialli Apuilana nodded.

“What if you used those occasions to refresh your memories of the hjjk language? Or to teach him a little of ours.”

“I suppose I could,” Nialli Apuilana said grudgingly.

The obvious reluctance in her tone was maddening. Taniane felt her resistance. The girl is innately contrary, she thought. She said, perhaps a little too sharply, “You’re the only person in this city who can serve as an interpreter for us. Your help is essential, Nialli. The Presidium will meet soon to take up this entire treaty thing. I can’t rely on Wonderstone trances alone. The Wonderstone is all well and good; but we need to hear actual words from the boy. You’ll have to find some way of communicating verbally with him and learn from him what this is all about. And then give me a full report. I want to know everything that he says to you.”

Something was wrong. Nialli Apuilana’s jaw was set. There was a cold, hard look in the girl’s eyes. She stared without speaking, and the silence stretched across too many ticking moments.

“Is there some problem here?” Taniane asked.

Nialli Apuilana glared sullenly. “I don’t like acting as a spy, mother.”

A spy? Taniane thought. That was unexpected. It hadn’t occurred to her that serving as an interpreter on behalf of one’s own people could be construed as spying.

Is it because of the hjjks? she wondered.

Yes. Yes. It is because the hjjks are involved in this. And she sat stunned, appalled. For the first time she understood that her daughter might feel an actual conflict of loyalty.

Since Nialli Apuilana’s return from captivity she had never said a word to anyone about her experiences among the hjjks: nothing of what they had done to her, nothing of what they had said, not a scrap of information about what life in the Nest was like. She had steadfastly deflected all inquiries, meeting every query with an odd mix of distress and steely ferocity, until the inquiries had ceased altogether. Up till this moment Taniane had assumed that the girl had simply been shielding her privacy, protecting herself against the awakening of painful memories. But if she saw a request to report on her conversations with Kundalimon in terms of spying, then it might well be that it was the privacy of the hjjks, not her own, that she felt a powerful desire to protect. That was worth some further investigation.