He tried to get the operator back. The connection cut out.

“We have lost connection to the island, nandi,” the atevi operator informed him regretfully. “Shall we continue to try?”

“Attempt to reach Toby Cameron on ship-to-shore, boat name Brighter Days.” He gave the name in Mosphei’. “Advise me when there is an answer—at any hour you receive it. This is an urgent personal matter.” He was trying to persuade himself his sudden attack of anxiety was only that. It hadn’t been so many days, and it was unreasonable suddenly to go feverish with desire for news, but the momentary thought it might be Toby calling had just taken the lid off his anxiety.

Which was stupid of him. Toby might have stayed out at sea awhile, attempting to pick up shortwave transmissions, looking for information. Or if he had come back to shore, he probably was camped out on his boat in some harbor, even at Port Jackson, ready for a call to go pick his errant brother up off some beach on the mainland. Toby would very likely do exactly that, and maybe not communicate with Mospheiran authorities for fear of having the navy step in and take the job away from him. He’d be ready for one phone call, the same phone call he was trying to get through to him.

Toby was all right. He had to be all right. It could even be a weather delay. It had rained, hadn’t it? So there’d been weather at sea.

He desperately hoped Shawn had heard his last statement in that call and would check up on Toby, which would bring down the whole Mospheiran navy into the search, for sure, but dammit, he wanted to know, and he wanted to know now. He wanted someone looking out for Toby, when he couldn’t go do it himself.

He’d ask Shawn in the next call he made. Maybe by tomorrow the communications would be a little better. The Messengers were working on it.

Frustrating. But that he had any phone contact with Mospheira at all was a great improvement over yesterdayc a relief not just in his personal level of anxiety. Peace between the mainland and Mospheira rode a little easier now that Mospheira had been made officially certain Tabini was back in power, and the station could start making preparations to make drops of supplies and personnel on this side of the straits—if that had to be done—to help them get the shuttles flyingc because the station, in turn, depended on the shuttles getting foodstuffs up to them.

“Shall we continue to try the contact with Toby, Bren-ji?” Jago asked from the door.

He hadn’t even realized she was standing there. The servant had departed.

“Insofar as you have time,” he said, “yes, nadi-ji, pursue it with the Messengers’ Guild. I have some concern for him. One cannot understand why the Guild cannot come up with one clear line.”

“Yes,” Jago said, receipt of an order.

“Is there news?” he asked. She had that manner about her.

Jago came all the way in and shut the door. “Tabini-aiji’s choice of bodyguards is under Guild dispute at this hour. The western and northern members want their own members near the aiji. The aiji has selected only Taibeni clan. This does not please the south or the Padi Valley. This may go on some hours. One believes the aiji will have his way, particularly as the last choice was not trustworthy.”

The chief of Tabini’s guards, Ismini, was dead, with two of his men. Another had gone south, which said something. The surviving heart of the usurping regime was in the south, on the verge of eradication—politically struggling for what scraps of power it could get back, and damned cheeky to be asking anything.

“There was some notion,” Jago said, “of myself and Banichi being called to that post. We have refused, Bren-ji. Banichi has refused a direct request from the aiji’s staff.”

He didn’t know what to say to that. Tabini’s safety was paramount. But losing Banichi and Jago to Tabini—he didn’t know what he would do, and yet he couldn’t refuse the order to give them up, either.

“We would not consider it,” Jago said, “and the aiji has graciously backed us in that determination.”

He owed Tabini for that one. He ever so greatly owed him.

“If it were advancement for you,” he said, constrained to think of their side of the situation.

“No,” Jago said, flatly, and simply walked out on the discussion.

Offended? He earnestly hoped not. But when he found her a little later in her quarters, she seemed content and rather smug.

Preparations for the formal dinner still did not produce Banichi, nor Tano nor Algini. So it was an Infelicity of Two, himself and Jago, unless one counted them each a Stability of One—Bren personally chose to do so.

Given any choice at all, he would have declined the honor of dining with people he knew wished him dead. But his appearance surely had its purpose. It was difficult for the aiji-dowager to hide his presence in her household: that he resided here was a matter widely known in the Bu-javid, and it was not the dowager’s nature to hide any controversial fact, not in the least. Her neighbors from the East surely knew her ways, her inviting him was a statement on her part, and the wisest thing he could do, he was firmly convinced, was to keep his expression pleasant and his mouth generally shut.

So he gave himself up to the dowager’s domestic staff, bathed, dressed in his courtly best, braided and beribboned—he insisted on the white ribbon, the paidhi’s neutrality, rather than the black of the Lord of the Heavens, that title with which Tabini had attempted to put a human of no house into the ranks of the great houses. That distinction had been useful in dealings on the station.

It was not useful here, and certainly not among conservative Easterners.

“Nawari will accompany us tonight, nandi,” Jago informed him.

That was one of Ilisidi’s young men, a member of the dowager’s own bodyguard, a very reliable man, and it improved the security, besides improving the numbers. “The young gentleman will also attend,” Jago added. And then dropped the bombshell: “So will the lord of the Atageini.”

God. Lord Tatiseigi. Preeminent lord of the Padi Valley, in the central regions of the West, and an old flame of the dowager’s—in any sense, Tatiseigi was certainly an odd and volatile inclusion in tonight’s invitation. But Ilisidi and Tatiseigi had become thick as thieves since Ilisidi’s return from space, and perhaps the dowager meant her Eastern neighbors to see that she had strong allies in the West, that her power was increased, if anything, since Tabini’s return to powerc and to make one additional point that if they shared her dinner table and sought her favor, they had to share it with her intimates and behave themselves.

It was like a great deal else Ilisidi did: difficult to parse, and covered with thorns. Tatiseigi’s presence would not please the East, though in conservatism, they hardly had him outdone. More, he had to wonder if Tatiseigi knew that the paidhi-aiji would be there, or if Jago had gotten the full story of the dowager’s dinner party even from Nawari: Ilisidi’s guest lists could produce very uncomfortable surprises. Her sense of humor was not what other people called amusing, particularly when someone pushed, and he suspected it was in full force tonight.

Jago appeared, sleek, black-clad, and armed, at the very moment they needed to depart. Nawari had showed up at the door, likewise elegant, a handsome young fellow—all Ilisidi’s “young men” tended to that description, besides their other qualifications.

From there it was a short walk to the dining hall—and despite coming from within the apartment, he was not the first or even the second guest to arrive: Lord Tatiseigi was already there, his arm in an elegant brocade sling. Lord Tatiseigi had been wounded in recent action, and was quite proud of himself. Cajeiri was there, attended by two Atageini men in Assassins’ black, as well as the Taibeni youngsters, the latter in genteel court dressc rumor would tell the Easteners who and what the two anonymously-dressed young people were: not Guild, but certainly self-appointed bodyguards to the young gentleman—from a clan not highly approved by the Atageini, who asserted their close kinship to the heirc “Nand’ Bren!” Cajeiri said brightly, rising from his chair and bowing—due courtesy for a young person to an elder, but a little out of precedence. Bren managed a courteous, quick bow to Lord Tatiseigi, and had a nod from him, before addressing the youngster.