Mistake. He winced.

“You’re hurt,” Barb observed.

“Oh, bruises. Nothing much.” Quick diversion to Barb’s favorite topic: Barb. “Your head’s far worse. Nasty crack you took. Tano’s very sorry. You just mustn’t emote around armed security. Mustn’t. You could have been shot.”

“Tano knows me! Did he think I’d assassinate you?”

“It wasn’t Tano who’d have shot you. The lord’s men in the hall might have, thinking you were coming after me. I was under their lord’s protection, and you were about to touch me.

That’s the way it works. Just don’t touch people. And keep a calm face, no matter what.”

Bowed head. “I was doing pretty good up to that point.”

“You really must have been,” he said honestly, and he saw that Tano and Algini had come through the hall door.

Banichi and Jago went over to them. For a moment there was a low conversation with a notable absence of handsigns. His bodyguard evidently wantedtheir eavesdroppers to have no trouble with whatever they were saying to each other.

Jago came over to him, then, and quietly refreshed Bren’s cup and Barb’s. “One may report some progress with staff, nandi,” she said—the singular address, along with a turned shoulder, pointedly though quietly ignoring Barb. “We have sent word through the lord’s staff that we wish to make two phone calls in Lord Machigi’s best interest. We have received permission. Tano and Algini will be going to a house security area to make the calls. We are to make them ourselves, under observation, with a written text.”

“Are we to call Shejidan to reach the Guild?”

“No. They have agreed to our contacting Cenedi at Najida.”

“Tell Cenedi this: that we have spoken at length with Lord Machigi and are favorably impressed. Say that he had already recovered both Barb-daja and Veijico from the kidnappers and released them to me as an act of good will, besides agreeing to look for Lucasi. Machigi, we are convinced, is not the agency behind the recent attacks in Najida, and possibly he was not involved with other actions that have been attributed to him. We are establishing proof of this and hope to present it soon.”

Jago nodded, a little bow, and went over to the others.

“What’s going on?” Barb asked.

“We’ve gotten permission, we hope, to phone home to Najida. We’ve added, if we can get it in, that we’ve recovered you and Veijico. I can’t promise we’ll get that concession. Local security will be very worried about prearranged signals and verbal code. Things are going to be somewhat tense around here until the lord gets word certain proceedings have been canceled.”

“Can you get a message from me to Toby?”

To his brother. Toby had been wounded in the kidnapping incident—and he’d assured Barb that Toby was all right. He wished he were entirely sure that was the case. “No. We can’t. We may not even get the permission to talk about you at all. Excuse me.” He set his cup down and got up and went over to his bodyguard, seeing that Algini and Tano were about to go out the door.

“Take care, nadiin-ji,” he said to them, wishing at the same time he were going with them.

Glad as he was to have recovered Barb and Veijico, he just was not getting his thoughts together with them in the room. He needed somewhere else. He needed a buffer between himself and Barb’s questions, and most of all needed a buffer against her asking him questions about Toby while he was trying to keep his nerves together and think.

Tano and Algini left on their mission. He didn’t go back to the couch. He tried turning his back on the whole room, standing by the fireside, trying to compose a mental list of things he needed to keep in mind. His computer was back home. He didn’t have its resources.

Barb, to her credit, took his signal; she sat still and sipped her tea and didn’t talk to him for at least the next five minutes.

He was framing a course of logical argument, an approach to negotiations with Machigi, what he could imply, what he could offer in the way of inducements—

A knock at the door announced some arrival.

Thoughts flew in a dozen directions. Tano and Algini wouldn’t be back this soon. His heart rate kicked up a notch. Barb sat there looking frightened, while Jago’s hand rested very near her sidearm and Banichi stood similarly poised, on the other corner of the room.

It proved to be nothing more than house staff bringing their belated breakfast, a rather large breakfast on a rolling cart, and they were clearly bent on serving it.

It smelled good. A lot better than last night’s toast.

“Just leave it, please, nadiin-ji,” he said, and that had to be that, courteously. The servants would assume what they liked and report him as rude. But they were notgoing to linger in the room, big-eared and listening.

“Veijico,” Jago said with a meaningful glance, and Veijico took a plate and took a little of every dish, plus a cup of tea, and sat down and began to eat.

Barb looked confused.

“Veijico tries it first,” Bren said. “We’ll wait about half an hour.”

“I’m starving,” Barb said.

He felt like saying, peevishly, Suit yourself, but he didn’t. He didn’t say anything, discovering himself in an uncharacteristically short temper. He just turned and went back to the fireplace.

Barb followed him. “Are you upset?”

He really, truly didn’t want to argue right now; and he wasn’t in a good mood. But he said, patiently, “I’m thinking. I have to present a case to our host, and I haven’t composed it yet, and there’s nowhere to work but here. I’ll eat when I’m done. It’s all right. I’ll just stare into space for about an hour. Please.”

She looked a little put out. Barb was good at that. She didn’t understand any activity that didn’t involve discussing the matter. But at least she took a broad hint and went away under her small dark cloud.

And he’d known her long enough he could accept that she’d take quiet offense, and be upset, and want to know intimately everything that was going on. He’d known her long enough and well enough to accept her reactions with a total failure to give a damn, except for Toby’s sake.

Getting her back to Toby and getting both of them on their boat, out of atevi waters and back to safety at Port Jackson, where he could be sure they weren’t a targetc even that had to be put on a lesser priority. All personal questions did. Toby mattered in these equations only because he was, among other things, an agent of the Mospheiran government and knew things that might be of interest to certain people on this side of the straits. Barb knew an uncomfortable lot—but couldn’t speak but half a dozen words of Ragi.

But the only way now to keep that knowledge out of play was to ignore it, stop worrying about Toby—and hope Barb never dropped the wrong name near a hidden microphone. He couldn’t even tell her what names not to drop.

He stood, he thought through things Lord Machigi might ask him, and what he could answer—he asked himself what he could possibly offer as inducements for better relations with a young warlord bent on conquest as a means of keeping his several clans in line.

Machigi had been practicing the old Momentum theory of leadership: start a war, keep everyone facing the enemy—and avoid discussing domestic problems for another decade.

Most long-term successful leaders of the Marid had adopted that policy in one form or another.

So how could he get anything different out of Machigi? How to be sure he caught Machigi’s lasting interest?

Trade him something really good short-term?

What did a young warlord want that a diplomat could give him?

What was Machigi going to want that the aiji-dowager could give him?

They had talked vaguely yesterday about the space station, but that was far, far from something Machigi could actually realize—let alone explain to the peasant fishermen and the city ship owners and merchants who were the majority of Machigi’s district. Fishermen and merchants were his constituency, the people who kept him in power, despite the ambitions of certain high-level local influences that might want to replace him. Machigi’s hold on themwas his popularity with the trades—and with the subclans. But it was a precarious hold, and let Machigi present some proposal that was too far from the interests of fishermen and merchants, and he could lose that popularity.