“I never favored that tea service,” Ilisidi said.

He had the momentary impulse to send his cup after it. If Tabini had said the like, Tabini would have been testing him, and he would have thrown it. But he didn’t know Ilisidi. He had to take that into account for good and all. He rose and handed his cup to Cenedi, who waited with the tray.

Cenedi hurled the whole set at the fireplace. Tea hissed in the coals. Porcelain lay shattered.

Bren bowed, as if he had received a compliment, and saw an old woman who, dying, sitting in the midst of this prized antiquity, destroyed what offended her preferences, broke what was ancient and priceless, because shedidn’t like it. He looked for escape, murmured, “I thank the aiji-dowager for her attention,” and got two steps away before bang! went the cane on the stones, and he stopped and faced back again, constrained by atevi custom—and the suspicion what service Cenedi was to her.

He had amused the aiji-dowager. She was grinning, laughing with a humor that shook her thin body, as she leaned both hands on the cane. “Run,” she said. “Run, nand’ paidhi. But where’s safe? Do you know?”

“This place,” he shot back. One didn’tretreat from direct challenges—not if one wasn’t a child, and wasn’t anyone’s servant. “Your residence. The aiji thought so.”

She didn’t say a thing, just grinned and laughed and rocked back and forth on the pivot of the cane. After an anxious moment he decided he was dismissed, and bowed, and headed away, hoping she was through with jokes, and asking himself was Ilisidi sane, or had Tabini known, or whyhad she destroyed the tea service?

Because a human had profaned it?

Or because there was something in the tea, that now was vapor on the winds above the chimney? His stomach was upset. He told himself it was suggestion. He reminded himself there were some teas humans shouldn’t drink.

His pulse was hammering as he walked the hall and climbed the stairs, and he wondered if he should try to throw up, or where, or if he could get to his own bathroom to do it… not to upset the staff… or lose his dignity…

Which was stupid, if he was poisoned. Possibly it was fear that was making his heart race. Possibly it was one of those stimulants like midarga, which in overdoses could put a human in the emergency room, and he should find Banichi or Jago and tell them what he’d done, and what he’d drunk, that was already making its way into his bloodstream.

A clammy sweat was on his skin as he reached the upper hall. It might be nothing more than fear, and suggestion, but he couldn’t get air enough, and there was a darkening around the edges of his vision. The hall became a nightmare, echoing with his steps on the wooden floor. He put out a hand to the wall to steady himself and his hand vanished into a strange dark nowhere at the side of his vision.

I’m in serious trouble, he thought. I have to get to the door. I mustn’t fall in the hallway. I mustn’t make it obvious I’m reacting to the stuff… never show fear, never show discomfort…

The door wobbled closer and larger in the midst of the dark tunnel. He had a blurred view of the latch, pushed down on it. The door opened and let him into the blinding glare of the windows, white as molten metal.

Close the door, he thought. Lock it. I’m going to bed. I might fall asleep awhile. Can’t sleep with the door unlocked.

The latch caught. He was sure of that. He faced the glare of the windows, staggered a few steps and then found he was going the wrong way, into the light.

“Nadi Bren!”

He swung around, frightened by the echoing sound, frightened by the darkness that loomed up on every side of him, around the edges and now in the center of his vision, darkness that reached out arms and caught him and swept him off his feet in a whirling of all his concept of up and down.

Then it was white, white, until the vision went gray again and violent, and he was bent over a stone edge, with someone shouting orders that echoed in his ears, and peeling his sweater off over his head.

Water blasted the back of his head, then, cold water, a battering flood that rattled his brain in his skull. He sucked in an involuntary, watery gasp of air, and tried to fight against drowning, but an iron grip held his arms and another—whoever it was had too many hands—gripped the back of his neck and kept him where he was. If he tried to turn his head, he choked. If he stayed where he was, head down to the torrent, he could breathe, between spasms of a gut that couldn’t get rid of any more than it had.

A pain stung his arm. Someone had stuck him and he was bleeding, or his arm was swelling, and whoever was holding him was still bent on drowning him. Waves of nausea rolled through his gut, he could feel the burning of tides in his blood that didn’t have anything to do with this world’s moons. They weren’t human, the things that surrounded him and constrained him, and they didn’t like him—even at best, atevi wished humanity had never been, never come here… there’d been so much blood, holding on to Mospheira, and they were guilty, but what else could they have done?

He began to chill. The cold of the water went deeper and deeper into his skull, until the dark began to go away, and he could see the gray stone, and the water in the tub, and feel the grip on his neck and his arms as painful. His knees hurt, on the stones. His arms were numb.

And his head began to feel light and strange. Is this dying? he wondered. Am I dying? Banichi’s going to be mad if that’s the case.

“Cut the water,” Banichi said, and of a sudden Bren found himself hauled over onto his back, dumped into what he vaguely decided was a lap, and felt a blanket, a very welcome but inadequate blanket, thrown over his chilled skin. Sight came and went. He thought it was a yellow blanket, he didn’t know why it mattered. He was scared as someone picked him up like a child and carried him, that that person was going to try to carry him down the stairs, which were somewhere about, the last he remembered. He didn’t feel at all secure, being carried.

The arms gave way and dumped him.

He yelled. His back and shoulders hit a mattress, and the rest of him followed.

Then someone rolled him roughly onto his face on silken, skidding furs, and pulled off his blanket, his boots and his trousers, while he just lay there, paralyzed, aware of all of it, but aware too of a pain in his temples that forecast a very bad headache. He heard Banichi’s voice out of the general murmur in the room, so it was all right now. It would be all right, since Banichi was here. He said, to help Banichi,

“I drank the tea.”

A blow exploded across his ear. “Fool!” Banichi said, from above him, and flung him over onto his back and covered him with furs.

It didn’t help the headache, which was rising at a rate that scared him and made his heart race. He thought of stroke, or aneurism, or an impending heart attack. Only where Banichi had hit his ear was hot and halfway numb. Banichi grabbed his arm and stuck him with a needle—it hurt, but not near the pain his head was beginning to have.

After that, he just wanted to lie there submerged in dead animal skins, and breathe. He listened to his own heartbeat, he timed his breaths, he found troughs between the waves of pain, and lived in those, while his eyes ran tears from the daylight and he wished he was sane enough to tell Banichi to draw the drapes.

“This isn’t Shejidan!” Banichi railed at him. “Things don’t come in plastic packages!”

He knew that. He wasn’t stupid. He remembered where he was, though he wasn’t sure what plastic packages had to do with anything. The headache reached a point he thought he was going to die and he wanted to have it over with—

But you didn’t say that to atevi, who didn’t think the same as humans, and Banichi was already mad at him.