It told him something.
Her expression shifted. A small thing — a change in the set of her jaw, a stillness that was different from her ordinary stillness. He had known her face since he was twelve years old. He did not have a name for what it was doing now.
She set the woman's hand down carefully, the way you set down something that might be fragile and might not be and you didn't want to be wrong about.
She looked at him.
"What did you feel on the dock?" she said.
"Fraluma blood."
"That is not possible."
"I know it isn't possible." He kept his voice level. "I felt it anyway."
Dremma turned back to the bed. She lifted the woman's other hand and ran her thumb slowly along the inside of the wrist, her eyes slightly unfocused in the way they went when she was reading something that didn't have words.
"Describe it," she said. "Precisely."
"Faint. Diluted." He chose his words with care, because this was Dremma, and imprecision with Dremma was worse than silence. "Not the full signature — not what I would feel from one of our own. Something between. Like —" He stopped.
"Like what?"
"Like a translation," he said. "The source material is ours. The language it's been rendered into isn't."
Dremma was quiet for a moment. She set the second hand down with the same care as the first. When she turned to look at him, her expression had resolved into something he recognized: a conclusion she hadn't wanted to reach and was going to reach anyway, because she was Dremma and that was what she did.
"And you told the Chancellor —"
"Nothing. An urchin. He was satisfied."
"For now," she said.
"For now," he agreed.
She moved toward him — not toward the door, toward him specifically — and stopped close enough that her voice could stay low and still reach him. "You understand what this means. If you are right."
"I understand what it means if I'm wrong," he said. "I've been standing here considering both."
"And?"
He held her gaze. "I'm not wrong."
Dremma looked at him for a long moment. Her eyes were tired in the way they had always been tired, which he had once thought meant she was exhausted and had long since understood meant she had been paying attention for a very long time without any particular expectation that the attention would be rewarded.
"I need to examine her properly," she said. "You'll wait below."
"I'll wait below."
"And Edi-Veen." She paused at the door, hand on the mechanism. "You were given a direct order from your Resident Mother."
"I know."
"So does Sraaak." She said it without apology, without softness. Simply true. "Be ready."
The floor panel opened. She descended. It closed above her, and the room above his head was quiet, and Edi-Veen stood in the passage below and let out a slow breath and began constructing the explanation he was going to need for the tribunal.
He heard her wake.
