"...I'm very curious exactly how hypothetical all these questions are," he says, "but—I won't force you to tell me."

"Because that's not something that a person who was safe to talk to would do?"

"Yeah. Exactly."

She sits, thinking, watching him, for a minute or so.

Then she stands up.

"...huh."

He looks thoughtfully up at her newly revealed face.

"How old are you?"

"A few centuries." She smiles. "You're hardly in a position to tell me it's dishonest not to look my age."

"That's fair," he acknowledges. "So. Got any clever ideas for me?"

"Not... exactly." She brushes flakes of sea salt from her dress. "But I might want to introduce you to someone who does. Since you've so successfully demonstrated that you're safe to talk to about them."

"I imagine they don't want me showing up on their doorstep without a word of warning, even so," he says. "You can find me in the east gardens most mornings, and in the useless side of the palace most of the rest of the time."

"Thank you. I'll be seeing you again soon, I imagine."

"I look forward to it."

A rippling shimmer passes over her. Dress and all, she turns into water and flows away.

It's not quite midmorning when she emerges from the sea and goes looking for Tarinda again.

Tarinda is getting more vocabulary by way of complaining encouragingly at Kioh about how she doesn't have enough words to answer all his questions!

It's a very effective strategy!

She smiles when she sees them.

"I have good news, I think," she says. "If it were up to me, I'd tell him everything and see what happens."

"Can you tell me more about the conversation you had?"

"Of course."

She beckons Tarinda into her house. Kioh, sensing grownup talk on the horizon, scampers off.

In Tarinda goes.

"So first of all—" A shimmer; her face changes. "I went to Skygarden looking like this. Partly because it makes more sense for me to be trying to talk to the Emperor all of a sudden if I self-dedicated within the last year or two, partly because if the conversation was unpromising but he let me go home afterward it would be harder for him to find me if he was looking for someone young, partly to see if he had any trouble controlling himself around a pretty young woman. He didn't seem to; he mentioned once or twice that things could have gone poorly for me, but he never did anything threatening, never even looked at me like he was considering it. He seemed very... I'm not sure how to put it."

She sits at her table and conjures water into a cup.

"...when I arrived on the island, he was sitting at the edge watching the sunrise," she says. "I walked right past him, not knowing who he was. He asked where I was going, and I said I'd a fancy to speak to the Emperor, and... would you understand what I meant, if I said he didn't stand up to speak to me? There's an attitude some people have toward power where they'll never pass up a chance to look down on someone. He wasn't like that. He was perfectly comfortable sitting in the grass with me standing over him. Anyway, I asked who wanted to know, and he said the Emperor, and I told him to prove it because that's what I would've said at this age, and he opened a portal to the sky over the ocean somewhere and tossed a rock through it and turned the rock into a flying island and walked through, and—" She blinks in sudden realization. "—and I'll bet I know why, actually, later on he mentioned that he lost a city once because someone tried to kill him, I think he was moving the conversation into the middle of nowhere so no one else would get hurt if I started a fight."

"That's... promising? I don't really know what to expect about the psychology of people who torture their slaves for fun but if I forget about that part."

She shifts back to her usual face.

"Yes, the part where he tortures his slaves for fun is still an issue, but we touched on that too. He asked me what I wanted and I said I wanted to know what kind of a man my Emperor is, and... he seemed, I think, very much like someone who wished that more people wanted to know that. He said—I'm getting a little out of order now—that it's lonely being so dangerous because it's hard to talk to people when they're afraid of him, but he doesn't like solving that by pretending to be less dangerous because if someone would fear him if they knew the full truth then it's right for them to fear him even if he'd rather they didn't. He also said, later on when I got a little closer to the real questions, that he wants to be someone who's safe to talk to about things that might annoy or upset him; he said that if someone tells him something like that, they've given him something valuable by trusting him not to react badly, and he doesn't want to damage that by making them regret it. I asked about the rumours that he kills people who annoy him and he said that sometimes he loses his temper and does stupid impulsive things, but promised that if he did any such thing to me he'd apologize. —he also said he can raise the dead."

"Even if he can raise the dead he probably can't fix Page or any of my other stuff if he breaks it!"

"Maybe he can, maybe he can't. I can ask him about that sort of thing before I introduce you, if you like. Anyway, I asked about what he'd do if I had a clever idea for how to make his empire happier and more prosperous but he didn't like the consequences, and he said he wouldn't kill me to stop me from trying it unless it was going to be a disaster that made everything worse, and even then he'd try very hard to convince me to see his side of things. And I asked how much happier and more prosperous such a thing would have to make the empire before it would be worth giving up his slaves for, and he said he doesn't know, that he can't imagine what would make that worthwhile but plenty of things have happened that he couldn't have imagined beforehand."

"The prosperity is pretty unimaginable..."

"Yes, I thought so too."