Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch #1)(42)

For a few moments Lieutenant Awn said nothing, while I finished wiping her face. “Right,” she said, and went downstairs and filled the bowl, and brought it to the flower-bearer, where she stood next to me, still frightened, clutching her handful of pink petals. Lieutenant Awn held the water out to her, and she set the flowers down and washed her hands. But before she could pick the flowers up again, Anaander Mianaai turned to look at her, and the child started back and grabbed my gloved hand with her bare one. “You’ll have to wash your hands again, citizen,” I whispered, and with a bit more encouragement she did so, and picked up the flowers again and performed her part of the morning’s ritual correctly, if nervously. No one else came. I was not surprised.

The medic, speaking to herself and not to me, though I stood three meters away from her, said, “Throat cut, obviously, but she was also poisoned.” And then, with disgust and contempt, “A child of their own house. These people aren’t civilized.”

Our one small attendant left, a gift from the Lord of the Radch clutched in one hand—a pin in the shape of a four-petaled flower, each petal holding an enameled image of one of the four Emanations. Anywhere else, a Radchaai who received one would treasure it, and wear it nearly constantly, a badge of having served in the temple with the Lord of the Radch herself. This child would probably toss it in a box and forget about it. When she was out of sight (of Lieutenant Awn and the Lord of the Radch, if not of me) Anaander Mianaai turned to Lieutenant Awn and said, “Aren’t those weeds?”

A wave of embarrassment overcame Lieutenant Awn, mixed a moment later with disappointment, and an intense anger I had never seen in her before. “Not to the children, my lord.” She was unable to keep the edge out of her voice completely.

Anaander Mianaai’s expression didn’t change. “This icon, and this set of omens. They’re your personal property, I think. Where are the ones that belong to the temple?”

“Begging my lord’s pardon,” Lieutenant Awn said, though I knew at this point she meant to do no such thing, and the fact was audible in her tone. “I used the funds for their purchase to supplement the term-end gifts for the temple attendants.” She had also used her own money for the same purpose, but she didn’t say that.

“I’m sending you back to Justice of Toren,” said the Lord of the Radch. “Your replacement will be here tomorrow.”

Shame. A fresh flare of anger. And despair. “Yes, my lord.”


There wasn’t much to pack. I could be ready to move in less than an hour. I spent the rest of the day delivering gifts to our temple attendants, who were all home. School had been canceled, and hardly anyone came out onto the streets. “Lieutenant Awn doesn’t know,” I told each one, “if the new lieutenant will make different appointments, or if she’ll give the year-end gifts without your having served a whole year. You should come to the house anyway, her first morning.” The adults in each house eyed me silently, not inviting me in, and each time I laid the gift—not the usual pair of gloves, which didn’t yet matter much here, but a brightly colored and patterned skirt, and a small box of tamarind sweets. Fresh fruit was customary, but there was no time to obtain any. I left each small stack of gifts in the street, on the edge of the house, and no one moved to take them, or spoke any word to me.

The Divine spent an hour or two behind screens in the temple residence, and then emerged looking entirely unrested, and went into the temple, where she conferred with the junior priests. The bodies had been cleared away. I had offered to clean the blood, not knowing if my doing so would be permissible, but the priests had declined my assistance. “Some of us,” said the Divine to me, still staring at the area of floor where the dead had lain, “had forgotten what you are. Now they are reminded.”

“I don’t think you forgot, Divine,” I said.

“No.” She was silent for two seconds. “Is the lieutenant going to see me before she leaves?”

“Possibly not, Divine,” I said. I was at that moment doing what I could to encourage Lieutenant Awn to sleep, something she badly needed to do but was finding difficult.

“It’s probably better if she doesn’t,” the head priest said, bitterly. She looked at me then. “It’s unreasonable of me. I know it is. What else could she have done? It’s easy for me to say—and I say it—that she could have chosen otherwise.”

“She could have, Divine,” I acknowledged.

“What is it you Radchaai say?” I wasn’t Radchaai, but I didn’t correct her, and she continued. “Justice, propriety, and benefit, isn’t it? Let every act be just, and proper, and beneficial.”

“Yes, Divine.”

“Was that just?” Her voice trembled, for just an instant, and I could hear she was on the edge of tears. “Was it proper?”

“I don’t know, Divine.”

“More to the point, who benefited?”

“No one, Divine, so far as I can see.”

“No one? Really? Come, One Esk, don’t play the fool with me.” That look of betrayal on Jen Shinnan’s face, plainly directed at Anaander Mianaai, had been obvious to everyone there.

Still, I couldn’t see what the Lord of the Radch had stood to gain from those deaths. “They would have killed you, Divine,” I said. “You, and anyone else they found undefended. Lieutenant Awn did what she could to prevent bloodshed last night. It wasn’t her fault she failed.”