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“It is not a weapon,” she instructed Selar, “but a natural extension of your hand, an extension of your soul. It is given you by your family when you reach adulthood at the age of seven, and you keep it with you from then on. A true Romulan feels naked without it.”

Selar weighed the pretty but deadly-sharp object in her hand and considered this. She seemed to slip into a light trance for a moment, as if calling upon some ancient race memory that might help her become one with something she really would prefer to lock away in a display case and admire for its beauty, not its killing skills.

“I am a healer,” she said at last. “Perhaps understanding too well how much damage even such a small blade can do to internal organs is what restrains me.”

“Then you must free yourself of that knowledge whenever the blade is in your hand,” Tuvok suggested. “Nowhere is it written that you must use the blade, wife, merely that you know how.”

It was the first time he had called her that, and the layers of pretext it suggested-and necessitated-seemed to galvanize her.

“Indeed… husband,” she said carefully, then turned to Zetha. “Show me again.”

And Zetha, who had never owned an honor blade because there was no family to give it to her, nevertheless showed Selar everything she had learned by watching others, true Romulans, challenge each other even in the most refined venues, often over the most trivial things. It was not at all uncommon for two senators to be dining in one of the most opulent restaurants in Ki Baratan and fall to insults over the choice of wine. Lurking in the alleys, she had witnessed the outcome often enough.

“I’ve never seen anyone killed with an honor blade,” she told Selar now, thinking: Not entirely true even as she said it. There had been weapons training in the barracks, though the Lord had pointed out that the weapons they were given-which were taken away and locked up again at the end of each training session-were not true honor blades, because ghilik could never truly be honorable.

She had wondered at the time why at least some of them hadn’t turned on him and filleted him like the dead fish he was. Already some of their number were starting to disappear. Sent on special missions, they were told, but they all knew. Special indeed. So special that no one ever returned. Zetha would count the empty bunks each night and wonder when it would be her turn.

“Interesting,” Selar was saying now, as Zetha hid her thoughts behind tales of old ones, women, adolescents up and down the castes and classes and hierarchies of Romulan society drawing knives in challenge. “How often do they kill each other?”

Zetha shrugged. “Rarely. Mostly it’s bluster. You shout insults, I shout insults back, I pull my knife, you pull yours, we glare at each other, attract everyone’s attention. Sometimes we inflict superficial wounds, so we can show off the scars later.” She searched for a metaphor. “Like two h’vart in an alley. Lots of yowling and claws and fur standing on end, but they rarely actually fight.”

With a skeptical eyebrow, Selar said. “Show me again.”

And she did. Selar was tall and possessed of a long-limbed grace; freed of her philosophical constraints, she learned quickly. In exchange for what might prove a life-saving lesson on Quirinus, she perfected Zetha’s cover identity by lasering off her freckles.

“I don’t look like me,” Zetha said to the face in the mirror, wondering if it was the freckles that had marked her as non-Romulan.

Without them, might she pass? Well, for Quirinus, anyway. Ironic that there were Vulcans who looked like Selar and Vulcans who looked like Tuvok, Romulans with brow ridges and without, and variations in both races to encompass ever possible color of skin and eye and texture of hair, and no one on Tenjin had questioned her supposed Vulcan ancestry, yet on Romulus there was something about her that other Romulans could see and judge that she was not one of them. Would she ever know what it was? Since she would probably never see Romulus