“Things have changed, my dear Kei. A lot of these people have your soldiers to thank for their homes being saved along with their lives. I’m not saying there isn’t resentment—but there’s more goodwill than you’d think.” Tijus shrugged and grinned. “Besides, everyone likes a show, and it’s a decreed day of rest in your honour. People like that.”

Canny. A little bribery, a little entertainment, and a lot of curiosity. He wondered how many of the people watching them had seen the show the Gifted had put on for the populace on their last visit, and were hoping for more of the same. It made him wish they’d brought Reis and Neras after all, but Arman and Neka had decided that they weren’t the best people they could send on a delicate diplomatic mission. Jera was a much more stable and genial person. Right now, he looked completely harmless, and clearly just enjoying himself.

Kei didn’t know Utuk well—he’d had little enough chance to see it—but it seemed to him there were changes. There were statues he didn’t remember, a couple of buildings which looked new or at least, newly refurbished, but what struck him most was the lack of underlying anger in the people around him. The first time he’d encountered it, the population of Utuk had felt almost like a carcho waiting to pounce, though he had hardly been in a fit state to really appreciate all that had been going on. After victory had been won, there had been a dull resentment of the Darshianese, punctuated by fury and overlain by a general hostility which might not, Kei now realised, have been entirely directed at them. The war had not been popular—too many ordinary people’s sons, brothers and fathers had been caught up in it. Many of those men had come home, of course—but many had not.

It had been long-held, slow-burning anger over that, but more so over rising unemployment and the ever-increasing taxes to pay for pointless extravagance, which had played into deliberately fomented agitation and had led to vicious riots and the assassination of the sovereign. Utuk had taken years to fully calm and stabilise. That it had done so at all had certainly not been thanks to the now departed Senator Mekus, who’d been behind an attempt to assassinate the new sovereign in order to put his granddaughter on the throne, and to stir up more unrest in a city still smoking and bloodied from months of rioting.