Free Treason by Orson Scott Card

that particular discovery.”
    “True sight?”
    “You wouldn’t understand,” he said. “Very technical. But when someone wants to talk about us, he refers to our greatest accomplishment, and then everybody who matters knows who he’s talking about.”
    “What about someone who hasn’t made a great discovery yet?”
    He laughed again. “Who would want to talk about such a person?”
    “But when you speak of women, they all have names.”
    “So do dogs and little children,” he said, so cheerfully I could almost believe he hadn’t intended to be insulting. “But no one expects great accomplishments from women, at least not while they’re fully engaged in the work of conceiving, bearing, and rearing children. Don’t you think it would be coarse to speak of a woman by referring to her greatest gifts? Imagine calling someone ‘Blanket Dancer with the Huge Buttocks’ or ‘Cook Who Always Scorches Soup.’” He laughed at his own joke, and several others, who had been vaguely listening in, suggested other titles. I thought they were hilarious, but as a woman I had to pretend to find them insulting, and in fact I was a bit annoyed when one of them suggested that I might be called “Emissary with the Freckled Breasts.”
    “How would you know to call me that?” I asked archly. I was annoyed to discover how easily it came to me to sound arch; all I had to do was imitate the Turd’s speech and then raise one eyebrow—which I’ve been able to do since childhood, to the amusement of my parents and the terror of the troops under my command.
    “I don’t know it,” answered a man named Stargazer—the same name as two others in the room. “But I’d be willing to find out.”
    It was something I hadn’t really been prepared for. Rapists on the road I could cope with by killing them. But how does a woman say no to a man in polite company without offending? As a king’s son, I was not used to hearing women say no. As Saranna’s lover, I had lately not been used to asking, anyway.
    Fortunately, I didn’t have to answer at all.
    “The Lady from Bird is not here to find out what’s hidden under your robe,” Mwabao Mawa said, “especially since most of us know how little it conceals.” The laughter was loud, especially from the man insulted, but they moved away from me for a short time, and I was allowed a few moments to myself, to observe.
    There was, amid all the chatter of science and court gossip—more of the latter than of the former, of course—a detectable pattern that amused me. I watched as one man at a time took Mwabao aside for just a moment of quiet, unheard conversation. And one of them I overheard. “At noon,” he said, and she nodded. Little enough to generalize on, but I was willing to believe that they were making appointments. For what? I could think of several obvious purposes. She might be a whore; though I doubted it, both because of her lack of beauty and because of the obvious respect these men had for her mind, never leaving her out of their conversations or ignoring a remark she made. Or she might really be a mistress of the king, in which case she could be selling influence—though again I doubted it, because it seemed so unlikely that an emissary would be placed with a woman who had that kind of power.
    A third possibility was that she was somehow involved with a rebellion or a secret party, at least. This didn’t contradict either fact or logic, and I began to wonder if there was something there that might be exploited.
    But not that night, at least. I was tired. Though my body had long since healed from the strain of climbing to Mwabao Mawa’s house—and, for that matter, from the beating of the Nkumai soldiers only a short time before—I was still emotionally drained. I needed to sleep. I dozed for a moment and woke to find the last of the men leaving.
    “Oh,” I said, startled. “Did I sleep so long?”
    “Only a few moments,” Mwabao Mawa told me, “but they