Fralk turned an extra couple of eyestalks on it again. “You could tell me it sang songs and I would not argue with you. It might do anything; it might do nothing.”

“It’s done nothing since it’s been here,” Ternat said.

“Well, not quite,” Reatur said. “Most travelers I charge food or tools to see it. Over the years, now that I think, it’s earned me a tidy sum.”

“That I do believe,” Fralk said. “It’s worth traveling a long way to see.”

A well-spoken young male indeed, Reatur thought. “Guest with me tonight,” he said expansively. “My ice is yours.”

“I thank you,” Fralk said. Then he proceeded to wreck the fine impression he had made, for he took the old proverb literally. He reached out a couple of arms, used his fingerclaws to scrape a good handful of ice from the wall, and put it in his mouth. “Very nice,” he said.

Reatur saw Ternat turn yellow with anger. The domain master glanced down at himself. He was the same color, and no wonder. “Envoy of the Skarmer domains, you forget yourself,” he said. His voice was stiff as glacier ice in midwinter.

“No, domain master, I do not. For this I was sent here.” Fralk took more ice and put it in his mouth as’ calmly as if he were munching it from the walls of his own castle. Suddenly, his politeness seemed something he had assumed at will, not native to him.

“This is insolence,” Reatur said. “Why should I not send you back to your clanfather without the arms you have used to prove it?”

Fralk spun round in a circle. “Which arms are those?” he asked when he stopped. Yes, he was mocking Reatur. “Any two will do,” the domain master growled.

He had to give Fralk reluctant credit; the Skarmer envoy went neither blue from fear nor an angry yellow. “You would be unwise to take them,” Fralk said. He was the very odor of good manners again. Reatur, whose moods ran fast and deep, began to see why this young male had been chosen ambassador. Like smooth ice reflecting the sun and hiding whatever lay beneath, he did his clanfather’s bidding without revealing himself in the process.