"Good evening, sintaha Rowley," Tsu said.
He followed her into the house she shared with Smarin and Torl, her parents. They greeted Rowley warmly, slim, smiling, happy as usual.
It was a stage play, performed for his benefit. He moved around among the actors, but he was not an actor himself. He was the audience.
Rowley had been in this house often, always with a haunting sense of wrongness. He knew it as well as he knew his own tent. Living room, kitchen, two bedrooms and quarters for bathing. Clean people, the natives of Hume.
Rowley sat on the stone stoop and contemplated the gathering shadows. Tsu came out and sat close beside him. He asked her again about the trees, why the people tended them.
"It is proper to tend the trees, sintaha Rowley. We have done so always."
Was she evading? Or did he fully understand her language, simple as it was? He had learned it quickly, and had wondered at the time that it was so similar in grammar and syntax to his own. An odd coincidence—or deliberate casting, to impress the play more easily on the audience?
"Tomorrow," he said, "I should like to learn more about the trees."
"If it will please you," she said.