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root and leaf and blossom of this evil town, the hatred and fear of both Blacks and Whites who lived at war with each other, the one doomed to perpetual defeat, the other to perpetual fear of...

Of what? What did they fear?

Justice.

And it dawned on her for the first time what she had not seen in Fishy's heartfire: the desire for revenge.

And yet that was impossible. What human being could bear such constant injustice and not cry out, at least in the silence of the soul, for the power to set things to rights? Was Fishy so meek that she forgave all? No, her sullen resistance clearly had no piety in it. She was filled with hate. And yet not one thought or dream or plan for retribution, either personal or divine. Not even the hope of emancipation or escape.

As she walked along the streets under the noonday sun, it made her almost giddy to realize what must be going on, and not just with Fishy, but with every slave she had met here in Camelot. Peggy was not able to see everything in their heartfires. They were able to conceal a part of their feelings from her. For it was impossible to imagine that they had no such feelings, for they were human beings, and all the Blacks she met in Appalachee had yearnings for retribution, manumission, or escape. No, if she didn't see those passions among the slaves of Camelot, it wasn't because they didn't feel them, it was because they had somehow learned to lie a lie so deep that it existed even in their heartfires.

And that threw everything in doubt. For if there was one thing Peggy had always counted on, it was this: No one could lie to her without her knowing it. It had been that way with her almost since birth. It was one of the reasons people didn't usually like to spend much time around a torch - though few of them could see even a fraction of what Peggy saw. There was always the fear of their secret thoughts being known and exposed.

When Peggy was a child, she did not understand why adults became so upset when she responded to what was in their heartfire rather than the words they were saying to her. But what could she do? When a traveling salesman patted her on her head and said, "I got something for this little girl, I wager!" she hardly noticed his words, what with all that his heartfire was telling her, not to mention her father's heartfire and everybody else nearby. She just naturally had to answer, "My papa's not a fool! He knows you're cheating him!"

But everybody got so upset with her that she learned to keep silent about all lies and all secrets. Her response was to hold her tongue and say nothing at all. Fortunately, she learned silence before she was old enough to understand the truly dark secrets that would have destroyed her family. Silence served her well - so well that some visitors to her father's inn took her for a mute.

Still, she had to converse with local people, and with other children her age. And for a long time it made her angry, how people's words never matched up very well with their desires or memories, and sometimes were the flat opposite. Only gradually did she come to see that as often as not, the lies people told were designed to be kind or merciful or, at the very least, polite. If a mother thought her daughter was plain, was it bad that she lied to the child and told her that she loved how her face brightened up when she smiled? What good would it have done to give her true opinion? And the lie helped the child grow up more cheerful, and therefore more attractive.

Peggy began to understand that what made a statement good was rarely dependent on whether it was true. Very little human speech was truthful, as she knew better than anyone else. What mattered was whether the deception was kindly meant or designed to take advantage, whether it was meant to smooth a social situation or aggrandize the speaker in others' eyes.

Peggy became a connoisseur of lies. The good lies were motivated by love or kindness, to shield someone from pain, to protect the innocent, or to hide feelings that the speaker was ashamed of. The neutral lies were the fictions of courtesy that allowed conversations