The Seer: Chapter Thirteen

    In Maris’s dream her parents were still alive. A breeze delivered scent of ginger vine and jasmine flower through the open windows, baking taro wafting in from the kitchen. Her father’s resonant laugh, her mother’s flute-like song. Home, where she had lived her earliest years in something very much like happiness.

    A sweet dream. A rare, sweet dream.

    In the dream he had knocked on the door, a rat-a-tat demanding response. She knew who it was, even before he stepped across the threshold, not waiting for an invitation.

    Keyretura did not wait.

    She cried out a warning, but her parents did not hear. They turned to him with gracious, deferring smiles, their Perripin hospitality unimpeachable.

    Then his gaze found her, his dark eyes burning into hers.

    She ran from door to door, searching for an escape, but he was always there. As the sweet dream turned ugly and rancid, Maris disgustedly took control away from her dreaming self and woke.

    From under the warm blankets she spread her fingers and sent channels of thought out and past the walls of the small cabin into the overcast winter day, out to the perimeter of the property where her wards were woven through the land and the trees, tuned to warn her of any trespasses. Had he somehow found her?

    No, he had not. Only a dream.

    As she pulled her attention back into the cabin, she sensed the new depth of snow on the ground. So much snow.

    The first time she’d seen snow, it had been a marvel to her. White flakes falling endlessly from above, covering the world, making it seem clean. A canvas on which anything might be written. Even, somehow, her own freedom.

    She remembered that moment vividly, sitting atop a bay mare, looking across the astonishing white fields. He was at her side, of course; there was no escaping him in those days. How she wished then that when she turned back to face him, he too would be covered in white, her life made clean of this black-robed man, releasing her from the nightmare of her apprenticeship.

    Absurd, of course. Freedom did not come from bits of frozen water, praying to the nine elements, or wishing upon grains of sand. And when she turned back, he had still been there, eyes hard on her, assessing.

    No escape. Year after year, lesson after lesson, that had become indisputable.

    Then, at last, the test that did free her. An ordeal best forgotten, like Keyretura himself. In the years since, she had seen snow many times, had learned that it blanketed without discrimination, making all things white, from villages flattened by plague, to the dead of battle with pikes and flags sticking up like some odd winter flower.

    But snow made nothing clean. It only covered for a time. When the seasons changed, it would melt away, revealing the debris beneath.

    Now, in the waking world, the banging came again at her door. She sent a bit of herself outside, focus settling atop the boy, floating down over him. Youth came off Samnt in hot waves, the swirl of etheric flow around his body bright and vibrant. She sank her attention in through his skin, feeling the press of blood in his veins, hearing his child’s heart beat strong and fast in his chest.

    Not a child, she reminded herself. Not for long.

    She withdrew her focus back under warm covers. The door was unlocked, but unlike the monster of her dreams, Samnt would never enter without invitation. Not because she was a mage. Not because he was afraid to offend. Because it was not done.

    “Come in,” she called.

    He threw open the front door, stamping inside, bringing in swirls of snow and wafts of cold air. This sent her burrowing deeper into the cocoon of blankets.

    Grinning, he slammed the door behind. “My ma sends hello. And this,” he said, holding up a burlap bundle, fist closed around the top of the bag.

    He was breathing hard from the run up the hill to her cabin, exhaling a white fog into the air. He could have come more slowly, but no — passion drove him to speed.

    So young.

    With a thunk he landed the bag on the table. The sides slid down to reveal bread, a large hunk of white cheese, and a brown ceramic jar. His eyes flickered around the room, as if to assure himself that nothing had changed in the day since he had been here last, then he was at the window, pulling back heavy drapes to let in a gray light.

    Next at the woodstove, prying off bits of wood for kindling, setting them in the stove under the logs he had chopped and stacked for her back in autumn.

    What, she wondered again, was she doing in this wretched, frigid land? For a time she lay there, thinking of her home in Perripur, in the Shentarat Mountains, and how overgrown with green it would be now. How warm.

    The stove fire was burning enthusiastically. She struggled into clothes and braved the air of the room.

    “Didn’t wake you, did I?” he asked, poking at the logs. Concern flickered briefly across his face, then his mind was elsewhere. “Snow later, I think.”

    “Such fortune we are heir to,” Maris said wryly. “What’s in the jar?”

    “Applesauce,” he said, “Our trees, our spices. Ma’s quite proud of it. You’ll like it, truly.”

    “Thoughtful of her. Thoughtful of you. You may stay.”

    He laughed and crouched down to put more wood into the fiercely burning stove and a kettle of water on top. She found herself smiling at him.

    This, perhaps, was why she was still here.

    “Let’s get started,” she said.

    “Need more wood brought in.”

    “It will wait. It’s not going anywhere.”

    At this he sighed and dropped into the chair by her side. A moment later he was up again, tilting his head sideways to look at the books on her shelf. “Pa went to the village yesterday,” he said, running his fingers across the leather spines. “Trading tools at market. Saw a book there. Cost so much.” He turned back with a quick smile.

    “What was it about, the book?”

    A shrug. “He didn’t know. Leather working, maybe.”

    “Next time you go with him. You read it for him, yes?”

    Samnt nodded but without enthusiasm. That, she resolved, would change when he understood what books could be.

    It had been so warm in autumn when she’d come here to wait out the winter in the mountains of Kathorn. Samnt had been eager to help stock the cabin, helping her lay in far more wood than she thought she would ever need. Now she found herself wondering if she would have enough to get through to spring thaw.

    When the kettle boiled Samnt prepared tea from her dwindling supply that she had brought with her from Perripur. He sweetened it with local honey, just as she liked, without her even asking. A simple gesture, but one that touched her. He sipped his own mug, made a face, wiped his mouth with his sleeve.

    The face of another boy came to mind, one who drank tea and wiped his face on his sleeve. Five years ago, was it? No, ten. The boy’s parents were already dead, his feverish sister restless on the soaked, stained mattress. Maris did all she could for them, gave the last of her herbs, but the illness held strong, eating through them, their family, their village. Still she stayed and nursed them.

    The boy had died last.

    “Let’s do some reading,” she said to Samnt. “From the animal book.”

    “Teach me magic, Maris.”

    “What, that again?”

    “Yes. Why not?”

    “You don’t need it.”

    “But I do. I’m a fast learner. You said so yourself.”

    To learn fast had little to do with it. Yes, he had the rare spark, but Maris would not wish the nightmare on anyone.

    “Study something else.”

    “What?”

    “Anything. You must learn to read. Then we’ll go to numbers –”

    Samnt cut in, exasperated. “Maris, I’m fifteen in spring. I’m going to plant grain, raise pigs, and dig crappers for my life’s keep, just like my parents do. I don’t need to read for that.”

 

---

 

    The woman’s words hadn’t mattered — it was the intent behind them that had settled ill into Maris’ body and spirit — but Maris would never forget them. My grief to you, a hundred times, and a hundred times beyond that.

    Today, perhaps, Maris had made some payment on that curse.

    Her eyes roamed over the room, stopping at the books of her small library, that had been comfort and friend, aid and insight. Now they seemed entirely senseless, an absurd weight, a foolish indulgence.

    Much like her desire to teach this boy.

    She reached a bit of herself into Samnt to check how his body waited. The pathways from his mind to his body were slowed, frozen. Brain and blood and breath still moved, but nothing else. If she wished, she could keep him there until he starved to death.

    Keyretura would never have bothered with such a demonstration. He would simply have told Samnt how much the apprenticeship contract would cost, an amount that would ruin his parents as it had hers, and the conversation would have ended there. Samnt would have been disappointed, his curiosity about magic unfulfilled, but his body and spirit undefiled.

    Kinder, perhaps, Maris realized bitterly.

    Of course, if Keyretura had been master of the house, Samnt would not have been here at all. Keyretura did nothing for free.

    Maris turned back to the book on the table about farm animals that she had been using to teach Samnt. It seemed they would not need it today after all.

    “Stand up, Samnt,” she said, hearing in her tone the hopelessness she felt.

    Finally she forced herself to look at him, at his frozen, rictus grin, letting it make her feel wretched, taking penance for her mistakes. So many mistakes. Then she released him.

    He fell forward, slumping over the table, gasping for air. He pushed himself to his feet, the chair’s legs scraping against the floor, nearly toppling as he stumbled backwards toward the door.

    “Magic,” Maris said. “Now you’ve seen it.”

    From the look on his face, he would never want to again.

    Well, she had given him that, at least.

    His eyes darted around the room — the jar on the table, the book, back to her. A look of terror that she recognized.

    There were other things that she could have shown him. A spark of light. Pictures drawn in the air as if with smoke. An ant following her finger. But these would only make him want more.

    No demonstration was as powerful as the one that touched you deep inside, where, until that very moment, you had never questioned your own control. It was something Keyretura had taught her.

    Samnt fumbled behind himself, feeling for the door handle, unwilling to take his eyes off her.

    “You may go,” Maris said unnecessarily.

    He opened the door and turned, running, leaving the door wide open.

     

    It was some time before Maris noticed the cold.

 

---

 

    Another storm came and went, another foot of snow atop the last, as if the sky felt an urgency to produce as much of winter’s fruit as it could.

    A tenday passed, then another. Absurd as it was, each day she prayed to the nine elements, the snow, and anything else she could think of, that Samnt would not return. As the days went by, that bitter wish seemed fulfilled.

    But he was young, and she had given him a shock, so she waited a little longer to be sure.

    The snow melted, the rains came, and the roads cleared.

    Samnt was not coming back.

    At last she collected her clothes, herbs, and most of the books, loaded up her pack, and wondered yet again how it was she kept accumulating things everywhere she went. More things than she could take with her.

    She took one last look around the room. On the table sat the jar of applesauce, unopened and untouched since the day Samnt had brought it. She could hardly lift her heavy pack as it was, but she took the jar anyway.

 

---

 

    Maris hiked to the coast, wondering if it were time to get a freighter home to Perripur, to her isolated home in the Shentarat Mountains, where she would not need a supply of wood to stay warm, or the help of a farmboy to get through the season.

    At a harbor village she found a public house with the encouraging name of the Ill Wind, its facing gouged and dented from years of coastal storms and neglect. Exactly what she needed.

    The Ill Wind was as gloomy inside as the name promised, walls slimy and dark, floor poorly swept and into corners where it had been addressed at all.

    Maris rapped the edge of one of her few remaining coins on the table to get the tavernmaster’s attention. In moments she had a bowl of stew in front of her. She hadn’t needed coin for a while, indeed hadn’t worked for it in some time, so to discover she had only a few remaining, while disappointing, was hardly surprising. She’d spent the last of the previous collection on wood and foodstuffs in the mountains.

    Even mages must eat.

    Ship’s passage, food — these things required money.

    Mages could always find work in the cities. All she need do was go north to the capital. But the thought took away her appetite. She wanted to be no closer to the horror that was Yarpin than she already was.

    Worse than the misery and stink of that city was the chance of running across her own kind. From high cuisine to imported twunta to ship’s passage to lucrative contracts, mages went to Yarpin for the same reasons she was now considering doing so. She had no desire to cross paths with most of them.

    The one in particular. All the world in which to roam, yet there he had been, at the very Yarpin bookseller where she stood amidst high shelves of books, so absorbed in a heavy tomb that she did not even notice him there, watching her. He had spoken, she did not remember what. She dropped the book and fled the city.

    He would not be in Yarpin now, not these decades later. He disdained Arunkin. He’d be back in south Mundar, in his garish mansion of glass and water of which he was so revoltingly proud.

    Perhaps she could find work here in this village, wherever here was. If someone had money and the work was not too offensive.

    Or, of course, she could find a Perripin-bound vessel and trade on her robes, boarding with Perripin sailors who superstitiously believed that mages brought good weather.

    No, she would not sink so low as to pretend to have value merely by wearing the right clothes and breathing, like the Arun aristos, or her own Perripin statesmen. That she could not stomach.

    But she could sign on as crew without revealing what she was and work for her passage. The briny winds off the sea tempted her. A roundabout way to get back to Shentarat, to be sure, but there on the ocean, the chaos of undirected human passion was at least limited to the crew, giving her time to sort out the pulls and pushes among them, the wounds and past that each carried, slowly weaving it all together into a serene and settled braid.

    She had even achieved a bit of a reputation this way, without anyone knowing she was a mage. When Maris was on board, some sailors said, the crew got along as smoothly as an anknapa’s kiss, making for calm voyages that lacked unpleasantness.

    She was not quite ready to be away from the land that long. The last time she’d been months with crew it had taken her time to recover, wandering mountains, deep forests, baking deserts. Then she had traveled to the high arid lands of Mirsda, toward the Rift, to see Gallelon.

 

---

 

    The long lives of mages and the etherics they handled meant complex, tangled relationships, rarely based on anything as simple as affection. Gallelon was as close as she had to a friend among her kind. He was another sort of sanctuary, though necessarily a brief one; it did not take many months for the two of them to reach the limits of their tolerance for each other.

    On their last morning as they lay together, her head nestled on his arm, she ran her dark fingers across his pale body, wondering at his body’s ancestry and how he came to have the hint of ginger in the hair on his chest.

    “Where do you go next, Marisel?” he had asked her.

    “Home, perhaps.”

    “You should consider the capital. Yarpin would do you good.”

    “Do you jest? What a foul place.”

    He chuckled. “Excellent cuisine. Splendid wines. Passable ale. Some of the cleverest of the Iliban. Also some extraordinary collections.”

    Of books, he meant, knowing her weakness.

    He was right about the food. The last time she had eaten in Yarpin, the chef had worked mightily to impress his Perripin guest. Fish from the ocean, goat from the high hills, spices from Perripur, rare ferns from Arapur. It was an artistry of subtle flavors, a symphony of scent and texture. A splendid meal.

    Which the bowl in front of her now, here in the Ill Wind, was most certainly not. She couldn’t even guess what the greasy lumps floating in a sluggish sea of brown might be, but she was hungry enough to eat anyway. A quick touch of her attention into the unattractive sludge assured her that consuming it would not harm her, so she reached for the spoon, then hesitated, her hand hovering over the crumb-strewn table. From the cracks in the wood, antennae quested out, followed by the thin segments of a centipede. The creature took a large crumb from the surface in its pincers and slowly retreated to the undertable.

    Maris pushed at the creature with her intention to make sure it went in the other direction, but it pleased her to share her table with the locals, as long as they weren’t humans. She preferred places like this one for much the same reason she no longer wore black robes: sitting here, eating greasy soup, and sharing her table with insects, she could almost imagine belonging to the world.

    Around her sat dour-looking dockhands, grubby in overalls padded against the ocean chill, slumped over cheap drinks, bowls much like her own. The glances they gave her were mere curiosity at a plainly dressed dark-skinned Perripin traveler and nothing more.

    She’d worn the black for a time after she had been created, until the looks of hate and fear had become too heavy. It was a bad time for her, newly created and trying to find her way. She had gone to the Shentarat Plains and walked barefoot on the sharp ground until her feet bled. At the edge of the plains where the smooth rock gave way to barren ground and then hopeful grasses, she had stripped the robes off and buried them in the ground to rot.

    Simpler clothes, she had discovered, made for a simpler life.

    Now, catching the eye of the tavernmaster, she indicated someone else’s drink and that she would have the same. He nodded.

    Best of all, though, the Ill Wind had cats. On a high shelf amidst jars and curled atop a pile of burlap bags was a black and white feline, ears twitching in sleep. From a corner, an orange tabby roused itself to stroll into the kitchen. And overhead, against the high windows through which a fog-filled sky shone like a lackluster pearl, was the silhouette of another cat, sitting still as a statue, looking down on the room.

    With a finger of intention, Maris reached up to touch him.

    Male, a few years old, his feline blood pulsing easily through his lithe, powerful body. He had the glow of recent sex about him, a contented relaxation through the groin, the warmth of hard use across his shoulders, the taste of female nape in his mouth. At her pull, he turned his head to look at her.

    Softer than a whisper, she spoke a few words. Sounds more than anything sensible, the words being irrelevant. Her soft vocalizations were an invitation. Did he want to be stroked, she wondered. Perhaps some food, a bit of meat from her stew bowl?

    The cat blinked slowly, eyes on her a long moment, then he looked away and began to groom a paw.

    She laughed silently. She could not even summon a cat to her side. And people were afraid of mages.

    With a thunk the tavernmaster put a ceramic mug in front of her. Glazed deep brown, inside and out — to make the liquid seem darker, she knew from discussions with brewers. As a matter of habit she dropped her focus into the cup to be sure it didn’t hold anything she would have to fix once it was in her body. It didn’t.

    “Something else, ser?” he asked her. A large man, gone well to fat, brevity near surliness.

    “A room for the night,” she said, putting a falcon on the table. Overpaying, she guessed. He slipped it into a pouch beneath the apron, stained with enough colors to be a clumsy painter’s spill.

    Then, ambling from foot to foot, he drew himself upright. “We got a room, sure.” He looked bemused, as if he couldn’t figure out why she was here if she had that much to spend.

    It calmed her, his lack of effort to please. Other than money, he wanted nothing from her. Like the cat’s disregard, it comforted her.

    After he left, a thin figure entered into the room, looked around, came to her table. Blood-shot eyes looked out from behind dark, stringy hair, a face slick with sweat, gender indeterminate.

    A Sensitive.

    Male, possibly, she thought as he swallowed nervously. She could touch into his body to find out, but it seemed an intrusion and so she refrained.

    “Yes?” she asked.

    “High One.” A deferring dip of the head, breath shallow and short, tone flat. “I have been asked to contact you.”

    She sighed, lamenting the loss of anonymity this implied. A bit surprised as well: this far from the capital she had not expected to be so quickly recruited.

    If mages were a sort of family, Sensitives like the one in front of her were a distant, disfigured, and disowned relation. They were among the large portion of people who fell below the line to be considered for apprenticeship, yet were also not quite Iliban. Outcast among mages, deviant among Iliban, ostracized by all. She ached a little for him — with no choice about what he was, with no way to become more, his life could not be easy.

    He might even be one of the extraordinarily rare Broken, those failed apprentices allowed to live. Unlikely; failure to finish the study was not well-tolerated. She remembered Keyretura dragging her, coughing and retching, from the deep water where she had tried to end her own. Not at all well-tolerated.

    Certainly she could ask. Did you fail the study? Is that why you live in this wretched land that abhors you?

    “How long have you been employed thus?” she asked instead.

    He would not meet her eyes. “Since childhood, High One.”

    “Call me Marisel.”

    “Yes, High One.”

    Oh, well.

    “I am to ask if you are receptive to a contract.”

    Of course. It would be some task that only magic could accomplish, that only the very wealthy could afford. A troubled conception to be smoothed. Treasures to be secured in strongboxes that would open only for one specific hand. An impossible decoration high atop some glittering, ostentatious spire.

    But nothing as draining as the healing she had given across the country sides, over and over, for no pay at all.

    “A contract with…?”

    “It is not given to me to know, High One. May I tell them you are willing to discuss?”

 

---

 

    Gallelon had said something about this when they were last together, as he had been repairing a saddle. “Do something other than tend to the endless ocean of suffering Iliban, Maris,” he had said as his needle dipped through the hard leather. She suspected he was using magic to help make the holes, and, curious, she tasted the air around the needle, keeping her touch focused so he would not notice. He did anyway, grinning back at her. “Take an expensive contract. Get paid for your work for a change.”

    And she needed the coin.

    “You may,” she told the Sensitive. The waif slipped off the chair and sprinted out the door.

    Maris drank down the rest of the ale in front of her, which was neither as bad as she had expected nor as good as she’d hoped, and wondered what the contract might be about.

    A motion from the high window caught her eyes. A small gray kitten had found its way up onto the thin ledge and was walking toward the tomcat. He had stopped grooming himself as the kitten approached, coming rather closer than she thought prudent. The kitten then sat back on its haunches, intently watching the older male, who gazed out over the assembled humans as if he were alone.

    Slowly, as if to test the idea, the kitten raised a paw, reaching toward the older cat.

    Foolish creature, Maris thought, strangely absorbed by this drama. A sudden swipe from the big cat and the kitten would fly off the narrow ledge and fall some ten feet or so into the room of tables and chairs. It would probably survive. Perhaps with something broken. A painful lesson.

    The elder cat turned a sudden, hard look on the kitten, and the tiny paw froze midair.

    “Ser High One?” A whispered voice. A figure tentatively sat across from her.

    Another Sensitive? Who had this much money — or desperation — to be so fervently seeking mages so far from the capital?

    This one stank of poorly washed clothes, smoke, and cheap rotgut. Her face was thin, the cords in her neck raised. Maris was done being polite; a quick touch into her body told Maris that many substances swam in the woman’s blood, that she ate little food, that her kidneys would not serve her much longer.

    It tugged at her, this suffering. Sensitives had no choice but to use every means they had to quiet what they could not control. Lacking a mage’s training, their lives would be cacophonous with the etherics of the world, that Iliban could not hear.

    “Will you speak with my employers?” She spoke in a hoarse whisper. “They have a contract to offer you.”

    Well, she had already said yes once. “I will.”

    A quick duck of the head, and the woman slid off the chair and was gone.

    Maris returned her attention to the high rafters, to the tomcat and impertinent kitten, to see where the drama stood. But they were both gone. With a disappointed exhale, she returned her attention to her stew, which tasted much better than it looked, and wondered who would show up next.

 

---

 

    He arrived the next morning as she sat in the eating room, sipping at a dark and fermented bitter Arun tea, wishing for honey. His gaze swept the room, settled on her.

    A tall man, broad shouldered, and wearing clothes nearly as anonymous as her own. She dipped her attention into him to find that he was strong, with a large number of scars. A trained soldier, then, though she could have told this from the way he strode across the room to her.

    In Perripur the wealthy and powerful did not send soldiers to talk to mages. But here in Arun, the monarchy and military were tightly entwined, explaining the empire’s insatiable appetite for land.

    What will Arunkin not eat? went the Perripin saying, expecting no answer.

    He sat. “High One –” he began.

    “Marisel,” she said sharply, tired of the game.

    “Marisel, then. I won’t waste your time. The palace offers you a contract.”

    “Does it indeed? The red, beating heart of Arunkel? Where your king outlaws our very existence?”

    At this he tilted his head. “Times change. I intend to see them change further.”

    Maris exhaled a short laugh, then sobered, considered this, and realized from his words and demeanor that she was talking to someone from the palace.

    An intriguing notion, to see altered the near thousand-year tradition of loudly denouncing magic with one side of the mouth while hiring a mage with the other.

    “What sort of contract?”

    “To give the monarch the benefit of your excellent vision.”

    The monarch? She sat back, surprised. That the Arun king quietly employed mages when he could persuade them to come close, she knew. Gallelon himself had played that game years ago. He had told her about the king’s library one warm night as they sat watching a storm of falling stars. His description had filled her with a kind of lust. She felt it now.

    “The library is exquisite, but be careful of the Arunkel monarchy,” Gallelon had added. “The snake bites.”

    Rumor held that the old king was ill. Maris had wondered whether his mages had abandoned him.

    Was she being recruited to replace them?

    “The old monarch or the new?” she asked.

    A faint smile crossed his face. “The new.”

    In Perripur, state parliaments discussed every issue at length, often until it was far past relevant, producing treaties that covered inches thick sheaves of papers. The Perripin government did not hesitate to hire elder mages to advise and remove deadlocks. Far less often for their magic, though to have a mage handy meant a show of power. A little like having a swordsman as a servant.

    “You wish only my advice, Arunkin? I find that hard to believe.”

    He spread his hands. “I would be a fool to try to bind you beyond your will. Come to the palace. Let us show you Arunkel hospitality. When we need more than advice, we will ask, and you decide.”

    “You have a library.”

    He smiled. “Histories going back to Arunkel’s founding and before. Poems from the masters. We have the most extensive collection in the empire. You would be most welcome there.”

    Hot baths. Good meals.

    Books.

    A memory of Keyretura’s voice: What are you missing, Marisel?

    “I will not wear the black for you,” she said, suddenly annoyed at him, at herself. “I will not be used to put fear into your enemies or set your monarch on the throne. We do no king-making.”

    At least they weren’t supposed to. The council of mages had uncompromising penalties for such actions.

    She tasted the quickening of the man’s heartbeat, though he hid it well.

    “I don’t need your help in that regard, Marisel. The princess will be crowned midsummer, or sooner.”

    Maris’s mind, fickle thing, was already in the fabled library, imagining running her fingers across the leather-clad spines of books, velum scrolls, stacks of amardide sheaves. The treasures that must be there. Unique across the world. A sublime opportunity.

    The snake bites.

    “After your queen is crowned,” she said, compromising with the warnings in her head.

    He considered her for a moment. “Allow me to put you on retainer until then,” he said. “Enough that you can stay wherever you like…” With this, his eyes flickered quickly around the room. “And then I will send someone for you, after the coronation.”

    Maris had already decided, she realized. To see the inside of the palace, the Jewel of the Empire, and browse its library… irresistible. The contract obligated her to little.

    “So be it,” she said.

    He held his hand out, palm up. On it was a gold Arunkel souver, king-side showing.

    She hesitated. What was she missing?

    Hot baths, she reminded herself. Good food.

    The library.

    She put her hand on top of his, palm down, the gold coin between them.

    “Our contract is made,” she said. Their hands turned in place, the coin now hers.

    After Samnt, she had despaired of caring about anything for some time to come. Now there was something she wanted, and she cherished the thought of it, pushing away the nagging sense that she was, indeed, missing something.