In the porthole’s slanted dim light, I stirred and parted my ached eyes. It is a wish to be greeted in agreeable circumstances after one’s death. Perhaps in the pristine white of a sickbay, where valerian soothes one’s mood and sedates one’s mind. But an azure is not privileged to such things. Instead my mattress was beyond dirty, even more pitiable than the rest of the scant furniture in the dark and cramped cabin; many days straight it had been laid upon, without being cleaned, grimed with dried blood and sweat. It is a fitting arrangement, for azures do not ever complain. But for me, who was needy in my worst health, and in need of pampering by sight if not by care, it was enough to see Thea over the foot of my berth.

Her presence alone, though still in worn and sorry garbs, gave a heavenly feel as could to our surroundings.

“Welcome back,” she said. The mundane, everyday voice brought me much comfort, and dispersed all doubt as to its reality. My mind retraced the many times this scene had played out between us.

“Aye.” I shut my eyes. My head was still in a daze, it hurt to think. “How long this time?”

“Two days,” she said gently, “though you came to briefly last night,” and did not say more as I lay remembering.

Event by event, I recalled. And at the memory of the fall, I jerked up.

Readily, Thea thrust a prepared bucket into my chest. I clutched it as my stomach turned. The pain had always been the worst, and always the most keenly remembered.

Nothing came. There was nothing in my stomach. It had been two days.

“The captain’s order,” I said. One day had been all that was allowed me to complete the task. Or to not complete and meet my punishment. The latter would come, surely, if late.

“Oh, that.” Thea gave a strange chortle. “That stuff is over. I do not think she will inquire of you and your berth-mates any more of it.” She cast a glance around the slave cabin. It was empty at this hour in the morning. I was only here because the sickbay would not admit an azure.

“She is ever of fickle mood,” I remarked.

“Not in this. Some say she was delighted.”

“She was?” I knitted my brows. One learns to be wary of the captain’s extreme emotions when one has lived long enough on the Daybright. Not that she is any better bored, but still.

“She got what she wanted. And now I daresay that I was wrong, she likes as not didn’t think you azures would be able to do it at all.”

“Oh?”

“You.”

“Me? I did that?”

“Aye. Lex believes so.” She laughed.

I laughed too. No flogging.

Thea stopped first. Even then, I did not think she jested, being not one to be so tactless or cruel.

“You did, Star,” she repeated.

“I did. Oh, I remembered something before I died. There was a wyverness there.”

And in my excitement for a punishment escaped, I told her the entire story, as well as it could be recalled in my fuzzy state. It seemed that there had been witnesses, chiefly the one on the look-out at the masthead. I had been seen with the wyvern, and so had my fall.

In the end, still there was something strange in Thea voice as she spoke, “Then no one knows for surety how you bade that hierogram into existence. But it is marked now on that masthead. What is that wyverness? What sought she in you?”

I shrugged, but these questions Thea posed for herself alone. At length, for my sake, she gave another, less wry smile. “It is a good fortune, Star, to escape that punishment. I fear only that there may be no good in mingling with wyverns, and now the captain has her eyes on you.”

Always she considered matters further than I could. And it was true, to catch the captain’s attention is never a good thing. So much so that a flogging, whose pains might last no longer than days or weeks, seems preferable.

“Well,” she said, “what’s done is done. We could hope to think our way out of this no more than to have a hierogram done. Rest. I will be to the galley, and see if I can find something for us both.”

Stolen story; please report.

And so said, she rose. But halfway to the door, she stopped, listening. And when she had discerned what could by hearing, she stood in thought. It was ever her wont to think deeply before acting, if she could help it. Presently the wry smile returned. Without a word, she opened the door, but did not pass it, for beyond it stood someone.

Though seated at my berth, I could see that person. Thea was tall, but the other was taller, so that I could glimpse the black of her hair, the silver of encasing horns.

The girl-slave made a curtsy. She never did so before the officers, but she did it now, for doubtless the wyvernesss had had on her the same effects as she had I.

The clear, cool voice of Litzia reached my ears, “I did not want to interrupt.”

“Aye, ma’am,” Thea said, “do you have need of us? If it is some task better served by many, I shall go fetch more hands.”

“I come for only one in your care. So by your leave, if you would move aside, I will speak briefly with her in private.” Her flat tone betrayed nothing, but I could only imagine sarcasm in such a plea made by a wyverness to a slave.

If Thea thought it earnest, she did not make an effort to assume herself in a subservient role, saying, “I am heading to the galley anyway, so make yourself comfortable, ma’am, if not overly so – Star isn’t quite dead now, but neither is she very clear of it.”

“I will, thank you.”

And so once more Thea curtsied, and left.

The door closed, and we were alone in the room, not with so much as a witness as aloft the masthead. She who had played a part in my death once. Rather more awkwardly she stood in the middle of the dirty slave cabin than she had perched on the spar, coiling round the rigging and the mast. She made an effort for a natural smile, or so I thought, for it was not easy to see aught with surety in that dimly lit space.

“I am not overly familiar with azure anatomy,” she said, “but I am told you will be fine eventually. And that your people do not know death, no more than they know life.”

The memory of our conversation two days ago came alive in my mind, and I winced involuntarily. Even so, I answered in the same manner as before, “It is right, ma’am. We can’t die that simply, as our body could recover from wounds that are grievous to humans. Our memories are retained so long as there are someone nearby nursing our recovery. I will come to my full health eventually.”

But she had not come to inquire into our scant lore, even as she had not two days before.

Whatever she was about, I had questions aplenty myself. “Ma’am, the hierogram…”

“Keep that,” she interrupted, “First. I said then that you should grudge me not, but natheless, I must apologize for what I put you through. Your death was on me. I did not reckon the hierogram would draw so much life force from you as it did.”

Even if she said that, I could not recall much of the process save jumbled senses of incomplete sights and emotions. Only the pain of falling on deck was keen. I told her so.

“Mayhap you don’t, and that is well. At the time I tried indeed to stop you, yet you would not have it, and did free yourself from my grasp with such strength I did not expect in a slight azure.”

Now there was a hint of inquiry in her tone. But what questions she had, I asked myself also.

“I do not think I was conscious then, ma’am. Yet one thing I am sure: you gave your aid, else the hierogram would not have been made.”

And this we both knew to be true. Yet she did not confirm it aloud.

“Was it truly out of pity?” I asked.

And, for the first time, I thought she caught off guard. It was a simple enough question that I asked without speculating some ulterior motives. And yet it took her longer than should to arrive at an answer. When she did, it came with a sigh, and the veiling fog over her thoughts dispersed briefly from those dark eyes trained on me.

“It was,” she said.

A lie.

She gathered herself, and the veil again thickened.

“It is well you admit my aid, then, for I am come to pronounce your debt.”

I looked back at her dumbly.

A debt. To be sure, my falling to death was terrible, but it came and go in an instant, and so could not compare with a morning of flogging. I had her to thank for that. And still, her notion passed ridiculousness. A debt of me, an azure! An azure is something less than a common slave, who herself had none to her name but the labor already exploited as much as could. And she, the wyverness, an alaris of the Anemone cohort. By her race alone, she is noble and revered. To be courted by a wyvern into a pledge, and thusly knighted, is earning the right at once to gentry. That is to say, there was so great a natural gap between our social stations that it is already startling for us to engage in so long a conversation. And yet she has come to pronounce my debt?

“Surely you jest, ma’am. Whatever service could the likes of me render someone like you, that it must needs be invoked by a debt?”

Litzia chuckled. There was it again, that malice abounded when I had given her the fatal answer two days ago on the masthead.

“Someone like you?” she said dangerously.

Then, she moved. Until now I had remained seated, too weak to stand on ceremony, and she had not shifted from her spot. But now she came to my dirty mattress. In quite an unbecoming way, she dropped on all four, over me as I fell backwards. In fear I shrunk away, but the wall prevented my escape. I was a clawless rat who could not fight back even desperately, and she the cat who had run out of plays. If she bared her fangs even as one, I could not tell, so entranced as I was by her deep eyes. And so close she was, her horns now framed my field of vision, the curtains of her dark tresses blocked out the outside world, her thin smile completely captured my wit. With one sure movement she tucked a finger in her toga’s wide neckline, and pulled it down, revealing the upper part of her left breast.

Plastered on the ivory skin was a branded mark in the image of a chained-down torch – the symbol of Raiser Aachen – even as it tainted my and Thea’s flesh, being the mark of slavery.