My throat is raw when I wake up, coughing on bile in a tangle of cold, soaked sheets. The nightmare’s only mercy is how fleeting the memory of it is; even with as hard as my mind grasps at the fleeting wisps of terror and horror, there’s no imprint, not even the vaguest hint of a narrative or a mood.

Zidanya had left in the night, clearly. “Which is fine,” I say out loud, making myself enunciate the words and roll my pitch up and down the octaves. “She has no obligah.” The gob of mucus, burning faintly as it comes up, goes into the sink, and I drink deeply of the water glass I’d left in the bathroom, forcing it down past the gagging. “Rust my engines and vent my decks,” I mutter darkly, and then there’s nothing left to do but get dressed and go out of the room.

I don’t really process the fact that everyone’s awake and gathered variously around the common space, mostly having breakfast, until after someone hands me a mug while I’m staring at the water spigot. I’m startled enough to almost drop it, but Amber wraps her hands around mine, supporting the mug until I’m recombobulated enough to take it from her. It’s pleasantly warm, heat flowing through the ceramic into my hands, and I realize belatedly that I’m shivering and my hands are white with cold.

I take a drink from the mug instead of dwelling on it. Whatever’s in it, there’s a bitter and astringent base that’s almost entirely smothered in sweetness, fat, herbs, and a little bit of fruitiness. The light burn as it goes down suggests it might have a little bit of alcohol in it, too, and it palpably warms me up from the inside even as it soothes the rawness in my throat.

It is, to a certain extent, like the fog clearing off of a lake as the fans kick off the breeze and the lamps and heat shunts bring in the morning. By the time I’m finished with the mug, my throat has entirely lost its previous rawness, my grogginess has been transmuted into a muted, gentle wakefulness, and my stomach is rumbling with hunger.

Also, by that time, Amber and Zidanya are bickering over something, which I think is the first time I’ve seen them fight about anything. Their voices are low enough that I can’t catch all of it, and I’m trying to tune them out regardless while I pull together a plate of eggs, scrambled in oil with a selection of diced vegetables and spiced with onion and garlic along with the more typical salt.

“Zanya,” Amber is saying, “all I—”

“—will thank you to not so diminish me in your wheedling, Dame Ashborn. Am I chained to—”

“—asked for no reasons, much less excuses, merely that you—”

“—treating him like a child—”

“—perfectly reasonable to provide him with that measure of relief and joy—”

I slide a chair up to the counter and start to eat. Khalal slides a glass of water over to me, which involved some sort of magic on zir part given that ze was a meter away from the glass, and I hum an old tune one of my teachers taught me decades ago as I fill the gaping pit of less-acid-than-a-few-minutes-ago that my stomach is masquerading as.

Amber and Zidanya are done arguing when I stop. I realize belatedly that I was humming pretty loudly and drumming a variant three-two pattern on the countertop while I was eating, which was almost unbelievably rude even for me, but they have quite similar looks of embarrassment on their faces and no indication that I’m being inappropriate. Well, I’m confident about Amber’s expressions, and Zidanya’s are close enough that I’m sort of assuming they mean the same thing. Embarrassed or not, they both open their mouths with somewhat mulish expressions, but Sara clears her throat before they say anything, cutting them off.

“Sir.” She pauses, like she’s unsure of how to phrase something. “Khetzi asks for your attention,” she eventually says. “Outside.”

“Outside, huh,” I say into the sudden silence. I shrug, swinging myself off of my stool and walking towards the door. “Won’t come in, I guess? Alright. Khetzi!” I swing the gigantic door to our commensurately gigantic foyer open, grinning. “You call, I answer. You can’t come in?”

Khetzi does something subtle and probably meaningful with their hands. They’re in a slightly different outfit, still robes, still silver-and-white and absolutely immaculate, but the cut has changed. This, too, is probably meaningful to people who know, which I do not. “Magelord. We are charged with a message for you; will you hear it?”

They’re being unusually to the point, which is interesting. “Yes.”

“The Lady bids me say the following,” Khetzi says slowly, and their voice shifts to mimic Lily’s. “There’s a debt owed. I’m coming over for lunch; we’ll swap stories.”

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

I blink a few times as they give a small bow and turn as if to walk away. “Thank you?” I find myself saying it as though it’s a question.

“It is our pleasure to deliver such a message,” they say with a genial smile, and then they’re walking unhurriedly down the corridor as I turn back into our home.

“Cryptic nonsense,” I mutter under my breath, walking slowly towards the kitchen and the raised eyebrows of my companions, and also Khalal. “Always with the cryptic nonsense. Why can’t people be more straightforward?”

“My lord.” Amber’s voice is gentle, judged on the Amber-saying-my-lord scale of things. Barely sarcastic at all. “The message?”

“Lily informs us, through Khetzi, that she’s coming for lunch. Um.” I scratch the top of my head. “She said she owes us or me a debt or something along those lines, and she’s going to come by for lunch and we’ll tell stories?”

That gets a sharp jolt of attention from Khalal and a burst of confusion from Amber and Sara. Zidanya’s reaction, on the other hand, might not be particularly readable, but it’s incredibly emphatic. “Magelord, what were her exact words?”

“Well, I mean, they were Khetzi’s, right? I guess Khetzi was mimicking her tone of voice, so maybe they used her exact words as well.” I raise a hand, wincing preemptively, as Zidanya’s eyes narrow and her mouth opens. “Sorry! Um. There’s a debt owed,” I say, doing my best to mimic the intonation. “I’m coming over for lunch; we’ll swap stories. That’s it, that was the whole message, start to finish.”

“Lily, you ass.” Zidanya breathes the words, barely audible, and slumps bonelessly onto the arm of the couch. “What disaster. Lunch, today?”

“Can’t be by accident.” Khalal’s face and voice are equally grim. “Ain’t nothing in Lily’s deeds she don’t put there on purpose.”

“Unpack, Zanya.” Amber’s voice cuts in before I can muster up the right words to ask more or less the same question. “If we are to host, what are our obligations?”

“Stories may much convey, should there be no way that it be yon Cadoran word you repeat.” Zidanya leans forwards, hands twitching in her lap. Her voice is more distant than usual, both more musical and less herself. “Lunch as well.”

“Um.” My Visor flickers into existence and with an act of will I summon a language representation of a memory. I can’t pull the original word out in some sort of phonetic structure, but I can reuse some code I’d previously written to get a more holistic translation and some context. “Lunch: a midday meal, in the trade language of the Ionderai salt-flatters. Wait, what?” I blink at the rest of the context, language metadata I’d exhaustively pulled out into my display. “I thought lunch was a more casual and lighter meal. Raw fish over rice that’s been treated with vinegar? This isn’t at all what I would have expected from lunch.”

“Lily does tread three paths and more in every journey, but to seed the ground with missteps is unlike her.” Zidanya’s frowning. “And stories?”

“The tale of how one came to the day? In the western Heharai work-gang dialect of the First Stillness. I know that one! That’s… that’s back in your day, right?”

“In the days following Her Striving, yet before She was Shattered.” Zidanya nods slowly. “It is… not the tale of how one’s own feet to the present have striven, but the tale of a people, the beginnings of a people. What weal or woe hath the living memory wrought.”

“Zanya, you’re going over archaic.” Amber kisses her forehead, smoothing her hair back. “Stay with us.”

“Origin stories,” I say softly. “Of our identity groups? You know I don’t like to dwell too much on Fleet stuff.”

“No more than does Lady Sheid dwell overmuch on her own origins,” Zidanya says quietly.

“Point.” I blink a few times. “Wait, I know literally nothing about her origins. I don’t even know what ilk of folk she, uh, springs from?”

“What an interesting word.” Zidanya rises from the couch in a smooth motion, her face losing its emotions as she does. “Amber, attend me; we will have to manage this Magelord of ours. Sara, Gavonne, I trust the two of you know your protocol; not the highest, but not the semi-formals of the children in these days. Gavonne, assist her if she has any questions; she is no duller than yourself, but a surfacer. Khalal.”

“Architect.” Zir voice is warily formal.

“Decide, Khalal.”

“Greatest a’ respect, Architect. Ya can count on me tomorrow, but I’m not a boon, yeah?” Ze nods respectfully towards me. “Magelord. Would be good ta drill, if the Lady leaves ya in one piece.”

Khalal has barely finished speaking when Amber is pulling me towards the doors. “We’ll see you at the training grounds,” I manage to say, and then my shirt is over my head, Zidanya’s hands tossing it into the room ahead of me.

I try not to think about last time Lily and I interacted, or how quickly everything might go so totally wrong in a kilosecond’s time; and, as they start to brief me on the formalities and expectations ahead of us, I reflect, and not for the first time, on my good fortune.

Even if it does mean wearing, stars grant me strength, the leggings.