When Rosabella and Oralie finally stumbled back to the Palace’s master suite in the early hours of the morning, they were so full of merriment that their voices and laughter echoed down the hallways and Piotr once or twice had to remind his mistress that the rest of the house was fast asleep. For this reason, Oralie dismissed Piotr as soon as they reached her door. The tall valet frowned and withdrew.

“You see, Oralie?” Rosabella said, her eyes twinkling. “I told you you would fall in love with her.”

“I’m not nearly as smitten with her as you are.”

“Good. Less competition for me.”

Oralie ran her hand over the rough coral of the door. “But what a bunch of stories. I can’t believe the half of them.”

“About Nera, or about the rest of the troupe?”

Oralie shook her head, trying to clear the murk from it. “I don’t— yes. Either of them.”

“Oralie, my dear, this is why you really must get out more often. Your people expect it of you.”

“I did enjoy it greatly,” Oralie admitted.

“The afterparty is even better than the show itself, is it not?”

“Well, the show has less drink than the party.”

Rosabella snorted as she leaned against the door. “How can a Ductrix not be familiar with the wines of her own Duchy?”

“I’m not a Ductrix, Rosabella.”

“Consort, then. But my point still stands. Those wines of Thorssel were delectable, were they not?”

“Our vineyards are renowned.”

“And you know nothing of them.”

Oralie hiccuped. “Not nothing! I know, ah, a little of them. For instance, I know that they’re renowned.”

“I hope,” Rosabella said, pushing back up to her feet, “that tonight has been a broadening experience, then.”

“Yes, Rosabella. It has.”

“And what have we learned?”

Oralie held up a finger. “Go out and mingle with my subjects.” She held up a second finger. “Drink wine. Lots of it.”

“My apprentice, I have nothing more to teach you.”

“Oh, Rosabella. I’m sure you have plenty to teach me.”

“Hmmm? Like what?”

Oralie noticed that her hand was on the other woman’s arm. A thousand possibilities raced through her mind all at once, and in her addled state, most of them seemed far more enticing than they ought to have been. But despite the flush rising in her, the words that left her lips were words she hadn’t intended to speak at all. “The dreams are back,” she said. The way Rosabella drew herself up to her full height and sighed deeply destroyed the illicit subtext of the conversation, and yet it was the one thing that she had needed to say this entire evening. “The dreams are back,” she repeated.

“I know.”

“Did Dorsin tell you?”

“Yes.” Rosabella nodded, the action sending her curling locks dancing about her body. “But that is not how I know.”

“Then… then you’ve also had them?”

“I have.”

Oralie glanced at the door to her chambers. “Would you… come in? Just for a little while. I… I don’t—”

Rosabella was pushing the coral portal open before Oralie had finished her thought. “I would be honored. Come. We’ll ready you for bed, and then we’ll talk about your dreams.”

“I wish I understood them,” Oralie said as she followed Rosabella in.

“Oralie, my sweet, what is there about them to understand? They have seemed very straightforward to me.”

Oralie flushed. “There are other dreams,” she mumbled.

“Of course there are. Come. Let us dress you for bed.”

Here was the strangest piece of it: standing in front of her mirror, letting the Maga undress her, Oralie felt none of the excitement that she had expected to feel. The act was so perfunctory, and the heaviness in her mind so distracting, that even when she was naked, there was nothing but the dim certainty that she was so much less than what she could have been.

“You have a lovely back,” Rosabella said. She glanced at Oralie in the mirror, and the Era saw in the Ambassatrix’s eyes no untoward intentions, nothing carnal; there were only the words, earnest and true, protesting only enough that it was clear that she meant them, but not so much that it seemed a matter of pretense.

That made it all the worse. “The least offensive part of me, that’s all,” Oralie said.

“Offensive? May the word die in its cradle.”

“Look at me.” Oralie waved toward the mirror, toward the reflection of the sagging breasts, the blue-veined legs, the hair which had once been a beautiful blond but was now fading rapidly toward pallor where it wasn’t falling out altogether. “I’m old. I’m used up.” She coughed once. Of course. Her diseased lungs had to get into the act as well.

“Come.” Rosabella’s gentle hands on her shoulders steered her away from the mirror.

“I’m not dressed yet.”

“Come.” The hands directed her toward the bed, bade her to lie prone above the covers. She relented, closing her eyes and soaking in the feel of the satins beneath her body. The General Principles forbade ostentation, but there were benefits to being the beloved consort of a Dux.

A pressure under Oralie’s shoulder-blade made her gasp; when it relented, another pressure point, and another, appeared. Rosabella’s magical fingers were working her back. “You have carried so much weight,” Rosabella murmured.

“I’m an old woman.” But with every new point of kneading pressure on her back, a stress that she had not even known she was bearing relented just a little further.

“Not old, Oralie,” Rosabella said.

“Well past my prime, Rosabella.”

“Hush now. Let me work.” Rosabella’s fingers moved with expert skill to find knots of tension in Oralie’s back and defuse them. The satin was so soft, and the ministrations of Rosabella’s hands so soft and so rigid by turns that sleep began to infringe on the edges of Oralie’s consciousness. She didn’t track how long Rosabella was at her work, but instead began to drift on the currents of lassitude that bade her approach.

And then, minutes or hours later, the same currents drifted back in the other direction, as Rosabella relented in her touches. “How long?” Oralie mumbled into the covers.

“Long enough to do my work,” Rosabella replied. “How do you feel?” Her voice turned away into the room.

“Better. More than better.” The aches that had afflicted Oralie for so long had vanished. The pains she had long since become accustomed to, accepted as the price of life, and almost managed to forget in her day-to-day routine, had disappeared without a trace.

“Then I have done my job. Here. It will not do for you to catch cold.” Something warm and smooth— her nightgown, Oralie thought— fell onto her back, and the Era gratefully shrugged into it. She sat up and fastened the sash.

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“Hairsilk,” Rosabella said, a hint of admiration in her voice, as she sat down in the pile of pillows at the head of the bed. “The Dux spares no expense for you.”

Hairsilk. The thought of it alone was worthy of despair. “No longer. Our contracts are revoked.”

“Oralie,” Rosabella sighed, her gentle hands tugging at the Era’s shoulders. “Lie down. Rest in my arms. Forget your Gens’s troubles, and let me tell you of my dreams.”

“You mean my dreams,” Oralie said as she laid her head in Rosabella’s lap.

The Ambassatrix’s magical fingers began to work their sorcery on Oralie’s scalp. “No. I mean my dreams. I share them, do I not? May I not call them mine?”

“We both know that isn’t how it works.”

“How does it work, then? When I dream the ocean, and a wheat-haired girl, shy and retiring, who glances at me with those full blue eyes, and her body is a body I would have loved in another life; when I see her with the man I love, and feel pride and sadness both at once; when her vanishing voice calls my name, ‘Rosabella!’ with such clarity and certainty, how could they be anything but mine? When that girl comes to me…” Rosabella mercifully let the words trail off.

Oralie could find no words to explain it. The dreams were hers; she knew it. But the entire situation made no sense. “Synapsis,” she said at last.

“You have no Bond,” Rosabella said, as she had said a hundred times before.

“And you don’t dream. You don’t sleep.”

“Only sometimes,” Rosabella said. “But during my devotions, my dreams are of the waking world, and always these visions of a beautiful young girl occur in the nighttime hours of Thorssel, when you are asleep.”

“I wish I understood.”

“You said it yourself. Synapsis.”

“You said it yourself, yourself. I’ve got no SOPHIOS.”

“Apotheosis may work in many ways, Oralie.”

“Some apotheosis. What does it matter if we can’t work it out?”

“Have you tried working it out? Who else knows about them? Who else knows that you share your dreams with me?”

“Only Dorsin.”

“He acts on them, I assume. Come. Do not be ashamed. Your secrets are safe with me.”

Oralie nodded, and was rewarded for her troubles by fingers digging deeper into her skull, sending another wave of pleasurable lassitude rolling through her body. “I just wish we’d shared one in the past week. You could have told us Senrii was safe. Dorsin tells me they’re the only reason the Gens is still afloat. He says his family blames it on the ‘runt’s luck,’ but he and he alone knows where credit is due.”

“Calling Dorsin a runt seems rather inaccurate.”

“Just a joke among family members.”

“But you have never seen fit to bring your apparent sleeping Synapsis to the attention of an inquirer or to the Sodality, to learn why it happens?”

Oralie released a lazy shrug. “No. Why would I? Just a quirk of nature, or of fate. It will all be finished when I’m gone, and right now it’s the only thing keeping us afloat. No reason to trouble anyone about it now.”

“Everything happens for a reason, Oralie.”

“No.”

“Oralie, would you have a Bond, if you could?”

“Of course I would.”

“I have a little put away.”

“What? Rosabella, no—”

“And why not? After what I cost your family, should I not repay what I can? I am afraid I cannot afford more than six intervals, barely half of what I owe, but—”

Oralie sat straight up and placed her hands on Rosabella’s shoulders. “Rosabella, I could never ask this of you.”

“Then I offer it freely. Or in return for payment.”

“Payment?”

“One of your hairs, perhaps. A single golden lock by which to remember you, when I have returned to Acerbia.”

“If you wanted gold, Rosabella, you should have asked when I was younger.”

“Then I will take a pale hair as collateral against a golden hair, which you will give me once the Bond has restored you to the flower of youth.”

“Rosabella.”

“Yes?”

“You can have one of my hairs. But I won’t be taking your money.”

Rosabella pursed her lips. “You do me wrong.”

“You can’t guilt me into this.”

“I will owe you greatly.”

“For a hair?”

“Forgive me. I already owe you greatly. I will owe you greatly, plus one hair.”

“Mmmm. Are you going to talk me to sleep, or are you going to take one?”

“I have already done so.” Rosabella held up a fading lock that she must have plucked while Oralie was drifting. “It is possible,” she said, sounding uncertain, “that this hair might bring about the salvation of your family.”

“I suppose now is the appropriate time for bedtime stories. You already have the hair, Rosabella. You don’t need to convince me.”

“Perhaps I need to convince myself. Now. Lie back down. Let me stroke your hair — the rest of it, of course — and tell me more of your dreams, Oralie.”

“I thought you were going to tell me of yours,” Oralie murmured as Rosabella’s gentle hands pressed her out onto a sea of quicksilver imaginings.

“Very well. I will tell you of mine. My dreams — by which I mean, my desires — speak to me of a day when Gens Nethress bestrides the world. Ductrix Oralie’s children and grandchildren are as many as the sands of the sea, and the bloodlines pay homage to her familial devotion, to her love for her house and her sacrifices for the generations to follow her. And she lives still in my dreams, forever young, forever vital, ruling alongside her beloved husband a world where there are no more Wildlands, there are no more Chimeras, there are no more Gentes struggling among each other; there is only peace, and exploration, and inquiry. A world where…”

But Oralie was fast asleep. Rosabella would have to wait until another time to hear of her dreams, then. Carefully, the Ambassatrix supported Oralie’s head as she slipped her legs out, then let it down gently to the pillows.

It was almost time for her to leave. Before she did so, however, Rosabella slipped an envelope sealed with the double-helix onto the bedside table. She spared a final look for the sleeping Era; then she left the chamber, closed the door and her eyes, and drew a deep breath.

“Stay away from my mother.”

Rosabella looked up, her mouth broadening into her most winsome smile. “Senrii. How good to see you again.”

Senrii pushed off the wall. She’d been waiting outside the room the whole time. “And don’t do that… thing.”

“Forgive me. I forget myself sometimes.”

“My family’s not your toys, Rosabella. I don’t like people hurting people I love.”

“Dear child, I intend to hurt nobody.” Oh, if only that were true.

“Sneaking out of my mother’s room past midnight? My father told me who— what— you are. What you do to people around you. Even the women. I don’t like that. It’s like— it’s like—”

“Senrii—”

Senrii’s eyes burned with cold fire. “So stop toying with our hearts. If you really love anybody here, stop taunting us and tempting us. It’s a cheap parlor trick. Any maga with the right STIGMOI could do it. We don’t, because we’re decent people.”

Rosabella shrugged helplessly. “I am who I am, Senrii. I love your mother. I would never hurt her.”

“Yeah? You worm your way into my dad’s heart so that he never gets over you, and you think that now it doesn’t hurt my mother to see you again?”

“Oh, Senrii. You are right. My presence does hurt Oralie. But not the way you think it does.” She smiled sadly. “For your mother never quite got over me, either.”

“Why, you—”

“Peace, Senrii. Not a taunt. Just a fact. And I love her as I love my own hands, my own eyes. I would not see her in pain. For which reason I am going directly to the airfield to leave. If my presence causes conflict among this household, it is better that I go. Family is the most important.”

Senrii’s voice was still and distant. She was a dangerous one, she was. “Yeah, well. You’re right; you should go. Have a nice trip.” Senrii never ceased watching Rosabella as she bowed graciously; her eyes remained glued to the Ambassatrix until she disappeared out of sight around the hallway.

When she was alone, Rosabella opened her hand and stared down at the long, pale strand of hair in it. Had anything she just said to Senrii been true? Had any of it been a lie?

Which mask was she wearing tonight?

***

Tumbling Seeding 29, 1885 CE

Rosabella swept into Eztli’s office. “Please, Era, forgive me for disturbing you.”

The Era was seated behind her curving desk of beetle chitin. At the sight of Rosabella, a transformation came over her face; the weariness vanished, and she smiled. “You know I always have time for you, Rosabella. Especially after a day like today. Are you here for business or pleasure? I beg you, tell me it’s the latter.”

“Both, my darling. I have a gift for you.”

“What is that? May I see it?”

“Of course. Did I not say it was a gift for you?” Rosabella offered the packet of hair.

“I don’t understand.”

“Come, my love. Do you not recall our last conversation, after the throes of passion waned and you loosened your tongue? Not that it was so loose before—”

“Stop teasing me! But— I remember. Then this is—”

“A hair from the head of Era Oralie Generosus Nethress Ortus La Table d’Or, wife of Dux Dorsin Generosus Ortus Nethress, for your brother’s database. By chance, I happened to have a few moments with her. An Ambassatrix’s duties takes her many places, after all. It was not so hard to pluck a lock without her knowing.”

“But this is marvelous! The very breakthrough to cap an otherwise-atrocious day. If one of her get shows his face here, we will know it.”

Rosabella sat in the seat across the desk. “I know it is not my place to ask, but—”

“Rosabella, are you preparing to ask me a query which you know I may not answer?”

“Forgive me, Era.”

“Oh, come off the formal titles. With all the places those lips have gone, don’t you think they’re allowed to form my name?”

“As you say, Eztli. I was only going to ask that it not be used to harm her in any way.”

“Of course not. Ilhicamina is only interested in completing our map of the Nethress family genome. Especially after that infiltration. We can’t afford to be caught blind again.”

“Of course not. Forgive me for asking. I care for her, her husband notwithstanding.”

Eztli shrugged. “It is of no consequence, Rosabella.”

“It is simply that…”

“Yes?”

“Eztli, I would never want you to think that I was doubting you or your family.”

“If you did, Rosabella, I wouldn’t tell if you didn’t. As far as I am concerned, you’re as much a human as I am.”

For a Nxtlu Generosus to name another as “human” was a rare treasure. Perhaps gaining Nxtlu’s trust would be even easier than Rosabella had expected. “You do me honor, Eztli.”

“Because it pleases me to do so.”

“It would honor me further… if you would consider…”

“Yes? What is it, Rosabella? No, don’t shake your head. Tell me.”

“I only wonder if perhaps I am not being everything that I ought to be, tied as I am to the Sodality.”

Eztli’s eyebrows rose. “You— you would prefer—”

“I am only thinking, Era, that it might be better if I learn to take my rightful place— assuming, as you say, that I truly am as human as you are—”

Eztli’s grin became a full, genuine smile. She rose with excitement. “Rosabella, your will is supreme. Never forget that. Never. You’re a human; you’ve proven it through your actions. You have the Smoking Mirror inside you, so your desires are divine. Tell me, what is troubling you so?”

“Eztli, my love. What would happen if I chose to… not to forsake my vows to the Sodality, but—”

“But to fulfill your humanity? To turn to the divinity within? To join forces with the bloodline that recognizes the superiority of the divine mandate of humanity?”

“Yes, my love. In so many words. Do you think such a Gens would have me?”

Eztli smiled deeply. “They would be fools not to.”