Audience, appetizers and alcohol. You could kill him now and that smile wouldn’t leave his face.

Boss Bu had become king of a small corner of the Degatawa Summer’s end ball. He reigned from a palatial velvet chair pulled free from one of the dining tables. A small table bore his goblet and a plate never empty with various bite-sized delicacies. Smoked ham wrapped around baked peaches, fish hunks atop butter soaked bread, artichoke hearts dipped into his own dish of a white, pungent sauce. The most wondrous part of the old man’s endless storytelling was how he found moments enough to eat, drink and breathe.

A hilarious wrinkle in some old monster-hunting story earned him a ripple of laughter. Cyril jumped in to correct him. The younger warden stood at the old man’s side. Cyril sipped respectful, but ample, drinks of his own goblet. Xin had watched him refuse two bottles from the servers before allowing Bu to start his drinking. The wine looked the same as the others before it. Cyril seemed content to watch, to be a living article of Bu’s stories. As if to merely nod along and laugh at the appropriate times and prove to the affluent onlookers that “Yes, it all really happened.”

Except when he had something funnier or more interesting to say.

Xin was too far from them to hear anything but the laughter. A small pack of kids had assembled for these stories. They sat cross-legged in front of Bu’s throne. Xin remembered his father telling him all of those stories. He used to insist on hearing them first, as soon as his father had returned to the guild triumphant. Xin didn’t remember when he stopped insisting.

“It’s a little sad, isn’t it?” Pratima Migtrolio did not look at Xin when she spoke. She watched Bu launch into another old story. Cyril shook his head as if there was no stopping the old man. “Some people can never leave the past alone.” Xin moved away from her and through the party. He cautiously opened doors until finding an unoccupied hallway leading towards the servant quarters. Pratima had followed him without hurry. “Though, perhaps it’s less sad than those that flee from it.”

Xin recognized she probably meant him, but ignored the pointed jab. “You must mean Cyril. Your letter was a little scant on the details.”

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“I was hoping you could illuminate such things for me,” Pratima said. She had an odd way of asking for something. As if it was expected you would help her, regardless of the inconvenience or the danger it posed to do so. Xin was quickly losing track of why he was annoyed. The irate sensation left him more and more rarely. When it became clear he had no answers, Pratima sighed. “Then if I could have it back?”

Xin kept his face even and undisturbed. He tried anyway. “I burned it,” he lied. “I didn’t think you’d need it back.”

“It was not yours to discard,” Pratima scolded him. “I still had uses in mind.”

“If you have designs, then share them,” Xin said. “How can I be expected to act in accordance with your plans if you do not make them known?”

“How can you expect to be trusted when you burn the gifts I give to you?” Pratima asked. Her fingers steepled. In the blink of an eye, Xin’s arm was pinned against the wall of the hallway, wrestled there by Pratima. She held it in place with no effort, even as the young man yanked his own arm with all of his might. Force was not a weapon Xin expected her to employ. He wondered what made women so eager to pin him to walls.

“I understand you’re scared of the future,” Pratima said. Despite her manhandling Xin, she spoke with the even calmness of an undisturbed lake. Cold. Rigid. “I understand that you are part of something that is moving very fast. In ways you did not expect. All of the plans in your head are becoming impossible. Maybe you’re losing sleep. Maybe it’s hard for you to eat. Maybe all of this has you looking to the past for safety. Perhaps you’ve had the very unintelligent notion that you should tell your father of our many conversations.”

Pratima leaned in close to Xin. “Perhaps our future has become unclear to you. Fond memories of your past may steer you from the truth, young man. Nostalgia is smoke. Like from those rotting little pipes men like to burn. It smells sweet and puts your mind at ease. It may even convince you of the great delusion all men like to believe.”

Xin stopped fighting. “And what ‘delusion’ is that?”

“That things don’t have to change.” Pratima pried open Xin’s hand and smirked. He was sweating. “Don’t forget your place in all this,” she released Xin but continued to talk, “don’t lose sight of what we have to gain.”

“I don’t care about what we have to gain,” Xin explained. “Only about what that man stands to lose.”