I stopped by the medicine lodge to ask Mirjam to give me something for the pain, but she was walking out the door when I came, her step thundering across the porch and down the stairs. Her expression was severe and her jet-black hair was braided back tight, her stained skirt flapping against her shins. She had a tattoo of a rat on her left forearm, the mark of a Kyjan revolt medic. It was an inside joke, an unofficial talisman to ward off the vermin and disease. Her eyebrows were thick and wild, wisps of hair even above her nose, eyes framed with thick, dark lashes. They cut into me, flinty and sharp.

“You look like shit.”

“Spare some tonic for a poor, beaten wretch?”

“You dislocated Ordin’s ankle, you’re lucky he didn’t break something. He’ll be in a splint for six weeks and it will affect his performance in the tournament. I would have thrashed you myself,” she replied without sympathy.

The medicine lodge was one of the privileged buildings in the village that was on solid ground, and had a yard and a garden surrounding it for growing food and herbs. The men stopped here to talk every once in a while when they came for tobacco, the women when they came for herbs, the rich chaperoned by serving boys in gondolas, the poor wading through the mire. Mirjam was a hardass, but she was a pillar of the community—and my continued existence.

“Are you going to treat me or just lecture me?”

She put a hand on my shoulder and I let her. Her fingers moved back and forth in front of my eyes, checking for a concussion. Sometimes I flattered myself we could pass for siblings. I had the same night-black hair, black irises, and olive-deep skin, but I was about ten years her junior and had my wicked scar sunk into the left side of my face.

“You’re fine,” she decided. “You seen it coming?”

Even if you weren’t prone to climbing trees, the nearest incursion of Ru’our Kholtan’s ostentatious gifts for the village was within everyone’s eyesight now. Open visibility of a caravan of skiffs, gondolas, and pack animals fighting their way upstream and into the village.

And I was most certainly not fine. But at least my facade was holding. With Mirjam, who was always tough and blunt, I could pretend.

“Hard to miss it,” I said flatly.

“Hm.” Her reply was mirthless.

The tinny sound of a gong pierced through the village, and then the voice of a crier. “The wares of Elder Ru’our Kohltan! Announcing the arrival of Master Kholtan’s caravan!”

“Do you have tonic made?”

“Later. C’mon,” she commanded, pulling her gondola flush with the bank.

“Why bother?” I replied dryly, walking for the medicine lodge—I could get the painkiller myself. I knew where she kept everything.

“Where else do you have to go?”

“Off.” Anywhere but the parade clogging the canals in procession to the meeting hall. The shores of the town square in front of would be packed with villagers jostling to see. Whenever Ru’our’s personal effects arrived from a trade expedition, it was an impromptu holiday. Jam, pies and picnic blankets spread on the meeting hall floor as he received his delivery. Frankly, I didn’t want to deal with this. I wanted enough painkiller to make my head spin. I didn’t want to remember a single event that happened today. I was going anywhere but there.

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“You should pay attention to what’s going on in this town, Seth.”

Mirjam’s voice made my hair stand on end. It was her tone. It sounded like a threat. No one said it, but the whole village knew that all knew that at some point, she must have handled a gun. She had eye for bullshit like she was still looking through the scope.

I shut my eyes slowly. Good god, not more. I turned back.

Mirjam’s face was fixed toward the water—where the boats full of villagers were beginning to appear, people leaving their jobs, setting aside their housework to come and see. She usually treated Kholtan’s spectacles with vague disapproval and disinterest. This was different. I knew what it meant when she got like that, like a hound following a blood scent.

She knows something.

I thought about Kholtan’s mention of investors to Benjamael, of a demonstration—and the fact that he hadn’t been here yesterday. He must have arrived last night, hell knows when he found time to talk Benjamael, let alone the whole council, into ambushing Aldin the students. Whatever was going on, Kholtan was maneuvering like lightning, and Mirjam’s brow had darkened the same way when the first few cases of the plague arrived. Her lips tightened to a grim line, her shoulders straightened up like she was at attention. Mirjam was a soldier. She didn’t overreact.

I cocked my head and gazed at her, grimly. She met my eyes. Definitely bad. We’d go to the meeting hall, then, even though my back ached like fuck. Nevermind that I’d just been expunged from the student ranks and a future in this village. I gritted my teeth, Good god. Not more. I followed her into the boat and took up the oar.

I wasn’t watching where I was rowing, paying more attention to the small whirlpools the oar made in the water and trying not to grunt with pain, head full of noise while Mirjam brooded in the back of the gondola. I glanced up in time to almost crash into a boat with a foreign woman in it.

I blinked. She was an amber-eyed vision with pastel rouge paler than my skintone on her cheeks, swathed in pale silks and floral brocades. She couldn’t have been much older than me, kneeling on a nest of silk cushions in a wide curved, oversized gondola, two girls rowing it slowly. Her cheekbones were high and fragile, her lips painted with a gloss that made them shine. Her hair hung in strawberry blonde waves, dressed in a delicate, pale blue brocade, her skin white as milk. Everyone within eyesight of her was staring. A Xavian girl.

A girl I could have watched eagerly out the glass back door of the sunroom while they promenaded on the lush, green banks of Oranjesuul Flow in Islingraet, the south coast of Xavia, where my mother’s hands would rest upon my shoulders. The city on the water with its borders full of tall houses layered high like tiers of a cake, gardens overgrown with trellises of color, where young ladies promenaded on the cobblestone in town and on the banks of the estuary sheathed in fans, umbrellas, and high-laced collars. I thought they were the most beautiful things I had ever seen. Back before the propaganda began to play on the radios, and the eyes of the gentlemen escorting them turned despising and suspicious toward a black-haired child. Then the ladies politely looked aside and drew their fans to their faces, like I was unclean.

This woman’s eyes lingered on me—on us, Mirjam and me. It had probably been years since she’d seen Kyjans, if ever. Her head was full of idle propoganda that was of no consequence to her anyway—the politics of the purge had no reason to touch a young woman of status. Her amber gaze moved gracefully away, taking in the sights.

She didn’t belong here. Right now, neither of us did.

So Ru’our had brought back a woman. She didn’t look like a servant for his wife. She had stunningly elaborate embroidered organza shawl of an even lighter blue was over her face and head. I couldn’t make out the writing from my current angle, but if I wasn’t mistaken, it was a wedding veil.