The river fog swirled thick and pale. Mila paused at the apex of the stone bridge she was crossing and looked down into the dark, fast water. She felt a flash of homesickness and sighed. This dark inland realm was so different than the bright, blue-green water of her home harbor, with its black sand, salt breezes, seabird calls and sweet-tolling bells.

Mila missed Opali, missed her friends, missed the streets full of dancing, singing parades and theater, missed the tiny shrines and spirit-niches, missed the dozens of cats that everyone in the neighborhood fed and petted and dotted over, missed her neighborhood common spaces—kitchens, baths, plazas, parks, missed her room and the shared porch with the colorful hammock.

Traveling across the sea, into the Imperial Democracy, to study at Harmine University was already so hard, and she had years still to go. The Yavanese people were chilly and distant, their language felt guttural and unpleasant in her mouth, the sky was often cloudy and wet and cold, and—her eyes narrowed as she spotted yet another allegiance insignia scrawled on the stonework of the bridge—the political climate was rapidly descending into fascist populism. Just over the last few months, Mila had seen more and more students sporting allegiance regalia, making loyalty salutes to each other, gathering in little knots to shout slogans.

She shivered, and pulled her coat tighter. As a foreigner from one of the Common Cities, she was already inherently a target. She got jostled in doorways, had boys mutter racialized slurs at her under their breath as she passed, worked twice as hard in classes for half the respect from teachers.

Of course, none of that was new to her. She’d been dealing with it her entire life and she’d learned to shrug it off and pretend it didn’t hurt. Opali didn’t use insults like ‘half-breed’ the way Yavanese did, didn’t consider race or breeding something that could be used to insult, and yet that hadn’t stopped the stares and whispers that greeted Mila at the well when she went to draw water or the children who mocked her when she tried to play with them at the market.

“Our mothers told us what you are!”

“You are rassa!”

“Get away from us! Go!”

“Rassa child! Rassa child!”

Her mother, Pazo Finnochio, was Opali to the bone and to the heart, a tall woman with lovely, shining skin and coiled hair, a fine weaver and skilled haggler, famed up and down Seaward Street and in the harbor market for her razor wit. Before Mila was born, her mother was a sailor on a ‘trading ship’ that would often switch flags and turn pirate when it suited them, as most Opali ships did. Her mother told her many wondrous stories of the sea, of the stars, told her exciting stories of taking prizes and even some fighting, sang her many, many songs. But Pazo wouldn’t tell Mila about the voyage on which she was conceived.

All Mila knew was what one of her sympathetic neighborhood aunties told her: that Pazo’s ship, the Starborn, had been chased and boarded by a Yavanese navy frigate, and all her crew inquisitioned and all her cargo ‘repossessed’. The marines hung the Opali captain for piracy, claimed the ship, and dropped the crew off on a nearby inhabited island. By the time Pazo and the rest of the crew worked their roundabout way back to Opali, she was visibly pregnant.

The sympathetic auntie hesitated, her mouth twisting uncomfortably. She hadn’t said the word rassa anywhere in the story, but Mila could feel it in the space between them. Mila got up, thanked the woman politely, and left.

She went to her mother, and asked whether it was true, as some other children had told her, that rassa children were full of the hate and anger that made them. Was she hateful and angry? Pazo put down her weaving and pulled Mila onto her lap.

“You, child, are full of my love, and the love of allllll my fore-mothers. And anger is no bad thing to feel, though to be full of it all the time would be hard.”

Little Mila thought about this. But, she asked, what about my father? And my fore-fathers? Do they fill me up with anything?

Pazo did not frown, exactly, but her eyes glinted with something fierce and unyielding. “No, child, they have no claim on you, none, beyond a word. They cannot miss you, cannot cry out for you, cannot love you or laugh with you. I do all those things. I am not just a word. Many people of this city—your aunties and uncles and crib-lings and siblings—do all those things. They are not just a word. You do all those things back to me, and back to all of them. You are not just a word. Listen. Words only have the power you let them have. Now tell me what you heard.”

Mila repeated this back to her mother, and her mother was pleased that she had listened. The whispers and jibes and looks continued and Mila took her mother’s advice and her skin grew thick and she learned not to let the name-callers see her flinch or react in any way. But Mila always carried a seed of doubt with her—was her father really of no consequence? Did he indeed exert no influence at all on her? She felt guilty for doubting her mother. Perhaps her doubt itself was part of his inheritance, his contempt for all things Opali.

Now the daily ritual of murmuring words of welcome for the dawn sea and sun, with their invocation of Opali ancestors and spirits, felt double-edged to her. As she lit incense in the wall-alcove, or touched the Fountain stone on the way to the harbor market, or made any of the hundred small genuflections and gestures that traditionally knit Opali people to their spirit world, which had always before been a source of wonder and belonging, she shivered with this new fear.

When Mila was ten, she was ritually asked what gender she was, as is the Opali way, and she felt that she must be a girl. She began chewing licorice root and drinking the special tea blend that was used to switch puberties, to develop skinny hips into round ones, and lean chests into full breasts. Because girls like Mila were drinking this tea almost constantly, they called themselves and each other ‘tea girls’.

The tea, however, could only do so much, and Mila listened as some of the older tea girls talked about the last visit, some years ago, to Opali of a sorcerer-chirurgeon, one of the rare medical enchanters who alter bodies as a tailor alters cloth. They speculated, with a kind of callused, sardonic optimism that Mila instinctively identified with, on where such-and-such sorcerer, who was recently rumored to be in the city of Kari, might travel next, and how close to Opali his journey might bring him.

Sorcery wasn’t the only topic of discussion. In the more distant past, there had been the Jyllish alchemy ships, roving from port to port, supplying elixirs and tonics that were now legendary among the tea girls. Such visits were a thing of the past now, ever since the Yavanese Imperial navy had begun patrolling the Whistling Sea and claiming jurisdiction over all commerce crossing its waters. The last visit, some ten years ago, had been of the clipper Damselfly, and shortly thereafter there had been rumors of that ship’s fate at the hands of Imperial marines.

Opali people take many lovers and raise their offspring in sprawling networks of kin-folk and neighbors. Heredity and blood relations do not necessarily count as strongly as these bonds of interdependence. Her mother decided to bear more children, and they were all raised by Pazo and her lovers and Mila and a dozen aunties and uncles and half the neighborhood, it seemed. As the saying goes, ‘more hands and more tits lightens the work,’ and Mila still had plenty of time to go to astronomy class in the Belltower of Gulls and to visit Hila the herbalist-chemist and help her grind the recent harvest of dried yuma root into powder in exchange for another lesson, all the while ignoring the whispers of her apprentices.

Mila watched her younger siblings and cousins toddle, then scamper. She cleaned scrapes and wiped away tears and even helped Hila set two broken bones. She saw how no one whispered at these children or looked at them dirty or mocked them in the alley as they played. She hated her own resentment, and thought again, is this my father’s poison inside me?

When she asked the old watchkeep at the Belltower of Ire what sails were those on the horizon, and learned that this ship was known to be a grain merchant and that ship often carried wool, and then played this forewarning to her advantage haggling that day at the market stalls for lower prices, she felt a surge of alarm. Even as she chopped the fish for stew or gave the bolt of cloth to her auntie to make some new smocks, she wondered, was this the same coldness that had created her? Was this a sign of her Yavanese father’s predatory taint? Or was she just being a clever, dutiful kin-daughter?

Mila dove into her studies of herb craft ravenously. In particular, she hunted for any and all information and lore pertaining to the tea blends that shaped the endocrine and hormone glands of the body. She gathered her friends on her hammock-strewn porch to smoke hookah and discuss the different popular blends of tea they drank, to compare effects using their own bodies as data, to scrutinize each others’ adjustments of certain ingredients and compounding ratios.

These afternoons would always simmer into long, fragrant evenings, full of languid cuddling and flirting under a purple sky. And Mila, coming back from putting away her notes, would sip her wine at the balcony for a long moment, her head full of the afternoon’s questions, and wonder whether they were all missing something.

Mila had great respect for plants as the original chemists, ceaselessly synthesizing and compounding molecules into long, complex chains that were far more nuanced than any human could create in even the best laboratory. But they were also so slow. Humans did respond to plant molecules—the tea worked; she had tits, after all—but the phyto-compounds were so diffuse, and it took so much plant matter to effect any small change or healing. What if—and Mila winced as the secret fear arose, the horror at her own manipulative instinct, baked into her so deep it would never come out—what if there was some way to use the complex biochemical schematics that assembled plant molecules to instead direct the brute-force, slap-dash chemistry of human alchemists? Could an ultra-concentrated, and yet ever-more elegantly directed medicine be had?

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

And then the girls on the balcony called to her—

“Mila? Where’s Mila?”

“Mila where are you? Get your tight little ass over here, I’ve got plans for it.”

“And bring more wine!”

And Mila went, shrugging and grinning, her thoughts left behind.

Hila had four older, more seasoned apprentices already, but Mila had already surpassed most of them. As she saw Mila sponge up certain pharmacological lore in a week that had taken other students a month, and demonstrate it handily, she frowned thoughtfully and went to some of the other witches, midwives, healers and pharmacists of Seaward Street.

In the Belltower of Terns, on the northern bluffs of the city, there was a reclusive alchemist, an exile from across the sea, trained at a distant school. They had never met, but in Hila’s estimation, his anesthetics were superior to everything else she had ever been able to procure for her patients. Had any of her peers ever tried to send him a student? A few had tried, but they always came back after a week or two, complaining of the language barrier, of his monstrosity, of their contempt. Perhaps the girl’s rassa taint would help her deal with these better than a normal Opali. She certainly didn’t get on well with Hila’s other apprentices.

Mila jumped at the chance immediately. She listened to Hila’s warning about the would-be students who had tried and given up, but the gleam in her eyes was undeterred. This could be what was missing, not only for her, but for every other tea girl in Opali. She had to find a way to learn from this exiled alchemist.

She came to the Belltower of Terns on a windy, bright day. The small door at the base of the tower was thrown open. At her call, a towering red beard stumped out of the gloom, flanked by shelf-like shoulders. As the man stopped before her, one hand resting protectively on the door-frame, she craned her neck to peer out his face. The bright sun reached his bearded mouth; above that there was shadow.

“Good morning,” he said. “And you are…?”

Trying to hide her nervousness, Mila introduced herself and explained her presence.

He frowned and crossed brawny arms. “Others have come, and said the same, and then left as abruptly as they announced themselves. They have all come seeking someone they made up themselves, a figment of their own expectations, and could not stand the difference between what they sought and what they found. Why should you be any different?”

Mila thought he was Opali, which meant he was the towerkeeper, not the alchemist she sought. She thought she detected a note of defensiveness in his voice. And something else…Was the alchemist something else, beyond merely arrogant and difficult and foreign?

Mila responded quickly, listing her qualifications, her relations to her extended kin-network, all the ways she was woven into interdependence with other Opali. She watched his en-shadowed face, looking for a flicker of interest, for anything.

There was nothing. Finally, she ran out of things to say. She swallowed, throat dry. His mouth made a thin line, and she knew what he would say next.

“Wait,” she blurted, thinking desperately. She had responded in an typical Opali fashion, as one apparent stranger would if one were trying to build trust with another apparent stranger—highlighting the connections between oneself and one’s kin, the bondedness, trying to find the common threads that might cross between them, the mutual relationship that could serve as a vouchsafe. The prospective students that came before her had surely done the same, and they had all failed to include this exile, failed to weave him into the web of their relations, given up on him. Perhaps in the same way that those jeering children, whispering apprentices, and gossiping neighbors had resisted including her. Maybe this was the time to respond not as an Opali person who belonged unquestioningly to all Opali, but as a rassa girl who knew what it meant to be different, and apart.

“I—my father was Yavanese.”

Finally! A frown of interest. She continued:

“I never knew him. He shamed himself in the act of conceiving me, in the eyes of all Opali and because of that I am...not well thought of by many.” She did not try to hide her bitterness. “I know a little of what it means to be an exile here.”

He shifted, a tiny movement of huge bulk, and uncrossed his arms. After a pause he said, gently, “My name is Lindsey. The one you seek is named Sada. He lives with me here now, but once he lived among the Yavanese and did their bidding. He fled their power but...at a high cost.”

Lindsey went silent and studied her for a long moment. “Do you play chess?”

Mila did. And that, it turned out, was enough to get her in the door.

~ ~ ~

Mila had walked the length of the bridge. Where the tight-fitted flagstones of the bridge met the rougher cobblestones of the road, she stepped off both and cut back towards the riverbank, walking through wet, sprawling road weeds. That’s when she spotted a new scrawl of graffiti.

Cleanse The Degenerate Filth

Fucking fascists. She knew that, by default, she was probably included in that category already, but if anyone found out how much more aptly she fit into the Yavanese imaginary of degenerate filth, her life would be radically more forfeit. Mila knew she was walking the edge of a razor just by attending their University.

And yet, Harmine-trained sorcerers, alchemists and enchanters were the best in the known world. Nowhere else was there anything remotely like the University library, or the alchemical research labs or the Medicava infirmary. Mila set her jaw. She needed to learn things she could only learn here. Things that were desperately needed in Opali and the other Common Cities.

Mila walked the length of the bridge, then stepped off the edge of the cobbles onto a path that followed the riverbank, springy with fallen leaves. She walked under alders and maples and willows, the river burbling at her side. The pre-dawn gloom lightened gradually. The river fog grew paler and paler and then golden light poured through it like a trumpet blast as the sun rose. Mila stopped under a great maple with leaves the color of bright, brassy honey and watched. She breathed in deep through her nose, savoring the autumn river smell of the world awakening.

The mixing of water and sun at daybreak. She breathed it in. Here at least, in the depths of the Yavanese Imperiat, she felt her most Opali. The ritual words and gestures of prayer were buoys for her, bolsters and battlements that held her up and defended her from despair. Why it should be so here, of all places, and yet not back in Opali? Mila didn’t know, but she was grateful nonetheless.

This was why she walked every morning to the edge of the cobble and brick sprawl that was the University, to the forest and fields. It wasn’t Opali harbor, but it was something close enough. She bowed to the East Breath and murmured the ritual prayer of welcome for the new day. The ancient shapes of the words as her tongue formed and released them to the morning air eased the constriction around her heart and brought a sense of buoyancy to her bones. She felt familiar energetic echoes as spirit allies and ancestors roused and swirled to her side. The feel of her own language on her lips banished the ache of the awkward Yavenese that she contorted her world into every day. She felt a smile—a real one, a good one—rise to her face. She savored it for an endless flow of moments.

~ ~ ~

Eventually she had to turn away and re-enter the world of Harmine. Walking back to her dorm, Mila considered the conundrum of her new roommate this term. Roxa Monir, also a foreign student, from the Duchy of Waterfalls. Daughter of a countess and a diplomat. Mila had resigned herself to sharing a sleeping space with a prissy, stuck-up brat at best, and a false-face bully at worst. Roxa, however—well, Roxa had defied her expectations.

In retrospect, Mila had to admit she was as susceptible to the prejudices of her people as anyone. The Opali people had no noble caste and reserved a certain level of popular contempt for the villainous and foppish stereotypes of aristocrats that were commonly portrayed by their street theater performers.

Mila had to admit she had lucked out with Roxa. Her tall, freckle-dusted roommate had been well-trained in courtly graces and from their very first meeting seemed determined to use them to win Mila as a friend. She noticed Mila’s preferences for clean floors and uncluttered surfaces and diligently matched her tidying efforts with broom and cloth. She always offered to take Mila’s laundry to the wash-shop along with hers, and was careful to never lose a single sock. Mila could tell she was being deliberately charmed.

And Roxa was very...charming. Her pointed chin and high, angular cheekbones gave her face a fox-like cast. Her smile was infectious, her laughter generous. Some nights, when they played cards—Roxa loved games—the long, lingering, sidelong glances she gave Mila over the rim of her clay mug of wine made Mila struggle not to blush. Such glances in Opali could not be mistaken, but who knew what constituted flirting in the Duchy of Waterfalls? Certainly not Mila.

And Mila was sharply aware of the way people on this side of the Whistling Sea saw her own people. Here in the Imperial Democracy, the Common Cities were widely held to be populated by thieves, heretics, pirates, and whores. The classic stereotype of the Opali in particular was a dishonestly sly yet blissfully ignorant bumpkin who would spread her legs for anyone.

But while Roxa easily broke propriety to grin mischievously or laugh until cocoa sprayed out of her nose, she never made advances on Mila. And Mila was too spooked by all the allegiance salutes she saw every day and the precarity of her position here to risk moving a muscle in anything resembling a gesture or a cue that might be construed as flirting back. Sometimes, here at Harmine, she felt like a rabbit frozen in the heather as hawks circled overhead.

And thus the conundrum—how much could she really trust Roxa? There were hawks above her—of this she was certain—but was Roxa one of them?

Her worst fear boiled up to whisper that any dalliance between them would be powerful leverage indeed. A sworn statement by the daughter of a countess-diplomat to the effect that one Mila Finnocia had committed acts of tribadism, before an Imperial Arbiter, could see her brought up on charges of unhygienic social behavior.

But Arbiters were few and far between, and their courts were slow, elaborate and unwieldy. Far closer at hand, Mila thought grimly, was the threat of leaking a few choice words to the school rumor-mill, the threat of vigilante punishments carried out in stairwells and alleys. That threat would be a tempting power to hold over the head of a young, foreign girl. Mila couldn’t afford to pretend otherwise. Blackmail was as Yavanese as chemical rocket arrows. Being naive about the way things worked here could put everything she’d worked for in jeopardy.

Mila bit her lip. But would Roxa do that to her? Her instincts said no, though her fear argued with a louder voice. Even if Roxa went no further than a bit of light flirting, all it would take to expose Mila—and expose her for far worse than a ‘tribadist’—would be one slip up in the intricate and careful system she had developed for dressing, undressing, shaving and washing. Just one glimpse.

Mila was no fool. She knew she was only one mistake away from being compromised. And so she had been turning this over in her head every morning for over a month, trying to think of a way to avoid doing what she knew would be smart to do in this situation, even wise to do.

She knew that to protect herself, she should discover a secret about Roxa (or lure her into a situation) compromising enough to protect Mila’s own secret from being exploited, if uncovered. She needed a deterrent to blackmail, which could only be…preemptive blackmail.

It twisted her heart to consider betraying her roommate’s apparent trust like that. The old fear hammered at her—was this her Yavanese inheritance of treachery, her father’s betrayal of human decency and respect, acting through her as a disease acts through its vector?

And yet...she was here, in the heart of this land of treachery. One did not show vulnerability to a shark. To act in good faith, as if she were still in Opali, would invite her own destruction. Every cell of her body told her this, in no uncertain terms.

Mila groaned and rubbed her temples. Another morning walk, and no decision again. Uncertainty was such a hateful thing.