Not for the first time in the last few hours, Rhian considered just making a run for it. He still had a few coins jingling in his pouch left over after buying the pill, a borrowed horse, and, most importantly, there was not a knight in sight to stop him.

Except it wouldn’t work.

Rhian had sworn an oath to the Pantheon and the Divine Syngian to obey Lady Daphne’s every word. Though he might be a thief by trade, he lived by a code like any other man, and the first rule any sane man followed was not to spite the Great Gods if you could help it. More importantly, he likely wouldn’t get far even if he did try it. Even a strawborn peasant like himself knew of the Greenglade’s signature spell, and he’d bet silvers to straw that the brand they’d burned into his cheek was laced with the magic.

If they knew where he was, they could catch up to him within a day from their pegasi even if he rode throughout the night.

Rhian sighed, as he squeezed his knees and urged the horse through the iron wrought gates of Greenglade Castle. This was his life now, playing errand boy to the mad whims of a rich woman.

It’s not all bad, Rhian thought. His duty was to Lady Daphne and not, say, the mines, where a quick and painful death was surer than the swing of a sword. Not that death would stop them from making use of his body. It was said that in some regions of the Empire, the dead were raised by necromancers to work the deepest shafts of a mine.

As a penal laborer, at least that fate would never befall him. Neither could he be sold in service to another, or be killed without cause, which was all that marked him above the slaves outside the Empire.

He was allowed into the castle without fuss. Dawn was just about beginning to break, but he found the young misstocrat already dressed and at the stables, running her hand against a pegasus.

Daphne turned to the stableboy. “I know just what to call her—Jade.”

“Jade?” Rhian repeated. “Horse ain’t green.”

Daphne didn’t even look his way. “Welcome back, Broken Nose.”

“I ‘ave a name you know,” Rhian grumbled.

“You aren’t important enough to remember,” Daphne said. “Just as my maid is maid, and my knight is knight, you are Broken Nose.”

He glanced at her maid, who didn’t seem the least bit insulted. “My nose isn’t even broken anymore.”

“We could fix that,” Daphne offered.

His legs shuffled back of their own will. “No need for that,” he said hastily. “Your horse gets a name, but the rest of us don’t?”

“Of course,” Daphne said. “The horse is beautiful. What man would not want to mount it with wild abandon to reach the heavens?”

Rhian’s brows furrowed. What was with the stoneborn and all their fancy words? Couldn’t she have just said it flew instead of saying all that?

“But once a hero finds a new one,” Daphne continued, “she’ll be discarded without a second thought. Such is life for a jade beauty.”

“Sounds awfully sad,” Rhian said.

“It is what it is,” Daphne said, turning to him at last after she dismissed the stableboy. “Do you have it?”

Rhian bobbed his head, and pulled out the sandy pill in question. “Guy I got it from swears its from the Dunelands, which means it came from anywhere but the Dunelands,” he said. “Still, he’s never sold me a bad pill before.”

“Well done,” Daphne said, taking the pill in hand.

Rhian nodded. “Now, you’ll want to—don’t!” It was too late. Daphne had swallowed the pill whole in an instant, and gone completely silent. He gave Daphne’s maid—who still refused to tell him her name—a look. “We, uh, might have some problems.”

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“Was that not silphion?” she asked.

“Did it look like silphion?” he asked with a sarcastic lilt to his tone. “Why would she ask the likes of me to get something a hystor would happily provide her for free.”

“Because the hystor would tell her parents,” the maid said.

“It wasn’t silphion,” Rhian said. “Do you know where we could get some rope?”

She glared at him. “What wicked thoughts are you thinking? I will not help you tie up my mistress!” After a pause, she added, “It would leave ugly red marks on her skin, and she’d whip the both of us for that.”

That Rhian could believe. “Then help me get her into the carriage,” he said. “Taking a dose that large … we have a minute at best before it starts hitting hard.”

“What does that look like?” the maid asked.

Daphne’s eyes were wide and wild, taking long stretches to stare at the simplest things around her. It was as if she’d been reduced to a newborn babe. “If we’re lucky, like that, but she starts rambling ‘bout nonsense,” said Rhian.

“And if we’re not lucky?”

“She could see us all as bugs with insect faces,” Rhian said. Happened to a friend of his once, and why he’d never taken the pill himself. “She’ll be screaming and struggling a lot in that case.”

“What exactly did you give her?” she asked as they managed to seat Daphne in her carriage without anyone being the wiser.

“Exactly what she asked me to get! Refined cactus juice,” Rhian said. “Do you think you could convince the knights to leave early? I’d rather not be here while this is happening to her.”

The maid glared at him. “You want to travel while she’s in this state?”

“She’ll be fine after a few hours,” Rhian said. “Just make sure she doesn’t jump out of the carriage.”

She paused. “Does that happen often?”

“Often enough that I wanted to use rope,” Rhian said.

“This seems like all the more reason not to leave. She should be resting in bed,” the maid said.

“Wu … wu … wu,” Daphne murmured. “So itchy, so hot …“

“If Lady Greenglade finds out, I’m a dead man and you’ll be expelled,” Rhian said.

The maid raised a brow at him. “How would any of this be my fault?”

“You were there when the young miss asked me to acquire the pill for her, but you said nothing to Lady Greenglade,” Rhian said. “Lady Daphne might not even be allowed to return to the academy, and then she’ll be mad at you too. Call my crazy, but I don’t like your odds of staying around if both your mistress and her mother are mad at you.”

“Simple!” Daphne exclaimed, staring now at her fingers as if they held the secrets to the universe. “Yet, profound!”

“Can she even hear us?” the maid asked.

Rhian shrugged. “I think so, but I don’t think she finds the like of us all that interesting to begin with.”

“Because of the drug?”

Because that’s how she is, Rhian thought. “Are we leaving or not? The choice is in your hands. There’s nothing more I can do here.”

She looked at him with some suspicion. “You incapacitate Lady Daphne and then insist we leave … the whole thing seems suspicious. How do I know your friends have not prepared some ambush while we’re travelling?”

Rhian blinked. “Are you seriously asking? We’d be insane to try something now.”

“Why is that?”

He sighed with great longsuffering. “We’re thieves. The whole point is to take what others ‘ave without getting killed. There must be a dozen knights, squires, and mages-at-arms escorting this carriage, and it’d take a small army of us strawborn to subdue them all.”

“The wise are not learned,” Daphne said. “The learned are not wise!”

It was becoming harder and harder to tell if this was just the young misstocrat’s usual talk, or if the pill was just bringing out more of it.

“When people see some things as beautiful, other things become ugly. When people see some things as good, other things become bad,” Daphne mumbled. “Being and non-being create each other. Difficult and easy support each other. Long and short define each other. High and low depend on each other. Before and after follow each other…”

“Fine!” the maid said at last. “But only because Lady Daphne would be incensed if she were unable to attend the academy this season.”

He breathed a little easier at that.

“You stay right there,” she said. “I’m not dealing with this by myself for the entire journey.”

Rhian tensed right back up as she left.

“Have you ever lusted for food?” Daphne asked. “Like a toad lusting after swan’s meat, only literally?”

He frowned. “You mean being hungry?”

“Hungry,” Daphne said with an agreeable nod, still with that faraway look in her eyes. “Simple, yet profound.”

Rhian ought to have known better, but he asked anyway. “What’s so profound about being hungry? It’s the simplest thing there is.”

Daphne sighed. “It is too sophisticated for you to understand right now, for you have eyes but cannot see Mount Tai. How best to put it for you?” She fell silent for a moment, eyes moving wildly. “We join spokes together in a wheel, but it is the center hole that makes the wagon move. We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want. We hammer wood for a house, but it is the inner space that makes it livable. We work with being, but non-being is what we use.”

“What is this? Poetry?” Rhian asked. Was this what spoiled aristocrats learned all day at the schools?

She went back to ignoring him. That he was used to.

At long last, the maid returned, and began going about making the young misstocrat comfortable.

The carriage shuddered forward. It was going to be a long trip.