They hadn’t spoken about it, afterwards. But now, watching Mylla through the crack in the hidden closet inside Adela’s room, Tasia’s hand floated to her lips, touching the places where Mylla’s mouth had been two days before. An unfamiliar, but not entirely unpleasant, feeling warmed Tasia’s insides, centered at a spot a few inches down from her belly button.
On the other side of the sliding panel, Mylla stopped, stepped closer to their hiding place. Adela squirmed. Hands reached towards the crack in the wall, and seconds later, the crack widened as Mylla figured out how to open it.
Full of gleeful giggles, Adela erupted from the hidden closet and careened into the handmaid. “You found us, you found us!” she squealed.
Mylla proved herself to be a good playmate, tickling the young princess and chasing her in a circle around the bed.
Tasia stepped out and slid the false panel closed behind her, glancing back at it once to make sure it was invisible once again. “Quite the hide-and-find companion you make, Adela. You do realize the goal is not to be found, don’t you?”
But Adela was too busy laughing and running from Mylla to answer.
Mylla caught Tasia’s gaze. She smiled, and the heat inside Tasia intensified.
Maybe later tonight, Tasia would ask the girl to brush her hair out again. Maybe there could be another kiss, and she would come to understand what this feeling deep inside her gut meant.
~ NOW ~
“Well, you’re up early, aren’t you?” Tasia said.
Evrart sat at one of the tall round tables in Lord M’Tongliss’s open-air kitchen, looking even more dour than usual, if such a thing was possible.
Kitchens and dining halls, she’d learned, were odd things here in Terinto. In the palace — in any stately house in the Capital Lands outside Terinto — the dining hall was at the very heart of the home, usually with the kitchen located a floor beneath it. But Lord M’Tongliss’s kitchen was outside at the back of the home. It had an overhanging roof and two adjacent walls where the kitchen connected to the rest of his mansion, but the other two walls were absent. Where those walls should have been, two huge clay ovens, which to Tasia looked like upside-down funnels, gave off tremendous heat. This was the reason the kitchen wasn’t inside, where the desert sun often made the heat stifling as it was, and it was also the reason why two of the walls were missing. In a land where daytime winter temperatures reached levels that could be considered comfortable, and where daytime summers were downright unbearable, a closed-in kitchen with ovens of that size would be hard to even enter, let alone to work in.
Beyond the kitchen was a partition wall, and beyond that was an open-air dining hall, lined with marble pillars and covered only loosely with flapping lengths of silk draped between the pillars.
Tasia had decided she liked the open-air kitchen and dining hall. The kitchen in particular was a pleasant place to take her meals when she wasn’t being officially entertained by Lord M’Tongliss or one of his two wives, and it was a better place than most within the mansion to disappear for an hour or two when she needed some privacy. Kitchen slaves came and went here, but almost none of them spoke the common tongue, and they had clearly been trained not to approach the free members of the household.
But she could never manage to hide for long. Especially not from Evrart.
“We were supposed to meet this morning,” he said.
“I know. But I wanted to do my training first,” Tasia said, accepting a bowl of freshly cut melon from one of the kitchen slaves with an appreciative smile.
Evrart scratched at the half-formed black beard that was growing in patchily along his cheeks. The hair on his head was also growing back in patches — he’d shorn off his bowl-like cut on the sea voyage to Paratheen, because the Imperial magistrates searching for them would be looking for a Wise Man, not a scruffy Port Lorsiner who’d washed up in Terinto. The ratty beard and shaved head were a good start, as were the tunic, trousers, and tattered brizat he’d exchanged for his Wise Man’s robes, but there was something so inescapably officious and prim about the man that Tasia doubted he would ever truly pass for a common sailor or ex-soldier or laborer.
You can take the robes off a Wise Man, she thought, but you can never take the Wise Man off.
Although… now that she knew Evrart had been in the Brotherhood of Culo all the time, had he ever really been a Wise Man? Or had he been a Brother masquerading as a Wise Man the whole time?
The thought made her shiver. She was less fond of games of deception than she ever had been.
“I would have thought our meeting would take precedent over your training,” said the former Wise Man. “After all, it is only the future of the entire Empire that is at stake.”
Tasia was careful to roll her eyes while her back still faced him. When she turned and approached his table, she extended the small dish of melon chunks towards him with the grace and good manners expected from a royal. “Have some. I don’t know what it is, but it’s just the right amount of sweet.”
He held up a hand and shook his head. She sat down on the stool across from him.
“How is your arm?” she asked, nodding to the arm that had been broken during their escape from the palace three weeks earlier. It wasn’t in a sling any longer, and based on the way he was moving, it appeared to have healed completely.
“I saw the healer again yesterday,” he said. “It is as if the break never occurred.”
Tasia raised her eyebrows. “How exactly does that work again? The healing?”
“It… would take too long to explain,” he said. “But I do want to discuss the Brotherhood and how you keep ignoring them. Along with a number of other important things we need to address.”
“The important things can wait long enough for me to finish my breakfast,” Tasia said, popping another piece of melon into her mouth.
Evrart closed his eyes for a moment as if gathering the strength he needed to be patient. “Empress,” he said, exhaling the word as if it was a sigh.
“‘Empress,’ what?” Tasia snapped. She was growing tired of his daily admonishments, his patronizing, his attempts to push her in the direction he thought would be best. “You use that word so freely, yet you act as if I am the one who should be bowing to you.”
“That is far from the truth.”
“Is it? You are loyal to your precious Brotherhood, first and foremost.”
He opened his mouth to respond, then closed it again.
A Wise Man disloyal to both the House of Dorsa and the House of Wisdom, and who prefers to be called “Brother,” as my senior counselor, Tasia thought to herself, staring down at her dish of melon instead of the severe-looking man across from her. And a Terintan lord who gained his title and lands by betraying all his comrades during the Terintan War for Independence as my generous host and only noble ally. Quite the “Empress” I’m making so far.
“Empress,” Evrart said at last, his tone soothing this time. “I am loyal to the Brotherhood because the Brotherhood is loyal — and has always been loyal — to a single, simple purpose: the preservation of mankind. Before the Empire even existed, the Brotherhood was there, keeping the shadows in the Shadowlands and pushing them back whenever they threatened to spill into our world.” He held up a single finger. “One injury. One injury from a shadow-infected will spread the infection further. We’ve stopped the spread of the shadows before, winning battles over the centuries without ordinary people even knowing there was a battle to be fought. But this time, the threat is so great that we need the might of the Empire behind us. As long as you understand that and agree, then you have my loyalty. And the loyalty of the entire Brotherhood.”