“Huh.”

“You never talked about it? My first day in his house, I was served a cold beer.”

Havec shifted uncomfortably. “He had a few… things that did… stuff, but he never understood how they worked either. It’s not like they tell you, right? He told me he walked into a shop in Saintianos, told them he preferred his beer cold, and they handed him a rock.”

She grunted.

“So could you make us a fire right now?”

“Sure. Do you want me to?”

“Not really.”

She shrugged and went back to eating.

When he was done, his head had become a wild thatch that suited him better than the pretty curls. He reached into his pack and came out with a tiny mirror and slender black pencil. She watched him with her brows climbing as he reapplied his eyeliner, putting it on twice as thick. She had thought he meant to cast off all his vain trappings, but apparently he was just changing his look. When he noticed her watching, he held out the stick as if she might wish to partake.

“Thanks, but I’ll stick with being smart.”

He snorted, but this time she was sure of it: his lips twitched, edging toward a smile. “Probably wise, beauty is dangerous.”

“By which you not-very-subtly call me ugly.”

“I never have. Xar, now…”

“What, seriously?”

“‘Scrawny’ and ‘ferret-faced’ were his words.”

A high-pitched noise slipped between her lips, and she realized she was leaning back from him.

“Hey. Girl.” When their eyes met, he said, “You did not want that man to desire you, trust me. And I don’t think you look like a ferret. Scrawny, though, I have to give him. Women are supposed to be…” He made the shape of an hourglass with his hands.

“You know the first thing about how women are supposed to look?”

He made a face, conceding the point.

Planting a hand in the dirt to brace herself, she sat up on her knees and leaned forward, stabbing her forefinger into the earth between them. “I told you I can’t ‘hex’ people, but you ought to know: one very popular use of sorcery is to keep pests out of homes. If I can make insects go away…”

He stared at her from behind the mask of makeup, eyes wide. Satisfied, Qanath sat back and finishing her crackers in silence, letting him think about all the unpleasant things she might do. Prickly she would put up with – it didn’t seem like she had much choice – but there were limits to how much aggressive rudeness she would tolerate. Havec had been walking a line with her since they met. Time to put her foot down before he got the impression he could ride roughshod over her dignity whenever he felt like it.

It surprised her that he didn’t reopen the fight. After a minute, he shook his head and began stuffing his things in his pack. He vanished into the undergrowth for a few minutes, and when he came back, he picked it up and slung it onto his back. “Ready?”

Qanath had finished her breakfast by then. She donned her own bag while Havec waited with surprising patience. He had definitely changed his mind overnight about attempting to chase her away. His entire demeanor was different, and it was less the hostility that was noteworthy for its absence than the superiority. Like he thought he was twenty years older than her and had the right to tell her what to do.

“So,” she began as they set foot back on the road, “this revenge of yours.”

“You mean the revenge I mean to pursue in another country for personal reasons, none of which has anything whatsoever to do with you?”

“That revenge, yes.”

It might have been a trick of the dappled light flickering beneath a ceiling of tattered, patchy clouds, but she thought his lips twitched again. He was silent for a long time, though, eyes on the horizon. She had decided he wouldn’t answer by the time he did.

Then he drew a deep breath and said almost briskly, “My father had just died. We got home from the funeral, changed out of our things, climbed into the carriages. Mother wanted to retreat to the country for a while, find a bit of peace, but something came up, I never knew what. The grace of the gods, evidently.”

Qanath frowned.

He glanced at her. “Since she stayed behind, it was just me and a bunch of servants. There in the lake house when the bandits struck.”

She gasped, putting a hand over her mouth.

Havec shrugged off her horror. “They killed everyone else, but me, they took. Made a beeline for the border, where they handed me over to Talak, who conveniently happened to be waiting.” Another sidelong look, and he added, “The bonding-broker. I thought it was all a dreadful, incomprehensible nightmare for about a day before I realized it was set up in advance. As soon as Talak had me, he got the hell away from Moritia and anyone who might know I had gone missing or recognize my face. I wasn’t kept in the loop, but I guess he sent out feelers for all the richest perverts he knew. Even in a place like this, it can’t be every day you see a foreign prince on the auction block.”

Qanath stopped in her tracks. When he turned around to give her a questioning look, she said, “Prince?”

“You didn’t see that coming? Do you not have fairy tales?”

“Huh?”

“Fairy tales? You know, stories for little people?”

She rolled her eyes as she went to join him. “If we didn’t have fairy tales, there wouldn’t be a word for it in our language, which we’re speaking.”

He grunted. “I suppose. I’d just never heard anything like in the years I was here. But Xar never did like to be reminded I was a kid back when I was a kid, so I guess that tells me nothing.”

“What does that have to do with anything?” she demanded, adding eagerly, “A kidnapped prince.”

“Oh, I’ve thought more than a few times how it all sounds like a story. The just king dies too young and his wicked brother sees his chance to take the throne.”

“You have an evil uncle?”

“With a son my age, you should note. We were always the best of friends, me and Hemell, he must have been broken up when I disappeared.”

“Really?”

He shot her a startled look, and she braced for his derision; nothing provoked sarcastic people like failing to pick up on their jokes, it was the conversational equivalent of dripping blood in shark-infested waters. It surprised her when, after a moment of complicated silence, he said simply, “No.”

“Does that mean you’re the rightful king?”

He scratched at his butchered hair, lips drawing back uneasily to reveal his teeth. “One thing at a time, okay? The first order of business is to find out if my mother survived. Then I’ll finally gut my uncle and,” he shrugged broadly, “we’ll see where it goes from there.”

***

They made their way that day through terrain that was staggering in its tameness, lacking in any real hills, enlivened only by myriad birds and the occasional herd of antelope. They never encountered a copse of trees that could be described even generously as woodland. The scattered weathered monuments and perfectly-engineered bridges carrying their empty highway across the smallest of streams contributed to the foreignness of the environment. Havec found it fascinating.

His homeland was mountainous and heavily forested, and if he couldn’t always recall what it had felt like, he had a great trove of images he carried in his mind. This was his first real chance to see the Empire and contrast it to what he knew; he made the journey south mostly locked in a trunk, and when they did let him out to eat and crap, he was too busy shouting at his captors and trying to bite them to take in the scenery.

He was astonished by just how empty it was. The impression was helped along by the flatness of the terrain and the lack of trees, giving every panorama a sense of breathtaking expansiveness. It wasn’t just the land, though: it was the lack of people. He had understood that Tabbaqera was massive, not only in geographic scope, but in population. There were supposed to be millions of people in this country, in cities so vast they stretched as far as the eye could see.