The old woman reappeared, setting three small red-glazed cups on the floor by their knees. She had yet to speak. When she left, Qanath and her father both took sips of their drinks to settle their nerves. It was beer and cold, and Qanath set the cup back on the floor shaking her head. No, Xaritu anKebbal wasn’t in financial difficulty. Not if he could afford to waste sorcery chilling his beer.

They could feel the master of the house coming before he entered the room. The floorboards creaked in protest, and in spite of all the wide-open windows, the air grew still. Heavy, as if a storm approached. Qanath glanced at her father and saw him swallow: she wasn’t the only one who felt the man’s menace weighing on the air.

He didn’t pause in the doorway to assess them but came straight to the pillow across from theirs and sat. He was half a head taller than the men she had previously thought of as big, his shoulders wide and roped with muscle, his hands as broad as spades. He had no shirt on, which seemed fitting, and his hair coiled on the floor in a complicated braid. He had a long, scholarly visage, and his eyes were quiet with thought.

After he had taken a moment to study them, he said, “Greetings.” His voice was as deep as the rumblings of the angry earth.

Qanath tipped her head, leaving her father to respond. They had agreed he was the one to do the talking. They wanted to give the impression that Qanath was respectful and obedient, even if it wasn’t entirely true. “Greetings, Avat Xaritu.”

He flicked the title away. “Call me Xar, everyone does.”

Her father bowed his head but chose not to use the nickname. Qanath wouldn’t have wanted to either. “We are aware that you have taken in no pupils for a span of years, Avat, but we wondered if you would be willing to hear our story and reconsider.”

“I’m certainly willing to hear you out after you came all this way,” the man replied, and his eyes had shifted onto her now, openly curious.

“My daughter,” a gesture in her direction, in case Xar anKebbal might have thought he spoke of a different girl who wasn’t present, “has much to recommend her. I know she’s older than the usual student, but if her body is less malleable, her mind is more mature. She would have no qualms about working in your household to pay her way.” His voice faltered, and Qanath knew he entertained the same doubts she had. “She has completed the Novitiate at the Collure.”

Xar anKebbal had watched her father politely while he spoke, but that got his eyes back on her. “Have you really?”

In answer, she pulled the satchel she wore ‘round her shoulders onto her lap and flipped the flap open. Withdrawing the tube of scarlet lacquered wood, she pried the top off and turned it upside down. She passed over the scroll of vellum that fell into her hand.

She felt a stir of anxiety handing something so precious to a stranger, but he took it in a gentle grasp. It looked fragile in his massive hands, but the vellum barely crinkled as he unrolled it cautiously. He held it only briefly, eyes searching for and finding amidst the florid calligraphy the crucial details. As he passed it back, he said, “You graduated. This seems like an odd place for you to come next.”

“We would never presume to propose my daughter for your Legacy, but it was our understanding that one need not serve the, the, the—”

“Ethos,” Xar anKebbal suggested.

“Thank you, yes, the ethos of the school to learn its arts.” He added nervously, “Forgive us if we were wrong.”

“The ethos of any school is so complex and varied it makes no matter. Just so, vengeance may be immediate or biding, indiscriminate or precise.”

“Ah,” her father said uncertainly. This intricate mysticism was a mainstay of the Empire’s culture, and ordinary people like them respected that. But it wasn’t every day you sat down face-to-face with it and had a chat.

“This is still a strange place for you to be,” the Avatethura Master continued. “Your daughter already has a career laid out ahead of her, and if she had a genuine interest in athletic pursuits, you would have done this the other way around.”

Her father’s hand trembled as he took up his beer, taking several sips to calm his nerves and bolster his resolve. When he spoke, he did so bluntly. “Her mother won’t acknowledge her.”

There was a pause buzzing with strangeness, then Xar anKebbal said carefully, “That is not a situation one encounters often.”

“Her mother is Sinesplas.”

“Ah,” the fighting-master said, drawing out the word. “When you say she won’t acknowledge her child, you mean she won’t name the girl her equal and elevate her social status above yours. And you are…?”

“Pemets, all our children are.”

Someone entered the room. Qanath looked up and felt her mouth open. The man who had strolled through the open doorway was only maybe a few years her senior, barefoot, wearing nothing but a loose, diaphanous shirt and a pair of undershorts so small they left his hipbones exposed. This would have been worth staring at anyway, but the man was a barbarian, almost the first that she had seen. His skin was pale in comparison, and his hair was astonishing; not dark red or dark brown like she was used to hair being, but white.

He watched them sidelong as he crossed the room, and his gaze was assessing. She didn’t think she was imagining the unfriendliness. When he came to a patch of wall that suited him, he crossed his arms and leaned back until his shoulders met the plaster with a thump. He fixed his stare insolently on her, one pale brow cocked skeptically. He was hot as the Rock of Ceda at noontime in the summer season, but she didn’t think she had ever encountered anyone for whom she felt a more perfect or immediate dislike.

“And you?”

Her father elbowed her surreptitiously. She started, eyes swinging back to the massive man at the center of the room who held her family’s future in his hands. “I’m sorry?”

“What is your opinion? Of this dispute between your parents? Your father believes you belong alongside your mother, ordering the world, but your mother seems to feel the life you already have is suitable. Who do you think is right?”

Qanath stared at him for what felt like an eternity and had to have been at least a minute in real time before the question finally reordered itself in her mind in such a way that she was able to understand it. She had expected to be grilled on her qualifications, her dedication. She had rehearsed her answers all the way here, lying awake nights while her father rested. It figured he would want to know about something else.

“I have two younger brothers.”

He grunted. “You would say you have no choice? They must make their own way in this world, as all people do.”

She lifted her chin and looked him directly in the eyes. “My father is a cobbler. He invested money we don’t have to send me to school. Either that woman acknowledges me so I can get a real job charging real money for my work or we default on my debt.”

One corner of Xar anKebbal’s mouth twitched. “Probably calling her ‘that woman’ doesn’t help.”

She felt her face grow hot and bowed her head. Now she understood why her father had said he would worry less about the manners of a child. Before she spent those years at university, she wouldn’t have felt so confident in the presence of a great man like this and would have been more judicious with her words. Her rudeness had seemed to entertain him, but she would be more careful from now on.

“Is this why you settled on me, then? You have an interest, if not in vengeance, at least in vindicating yourself?”

“We have no desire to punish anyone in any way,” her father answered for her. “But we thought, since you don’t have a group of young people already established here, you might have fewer qualms about a Pemets student—”

“Fa.” She laid a hand on her father’s, silencing him. “I don’t think that’s what he means.”

Xar anKebbal grunted, not confirming this. But she looked in his eyes and felt certain she was right. He had heard their story and grasped why they had chosen him. He wanted to know how honest they would be.

“You have a reputation,” she told him, meeting his eyes, “for championing hopeless causes and helping underdogs.”

It was at this point that the barbarian chose to leave. Qanath had forgotten about him, but it would have been impossible to fail to note his departure. He wore a strand of tiny silver bells tied about one thigh that tinkled as he moved, and he chose to walk between them and Xar anKebbal, disrupting the interview deliberately. Qanath could hardly help but look at him when he thrust himself into her view; it was an automatic reaction, innocent of intent.

Her eyes would linger on him, though, as he stalked from the room. She hadn’t grown up in luxury and had never seen one before, but she knew she was looking at a bed-bonded. The knowledge drew her eyes inexorably off his face. Those tiny underpants left the lower curve of his buttocks bare, and he was beautiful, lithe and fit, his coloration startling.

Her father’s elbow connected with her ribs again. He glared at her from the corners of his eyes, head bowed so low his chin almost touched his breastbone. A bead of sweat traced a slow line along his temple, then made a sudden dash down his cheek for the jaw.

Only then did it strike her that Xar anKebbal was the only person in this house. She put her eyes back on the hands making fists on her thighs, and knew they were wide. He never commented on her manners; if he had noticed her admiring his lover’s butt, he must not care. He hadn’t batted an eye when the man wandered in, then wandered out again, passing between them both times.

Clearing her throat, she forced herself to say, “My mother has a seat on the Senate. We knew I couldn’t keep my story secret, not living in your house for years. And any other fighting-master might not be willing to antagonize her.”

Xar anKebbal looked at her for the length of several minutes, saturnine face conveying nothing but thought. Then the stony planes of his visage cracked to let loose a smile that was almost mischievous. “You’re right that I have a hard time turning away from an underdog.”

***

Havec lay on the scorching-hot flagstones of the patio, one knee cocked, arms stretched out above him, glorying in the heat of the sun. He had been gone long enough that his memories of home were hazy and unreliable, but he was pretty certain its sun had been a weak flame beside this blazing furnace-heat. He had hated every moment of his incarceration in the hellish freak-show that was this civilization and dreamt each night of going home. But when that day finally came, there were things he would miss.

He heard a door slide open and felt his master’s oppressive presence buffeting against him. The man came to crouch beside him, and he didn’t need to have studied Havec’s visage a thousand times while he was sleeping to know he was awake; the Avatethura Master had spent fifty years steeped in the ways of war and knew at a glance the difference between a body that was relaxed and one that was still with readiness. Havec kept his eyes closed anyway.

“So,” the man said after the length of a minute, “what did you think?”

He grunted a question.