I nodded. "Yeah. I thought she might want to see our calendar, so maybe we can figure out where hers fits."

"When does it start?" she asked. "Because our first day of the year is on January first, which is supposed to be in the middle of winter. It's seven days after the birth of Christ, although I don't know if that is a holiday you use."

"Christmas?" I asked.

She nodded. "When God's son was born on Earth in an attempt to show us the way, but we didn't listen."

I scrubbed at my face, telling myself not to tackle that yet. "We celebrate Christmas, Ayla. Our calendar has thirteen months and a holiday week that starts on Christmas and ends on the last night of the year. The next day is the start of the next year. We call it New Year's Eve and New Year's Day."

"Us too!"

"Gonna guess you don't drink a lot and kiss for good luck, though," Kanik teased.

Ayla gave him a confused look. "For the new year?"

"For the new year," he agreed. "What do Moles do, Ayla?"

She licked her lips. "We pray."

Because of course they did. "What do the men do?" I asked instead.

"They gather in the men's wing," she explained. "For that evening, wives are given the time away from chores so they can pray. Girls are gathered together and led in prayers. The boys get to play games, though. It's to practice for hunting, they say."

Kanik glanced at me. Our eyes met, but he didn't say a word. He didn't need to, because it was pretty obvious what she'd just described. The men were allowed to celebrate a holiday alone while the women debased themselves in yet another way.

"Yeah," I muttered as I pushed to my feet. "So we have the same holiday but celebrate it very differently. But it's a place to start."

"She might not be ready to make the stairs yet," Kanik told me.

Ayla just eased herself forward until she was at the very edge of the couch. "I think I can do it."

"We're using your office, Kanik," I told him. "I'll try not to mess up your lesson plans."

He waved that off. "I closed it all up last night. My desk is still a mess, though."

"Not as bad as Rymar's," I assured him, offering a hand to Ayla. "Hold on to me, just in case your knees decide they aren't completely recovered? I'd hate to have you fall down the stairs."

"Okay," she breathed, taking my hand.

Then I led her forward, past Kanik. The guy had his jaw clenched, but he didn't complain. Nope, his eyes were merely locked on where Ayla's hand rested in mine. His expression was one I was getting to know a little too well: jealousy.

We were going to have to deal with this, but right now, I needed to know those dates. We had to figure out when the Moles were coming back. If we couldn't do that, nothing else would matter, not even a little jealousy between friends.

Fifty-SixZasen

Ayla moved slowly up the stairs, but she wasn't breathing harder at the top. That meant she wasn't as out of shape as I feared, just recovering from the effects of the venom she'd drank. Granted, while I knew exactly how our neurotoxin worked, I would never be able to experience it. I'd been born immune.

But once the girl was on the landing, she paused to look around. "It's like another house up here!"

"The rest of the house," I corrected, pointing to the first door on my right. "That's Rymar's room." Then to the next on the same side. "That's Kanik's."

She smiled, then turned to the left. "What's over there, or am I not supposed to know?"

I led her around the banister that walled off the staircase and into an open archway. "This is what we call the workshop."

All around us were tables with weapons and leather spread across them. On some, straight dowels of wood were waiting to be made into arrows and bolts. A bag of feathers was tied up at the side, with a smaller one next to it. Not that she'd be able to see the feathers inside, but I knew what they were.

"My father taught me how to fletch arrows when I was a boy," I explained. "See the big bag? That's the mixed feathers. Some are brown. Some are white. All colors, really. The smaller bag has the blue ones."

"Why do you make your war arrows blue?" she asked.

I smiled. "I started doing that to make a statement. I wanted them to know who'd shot them. I also stamped the faces of the men I killed with my sign die and threw their bodies down into the pit around the Mole base." Stepping away from her, I headed for the closest table to pick up the arrow I'd been working on recently. A blue one. "I was angry back then, Ayla."

"Because they killed someone?"

"My father." I paused. "And it was my fault. I was out too late. I knew I was supposed to get home before sunset, but Tasult and I'd been having fun, so I lost track of time. I was halfway back when the Moles rushed into town and my father hurried out to save me."

"He must've loved you very much," she mumbled.

"He did," I agreed. "So much that he yelled so the Moles would see him and not me. So much that he didn't fight when they shot him. He never tried to run, Ayla. He just yelled for me to hide."

"I'm sorry," she breathed. "They kill too many people."

"Like your mom?" I asked, clasping her shoulder to turn her back towards the next room.

"All wives," she explained. "They only want the children we produce. It doesn't matter if it's hard. They will keep making babies until the wife dies, and then they simply marry another girl when she turns twenty."

"The way that man tried to marry you," I realized.

"Yes."

So I gestured to the open door ahead of us. "This is what we call the office. It's really another bedroom, but Rymar and Kanik work in here."

She stepped inside and I followed. Ayla's head was swiveling around as she tried to take in everything. On the walls were notes and corkboards for tasks. The chairs at the two desks were both nice ones with padded leather seats, but where Rymar's was black, Kanik's was brown. Then there was the tired old chair at the side that none of us had wanted to throw away.

"This was our first chair," I said, gesturing at it. "The four of us - me, Rymar, Kanik, and Saveah's husband, Tasult - bought it when we got our first place together."

"Not this house?" she asked.

"Oh no," I said around a chuckle. "No, we were young and very poor back then. Together, we could barely afford to rent a place on our own. It had nothing in it until we pooled our money and bought that chair. Tasult loved it."

"And then he married Saveah?" she asked.

"Well, they didn't get married," I explained. "Lessa, the woman who measured you yesterday? She introduced them. Tasult thought Saveah was the most amazing woman he'd ever met, and they moved in together. We were all happy for him. When Tamin was born, I was named his godparent. When Taris was born, Rymar became hers. Kanik was supposed to get the next one, but..."

"The Moles," she breathed, moving forward to trace her fingers across the edge of Kanik's desk. "What work do they do here?"

"Rymar handles town business," I explained. "You see, he's the Deputy Mayor. That's a position people pick every so often to help out with the town. It's also not a lot of work. The Mayor does most of it. Rymar just handles the rest, like contracting street maintenance and such."