Dear Mother,

  Autumn arrives in ?elasdur. Exotic trees turn gold within the gardens. If I stand under the branches, my hands upon a trunk, I viscerally recall my last autumn in your home. It feels as though I should open my eyes there once again. Your handwriting brought me home similarly. I do not know why you have yet to respond to letters penned in my hand. Yet you responded when I needed you most, and in the delicate swoops and swirls of your ligatures, I feel your support. Your response delayed a grave fate—a fate which I still feel nipping at my heels. I beg Nam? in vain to tell me what to do.

  If only you could tell me more. Father never spoke of service in the Mountainhomes, and neither of you spoke of bringing home keepsakes. In my heart’s memory, The Silver Selvage is a warm place exemplifying the supremacy of àlvar brilliance, touched only by your voice and the voices of a choir taught your songs. I question how I did not feel a Dwarrow presence among your belongings. What else lies hidden? Would not their Chaos taint the quality of your work? Should I have heard the silken whispers of Lorkullen, urging us to fall as the Dwarrow have fallen? I feel the Chaos here in ?elasdur. It chokes me. How did we live alongside its wisps without corruption? All I can do is pray when you will respond to the Lord Mayor but not your worried son.

  Be well, Mother, and sing for me when you attend church. Tell Father I think of him often. The talons I send with this letter are not destined for Gildergreen, but for Father’s renovations, as we once discussed. I end with my dearest hopes that I will hear from either of you. It is dark here. You may be my only hope for a light to help me find a way.

  Your loving son,

  Esor

  ~

  The alchemy table was ready to receive Lady Ilare when she returned from her brother’s care: equipment cleaned, Esor’s experiments destroyed, missing glass replaced. The only thing that looked different was Ilare. She was quieter, less elusive, quicker to settle into work. She did not resist Esor’s growing educational fervor, but neither did she cooperate. Ilare was unfocused.

  “Do you still feel unwell?” asked Esor after a few unproductive lessons. “I could ask a maid to bring the doctor...”

  “Don’t,” said Samej. “She’s fine.”

  It was always Samej who responded to inquests after her health. Samej who said that Ilare didn’t feel well enough to see the church again. Samej who declared that lessons would end an hour earlier, giving Ilare time to rest before tea.

  Esor sought Ilare at the end of Lady Malenē’s class one Light, seeking to hear an opinion from her own lips.

  He found her alone at the balcony garden.

  She was digging in planters again, her back turned so that the keroterase in the other classroom would not see what she was doing.

  He stood in his class’s doorway, several lengths away. “I take some comfort in seeing you engaged in your normal misconduct, but fussing with the planters must stop,” said Esor.

  She emerged from the bushes with a bloodtoad cupped in her hands. “Misconduct, fie! I spent my childhood in tide pools, searching for leeches in still water. Everything rots quickly in a bog like Set. You’re never short of worms and flies and squirming things. But some bogs let nothing rot at all, and you’ll find the corpses of muskrats that died centuries past.”

  “You could grow ill again, digging like this,” said Esor. “You’re vulnerable to bog cough and...oh no.” He cringed when Ilare spilled the toad into his hands, leaving a track of red slime. He glanced at the windows. The keroterase weren’t looking.

  “Then I’ll wash my hands,” she said.

  “Xeta has been trying to exterminate these,” he said, fingers gently caging the bloodtoad. “You’re helping them grow.”

  “I can’t help my Affinity.”

  “An Affinity for...” Esor caught the bloodtoad when it leaped from his hand, sparing it from dropping from waist height to stone. “Vermin?”

  “The small things,” said Ilare. “I know what they want. I know where they hide. I could easily tell Xeta how to obliterate the lot of them—better still, I could command them to leave. But then who would I speak to next time I spend months in bed?” She peeled a slug off a rock, letting its body sling over the side of her hand, bright-gold and fat. “I’ve told no one before. Even my brothers don’t know. I can’t be sure if they’d consider my Affinity to devalue me or make me more valuable to a niche market.”

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  “I won’t tell them. You shouldn’t have told me.”

  Ilare’s eyes glimmered warmly. “Corvin said I can trust you.” She placed the slug back on the soil. “When I tend these little ones, I feel better than well. I feel necessary.” Ilare’s hair cascaded down her shoulder in a shimmering wall, shadowing all but the tip of her nose from Nam?’s glowing gaze. “What will you do with the bloodtoad? Kill it, the way Xeta does?”

  It tried to leap from Esor’s hands again. He reflexively closed his fingers, caging it to beat uselessly against his palms. “You have to stop digging.”

  “If I’m to stop digging, then we should have fun with this one, don’t you think?” She snagged the bloodtoad from him. It was calmer in her hands, satisfied to be there, even when Ilare went running through the classroom.

  Esor chased her laughter. She chimed with pleasure as she sought a worthy recipient of the squirming amphibian. Samej was gone—no sign of him—and Ilare slipped through the doors between classrooms to avoid keroterase in the hallways. Esor was always an arm’s length too far away to touch the fluttering trail of her robes. Hair drifted behind Ilare like the dream of smoke. Her scent lingered where she did not.

  He caught up when she was looking to place the toad in àstin’s desk.

  “Have you any clue how much trouble I’d be in if they found us running off like this?” Esor hissed.

  Ilare peered into open drawers. “Then why did you follow me?” Her cheeks glowed pink. The flush lit her eyes.

  She did not yield the bloodtoad when Esor tried to take it. Her fingers slid closed around his, holding it between them. Ilare’s skin was flawlessly soft. She had never been scored by the lash nor performed work to muscle her hands. When Ilare’s fingertips slid along the tender insides of Esor’s wrists, they tracked reddish slime.

  Esor pulled away with the toad.

  He was so disoriented trying to escape Ilare that he opened the wrong door to exit. “Enough mayhem,” he said sharply over his shoulder.

  Esor turned, expecting to find himself on a balcony where he could eject the toad.

  Instead, he found himself in àstin an Galefar’s supply closet, cluttered with shelves that overflowed with papers. The desk was normally covered in maps, but they had been tossed to the floor to permit a half-dressed tryst.

  àstin stood between the shapely naked thighs of a doe.

  Her skin was the color of oil-stained ivory, creamy from bared toe to her hindquarters edged against the desk.

  Though àstin moved his shoulders quickly to shield her, Esor immediately noticed the length of her ears, the noble cant of her brow, and fabrics too expensive for most ?elasdur nobles to afford. Her naked posterior pressed against star charts prepared for the next astronomy lesson.

  “Esor,” said àstin hoarsely, withdrawing his impudence from his paramour and hurrying to tie his trousers.

  The doe covered her body with the scraps of her robe.

  “Esor!” giggled Ilare from the other room, unable to see what he had found. “That’s the wrong way! What are you doing?”

  àstin had been making love to Lady Vaseri, the eldest of Patrician Malor’s daughters. Evidence glistened on her thighs and swelled their desperate lips.

  “Esor?” Ilare asked.

  Esor dropped the bloodtoad. It sprung into the shadows.

  ~

  KIT?ANVE BEAT VASERI when she learned of the news. A switch was light enough to be wielded by the most fatigued arm, and she striped her daughter’s back without rising from her pillows. Vaseri kneeled before her mother to take the blows in silence, occasionally shuddering at the slide of blood down her spine. Doctor Xeta was conferring with Corvin in the study, Inquisitors requested access to the xilcadis, and Kit?anve was one Frostland hare away from determining if her daughter was worthless.

  “Great House Kovenor was a hairsbreadth from agreeing to marry you to the Lord Mayor,” said Kit?anve. ?You fool. You soiled and wretched fool!? She keened in the High Tongue when she struck again, forming a crisscross of wounds across Vaseri’s unscarred back.

  Chisamith brought rags to sop up Vaseri’s blood. Normally keroterase would have been the only ones to touch the lady, but her unit had been sent to the gaol. Vaseri was lucky Kit?anve allowed her to be tended at all.

  Kit?anve thudded to one knee beside her daughter. She fisted Vaseri’s left ear, pulling it to her mouth. “Why?” ?Why, why, why??

  “I cannot tell you it was a matter of love when your voi has never known the feeling,” Vaseri whispered. ?Love, Mother. Can you imagine it?? She filled her song with bittersweet longing as she strained against Kit?anve’s grip.

  “Would I fight for your future if I did not love you? You knew the cost of getting caught. You risk everything for nothing.” Kit?anve’s hand relaxed. The ear remained purple from being gripped so hard. ?I’ll fix this.? She smoothed her daughter’s sweaty forehead. ?I’ll fix this.?

  Kit?anve shuffled to the study door. Channels of hot wind from the brazier blew her dress around her ankles. Fire burned so brightly that it threw the shadow of a desk and three bucks against the opposite wall. Corvin, Xeta, and Malor exchanged words quieter than the flame’s churn, turning their angry gestures into a puppeteer’s play of an argument.

  Kit?anve could not see the gutted hare until she reached the end of the table. Her eyes sought to distinguish detail in the glossy black mess of entrails. “Well?” she demanded.

  Malor lifted the hare’s ovary, severed from the rest by Xeta’s bloody scalpel. Follicles had produced swollen yellow eggs pricked with blood. Kit?anve had seen it dozens of times in her efforts to produce heirs for Malor.

  “I’ll have the dirt-eater strung up!” Malor roared. He flung the ovary into the fire, which leaped to devour it. The old Patrician stormed from the room, slamming the door behind him.

  “What of our agreement?” asked Kit?anve, clutching Corvin’s sleeve. She became angry when he remained thoughtfully silent. She shook him. “We have an agreement!”

  “It may be worth preserving, in some way,” said Corvin.

  Xeta wiped his scalpel on the table cloth. ?For now, at least,? he hummed.

  The hare’s ovary turned to cinder. The baby in Kit?anve’s womb tumbled. In the other room, Vaseri began to wail.