Gaotona sat down in his customary chair, nonchalantly looking through the plates. From someone else, she would have felt an implied threat. Look what I hold in my hands; look what I could do to you. From Gaotona, however, that was not it. He was genuinely curious.

Or was he? As ever, she could not suppress her instincts. As good as she was, someone else could be better. Just as Uncle Won had warned. Could Gaotona have been playing her for a fool all along? She felt strongly she should trust her assessment of Gaotona. But if she was wrong, it could be a disaster.

It might be anyway, she thought. You should have run days ago.

“Turning yourself into a soldier I understand,” Gaotona said, setting aside the plate. “And this one as well. A woodsman and survivalist. That one looks extremely versatile. Impressive. And here we have a scholar. But why? You are already a scholar.”

“No woman can know everything,” Shai said. “There is only so much time for study. When I stamp myself with that Essence Mark, I can suddenly speak a dozen languages, from Fen to Mulla’dil—even a few from Sycla. I know dozens of different cultures and how to move in them. I know science, mathematics, and the major political factions of the world.”

“Ah,” Gaotona said.

Just give them to me, she thought.

“But what of this?” Gaotona said. “A beggar? Why would you want to be emaciated, and … is this showing that most of your hair would fall out, that your skin would become scarred?”

“It changes my appearance,” Shai said. “Drastically. That’s useful.” She didn’t mention that in that aspect, she knew the ways of the streets and survival in a city underworld. Her lock-picking skills weren’t too shabby when not bearing that seal, but with it, she was incomparable.

With that stamp on her, she could probably manage to climb out the tiny window—that Mark rewrote her past to give her years of experience as a contortionist—and climb the five stories down to freedom.

“I should have realized,” Gaotona said. He lifted the final plate. “That just leaves this one, most baffling of all.”

Shai said nothing.

“Cooking,” he said. “Farm work, sewing. Another alias, I assume. For imitating a simpler person?”

“Yes.”

Gaotona nodded, putting the sheet down.

Honesty. He must see my honesty. It cannot be faked.

“No,” Shai said, sighing.

He looked to her.

“It’s … my way out,” she said. “I’ll never use it. It’s just there, if I want to.”

“Way out?”

“If I ever use that,” Shai said, “it will write over my years as a Forger. Everything. I will forget how to make the simplest of stamps; I will forget that I was even apprenticed as a Forger. I will become something normal.”

“And you want that?”

“No.”

A pause.

“Yes. Maybe. A part of me does.”