Dor and I rarely spoke to each other but for questions about this or that. I avoided Vathorem for days, pleading work and then lessons, and then only getting back just before curfew to sleep curled up on the floor of the kitchen. Vathorem took my cot, and Dor took the floor beside the cot. Vathorem gave me space for four full days, right up until the day before the marriage, and then it was Saturday and I had nowhere to go, and he decided I’d had space enough.

I woke early and tried to slip out, but he was already awake and already waiting. “Let’s you and I talk, eh?”

“Yes, well, I…I have to go.”

“Go where?”

“To, uh, to…”

Vathorem laughed. He stood up. It was a fluid motion, one that betrayed no hint of how old he was. “Dirva tells me you’ve a fondness for the gold elves.”

“Yes. That’s true.”

“You know, it’s been ages since I’ve seen one. Show me some gold elves, Ariah, and we’ll talk on the way.”

There was nothing for it but to do as he asked. We walked slowly, mostly in silence. I felt him watch me, I felt his magic gently prod me and probe me. There was little of the burn our shapers have. I remembered how little of the burn there had been with Dirva. And I asked him my first question, and when I did, my training with Vathorem began. “Why doesn’t it burn with you?”

“There we are. There we go. That’s the way of it. It don’t burn because I’m charming you while I do it. It’s all bound up in me, the red magic and the silver. Can you charm, Ariah?”

“No.” I wondered about Dirva, what talents he had that were not Semadran.

“Dirva can, aye,” Vathorem said. I looked over at him. He laughed. “Oh, I’ve got it in spades, lad. I’ve got so much of it I can’t see past it. Got so much of it seems it’s all there really is of me. Lad, have you ever tried to charm?”

“No.”

“Then you can’t say for sure one way or another. Tell me about the gold elves. Tell me what draws you to them.”

“I don’t know.” And I didn’t; it was a draw, a visceral draw, which until then I’d never questioned or examined.

“Sure you do,” he said, and he said it with such expectation that I really had no choice but to divine an answer for him.

“There is a…unity to them. It seems. The boundaries of where one starts and another ends are porous. I think.”

“That appeals to you, does it?”