“All right. Well, that’s a shame, but given you’re Imperial, I can’t say it’s a surprise. Dancers. The thing with dancers, the thing that lets them keep their balance when they are whipping so fast the world is a blur, is they find a spot. Some spot that don’t move. A point of stability. And that’s what you need: a thing that centers you and keeps you upright. And yours is the little brother. That’s a dangerous game to play, pinning yourself on someone else.”

“I need the herb.”

“You want to be tethered to a pipe the rest of your life? You want to be a man who can’t handle the world unless he’s caught in a haze of smoke?”

“It is so hard here.”

“We’ll work more on breaking the charms,” he said. He checked his watch, a lovely Semadran-made thing Dirva had given him years before. “I’ve time now. Break eye contact, get yourself some distance. Find your center.”

For three hours Vathorem charmed me. For three hours I struggled with it. When I fought the gift, when I pushed it down with all that focus and determination I’d lived with in the Empire, I could scrape together the presence of mind to break his charms. But I was there in Vilahna because ignoring it had only brought me trouble. I wanted mastery of the gift, I wanted to live with it, in it, instead of against it, but I was still so new to it and so untempered that I could not see through it. When he charmed me, I felt the magic faster and deeper than I would have otherwise. The charms obliterated me. The effort of fighting them left me exhausted.

That night something broke within me. The strain of it all—the gift, my helplessness, the shame of constant failure—crushed me. I wound up on the floor of the loaned apartment, the blood roaring in my ears. Breath would not come. I felt I was drowning; I felt I was dying. The noises that came from me were these terrible, animal things: hisses and whines. My vision blurred, narrowed. Sorcha brought me back from the dark edge. He charmed me, and it helped. There are different kinds of charms, you know. The way you charm has a lot to do with how well you know who you’re charming and what you want from them. Sorcha knew me as well as he knew himself, maybe better than he knew himself. All he wanted from me was my own safety. A charm born of that is a sweet thing, a tender thing. It is a comfort.