Sorcha handed me his pack and climbed up a ladder. When he was in the loft, I tossed him his pack and my own and climbed up after him. It wasn’t until we’d found a spot for ourselves that I noticed Shayat and Tamir had stayed below in the hall. They watched us, her face intrigued and his perturbed, as they pulled bedding out of their own packs and made pallets on the hall’s floor. We were put to work after that: hauling water from the well to the livestock troughs across the field, washing the oils from fragrant newly-sheared wool, weeding the herb garden, that sort of thing. Sorcha drifted to the shepherds and helped them corral the sheep into the pens for the night. It involved a lot of running and a lot of yelling. He grinned while he did it and came back with an arm slung around a compounder girl’s shoulders, the pair of them sweaty and slightly out-of-breath.

Shayat and I hauled the water. She wore a Qin robe for travel, but pulled it off for the work. Beneath it she wore a loose Semadran shirt and a pair of leather leggings, expertly tailored. It was the first day since we’d left Alamadour that I had not smoked my mind into oblivion, and Sorcha’s words—admonitions? Advice? I couldn’t tell exactly what they were—ran through my mind as I watched her haul the buckets up out of the well. She was stronger than me, and I watched the muscles of her forearms twist and bunch as she worked. She stood with one foot planted against the lip of the well and hauled up the heavy buckets, one after another. She pulled up two buckets for her and two for me. We threaded the handles through poles and balanced the weight of them on our shoulders. She already knew the way to the livestock troughs and led me over. She had me pour the buckets into the trough when we got there. “You said you were from Ardijan, professor.”

“I am.” Pigs ran up to the trough as I poured in the water, jockeying for space, all uniformly disappointed it was nothing more than water.

“Well, your friend Sorcha certainly isn’t.”

“He’s from the City.”

“If he’s from the City, and you’re from Ardijan, how did the pair of you end up in that apartment together in Alamadour?”

“It’s a long story.” I stood up and straightened my back. “Mercy, that water is heavy.”

She laughed. “You would make the worst farmer. You’re so delicate.”

I looked over at her and found her smiling at me. I laughed and watched the pigs survey the fresh water with haughty indifference. “You don’t seem to like him much.”