I didn’t tell Sorcha what Dirva and I had spoken about. I didn’t float the idea of leaving. I buried myself in Sorcha and Shayat, in the both of them together. I borrowed armfuls of books from Dirva’s house and read voraciously. I must have reread my notebooks full of Droma songs a dozen times as the days slid by. A week passed, and then a month, and then Shayat said her crew was restless and the route beckoned. That night she took me while Sorcha watched. She was rougher than usual, and I cried out in strange blendings of pain and pleasure. In her hands there was no separating one from the other. I felt a trust in her bone deep, and sex with her left me with a sense of purpose. I stayed on the border of stoned and sober: just high enough to keep the gift from taking over, and just sober enough that I felt Sorcha’s fascination, his excitement, while he watched. Afterward, Shayat offered to take us with her. “You can count,” she said to me, “and the compounders love you,” she said to Sorcha.

Sorcha smiled and shook his head. “Got the little one to think of.”

She accepted his refusal with grace. Sorcha kissed her, stroked her to show there were no hard feelings. Shayat was insistent with him, demanding, but gentle. She kept her claws in with him. It is strange to see the way a lover changes with someone else. Strange and compelling. Sorcha took me by the hand and pulled me into their knot, and I wound up in the center.

Shayat left us a sum of money large enough to pay rent and buy food until she came back to Rabatha. We gave her nothing in return but gratitude. She left, and Sorcha and I fell into old rhythms together, old ways of being with each other. I read everything. I read and reread Amran’s poetry and found it tainted with memories of the man himself. Sorcha drifted in and out, to monitor pregnancies and deliver babies and help new mothers, and I stayed curled in the bed, reading. Sometimes I wrote to my parents or to Vathorem, but mostly I read.

I was reading when the Qin Army came for me. They pounded the door with heavy hands that could only be Qin. “It’s time to repay the Exalted’s grace,” a soldier said. I’d read discarded newspapers along with all the borrowed books, and I knew why they were there for me. The military had mobilized in Ma-Halad. They needed translators. My papers said I was fluent in Droma. I had just enough time to write Sorcha a note and slip it into the hollowed-out book where he stored his pipe before they threatened me with arrest if I didn’t open the door.