“I’m not sleeping in trousers. Gets too hot keeping them on. C’mon, you’ve got your own blanket. I’ll keep myself to myself. Inside or outside?”

I opted for the outside. I waited until Sorcha slid in and cut the light. He gave me plenty of room and fell asleep quickly. I lay on my back and stared up at the ceiling. I had his spare blanket tucked tightly around myself. I started the night fully clothed down to my socks. I listened to the formidable creak of the squat house, the patter of feet outside the door. It was a loud place. The night was cool, but his room was small and had no window. Sorcha alone was enough to warm it up. The blanket he’d given me was a Lothic wool thing, thickly spun and tightly woven. Between his body heat and the effectiveness of the borrowed blanket, I grew first comfortably warm, then uncomfortably hot, and then I began to sweat and could not fall asleep. I took off my socks. A little while later I took off my shirt. Halfway through the night, blushing furiously in the dark, I slid off my pants. So it was I spent my first night in the City of Mages: ear freshly pierced, the smell of pipeherb still lingering in my hair, sharing a bed with a naked stranger, with my Semadran clothes in a pile on the floor.

Chapter 5

CHAPTER 5

Sorcha woke me only a few hours after I’d managed to fall asleep. He sat up and shook me awake by the elbow. I have never woken easily, and left to my own devices would have slept fully half the day away. But, as he had mentioned the night before, Sorcha had a standing appointment in the early hours of the morning, and apparently he’d decided that I was to make said appointment with him. “Hey, wake up. Prynn’s isn’t close and I don’t want to have to run there, yeah?”

I pulled his borrowed blanket over my head. I was not awake enough to really understand where I was. I was not awake enough to remember I’d met him the night before. Sorcha climbed over me. “Gah, you snore,” he said. “You could’ve mentioned that. Wake up, dammit!” He kicked me in the back. I responded by shuffling over onto his side of the bed. It was warm, and it smelled like honey. It was really very pleasant.

There was a burst of cold air as he ripped the blanket off of me. I was mercilessly thrown into consciousness. Sorcha grinned down at me. He was bare-chested, and his pants slouched lazily around his hips. They were, as yet, unbuttoned. He looked wicked and brilliant and predatory. He poked my pile of clothes with his foot. “What’s all this then, Captain Modesty?”

I pulled the blankets up around my chest. I felt exposed. “I got hot.”