When you are detained and pressed into the Exalted’s service, your papers are marked that you have been arrested, but truly it’s closer to slavery. You are not sent to prison, but instead to a cell where you sleep. I will say this much for the captain: he was a clever man. He knew enough about magic to think of devious ways to use my talents. If a group of emigrants came to the border, sometimes when one was deemed suspicious they would extract information by standing me outside the window and having me plead with the guards in the voice of the emigrant’s companions. I begged for my life as a man’s wife. I shouted vicious threats in retribution for violence done to a brother in a father’s voice. It was cruel, and I hated it, but the captain knew enough about the gifts to know how to trigger mine. There are times where the gifts come out unbidden. Their preferred tactic was to choke me until I’d nearly blacked out. Just before I blacked out, more often than not, the magic came out just the way they wanted. Sometimes it didn’t. Sometimes I woke some minutes later on the ground.

My tenure there seems like it lasted years, but in fact it was only about six weeks. Six weeks after I stupidly, defiantly, got myself detained, Dirva appeared back at the gate. He came with a Qin dignitary from the Rabathan courts. Their camels trotted up side by side, Dirva keeping pace, at ease, with little regard for the status to which his nahsiyya birth relegated him. For a brief moment, I thought him a mirage. When it sank in that he was really there, it took a lot of effort to hold back the tears.

Dirva and the razehm rode into the border station. He rode right up to the captain. “Let him go,” Dirva said. He held his hand out to the razehm, who handed him a sheaf of official documents requiring my release. Dirva threw them down at the captain’s feet. “His detainment is relinquished.”

The captain did not move to pick them up. He said nothing. All he did was look at the razehm. The razehm nodded. The captain let out a noise that was half-growl and half-laugh. He gave me a dismissive wave, and then he walked away. I was free.

“Return his papers,” Dirva shouted after him. His voice was sharpened steel. The captain pulled them out of his robe and threw them on top of the release orders without a backward glance. I scooped them up and scrambled onto Dirva’s camel. I left everything else behind me.

“Thank you,” I whispered.

“I am sorry it took so long,” he said. “Read the orders.”