I became his right hand. He took me everywhere with him, and he was valuable enough to get away with it. I served as his secretary, his attaché, his note taker, and his teaching assistant. Whenever my gifts got the better of me, he stopped whatever he was doing—a meeting with diplomats, a class, shopping in the market, it didn’t matter—and he had me tell him how it felt. He coached me through and told me what he did when he felt like that. The entire world waited for me to grasp his techniques. It was quite a lot of pressure, but in time it began to work.

The thing that was strange about this was that he and I grew quite close. Well, that’s not so strange. A man is usually quite close to his mentor; it’s a pity when a mentor and a student don’t bond. What’s strange is that we grew quite close, we bonded, and he wove me into the fabric of his life—but that as well as I knew him, I knew virtually nothing about his past. It never occurred to me to ask. He was a single man, just him and me in his apartment. He kept me as busy as he kept himself, so I had little time to ponder him. I got used to him, and I forgot to wonder about his blood and black hair and foreign spices. He was just Dirva. That’s just who he was. I think part of me didn’t want to ask. To him I was just Ariah, just myself. He never asked me about my green eyes. It didn’t matter to him. I wanted the strangeness of him to not matter to me in turn.

I spent four years in Rabatha with Dirva. By my last year of training, I was happy and comfortable and making good progress. He groomed me to become a linguist like him, perhaps to be placed in an important city when my time with him was up. I felt very potentially important. I think he was happy and comfortable, too. But then his past came knocking, and life grew much more complicated.