“Then mark your attendance at the end of class. Does anyone else have a question?” A dozen or so raised their hands. “Questions will wait until the end of class,” I said. In the shocked silence which followed, I taught them Athenorkos. I taught it the way it made sense to me: outlining the patterns of grammar first, how verbs formed corridors for nouns, how word order shaped the flow of ideas from one sentence to the next. For three hours I spoke, diagramming sentences on a chalkboard behind me, lost in the surprising richness of red elvish language. When I turned to address the students directly, I always spoke to the Semadran woman in the back. She took copious notes, her eyes trained on the board behind me.

At the end of the session, I reiterated again that the roster was there for those who wanted to record that they’d sat through the lesson. A line of Qin students queued up to mark themselves present. I noted that a handful of them were students who had, at one point or another, fallen asleep during the lesson. They had no questions for me, no questions about the content of the lesson, simply a concern that policies should be followed. The Semadran woman in the back of the room gathered her papers. She came down the center aisle and made for the door, but halfway to it she turned and came to me. My vicious armor from the moment before abandoned me. A glance at the line of Qin students still waiting to sign their names assured me I was trapped, and that whatever it was she was about to ask I would have to answer.

When she drew near, it became increasingly clear to me that she was more than a match for me. She was older than me and carried an unassailable self-possession I could not help but envy. She was tall for an elf and towered over me by a good three inches. Defiance was marked into every inch of her: she wore Qin robes, but wore them with her hair uncovered. She took up as much space as she pleased. There was, in her, a refusal to be diminutive. She reminded me of Dirva. When we were face to face, she raised her eyebrows. “How old are you?”

I let out a nervous laugh. “I’m…I’m old enough. How old are you?”

“Forty-six. How old are you?” she asked again. She peered at me, her head cocked to one side. She spoke Semadran, which turned a number of Qin heads our way. When she noticed them, she smirked.

I lied. “Thirty-nine.”

“You’re a boy.”

“I am old enough,” I said. It came out petulant, adolescent. I blushed. She smirked wider. I began to hate her. “Do you have a question?”

“How did you get this assignment? Who would assign you to this?”

“What?”

“You’re very green.”