“You just seem to be alternating between staring at the ceiling and your boots instead of looking at me, so I thought I might have done something weird.” Beq shrugged. “They say the more time you spend around arcanists, the stranger you get, so I must be pretty strange by now.”

“No, it’s … nerves, I suppose.” Maya took a deep breath and looked straight at Beq, trying to ignore the way her curls framed her round face and the spectacular blue of her eyes. Self-control, Maya. Come on. “You’ve been with the arcanists a long time, then?”

“Since I was four, I think.” Beq looked thoughtful. “That’s what they tell me, anyway. Since I can remember. I grew up here at the Forge.”

“My mentor picked me up at around that age.” Automatically, Maya’s hand went to the hard lump of the Thing in her chest. “I’ve been with her ever since.”

“That’s young, for a centarch.”

Maya nodded and found time stretching like taffy into another awkward silence. Say something. But what? “Ever since I saw you naked I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you” lacks … tact.

“All set,” Varo said, rescuing her. He came back to the table and picked up the big catalog. “I’d better give this back, too. Wouldn’t want them to lose their prank piece.”

“Thank you.” Maya looked between him and Beq. “I’ll try not to be …”

“A typical centarch?” Varo grinned. “That would be a nice change of pace.”

*

They set out the next morning.

Maya stepped forward, through the rippling mercury curtain, and in the space of a breath crossed most of the width of the Republic. She emerged from the Gate with her panoply raised, one hand on her haken and deiat coiled around her like a snake.

Jaedia had taught her to be cautious at these moments of transition, but it was more than that. Every previous time she’d gone through a Gate, she’d been at Jaedia’s side. To be without her mentor made her feel raw, every sensation heightened, as though something had scraped away her skin and dug cotton out of her ears.

The Gate to which they’d traveled was set into a rocky hillside, obscured from casual view by a screen of tall bushes. Maya pushed her way through the brush and found herself in a sun-dappled forest, the blue sky visible in patches overhead through the leafy canopy. The breeze raised gooseflesh along her bare arms, and the air seemed to be alive with birdsong.