Mehr heaved out a sigh. “Well, I do.”

They were both silent for a long moment. Then Amun spoke.

“It’s better they believe I hurt you, instead of the Maha. They would just wonder how you’d failed him, and blame you for it.” He looked at Mehr, simple truth in his eyes. “You need people, Mehr. Go to them.”

“And you?” she asked. “Do you need people?”

She thought, for a moment, that Amun would react badly. He frowned at her, his brow furrowing—and then a yawn cracked his seriousness. He gave a soft laugh and leaned back against the wall.

“I need to rest,” Amun said. “That’s all that I need right now.”

The wine was a mistake.

Mehr realized too late, of course. The girls had gambled, and Anni had triumphantly poured them all wine into cheap clay cups pilfered from the storeroom. The cups were small. They could only hold a mouthful or two of drink. It had been easy for Mehr to take the first cup of wine offered, then the second, then the third; by the fourth she was light-headed and dazed. She realized too late that the wine was far stronger than the watered-down, sweet stuff she had drunk in her father’s household. It didn’t help that she had barely eaten and that she was exhausted. She’d been weak and out of sorts before the first mouthful of drink had even touched her lips.

I should go home, Mehr thought. But she couldn’t seem to make her arms and legs move. Instead she sat at the edge of the room, the chatter around her eddying in and out of focus. The girls were talking about the male mystics, their voices hushed and full of laughter.

“Of course I don’t go near the men,” Rena said, more loudly than the rest. She sounded affronted.

“We go near the men all the time,” another girl said in a joking voice. “They’re everywhere.”

“Except when we eat, bathe, shit, pray, or sleep,” another voice said dryly. Mehr thought it was possibly Hema’s. But the room was soft and the voices blurred like ink and water. She didn’t really know.

“We have a sacred duty to serve with our whole hearts. Men are a distraction.”

“And you keep away from men, do you?”

“It’s not as if we can get—”

“Don’t say it.”

“Well, you should. I’m no fool. Imagine what would happen if the Maha—”

“… opposite of our calling. The poor girl …”

Someone muttered a sharp word. Careful—the monster’s wife. Mehr heard the conversation stutter. Silence fell. She felt their eyes turn on her, one by one, and her face flushed hot.

When Mehr said nothing, the conversation soon began again. They turned to other topics, and her tension eased. The flush on her skin remained, though. Perhaps it was the influence of the wine.