“I’m tired,” he said. His own voice felt unfastened, somehow, separate from the rest of him. “Bonesetting is taxing work.”

Alera smiled and began to answer when the pool of water exploded into a cloud of flying droplets and angry spray.

Tavi shielded his face against the sudden, icy deluge, and blinked at the pool as Kitai rose out of the water on a furycrafted column of liquid and dropped neatly to the cavern’s floor. She was a tall young woman of exotic beauty and extraordinary grace. Like that of most of the Marat, her hair was a soft, pure white. She had shaved it close to her skull on the sides while leaving a long, single mane running down the center of her head, after the fashion of the Horse tribe of the Marat. She was dressed in close-fitting blue and grey flying leathers. The clothes quite admirably displayed a slim physique, significantly more well muscled than an average Aleran girl’s. Her canted eyes were a brilliant green identical to Tavi’s own, and they were bright and hard.

“Aleran!” she snapped, her voice ringing back from the frozen walls. Her anger was a palpable thing, a fire that Tavi could feel inside his own belly.

He winced.

Kitai stalked over to him and placed her fists upon her hips. “I have been speaking to Tribune Cymnea. She informs me that you have been treating me like a whore.”

Tavi blinked. Several times. “Um. What?”

“Don’t you dare play innocent with me, Aleran,” she spat. “If anyone is in a position to know, it is Cymnea.”

Tavi struggled to make sense of Kitai’s statements. Cymnea was the Tribune Logistica of the First Aleran Legion—but before circumstance and emergency had forced her into becoming Tribune Cymnea, she had been Mistress Cymnea, proprietor of the Pavilion, the finest house of ill repute in the camp following the Legion.

“Kitai,” Tavi said, “I don’t understand.”

“Augh!” she said, and flung her hands in the air. “How can such a brilliant commander be such an idiot?” She turned to Alera, pointed an accusing finger at Tavi, and said, “Explain it to him.”

“I feel I am hardly qualified,” Alera replied calmly.

Kitai turned back to Tavi. “Cymnea tells me that it is custom, among your people, that those who wish to be wed to one another do not lie together before they make their vows. This is a ridiculous custom—but it is the way of the Citizenry.”

Tavi glanced at Alera and felt his cheeks warm a little. “Um. Yes, well, that’s the proper way to go about it, but it isn’t what everyone always does...”

“She informs me,” Kitai continued, “that those of your rank commonly take courtesans to your bed for simple pleasure—and set such baubles aside once you have found a proper wife.”

“I... some young Citizens do that, yes, but—”