Somyellia, as she was called, looked at me, tilted her head, bit her bottom lip.

“I…I can take her home,” I said.

“I don’t know, young master,” said the ranking mistress.

“Come now, Morlia,” Somyellia said to her. “Deny such a strapping youngling?”

“Silence, Morlia,” wedged a croaking voice from the carriage. “You want her, it’s twenty silver more. She’ll be back by morning.” The words ran up my spine like a dry tongue.

“I have it,” I found myself saying.

“Somyellia,” spoke the carriage, “come back with the money.”

As the carriage departed, she looked more like a girl playing dress-up than one of Augy’s whores. But she wasn’t playing anything. She had cavorted and hiked her legs up in palaces and mansions all throughout Nilghorde—perhaps all Rehleia—perhaps beyond our watery borders. She’d bounced atop soldierly bodies. She’d escorted the unrepentantly wealthy, on her hands and knees above pits of decorated hunting cats and amid silk and gold. I was a whelp, and she had either found an appeal in my innocence or had much more devious plans in store.

Under a swollen moon I meandered. Her lip was bit again, and to my terror I’d once more lost my powers of speech. Pollen from nearby gardens filled our noses, and if it weren’t for the decay on my clothes we would have looked like characters right out of the Poems of the Classics. Wind ran around our bodies, and the moon peered down upon its children.

“What is your name?” she said.

“Seasmil.”

“That’s an unusual name. What does it mean?”

“I—I don’t really know,” I said. She was beautiful and thought-provoking! “Never thought about it much. I was named after a relative. Does yours mean something?” While sunk in self-consciousness, I shifted my attention as best as I could from the ornaments adorning her to thoroughly digging a small hole in front of me with the toe of my boot.

“Of course,” she popped. “All who are kin to Maecidion the Virulent possess names with direct meaning.”

“What?”

“Mine means daughter of the sleeping demon,” she said in the manner of a small child announcing their alignment with a favored pit fighter, flag in hand. She giggled, and her big gold eyes flashed. “Why are you covered in all that filth?”

“Oh, no I was—do you want to see something?”

Maybe it was because my dismal lab was the only thing I could claim in the whole world as my own. Or maybe it was because she had looked at me with the eyes of a woman who may have really bore the meaning of her name.

She nodded, and with her hand in mine, I escorted her to my dark cellar of experiments, where I hungered for an experiment of a different kind.