I suppose I can thank the Premier for that too.

“I was about to say that you look like you belong in those clothes,” I sign.

She nods to the horse waiting beside her, and I hurry to it, ready to savor every minute of this day. I grab the saddle and swing easily onto the creature’s back, then guide it around to follow my mother. We turn in the direction of the rolling hills that make up the rest of the estate. The breeze is gentle, the air just the right hint of warmth, and I find myself leaning into it, trying to ignore the strangeness of enjoying this perfect morning in a hostile nation.

“How is your pain?” my mother asks after a comfortable silence, and I feel myself lean toward the soothing sound of Basean on her tongue. It’s a question she brings up during each of our visits. For a while, my answers had been always, constant, never-ending. She would see the small changes happening on my body—one month, the metallic tint of my hair; another month, the addition of bladed tips on my wings. When they infused the marrow of my bones with steel particles; when my heart was forced to grow larger and stronger to accommodate the changes in my body; when I spent those early weeks sitting up at night, gasping for breath and clutching my chest in agony, certain that my heart would burst from the strain … my mother saw the consequence of each week.

For all the anguish I feel in seeing my mother suffer, I imagine the sight of me causes her even more pain.

I shake my head. “Only a little, sometimes, when I’m sleeping,” I answer as I drop the reins to sign. “There’s not much left to my transformation now.” And before we can dwell on this, I quickly ask, “The mayor’s treating you well, then?”

My mother snorts a little. “That woman,” she says. “Do you know how she delivered this horse to me? She waited until I was lounging in a bath, and then had the horse stick its head right through the open window to drink my bathwater. I could hear her laughing even over my shrieks. A Cardinian with a sense of humor. I’ll be damned.”

I laugh in surprise, the sound coming out in a thin wheeze. “I suppose someone has to be a real human being in this country.”

My mother laughs too, then quiets as our horses leave the manor behind us and enter a stretch of grassland bordered by thickets of trees. “They bring me three meals a day,” she says in a low voice. “Porridges fat with chicken and eggs. White buns and scented rice. Fish and stewed beef and noodles. Basean foods, Talin. All of it, as if made by some master chef. The Premier keeps his word and wants to remind us of it at every turn. And all I can think about every single day is that, somewhere in their kitchen, a chef who likely fled Basea’s collapse is now making me meals in exchange for Karensan coins. By the order of the Premier.” Her lips tighten as she turns her eyes to the horizon. There we can see a few silhouettes of ruins from the Early Ones, tall pillars sticking out of the ground and reaching up to nowhere. “I’m sorry, Talin, that you have to serve them because of me.”