Shao Maralah Daonia lowered her blade, resisting the urge to slice out at Rainaa with it. Maralah practiced bare-chested in the chilly air of the courtyard reserved for the women of the Patron’s hold in Caisau. As a general rule, she did not prefer segregated spaces, but since arriving in Caisau, she had enjoyed the relative solitude of the women’s quarter. Only half the Patron’s wives lived here, and they kept their personal slaves close. She sent her usual sparring partner, Shao Driaa Saarik, south to Alorjan on reconnaissance to shore up the city for their expected retreat south. That left Maralah with many hours of solitary training here.

She took up her tunic from the slush-filled fountain and wiped the sweat from her face. The pain in her torso was less today than the day before. A broad scar rippled up her body from navel to armpit, the gutting blow dealt to her by the invaders who’d taken Aaraduan. They’d left her to die, which was a blessing of the Lord of Unmaking, for a certainty. They didn’t realize she had the hold’s soul at her call, to repair her to some semblance of living.

Rainaa waited patiently, clasping her little hands in front of her. She was a big-eyed northerner; Maralah could always tell by the cant of the nose, with northerners. Like the rest of the Patron’s slaves, her head was shaved bald, and she wore a purple wrap around her flattened forehead. Those born into servitude had the same sloped foreheads, an easy deformation to manufacture and impossible to hide. Slaves often bore the deformity as a badge of pride; newly conquered people or those plunged into servitude by debt or misfortune weren’t so marked and were treated with more distrust. But flatheads like Rainaa surrounded the Patron and his family like loyal, well-prized dogs. The Patron thought them perfectly tame.

It was a foolish complacency, Maralah knew. She had been a slave, a long time ago, and trusted not one word or expression people like Rainaa tried to sell her.

In truth, Maralah had known the Dhai were coming three weeks before, when Taigan sent word of their acceptance of his terms and told her he had a possible omajista. But she had been in the middle of burning the fields behind her during the hasty retreat of their last remaining army in the west. When she shared the news with her Patron that they had lost all but three hundred soldiers, the Dhai scholars were the last thing on her mind. Not for the first time, she wished the Dhai were some fearsome people they could hire as mercenaries, not bookmaking philosophers.