Zezili moved past the curtained waiting area and into the long rectangular room where a dozen hairdressers worked nimbly at the shoulders of their clients – twisting, clipping, rolling, and burning hair. The lacquered silver mirrors that stretched across both long walls were a familiar design, each infused with the emerald essence of Tira. Zezili walked past the open-air stations to the back, where gauzy curtains gave the clientele a bit more privacy.

“I’ve got a question for you,” Zezili said.

Her mother raised her gaze from her own image in the mirror and squinted at Zezili. Her feet did not quite touch the floor. She scrunched her plump, lined face as if she’d tasted something rotten. “A year of silence, and you come to me for favors?” She clucked her tongue and waved at her hairdresser. The hairdresser was as old as her mother – pushing toward sixty. Zezili had known her since she was a child.

“We’ll need a private room, Haodatia,” Zezili’s mother said, and then, to Zezili, “won’t we?”

Haodatia ducked her head and went to prepare a room. Zezili’s mother sat solidly in the padded seat, half her hair dampened with agave and rolled into tight curls at the front, bound in string, and the back knotted in triangles of paper that had already been heated to set the curls. The un-papered portion of her hair hung down to the middle of her back, waiting to be rolled and sewn into place with the rest. Zezili found the elaborate hairstyles exhausting, but her mother hadn’t let her cut her hair until she was fourteen, due to concerns about how it would upset their social standing.

Now Zezili stood before her in a dirty padded tunic, her stringy, tangled hair pulled back into a simple tail, blood and dirt smeared across her boots. If the whole town hadn’t known who she was, she expected she’d have been booted from the city limits the moment she began down the spiraling road to the temple.

“You should grow out your hair,” her mother said. “You look like a peasant.”

Zezili chose to ignore that and her mother’s challenging stare. They gazed at one another in the mirror until Haodatia returned.

“It’s ready, mistress,” Haodatia said.

She led them to one of the two private rooms at the rear of the salon. The wooden partitions were latticed at the top, letting in air and light but muffling conversation. Haodatia had lit two additional lamps to give her light to work by.

Haodatia took up another set of paper triangles and began looping the next roll of her mother’s hair.

“I hear you’re murdering slaves now,” her mother said. “How uplifting.”

“How do you destroy a mirror?” Zezili asked.

Her mother raised her brows. “Really? You came all this way for that?”