“What?” Baru stared over her shoulder. Ulyu Xe stood there like part of the night, a soft suggestion of easy brushstrokes, drawn in the same motion as the wind. Aurora light teased her shoulders and brow.

“Some people are like that,” Xe said. “Death arouses them. In Aurdwynn there’s erotica about people who’ve been sentenced to death, and the wild things they do.”

“That’s not my taste.” Her teeth were chattering. “Oh Devena, the weather’s turned, hasn’t it?”

“We could fuck for warmth, if you want.”

Baru laughed. “There’s a perfectly good house over there.”

“It’s full of people you don’t like as much as me.”

“Yeah,” Baru grunted, scraping at the boot stores on her ankles, “you and me, best of friends, there’s a picture.”

“I thought that was why you’d called me to your tent at Haraerod.”

“To be best of friends?”

“To fuck. Men and women knew me for my companionship. I was spoken of by the lonely.”

“Oh. No, I had a lot on my mind.”

“You’ll always have a lot on your mind, Your Majesty.”

“It’s true.” Baru laughed, too cruelly. “It’s true. Some day…”

Ulyu Xe shifted and stretched, very powerfully, as if arching for the surface of a clear cool pond. Baru looked at her body, wanting it, wishing she lived in a place where she could want without fear.

“Wait a moment,” she said. “Are you actually propositioning me?”

“You shouldn’t spend so much time inside yourself.” Xe shrugged, her arms still raised, shoulders taut. Baru had been ignoring her body’s interests: now she could not. That thrill like a plucked cord. “You’re never here. And I’ve been lonely, and I know you like women. So.”

Baru stopped scraping herself dry. “Huh,” she said. “I mean—no offense intended—but we’ve just met. Or—only just gotten acquainted, at least.”

“Sometimes that’s the best time. Later we might detest each other.”

“This seems a bit like you were put up to it.”

“You were with her last,” Xe said, and this, most of all, rang of truth. “She left herself on you. I miss her too, you know.”

Baru felt a sharp somatic pop, painful and yet correct, like her jaw snapping into place after a bad yawn. Somehow she was abruptly more fleshy. A rush of guilt followed, as if by putting her eyes on Ulyu Xe she had endorsed the pornographic narrative of divers as dolphin-fucking whores, and then after that came a lash of self-reproachment for immediately leaping to such an ugly topic. And then finally a skin-prickling terror. They had only just spoken of death. And now a proposition. Why must those always come together?