As Rialus sat on the windowsill telling himself this, his servant, Fingel, approached him. The backless sandals she wore audibly smacked the bottoms of her feet with each step. The sound had annoyed him at first, until he understood it was the only sound she ever willingly made. She never spoke a word unless it was required, a silent servant who announced her presence only with the sound of her feet. She was lovely to look upon. At first he thought her beautiful despite the fact that she had wire whiskers in her cheeks and tattooed bands under her light eyebrows, but before long he began to suspect these things added to her beauty, strange as that seemed to him. She looked to be Meinish by birth, had that race’s pale skin and straw-blond hair. Thin featured, delicate, with a slightly upturned nose and a slim body that nevertheless drew his eyes back again and again to the contours beneath her simple shift: she was nothing like his top-heavy Gurta, but that made it easier to admire her without being pricked by conscience or memory. She was quite distracting, really, all the more so for being so cold and detached.

Speaking in her usual dead tones, Fingel said, “His magnificence, Devoth of the Lvin, summons you.” She held out the small marker of carved silver that proved it.

“Does he?” Rialus took the marker and rubbed his finger across the Lvin emblem embossed on it. “What do you think would happen if I didn’t go? Told him I was busy?”

Fingel stood, no expression animating her features, as if her mind were blank and she had not heard him speak. It was her customary expression. She had looked at him directly only once. Early on, he inadvertently spoke to her in the Meinish tongue. It just happened, a flashback to his years spent in Cathgergen, brought on by the racial purity of her features. She raised her gray eyes and studied him, the look on her face the sad, sympathetic expression one might fix upon a child with a damaged mind. And that was it. She turned away and never, as far as Rialus could remember, looked him in the face again. Her constant silence prompted him only to blather more than usual.

“Am I important enough to him now that he would tolerate insolence?” he asked. “I should be. Where would he be without me? I’m his expert on the Known World. Perhaps,” he added, offering a faint invitation to conspiracy with his tone and grin, “we should tell him I’m not well. A headache perhaps. What think you of that?”

The girl could have been asleep with her eyes open.

Even a beauty like you can get tiresome, Rialus said silently, though he did not mean it. Aloud, he acquiesced, “Fine. I’ll meet with his magnificence.”