‘Tomorrow,’ Chel said, chasing a spongy lump around his platter with a hunk of hard, dark bread, ‘might I do some work in the gardens?’

Laralim looked up from her reading. The light in her chamber was low, a scattering of candles supplementing the stick at the small table’s centre, and she was squinting more than normal. She mulled his request, and he could almost hear the ticking of her calculations.

‘An unusual request,’ she said. ‘Most boys your age are engaged in field-work or training. I’d have thought the latter more in your interest.’ The corner of her mouth twitched, a fleeting half-smile. ‘Was there any reason in particular?’

Concentrate, react correctly. He fidgeted and looked away, down at his food, then up at the candles on the high tables by the door, doing his best to manufacture a blush. His thoughts jumped inexorably to Rasha, her plump cheeks, her nervous smile, and he found the heat rising in his cheeks was anything but affected.

‘I would like to, er, get my hands dirty.’ Too much?

Her smile returned, reinforced, that familiar look of indulgence lighting her tired face. ‘I will speak to Banu, see what can be done.’ She shuffled the thick papers, holding the uppermost closer to the candlelight.

‘Thank you, Auntie.’

‘It will do you good to make some friends,’ she said, eyes still on the paper, her smile undimmed.

***

Rasha’s look of surprised delight at his appearance was almost reward enough. She stood with a clutch of other girls of varying ages, the morning’s planting laid out on canvas before them in the slanting and dappled early sunlight. Chel recognized the other girl who’d brought him water that first night, whispering with Rasha behind a cupped hand, their faces alive with giggling gossip. He felt immediately ridiculous, his cheeks burning anew in the frosty morning air, chiding himself for his stupidity in thinking this would be a good idea. Is this my undoing, he thought, the defeat that derails our great scheme? A dearth of nerve in the face of the judgement of teenage girls?

It was the Urbu behind him, since named as Mero, who bumped him forward and drove him to his fate. Too nervous to speak, he nodded silent greeting to the girls, whose reactions varied from excited grins to outright alarm. Mero kept him to one side, away from the others, as Banu the overseer gave them their directions for the day’s efforts and left them to it. Chel nodded along, collected a wooden trowel and a small sack of plantings, and followed the others. Nobody spoke to him directly, not even Mero, who offered nothing in the way of help and guidance.

As the sun crept upwards through the cobalt sky, bathing the gardens in a long-missed amber warmth, Chel dropped to his knees and began to dig.

***

‘You’re not going deep enough.’