That was all. Mm. I've watched her gentle a male twice her weight down out of a standing rage with that exact sound, and here she was spending it on me.
"I didn't come about you." She drew a folder from under her arm and laid it on the desk between us. "I came because somethings have to change. Before the next storm rolls through and we do all of this again with a worse ending."
I opened it braced for the usual information: a stack of hopeful women, ages and intake notes, and the quiet cruelty of being asked to choose among them.
They weren't brides.
I turned a page, and another, and not one of them was a bride. Humans, yes, a whole file of them. But the notes beside the faces ran to training and letters after names, to clinics and case histories and the long Earth words for the work of putting a mind back together after something has taken it apart.
"Healers," Nezara said, when I didn't. "Of the mind. I want to bring three in to start. For the worst of them. The ones the pits left in pieces a wife and a warm house were never going to reach."
I knew the shape of it before she finished, because I'd heard it before, in this hall, out of a blacksmith who'd backed me into a corner and all but ordered me to find someone who could mend the part of these men that fists never could. Put them on the town's coin, he'd said. Make it a thing a male can walk into with no one calling him soft for it. I'd told him I'd look into it. I'd meant it the way I mean most things I say to Lorkin, which is to say I'd fully intended to forget it by supper.
And here it came back through my door in Nezara's hand, with a plan attached and that immovable patience of hers behind it.
"Three," I said.
"To begin."
I looked at the faces in the folder. Strangers, every one, names that hung off nothing yet, women and men who'd cross the whole dark to a town full of men who flinched at their own hands. It was a good plan. It was, I was fairly sure, the plan thatfinally made the whole grim experiment worth its invoice, and I would sign it. I'd known I would sign it since the second page.
I told myself the thing turning over under my ribs was only that, the ordinary weight of something this size coming down on the town. I'm good at telling myself things. It's most of the job.
One of the faces I held on a beat longer than the rest, and couldn't have told you why, and made myself turn past.
"Send for them," I said.
She rose, gathering nothing, because she'd brought nothing she meant to carry back out. At the door, she paused.
"Get a fresh cloth for that eye," she said, and left me with a folder full of incoming humans and a thing Lorkin had thrown at me weeks ago in this same hall, half in fury, that I'd filed under nonsense and that had chosen exactly now to surface. Some small thing'd come off a transport one day, he'd said, no taller than my chest, and knock me clean off my hooves.
I shut the folder. My eye throbbed in time with my pulse. Down in the empty hall the dust kept turning, gold and slow, over the boards that had held a feast once and would hold whatever came next, whatever it turned out to be.
I really was going to need a fresh cloth.
16
CHLOE
A month into being a wife,I'd learned that the best seat at Kazan and Maisie's long table was the one wedged between my husband and the cider.
I had a hand on each. Lorkin took up the whole left side of me, warm through his shirt, one heavy arm slung along the back of my chair. The cider sat on my right and kept not being empty, because every time it got low Maisie reached down the table and topped it without breaking whatever she was saying, the way she'd been topping my cup since the worst night of my life on her porch. Now she did it over a board of roasted figs and somebody's terrible joke, and I let her. It didn't mean anything sad at all.
"It does not have horns," Kazan said. Flat. Final. The way he said most things.
"It has little ones." Zarcal had both elbows on the table and a glass of water in front of him, and he was grinning around the whole argument. "Nubs. They count."
"A goat is not a bull."
"I'm only saying there's a family resemblance, and you've all got the same look when you want something off somebody's plate." Zarcal forked a fig off Korfas's board to prove it. Korfas let him. Korfas, who was the size of a doorway and had said maybe nine words all evening, watched his fig disappear with the patience of a male who'd been losing food to Zarcal since before any of them were free.
"That's mine," Korfas said. Words ten and eleven.
"It was an offering. To the resemblance." Zarcal ate it.
I laughed so hard I had to put my forehead on Lorkin's shoulder, and he rumbled under me, that low sound I felt more than heard. I thought I'd have traded every dinner I ever sat through on Earth for this one loud, crowded table.
"Where's Remmen?" I asked because the table was a chair short.
