Page 59 of Beds and Blades

Caen grinned and reached for the vial.

She tipped the veilshade into my deeproot. For an instant, the liquid blackened where the drops struck, spreading through the cup. Then the darkness thinned, unwound, and vanished into the rest of it. A moment later, the cup looked exactly as it had before.

“Take it daily,” she said.

“In your tea, water, or your deeproot. Three drops. It has no taste. Begin today.”

She looked at me with the level attention she brought to everything that mattered.

“You will know when you are ready to stop taking it. That decision requires nothing from me.”

I picked up the cup. I drank. It tasted exactly like deeproot. Nothing more.

I was skeptical about whether any of this would actually work. Then again, I had watched wounds close under Caen’s hands. At some point, skepticism had to account for the available evidence.

“Your expression,” Caen said, “suggests that your belief is still catching up to your observations.”

“That is accurate.”

“Your skepticism is noted,” she said. “And respected.”

“I have updated my priors since arriving in this world,” I said. “Wounds close under your hands. The claiming bond carries emotion in real time. The ring glows gold. Your pendant reads emotional states.”

I set down the cup.

“At a certain point, the weight of the evidence becomes difficult to argue with.”

“Yes,” she said. “It does.”

She picked up her own cup. We sat for a moment in the warm, companionable silence of two women who had just resolved a practical problem.

***

I looked out the window.

The sun was still high. There was time. Enough time to continue the conversation and address at least one of my remaining fourteen hundred and ninety-eight questions.

“Earlier,” I said, “when I mentioned Earth, I could tell that you recognized the name.”

Caen’s hand stilled around her cup. It was a small thing. Barely anything. But I noticed.

“How do you know about Earth?” I asked.

She drew in a slow breath.

“Because you are not the first woman to come from Earth to Mytharo.”

For a moment, the room lost all sound. The fire still worked in the hearth. The ambient activity of the garrison outside was present. But inside my head, everything went very quiet.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “What?”

“You are not the first and you will not be the last,” Caen said.

I stared at her.

“I need you to understand that I am going to require significantly more than that.”

Caen set down her cup with care, as if she had known this question would come and had been deciding for days how much truth to place in my hands.