Page 45 of Sword Dance

“So what do you do now,” said Damiskos, “when you’re not—I mean, back in Boukos, what do you do?”

“Dance, mostly.” Varazda smiled. “In all the best households. I’m terribly in demand. Of course they all know who I am—I don’t pretend to be anyone’s property—but you’d be surprised how much people take you for granted, no matter how fashionable or famous you are, when you’re the entertainment.”

“And you spy on them?” Damiskos couldn’t keep the delight out of his voice.

“It sounds so vulgar, when you put it like that,” said Varazda affectedly. Damiskos snorted. “I can’t tell you what I really do, First Spear—you are a foreign citizen, you work for the Phemian army. I’ve already told you more than I should. But you have got the general idea.”

“And … it’s satisfying work? You enjoy it?”

“Enormously. It pays well, too. I own my house and support my family in reasonable style.”

“Wonderful,” Damiskos said warmly, instead of, “Family? How … What … Family?”

Varazda looked at him for a moment. “Let me show you something,” he said finally.

He rummaged in his luggage and brought out something wrapped in a cloth. He unwrapped it and held out a large, flat shell with a miniature painting on the inside: a half-length portrait of a smiling little girl with dark brown skin and black hair in two stubby braids.

“She’s beautiful,” said Damiskos, smiling up from the portrait at Varazda.

“She’s my daughter.”

Damiskos looked back down at the picture. “What’s her name?”

“Remi. She’s three.”

There was a long silence. Damiskos realized Varazda was waiting for him to ask something—“How did you get her?” or “What happened to her real parents?”—and hoping that he wouldn’t. But giving him lots of time, just to make sure.

“Thank you for showing me,” Damiskos said.

Varazda wrapped the picture up and replaced it in his luggage. “What about you?” he said ambiguously.

“I don’t have any children.”

“You’re married, though?”

“No. No, I can’t afford to marry. Not that there’s any woman sitting around waiting for me to be able to afford it.”

“I see.” He looked faintly surprised, but whether by the lack of a wife or because he had assumed Damiskos made a decent salary, Damiskos wasn’t sure.

After a moment, Varazda said, “The other people in my household are—I call them family, but we’ve no official relation, we’re technically friends who live together. Yazata keeps house for us, and Tash is studying to be a sculptor. They’re the other two eunuchs who were freed at the same time I was.”

“I see.”

“I don’t have a … I mean, under Boukossian law, I think probably I could marry, but it’s not something I ever plan on doing, and I don’t have a lover.” He cleared his throat delicately. “Not that that’s relevant.”

It struck Damiskos as being extremely relevant; or rather, the fact that Varazda had thought to mention it just now, in a strangely hesitant way that was very different from his usual manner, that seemed monumentally relevant.

“I enjoyed myself last night,” Damiskos said.

Varazda went still. The comfortable mood of a moment ago was gone. Damiskos almost swore aloud at his own stupidity.

“Did you.”

“Well, the parts that were enjoyable. I enjoyed watching you dance—I enjoyed that a great deal. And after … I mean, the business with the students was touch and go and pretty ghastly, but even still, I … I wished that we had been properly alone in that hut.”

“Oh. You got over your disgust, did you? Enough to enjoy yourself?”

“Disgust? What?”