“Yes, Mistress,” Teia said fervently. There was no trace of guile in her.

Was she a good liar? Aglaia had asked. Teia was a slave. Of course she was a good liar.

“Oh, I almost forgot. Your second reward.” Aglaia Crassos rummaged through a little jewelry box. “You are to wear this at all times, understood?”

“Yes, Mistress.” Teia had no idea what she was talking about.

Lady Crassos handed her a slender, pretty gold necklace with a little vial dangling from it. Seeing the puzzled look in Teia’s eyes, Lady Crassos merely smiled broadly and left.

As Gaeros helped her dress, eliciting gasps and grunts and grinding teeth as cloth slid over inflamed skin, Teia heard the harpy noisily rutting next door, cries of passion not unlike pain. When Teia was all dressed and her tears dried, Gaeros gently took her tightly balled fist in his hand to take the necklace and put it on her.

With difficulty, Teia unclenched her fist and surrendered the vial. A vial of olive oil.

Chapter 43

Kip held a book open across one arm and rubbed his forehead, rubbed his eyes. He’d discovered a little trick to help his concentration. He was standing at the window, and now he closed the book, keeping a finger tucked in to hold his place. He looked left and right. No one was in sight. He turned the book over; its cover was bright blue, drafter’s blue.

Blue sluiced through him, starting at his eyes, and cleared away every obstruction to logic: weariness, emotion, even pain from sitting scrunched. Kip breathed out and let the blue go. He grabbed another book, on the fauna of old Ruthgar when it was called Green Forest. It was actually a pretty interesting book, but he’d grabbed it for its cover as well: drafter’s red. The primary colors—not in the sense artists used the term, but in the drafter’s sense, the colors that were closest to their luxin counterparts—were endlessly popular. Kip looked at the cover and drafted a bit of red. It blew air on the dying sparks of his passion for learning about the cards. He set the book down. Grabbed orange. A thin tendril of that helped him be more aware of how objects related. He wasn’t doing any of these colors perfectly, he knew. To be counted a drafter of a particular color, you had to be able to craft a stable block of its luxin. Kip couldn’t do that. He could draft only green and blue. The sub-red had been a fluke, just that once. He’d taken the test. He was a bichrome.

But what he could do was pretty darn useful. He opened his book again and kept reading.

Over the last two weeks, he felt like he’d made a lot of progress learning Nine Kings. Now he had a good sense of the basic strategies—it was, after all, only a game. There were whole reams of information he could simply ignore as well—strategies when playing more than one opponent, game variants played using fewer cards or more, ways to wager money, drafts from common piles. All unnecessary for him.

Then, at some point, he had a realization that he’d learned basic strategy, but in studying accounts of great games, he still didn’t understand why players wouldn’t play their best cards immediately—and with a whoosh like drafting fire, the metagame opened up. Counters that he’d figured were unimportant, perhaps vestigial from the ancient versions of the game, suddenly came into play. Strategies to thin the opponent’s deck. Theories as to how to balance play styles when addressing decks of certain colors. It became a game of mathematics, managing piles of numbers and playing odds. Playing against a certain deck in a certain situation, your opponent would have a one in twenty-seven chance of having the perfect card to stop you. If he played Counter-Sink now (and he was playing logically), you could infer that he didn’t have it.

He walked up to the librarian with the huge black halo of hair, Rea Siluz, and handed her back the basic strategy book she’d told him to memorize. “Metagame,” he said.

She grinned. She had beautiful, full lips. “That was quick.”

“Quick? That took me weeks!”

“The next step shouldn’t take you so long.” She handed him a lambskin-bound book. “Hang in there with this one. It’s a bit dry.”

Kip took the book. She’d said the last one was interesting. If that had been interesting and this was dry… But he forgot his complaint as soon as he thumbed open the book. “What’s this?” he asked.

The writing in the book was odd, blocky, legible, but unnaturally cramped. And unnaturally even. Every letter looked like every other letter, whether it was at the beginning of the word, the middle, or the end.

“It’s an Ilytian book. Not more than five years old.” She glowed, genuinely excited. “They’ve figured out how to copy books with a machine. Think of it! Apparently it’s hideously difficult to make the first copy, but after that, they can make hundreds of copies. Hundreds! In a few days! The Ilytian scribes are up in arms, afraid their craft will go extinct, but the goldsmiths and clockmakers are flocking to it. They say even tradesmen own books in Ilyta now.”

Strange. There was no personality to it. No human hand had inscribed these lines. It was lifeless, everything the same. No extra space after a difficult sentence to give a reader time to grapple with the implications. No space in the margins for notes or illuminations. No particular care taken on a memorable line or passage to highlight it for a tired reader. Only naked ink and the unfeeling stamp of some mechanical roller. Even the smell was different.

“I think I’m going to get bored even faster,” Kip said. “It makes a book so… tedious.”

“It’s going to change the world.”

Not to something better. “Can I ask something rude?” Kip asked.

“Generally when you preface a question that way, no, you shouldn’t,” Rea Siluz said.

Kip tried to figure out a more diplomatic way to ask if she was spying on him. He looked up, thinking. “Um, then… do lists of the books students are reading get passed on?”

“If librarians wish to keep their jobs, absolutely. Sometimes we neglect to write down all the titles, or miss things, however.”

“Ah. Can you miss that I’ve moved on to this volume?”

“Want someone to underestimate your skills, huh?” she asked.

“I don’t know if it’s possible to underestimate my skill at this point,” Kip said. “I’m hoping my skill takes a leap sometime soon and surprises everyone. Including myself.”

“If you want to take a leap, you have to start playing.”

Kip opened his hands, helpless.

“I’ll teach you,” she said. “At the end of my shift, I can stay late for an hour or two. I’ll bring decks.”

So now, a week later, he was waiting for Rea to come play against him as she had every day.

She came out and gestured Kip to follow her to one of the side rooms. “I’ve figured out your problem,” she said.

“I’m not smart enough for this game?” Kip asked.

She laughed. She had a nice laugh, and Kip was nicely infatuated with her. Orholam, was he fickle or what? But the women here had been a handful of heavenly beads nicer to him than the girls back home. He wondered if things had been unfairly bad before because he’d had the baggage of his mother back home—or if they were unfairly good now because he had the father he had. He couldn’t tell—and he never would. He was who he was, and nothing could change it, nothing could tell him how things would have been if his parents had been different, normal.