The Book of the Flame (working title) Vol 1:

They don't call it magic, but it's surely a miraculous art by which a rock yields iron, that iron transmutes to steel and the steel forms a sword.

	Hematite mined from the lower reaches of the World's Wall mountains bore a well deserved reputation for purity throughout the West, as the friendly burrads of Nok-Hein and Heiras referred to themselves.  Accordingly, merchants laded their wagons with barrels of ore and caravanned south from rural, poor Nok-Hein on the widened and sometimes well-patrolled new trade highways southward toward the wealthier burrad of Heiras.  At New Lumbertown a small fee rented cranes to transfer the heavy barrels from wagon to barges made of freshly-cut planking.   Bargemasters shepherded their cargo down the Greenway to the wide valley through which ran the vast Mambut River.
	A few days later, some barges concluded their brief career on the water at the quay in Neibol where the barge's lumber was to be sold.  On docks flourishing in such healthy ill-repute, wise merchants hired guild longshoremen to unload their wares and paid the customary 'tip' for protection of their wares to be passed to the local gangsters.  A small crowd of alarmingly eager urchins were always on hand to roll the barrels up the switchback to the warehouse district for an eighth part apiece.  Most goods sold easily in Neibol, a thriving trade city as it was at the nexus of the upper Mambut and the eponymous Neibol River that drained the Black Range.
	The very highest grade of ore in barrels stamped with the buran seal still had a ways further to go beyond the farriers and potmakers of Smithy Row.  Neibol's old walls sat on the promontory that was the northeastern-most point of a long spur out from the mountains that ringed the whole southern sky.  The High Gate opened onto a road that followed the ridgetop for a bell or two until it split in two against a sudden rise.  Like most other traffic from Neibol, loads of hematite took the southern fork and rounded the low reaches of a snow-capped mountain, climbing slowly to meet a high glen fronted by a fortress that served also as the buran capitol.
	Meikhei was a very old fortress, its foundations built in the ancient style by forgotten engineers for equally forgotten reasons.  To the uninitiated the east end of the glen was remarkable in its low, angular ridges, zigging out and back like the points of a gigantic star, but of course they weren't ridges in any natural sense:  the illusion rested on a thin layer of grassy soil obscuring  improbably large megaliths formed into immense ramparts.  Set back a little ways from those and describing a more regular line rose vertical walls of the modern style.  Through a gap in the old and a gate in the new, caravans passed through the walls into Meikhei's settlement.  The sheds for coke and wood weren't far from that for the ore, though happily for merchants who shepherded the best Geileshall ore such a long way, the latter brought a much better price.  At the customary rate of  a coin and two pence per box-weight of ore, the magic of commerce transmuted a wagonload of prime hematite into a purse containing a hundred or so gold squares stamped with an image at least vaguely reminiscent of the Grand Arimisan Bur, who theoretically ruled above all men on the continent of Muginat from his distant capitol in The Crossing.
	The Heiran Bur who presided from the Keep, however, represented her preeminence decidedly more with steel than gold, and so the ore destined to become non-theoretical swords approached still closer.  Meikhei's famed but malodorous forge complex had long ago outgrown its welcome near the corridors of power, pushing its newer works and the sheds far downwind from everything, but the old weapon-works had so far avoided expulsion by erecting a towering chimney to carry away its fumes.  So, up the motte to the Keep the ore rode, in wheelbarrows pushed by forge boys judged strong enough for the work but not yet selected for apprenticeship.  Beyond the outer gates the wheelbarrow travelled up a stretch of flagstone road with an expanse of gardens on one hand opposing dog runs and stables on the other.  Forge boys noticed no irony in their long trudges through the Keep of Meikhei's outer bailey: to them the word 'keep' had always and only referred to this vast edifice and its demesne that pedants of court Arimisan might explain was only acquired its diminutive sobriquet in comparison to the fortress on which it sat.
	Around the massive base of those huge old walls the barrows wended, across a smaller bailey and past the Grand New Furnace, which was actually the oldest and smallest of its brethren but had retained the name by which it had achieved fame.  Past the old stone horse troughs that other boys of the yard kept filled now as firefighting cisterns, the barrels came at last to their final destination, waiting for inspection in a neat row to one side of a heavy door of mountain oak, embossed with the seal of the Buran Forge and leading to the modest but comfortable apartment of the Master filling the space between two buttresses.
Master Dubei, occupant of that suite for the four years since he’d become a widower, huddled with an ambitious journeyman who had won his way to a lesson in an antechamber to the hallowed Furnace itself, learning the use of a contraption the Master had invented to weld steel blanks more efficiently than any man in the North had seen before.  Thus propagated one more change among many that crowded the last two-hundred years of Muginat, but for all that the proliferation of difference had bewildered those whose lives it altered, the changes were but a sprinkle presaging a flood, or perhaps an ember pregnant with conflagration.

“Eleihas, put that down before you hurt yourself,” the Mastersmith told the seven year old in the same High Arimisan as he used with educated men.
“You let Bedr swing swords.”  Eleihas didn’t put the sword down; the scamp knew her father’s first ‘no’ was never final.  Harik winced at this latest interruption of the day’s work, including as it did a technique in which he had been waiting to demonstrate competence some months now.  It was infuriating that he must tolerate the girl’s impertinence because her father the Mastersmith’s iron sense of discipline struck only softly where his children were concerned.
“Yes, and if Drend doesn’t mind his son lopping his own fingers off, it’s not my place to say.  I’d rather you grow old with your hands intact,” the mastersmith reasoned with his whelp, a moderateness he would never have assumed toward a journeyman in error, much less an apprentice.
She waved the sword about a bit more as Master Dubei stood at the anvil with his eyebrows raised, watching her.  The Master’s gaze, a lance of which even other Masters dreaded to become the object, eventually made her put it down.  For the moment.
A quarter bell later they finally had the steel pressed and ready for the fold and Master Dubei pronounced it ‘fair work’ - not an easy judgement to win.  Dubei directed Harik, “Clean that with the scraping stone and the wetcloth before you pack it in the charcoal.  Have the new boy help you.  Does he have a sootcatch he can wear?  Make sure he wears it.  I’ll not have this place looking like a farrier’s.”
He turned. “Now, where has my never obedient daughter gotten to?”
Harik shrugged.  He had been watching the Master’s technique for working the steel flat, as he was a journeyman, not a nanny.  Harik held the common view that despite his deservedly-severe reputation, Master Dubei was a sentimental sort of fool not to take a compliant young bride to care for his children and give him another son.  It was all very well that he had been fond of his wife, but one would expect such a learned man to understand that females were fungible.  With his wealth and status, he’d have little difficulty finding a pleasant, reliable girl to keep him company and tend his house even if he didn’t wish to remarry.
Harik followed the Master’s eyes to the sword rack.  An empty sword rack, he noted, as his master sighed.
“Tell Master Kor I’ll see him in the commons for noonmeal.”
“She’s run off again, eh? You’d best put her to chores mending your clothes or suchlike.” Harik commented.  It was forward, true, but the Master seemed well enough pleased with Harik’s work to allow it.
“You’d best hold your tongue, young master, until you have children of your own to look after.” Dubei responded, smiling indulgently as he fingered one of the un-patched holes in his work shirt.
“Me?  I’d put my wife to look…” too late Harik realized his slip, cursing himself for his recklessness.  Though the Master regarded genial aspersions from journeymen as a sign of confidence in one’s work, reminders that the matrimonial loop the big man still wore referred to a woman four years dead sometimes made the Master quite unreasonable.  Harik had learned this early in his tutelage, simultaneously discovering that the Master could lift him off the ground with one hand when he was incensed.
“I’m sorry Master, I meant…” Harik began placatingly, but the Master stopped him with a curt shake of his head.
“I know,” the Master said heavily.  “Tell Kor.”  The hulking artisan ducked under the doorway out of the foundry, hunched as if he labored under a weight.

Dubei lumbered about the workyard looking for his mischievous imp of a daughter.  She wasn’t often better at hiding than he was at looking, seeing as he had run the same grounds as a child, but he had enough respect for her powers of mischief that he took his time and listened.  In the meantime, he gave cursory inspection to the goings on.  As master over the Buran Forge of Meikhei, he was ultimately responsible for all the work being done in the Forge itself as well as that done in the workyards about it.  As he moved amongst the tables and machines, the young men working at them straightened their posture and made a show of focusing on their tasks.
Finally Dubei reached the carpenter Ehrald, his chief woodworker.  They’d known each other since Ehrald had been an orphan apprentice looking out for a then-scrawny apprentice candidate.  Time brought about an exchange in positions, as Dubei became extraordinary both in size and professional achievement before he’d celebrated a score of Meet Feasts.  Upon his melancholy appointment as Mastersmith, Dubei had likewise elevated Ehrald to chief woodworker for the forge, retiring Janisk at’Jurisk, who accepted his pension with mildly-palsied equanimity.  The mutual debt was deep and welcome, a comfort of belonging for two men without families beyond their children and the Forge.
“Have you seen my little one?” Dubei asked, thumbs hooked into the hemp cord looped around his waist from which hung various tools of his trade.
“I think I saw her skulking off thataway,” Ehrald pointed behind the woodshed vaguely, “Where is your boy?  Shouldn’t she be looking after him?”
“Irona has him with her youngest.”
“Ah.  Your shirt has so shortage of holes, mastersmith,” he commented with a smile and a poke at Dubei’s threadbare clothes, “You dote on her too much.  You’ll spoil her for the hardworking life.”
Dubei waved him off, “I’ll have none of that today, Ehrald.  I’ve already heard it from Harik, the cad.  Your boy Kel is doing much better, by the way.  His cauldron block fit well this time and doesn’t rock.”  His palm thumped against Ehrald’s shoulder in congratulations and he moved on toward the woodshed.
As he expected, he found her heaving the sword in lurching arcs behind the tallest pile of lumber as if to hew slow, unobservant enemies arranged passively on each quarter.  She was turned away and so did not notice him as he took a thick length of soft pine and leaned toward her.
When she next drew back, the tip of her appropriated blade embedded suddenly in something solid yet yielding.
She looked up through her sweaty locks, eyes wide in surprise and dread to see who she had hit.  But then she recognized her towering father holding the wood in which she had buried her erstwhile weapon.
“You’re going to hurt yourself, swinging that so hard.  You will strain your arm.  Your extra chores will be that much more arduous with your arm strained.”
Eleihas immediately looked contrite.  She doubtless wasn’t sure what ‘arduous’ meant, but she caught the important implication: she was going to be punished with extra chores.
“But teikhti, I was just testing the new steel.”
“Is that what you were doing?  Regardless, I told you not to,” he saw her mouth beginning to move in protest, “and I have already given my reasons why not.”
“I have not hurt myself.”
“Yet.  You have been lucky.”
“I am careful.”
He held up the pine plank with the sword still stuck in it.  “Oh? And what might have happened, had I not been watching where I was going?  Also, you cannot assume all the swords on that rack have their pins set in the handle. You could give it a strong swing and the blade might fly from the hilt and hit someone.”  Not likely, as the wrap held the wooden blocks tightly enough to the tang even before heat soaking so that the pin was mostly superfluous, but Dubei was willing to stretch the truth a bit to drive home his warning.  “What sort of careful is that, hurting someone who has done nothing to you?”
Now she looked down at her toe scuffing the ground, and Dubei realized she was trying not to cry.
“But I didn’t mean to hurt anyone.  I just wanted to play with it.  You said a woman might carry the sword.”
	He needed to watch what he said within the child's sharp hearing.  He never could stand to hear tears threatening in her voice so he lifted her to sit on the tallest woodpile and stooped so that her downcast eyes would see he wasn't truly angry.
“I understand, my little meikta.  You must think a little.  Be careful.  A sword is not a toy to be played with.”  He pulled the blade out of the wood and examined its edge from ingrained habit.  The pristine state of the tip gratified him and further blunted his ire; she had learned at least some proper respect for fine steel if she’d kept it from hitting the dirt despite the great weight it surely was to a seven year old.  “It is a killing thing, and not for little girls.  Like the snout-nose hammer is for detail smithing, not mashing brass coins.  And my stone spike is for etching my work, not scratching your name-figures on the Kei-Bur’s flagstones.  Why don’t you play with your toys?  Like the doll given you by dowager Defiras - what is her name?”
“I’ve not given it a name.  It’s not a real person.”
Dubei was taken aback, “Of course, not really, but isn’t that what one does with a doll?  You name it as if it were a real person and pretend it is.  I thought I saw you playing with it last night.”
“I was calming the little one with it after the storm scared him.  I am not four.”  Her eyes were dry now but she still sat on the woodpile and her countenance was all stubborn pride that recalled Sunrei when defying her father.  His heart both swelled and ached at the ghost of his daughter’s mother.
Dubei lifted her from atop the pile and set her once again on her own two feet, then sat himself on his plank so that they were on a level.
“Oh, my meikta, what am I to do?  I know that you have no mother and I work long days in all seasons.  I cannot be as much a father as I owe.  But still, your first God’s year is over and before you finish another you will be a maiden looking forward to matrimony.  You should enjoy your youth when you can because you know the wife to the workingman works twice as hard.”  He looked up at her now quizzical face and he held her head between his two big hands.  “I’ll marry you as best I can, meikta, but you must keep all your fingers if you want a worthy man.  And you’ll make a difficult name for yourself if you keep acting so wild in common witness.
“But I've no wish to play the tyrant,” he continued as she seemed ready to resume her well-worn remonstrations.  “I offer you this: I'll not bar your from whatever you do, provided you stay safe, and I must punish you if you are so incautious that I hear of it from someone else.  But if I’m no angry tyrant, you had best do your extra chores without protest or argument.  Now, what do you wish to do?”
“I wish to pl... swing the sword,” she looked at the weapon that leaned now against the shed wall, “But also I wish to keep all my fingers.”
Dubei breathed a sigh of relief, but too soon.
“So I wish to learn how to be safe. And all about swords and armor and horseshoes and... and...”  She struggled for more examples.  “And cauldrons and the mysteries of steel.”
Dubei threw up his hands theatrically. “Does my only daughter wish to toil in a forge, a spinster who knows no rest and no children?  What a cruel joke is this.”
“If it’s what I wish, would you stop me?” she was defiant now, challenging his very ability to oppose her, and he could not help but laugh.
“Ah, no.  For surely the greatest wizards and most renowned officers in all Muginat could not hope to stand against my meikta!  And I am only ‘teikhti.’”  He hugged her to him, partly because he loved her, and partly because memories of Sunrei were impaling his chest and about to irrigate his vision in front of his daughter.
“I can’t bear this any longer.  We’ll discuss this another time…”
“Do I still have extra chores tomorrow?” she asked, still clear eyed and insistent when he had let her go.
He paused for a moment, looking at the sword as it leaned against the pile.  “Yes.  I said so and I’ll not go back on that.”	
“Then may I get my chore’s worth?”
“What?”
“If I have to do extra chores anyway, then can I pla... practice more with the sword, just a little bit?”
Dubei considered this novel argument a moment, and snorted, “You should be the Kei-Bur’s solicitor!”  He affected an exaggerated court accent.  “I cannot think of a reason to deny you, big oaf of little skill with contracts that I am.” He continued more seriously, “But first, I’ll teach you a bit about swords and how they must be treated, as you professed to want earlier.”
Apparently the profession had been an earnest one, because Eleihas smiled victoriously.  Dubei could not help but be happy in her victory.

“A coin of sevens is how many?” Dubei asked relentlessly while Eleihas kept the pot stirred.
“Teikhti, what’s that sort of arithmetic to smithing?  You have five hammers, two anvils, a few rods of metal at a time, and a single press.  I don’t see you with fifty six of anything.”
Eleihas’ father grinned into the sweet onions he was dicing.  “I see your complaint also allowed you time to think.  Clever - cleverer if you’d used more courtly language.”
She made a face.  “Father, what has that sort of arithmetic to do with smithing?”
“Ahh, now you ask.  When I was very little, the Forge was far busier, making scores of scores of swords, scores of hundreds of bodkins, and so many rings for mail I think I could still rivet loops asleep in a blizzard.  You will be certain that when I was little, old Master Joslin’s scrivener kept careful count of the whole works when good steel was rare and precious as gold.  Today, I can use geometry alone to build my machines with all their parts in proper proportions just as the masons use it to create balanced arches and other such wonders.  Lest you think smiths are an exception, masons must track their stone much as we must account for our ingots in wartime.  How many stones can be quarried in a day?  It may be that the speed of the quarry is the slowest, and so sets the rate at which the wall goes up.  If the mason knows the figures, he can still tell his lord how long a wall would take even as the quarry gets older and slower.”
She flicked a little more salt into the stew.  “What has masonry to do with smithing?  And anyway, surely they’ve built walls before and would know the days.”
“When the wall is a new kind, what then?”
“A new kind of wall?”  That was a puzzling idea.  “Like a kind of wall they build in Muginarad?  Wouldn’t the mason have asked the Muginaradin from whom he learned it?”
Dubei shook his head, looking a little disappointed.  “Quarries everywhere are different and require new figuring.  And even more, not all new things come from the South.  Some things arrive new upon the eyes of the Gods.  In some Stonemaster’s mind is built a wall as no one has made before.  Like my press is new, as was the Furnace before it.”
The idea interested her so much she surrendered her chance to repay his comment on her grammar by pointing out the blasphemy of implying anything made by men was unknown to the Gods, who knew and saw all.  “What kind of wall?”
Dubei shrugged.  “I’m no dreamer in masonry; I have no imagination for what a new wall might be.  The point of what I’m saying - and the connection with smithing - is that if you want to know the number of something in any unfamiliar situation, you need to know the arithmetical maths as well.  In the market, in stitching, in deciding the weight of something that won’t fit on a scale, you should know arithmetic.”
Eleihas sipped at the ladle and tried to think of another objection; she hated remembering all these figures.
Dubei seemed to look at something in the air behind her for an instant, and added, “Had I understood the numbers of our finances better when I tried for mastersmith, things might have turned out differently.  Never assume any skill or knowledge to be beyond your need, Eleihas.  Never.”

“Master Olost?” the girl queried diffidently as she waited at the threshold to the polishing and finishing workshop over which he was Master.  His eyesight wasn’t so very good these days, but it was always impossible to mistake Dubei’s eldest, not least because it was otherwise a uniformly male domain.
“Yes child, what is it?”
“I... my father has said he might make me a knife of my own, if I could offer something in fair trade to others whose labor the making requires.”
“Oh, and this knife is to be polished and finished in Buran quality?” he asked her archly.  Would a girl treat such work as it deserved?  Well, if any would, this one might.
“I had hoped so, if it could be allowed.  Finished and polished blades are so beautiful,” she said sweetly with her incongruous grasp of the court tongue.
“Well, I could hardly refuse such a pretty at’Dubei,” he said, “Tell him I’d be happy to do it as a gift.”  Certainly kindness to the Mastersmith’s odd but very polite daughter was a sure way to earn his goodwill.
“If you please, Master, I think it would be best to earn such a great gift myself.”
Likely her taskmaster father had made that a condition, but he was still impressed with her unblinking insistence.  “And what do you imagine you could do in my workshop?” he asked.
“I can figure and keep records in fast hand.”  A very great skill, that, though there weren’t that many records to be kept in his workshop.  “And... perhaps I could do such apprentice work as you find convenient.”
Apprentice work?  He contemplated the gangling youth, standing close enough now that he could make out her imploring smile.  Having worked at her father’s side so much she may as well have been an apprentice of the Forge already, rather better than some of the more feckless actual apprentices.  It was also true that she wasn’t a beauty like her mother had been, to make his boys forget their fully-justified fear of her father the Mastersmith.
“Two bells a day for the season, then.  Assist Senior Haleita with the accounts on Fifthdays and before thirdweek markets.  Otherwise you’ll do as the apprentices do and take the same liberty days.”
She smiled hugely and abruptly hugged him as if this was a great gift.  It might have been, if she had been in a way to make a trade of polishing, or if her labors were to earn her room and board, but Olost was a little bemused by her gratitude under the circumstances.  “Thank you Master Olost!  I swear you won’t regret it!”
Which he did not.  Before the end he wished she might have been a boy that he could take as a journeyman, though of course if she had been, her father would already have taken her into his own trade.  A pity that the Gods bestowed the girl with her father's talent rather than her mother's comeliness. 

“Now, here is one from Junlyhon on the great southern continent.” Dubei unwrapped another sword from its oilcloth.
“It’s ruined!” exclaimed Dugei.
“No, it’s one-sided, and there aren't any annealing cracks” corrected Eleihas, pointing to the flattened back of the blade, “Very swift, I’ll wager.”  She studied the arced sword for a moment longer, “I wouldn't think it would fare as well against an officer... against a knight who knew how to wear his plate.  Perhaps this is a weapon for peasant levies?”
“But ‘Leih, it’s layer forged, and real fine.  Look at the blade,” her younger brother protested, pointing.
Eleihas looked at her father for hints at the truth, but he was impassive, waiting. “Perhaps the burrads of Junlyhon have some art of layer forging so that even peasants can own a good blade,” she suggested.
“No, that’s not the case,” Dubei said, “Just think of what you know of the Southern Continent.  You know that the all the burrads there are hot as if in Summer year-round, correct?”
Dugei and Eleihas nodded.  They had heard some of the stories, though they were never sure which were true.
“Think of wearing a heavy hauberk and plate under a summer sun that lingers all year round.  You would collapse!  Their soldiers do not wear so heavy a mail as ours.  They are also a smaller, fleeter people, I’m told, so that a fast blade serves better than a sturdy one.  Certainly it must serve them well, as their swords have been curved so for time beyond memory.”
“And what of shields?” Eleihas challenged, “What would happen if a Junlyhon officer met highwaymen with iron gilt shields?”
“I don’t think gilt shields are so valuable as a defense against muskets that southron levy men carry, so likely knights don't bother with such things.”  Dubei shrugged, “I don’t really know.  Perhaps the Master-of-Arms knows.”
“Could you ask him?” Eleihas pleaded, knowing he would.
Dubei sighed with amused resignation.  “I suppose I could if someone saw to the seams of my court pants before the Meet Feast.”
“Of course.”  She resolved to herself that she would finish it that night by candle light so that he would ask tomorrow.
“Now, I was speaking of the Junlyhon sword…”

“Master!  Master!” shouted one of the apprentices, hurtling through the works secure in the favor of the Gods who saved feckless youths from impalement or branding on the sundry dangers through which he wove.
“Yes, young rocket, what is it?” Dubei answered, feeling indulgent toward the young in light of a tremendously successful day.  He rested a proud hand on Eleihas' shoulder, silently conveying his pleasure at her astonishing talent with one of his more complex techniques.  Still shy of two God's years and he could swear she wasn't more than a winter from attempting his final secrets.  She drank them down as fast as he could share them.
“Master Dubei,” the boy puffed, yanking himself into a pose of proper attendance at the last moment, “There's a lord mag'strate here desirin' to see yourself on 'private business'.  As he's an easterner dressed real nice and looks all stuffed up, I thought he might be as someone you'd want to talk to direct like.”
“That's true, though it's not so urgent you need to risk skin and gear to tell me a few count earlier.  Present yourself to Master Harik for whatever tasks he sees fit.  Come, Eleihas, let's wash our hands.”  It would be good for her to see a negotiation now that she was older and understood accounts intimately.
“Shouldn't we wash up more than that, Teikhti?” she asked when they had taken the wax out of their ears.
“It's useful to remind them that we're busy with the Bur's work, so they count themselves fortunate to be granted the produce of our Freeman's time at any price.  We wash our hands carefully, however, because our fingers touch our works, and clean hands bespeak pristine steel.”
“Okay, father,” she agreed dubiously.  She was too honest for her own good.
“Meikhta, we have a duty to uphold the honor of the Forge.”
“And make a great deal of money,” she said wryly, but she laughed.  “Easterners certainly have enough.”
“We shall see,” he responded, happy that she was getting into the spirit of it.
Surprisingly, he wasn't the only man accompanied by a child on the cusp of adulthood, and something about the nobleman's expression caused a wave of deja-vu.
“Good afternoon, Sar,” Dubei said, nodding no more than a Master in the Bur's own Household should.
“Master Dubei?”
“Aye, Sar.”
“I am Lord Magistrate Dranuk of North Oset.  Perhaps I could discuss a family matter with you?” the man continued, cutting a glance at Eleihas.
Dubei thumped Eleihas on her shoulder.  “All family here.”
The nobleman's son looked surprised speculation at his counterpart, while his father merely nodded.  “Alright then.  I came about your daughter, who I understand is rising fourteen years.”
“What?” Dubei said sharply, startled by the conversation's bend in such a strange and unsettling direction.
“Well, not to mince words, but it's known that your late wife was a comely woman of noble birth, her father's profligacy notwithstanding.  Further, you're a man in a position to confer a considerable dowry.”
“True enough,” Dubei said, suppressing his irrational anger at having his family spoken of so practically.
“This is my own son Ceinuk.  As you can see, he's as well formed and healthy as I expect your daughter is.”
Dubei could tell Eleihas was examining the boy with interest, and certainly it wasn't just a father's partiality claiming Ceinuk was handsome.  His aristocratically dark hair was probably dyed that way, but even so he had a laudable breadth of shoulder and classic Southron features with only the barest hint of neikhin roughening across his cheeks.  He seemed to be returning Eleihas' interest as well.
“Further, Ceinuk has expectations of taking a judiciary seat of his own in not too many years.  His maternal uncle the Mussar of Kasten ails and hasn't any younger sons.  When the naming of the bench passes into the right of Ceinuk's cousin the new Lord Kasten there'll be three manors of statute to which Ceinuk will have first right when they become vacant.  I won't claim he's to preside over a rich town seat, but with a good dowry he'd be in a way to provide well no matter which office he takes.”
“I am gratified to meet you, Sar Ceinuk,” Dubei said in his most carefully correct court Arimisan, nodding in turn to the boy, “How many summers have you?”
Ceinuk seemed startled to be addressed directly.  “Me?  I'm twocoin years, Master Dubei, seventeen this winter.”
“Do you feel ready to hold office, sar, with all the responsibilities that entails?” Dubei asked him.
“Entails, Master?”
“The responsibilities attached to the manor, sar.  Do you feel ready to execute all the duties of a lord magistrate, to ensure justice for hundreds of souls?”
Ceinuk opened and shut his mouth like any apprentice caught out by a dangerous question.  Would he choose honesty, or brazen it out?  From the corner of his eye, Dubei could see that Dranuk was none too happy with this cross-examination, but his usual trepidation at having aroused the ire of his betters gave way without a fight to the rightness of testing the boy's mettle as they would no doubt insist on testing his daughter's.  The boy would give a good account of himself or he would marry someone else.
“I don't yet, S... Master Dubei, but I vow that I will be.”
“An excellent answer, young sar,” Dubei said, and clapped a pleased hand on his shoulder as he would any other of his boys who had navigated a similarly treacherous query.
“Thank you, Master Dubei!” Ceinuk said, beaming.  A very good lad, Dubei thought.
“Master Dubei, I think you forget yourself,” Dranuk put in then, looking pointedly at Dubei's hand.
“Oh no, Sar,” Dubei answered easily, “I haven't a grain of disrespect in me.  On the contrary, I congratulate you on having raised a son of such good sense.”
“I wonder if you are quite aware of the honor paid you that I'm contemplating allying an oathman's daughter with a future lord magistrate.”
“As it happens, Sar, I am aware of both that very flattering fact and the additional fact that my daughter is not nearly so common as her father.  She is every bit her mother's daughter, and any man who regarded her hand in marriage as anything less than a high honor isn't worthy of so much as kissing that hand.”  Somewhat to his own surprise, Dubei had backed the landsman some several steps rearward so that he fetched up against the Temple wall.
“Father,” Eleihas murmured urgently from just behind him, and he realized she had been tugging at the straps of his overalls
“It's okay, Eleihas, I've not taken leave of my senses,” he assured her.
“This is your daughter?  Covered in muck?” Dranuk asked incredulously.
“Yes, she helps brilliantly in the forge.  She's educated, hard working, not squeamish at all.  Why, just now she completed a flawless western fold on her own.”
“Which I doubt is the foremost skill Sar Dranuk seeks in a lady for his son, Father,” Eleihas pointed out.
Dubei waved away that irrelevance.  “My point, Sar Dranuk, is that Eleihas is a promising and capable girl who is equal to anything.  She even has better social graces than I.”  He laughed, trying to make a joke of backing the man against the wall.
Without much effect.  “I see little advantage in my son taking a laborer to wife, however industrious she may be.  Nor am I reassured that she has been taught a proper idea of her station, if she learns from your example.”
“Father,” Ceinuk remonstrated nervously.
Eleihas was tugging at Dubei's overalls again, which lack of faith irritated him now that he had a white-knuckled grip on his temper.  “Then I do not see a reason to prolong this interview, Sar Dranuk,” Dubei told the haughty landsman, who was probably as libertine and impecunious as Dubei's own noble father in law had been.  To the Dranuk's poor embarrassed son, he bowed moderately and said, “It was an honor to meet you, Sar Ceinuk.”  He turned his back, then, and shepherded his astonished daughter back inside.

Though Eleihas seemed to see the incident in the light of an entertaining tale to share with the apprentices, it worked on Dubei's conscience very uncomfortably every time he saw her laughing at her recollection of Sar Dranuk's discomfiture.  It became impossible not to contemplate how at home she was in the shop and on what easy terms she conversed with the artisans and laborers.  He had treated her as a boy because that had been the childhood he had known, and it was no wonder everyone around her had forgotten that someday she'd be a woman.  And that day wasn't so far off any more; he'd swear she hadn't been unconscious of Ceinuk's good looks.  The truth was that he was being selfish, keeping her with him so much.  Happy to run tame in the Forge she might be now, but when her mind turned at last to matrimony she'd find her fortunes hampered by his lack of foresight.  Absent Gods, his oblivious self-interest had doomed Sunrei when his ambition had driven him to accept her assurances of her good health, and now he was on a path to serving Eleihas the same, for even less benefit.  What benefit could excellence in working steel ever afford her, unless he was to keep her by his side as she aged into a spinster?
With his pleasure at her consummate skill so soured, it wasn't long until he fortified himself for what he knew would be a very unhappy interview.
“What is it, Teikhti?” she asked, looking concerned when he drew her aside that afternoon, “You are well?”
That threw him off the script with which he'd intended to follow in introducing the topic.  “What?  No, this has nothing to do with my meeting with the Bur's physician.  Mistress Tosinei says I'm perfectly hale.”
“Oh, I thought you were about to tell me why you hadn't wanted to discuss her inspection of your health.”
That reticence had owed to some very impertinent and embarrassing things the woman had the audacity to tell him, none of which he had any intention of sharing with his daughter, so he took no notice and carried on.  “It's about your work at the Forge.  It can't continue.”
She looked skeptical, as if she suspected a trick or a test.
“I am entirely in earnest, Eleihas,” he said, reverting to her true name in the reflexive formality to which he resorted when he was tense, “We are coming to the time when I must start seeking a husband for you, and your familiarity with laborers and oathmen will remind men of my parentage more than your mother's.”
Eleihas' expression was taking on the mulish cast he dreaded.  “But I am good in the Forge.  I'm good, father.”
“To what purpose, daughter?”  To preempt an answer – like her mother, Eleihas had a talent for making unanswerable arguments – he continued, “Sar Dranuk may be a fool, but he was only expressing a belief that any father of your future husband would hold.  You have prospects, meikta, and that I've done nothing to prepare you for them is my failure.”
“But...”
“Sar Dranuk no doubt approached me because he had pecuniary embarrassments and counts on his son to make a match with a wealthy bride, but I reckon he's only the first.  Sunrei was a distant relation of Lord Condier himself, meikta.   Whatever the disadvantages of my own birth, even the thinnest Condierene connection is worth a great deal in these matters.  By the Bur's favor I'm in a way to provide a considerable dowry and I wouldn't be surprised if even the father of a future Mussar found you acceptable.  But they must see in you your mother's daughter, not your father's.”
“When I was little you said...”
“That,” he said peremptorily, “Was something I said when we were in lesser circumstances.  You'd be wasted on a mere tradesman, meikta.  You speak court Arimisan better than half the nobility, you read and write, you're graceful...”
She snorted, “Graceful, teikhti?  Now I know you're funning.”
“Remember how you were able to walk in those Southron stilt things?”
“Hardly!  And that was years ago.”
“You don't knock over things in the Forge,” he pointed out, but added “Very often,” when he saw her about to remind him of a recent notable incident that had caught a whole line of towels on fire.
“Oh, I expect I will inspire poetry.  I await the day when a suitor pens 'An Encomium For the Maiden Who Scorches Fewer Aprons Than You Might Expect' and begs his father for an introduction.  Father, please don't try to convince me I could ever be a noblewoman.  I'd rather stay here where I belong.”
“But you don't belong, meikta, or you won't for much longer.  I don't belong sometimes, and you...  Eleihas, anyone can see you aren't born to be oathsworn.”  His daughter looked pointedly down at the scorched and stained overalls she wore, so he continued before she distracted the conversation with a quibble about her admittedly workman-like appearance.  “I mean, meikta, that you have too much wit, too much education to be stuck in a trade like any commoner, and anyone would know it two turns of the glass from meeting you.  Few tradesmen would feel comfortable with such an unequal match, and you wouldn't be willing to pretend dullness.”
This last point told, and her mouth shut into a line of mute dismay.
“Meikta, you can grow into anything, but you can't shrink.  I know you.”  He smiled, trying to look optimistic – not his greatest ability.
“Would a noble husband want me to grow?  Really, father?”
Dubei pulled his shoulders back in discomfort.  “Eleihas, just...  Just take my word this once, will you, like a normal daughter?”
She recoiled as if struck, but at least she didn't cross-examine him any more.

The next day she turned up again in the Forge at the usual bell, and he capitulated after one look at her grim face.  Some other day, he promised himself and Sunrei's ghost, some day soon.

“Aren’t we getting too old to be playing around like this?” Dugei asked Eleihas, for once not willing to suffer the thump of his big sister's waster against his chest.  It was the inevitable outcome of their contests behind the gardener's shed if she didn't accept a handicap, and on this of all days he couldn't bear to demand one of her.
“Too old?” she asked with mock outrage, “At what age do soldiers stop practicing?”
Usually Eleihas' raillery might have distracted him from whatever had dispirited him, but he had just suffered the severest, most brutal punishment Father had meted out on him.  Eleihas had been at one of her things for cultured girls and so wouldn't know it had concluded with the acute embarrassment of rendering a public apology to a boy he despised.  Seeing the thoughtful gaze of the other boys on Dugei brought low had kindled an inchoate sense of loss the exact reason for which took some time to fully form.
 Dugei wasn't any more introspective than was natural for a boy of ten years, but he couldn't help but compare his wide circle of friends of his own age and sex to his sister's increasingly obvious isolation amongst maidens who would have been her natural companions.  The influence he had over the opinions of others – allowing him to do and say things most boys of his birth wouldn't dare – illustrated the powers of popularity so that even a boy of ten years could grasp them unambiguously.
	Amongst them was the ability to make a laughingstock of a landsman's scion like Tinsei, a slight, bookish boy who would inherit a commission as officer over soldiers upon attaining three god's years despite his clear lack of aptitude and his noble father's near penury.  Father had made long ago made clear that whatever his martial talent, Dugei would inherit a hammer, not a sword.  This unsurprising interdiction hadn't dismayed Dugei, who shared his father's fascination with steel, but his youthful interest wasn't so consuming as to exclude of dreaming of other, more public glories.  Dugei resented with the uncomplicated intensity only permitted to the young that Sar Tinsei could take for granted the soldierly honors despite being so ill-formed, and so he had sneeringly humiliated the landsman's son in a duel with wasters while hopping on one foot just to accentuate his opponent's unfitness.
	Of course Father had somehow discovered Dugei's offense.  Like his sister, Dugei lived in dread of Father's awful disappointment, and his self-abasement when he begged Tinsei' pardon hadn't been feigned.  He'd since recovered some of his sense of righteous ill-usage, but he'd already provided the spectacle for the other boys, confirming their expectations of the desserts due those who flouted the natural order.  In such moments, the true gulf separating Dugei at'Dubei from nobility came clear – Dubei's wealth and favor with the Bur notwithstanding.  The chasm was too wide for such as Dugei to ever leap across to assume the role of a gallant officer in reality, regardless of his abilities.
	So, his sister's ability to serve him with a waster in much the same manner as he had served  Tinsei acted as salt for his lacerated daydreams.  “Leih, we’re not soldiers and never will be.  I'm to be a smith, okay?”
	“Are you sure?  Whatever will Father say when you tell him so?”  She asked sarcastically.
	He knew she didn't mean to cut so near the quick, she being the last to hear about everything and surely ignorant of his debacle with Tinsei.  Still, it smarted too much to go unanswered.  “Not like you're any better!  You'll be...” he started, then stopped.  Too late, and a coppery silence fell between them.
“A maiden, with flowers in my hair?” she clipped, her eyes glinting dangerously in a wooden face.  “A wife, bearing children for my husband?  Worked for Mother, didn’t it?”
	He went rigid at this oblique reminder that in entering the world he had martyred their sainted mother, to whom Father burned more sacrifices than he ever did the Seven.  If Eleihas would respect no bounds, then neither would he.  “But that's perfectly safe, Leih!  Any man Father could buy for you would be too old and impotent to put you in any danger.”
She was silent, staring at him.  Usually he could not withstand a stare full of such naked menace, but he was far too angry to care if she thrashed him.  By the Gods, he welcomed it, if only he could land a few blows of his own.
Instead, she seemed to crumple, and she collapsed heavily on a bundle of hay with her face in her hands.
The burning taste of vengeance won turned to ash in his mouth along with the fading sense of justification that had allowed him to ignore the hopeless situation that drove Eleihas' capitulation.  He could be happy following in Father's footsteps, but Eleihas just didn't seem cut out to be a woman.
“Oh, ‘Leih, I didn’t mean that,” he said, walking over to her.  Not quite within striking distance.
“But you did,” she said, choking slightly, “and even if you had said nothing it would still be the truth.”
“It isn’t, ‘Leih.  You can be pretty if you wash up and let the dowager tend your hair.”  
“Ha!  If I took after Mother, maybe, but I know I’m skinny and boy-waisted.  And I have father's bony face.”  She shook her head.  “But that’s not even half the problem, ‘Gei.  I think the Gods were confused when they spun my heart.  I know I'm supposed to want a house and my own children and all that, but I'd rather be like Father, master of a trade, or like the ore merchants, seeing barrels of the very best all the way through to foreign lands.  I, oh, I was a stupid girl, 'Gei, but I suggested to Father that I could take over from old Binikan when Bini' retires from the trade and ride as agent and courier for Father's freeman goods.  He wasn't even angry, Dugei.  He just laughed and told me that no daughter of Mother would pass as a boy forever.  It was the worst thing anyone could say, Dugei, and it came from Father's mouth.  I mean, he may not quite realize it, but I'm four years past ten and it's pretty obvious I'm not going to take after Mother, and even if I was what she was...”  Eleihas' hands described the flaring of a timerglass.  “I wouldn't want what she wanted.”
She and Dugei had played imaginary futures too often for him not to have known the aspirations underlying her daydreams, but he'd never really considered what lack of interest underlay her commendable disinclination to suggest they act out any of the usual maiden's stories.  He had lately come to know that their father was the only man in the Keep that failed to grasp his daughter's odd ambitions, which had struck him as a hilarious condition for a man who he generally regarded as nigh omniscient.  Widow Mirimei, who sometimes looked after them when they had been younger, had prophesied doom if Father didn't get a wife to turn Eleihas' unnatural interests toward matters more proper for a maiden with expectations, but everyone knew that the widow had settled on herself for the role.  They'd laughed together at her sour grapes, but now Dugei thought the widow might have been right after all.  Eleihas was in trouble, and even adults didn't dare mention it to Father, whose ferocious rejection of outsiders' attempts to instruct him in the raising of his children didn't seem quite as benign as it had.
Dugei wanted to tell his father no more than did anyone else.  Because he couldn't doubt that Eleihas' fears were well-justified.  His big sister was sometimes amusingly ignorant regarding matters of which every other child in the Keep was aware, but he was very much in awe of her intellect as regarded grown-up subjects.
“Father is convinced now that he can buy me a titleman, or negotiate with some Worthy to have his son offer for me.  No, it's worse than that.  He thinks I might actually charm such a suitor into seeking my hand.  How can such a smart man be such a fool?” she asked with bitter contempt.
 Dugei opened his mouth to make the loyal objections he felt bound to offer, but the best he could summon was, “Well, you're really clever.”  
“I'm not sure the usual courting visit would provide an opportunity to demonstrate the theorem of the three squares, 'Gei,” she sighed, blinking alarmingly moist eyes.  Dugei desisted in that line of argument, thinking privately of how her propensity for saying very learned things either intimidated or bemused most of the boys Dugei knew.  Even if she  could manage to display her mastery of such arcana, geometry might be more likely to make a man nervous than amorous.
“Though really, 'Gei, I've been thinking close to the same thing,” she said unexpectedly,  “I think I'd do best to see if I can get a Lord Chancellor.  Not all of them are very old, I suppose, and if I make myself very useful, perhaps they'd be willing to bring me with them when their lords send them on state visits.  I think I might be able to bear it if only I could see a little of the world, and have something interesting to do.  Plus, some of them haven't any money of their own and might be glad of my dowry.  Just think of Sar Poniksi.”
“Sar Poniksi?  'Leih that mean old frog has got to be sixty years old!”
“I just meant he has no fortune, he's considered very shrewd, and he travels all over.  And he's not precisely unhealthy.  His jaw is only crooked like that because he was wounded in the Wars of the Founding.”
“Wound or not, his lips are odd, and you said yourself that he always looks angry.  But you sound like you're actually considering him, 'Leih.”
She clenched her jaw and stared angrily at him, tears starting to roll down her cheeks.  “I don't know what else to do, Dugei.  I mean, what else can I do?”  Her knuckles whitened as she gripped the waster and he took a step back just in case.
“What in Three Hells am I supposed to do?”

~Chapter 2 (Eleihas is ~14)
Master Dubei had no other name - that he remembered - and his mother only had a face in dreams.  His father he could recall, dimly and uncertainly, as a huge, constantly-armored officer of some middle rank who had died in the War of the Founding.  So many men matching such a description had died in those three grim years of shifting alliances, treachery and bitter, indecisive battle that it seemed useless to wonder who amongst them all had sired him.
He could hardly be expected not to speculate why his father’s family had left him for an orphan in the care of the Keep household at Meikhei.  It seemed obvious that he was a bastard at the least, and was honest enough with himself to suspect he carried an unusual amount of Hanimi blood even for pure Neikhinmen, whose dark, leathery hands and suspect changes in complexion when exposed to the elements were alarmingly reminiscent of the chameleon-like traits of the Hanimin.  Even two and four God’s years after the war had expelled the last of the Hanimin from the North, Heiran ruling castes feared Hanimin as much as they coveted Hanimi goods, and Dubei remembered the abhorrence being a great deal stronger in his youth.  No family would willingly associate itself with any child that might be the product of a scandalous liaison with a Hanimi woman.
It was wealth and the rank due a skilled tradesman, then, that allowed him to purchaseg consent to marry the daughter of a nearly indigent nobleman.  Of course Sunrei’s father squandered the shockingly large bride price Dubei had paid and by the time of her death had once again achieved poverty. Nonetheless, his children’s perfectly legal and acknowledged connections to nobility (however ill-reputed) allowed an increasingly famous and wealthy Mastersmith to evolve hopes for his daughter far beyond that usual for children inheriting his dubious ancestry.

“It’s beautiful, Father!” Eleihas exclaimed, brushing the downy trim of the dress against her flushed cheek.  “Thank you so much!”
Dubei beamed his contentment at this reaction at this dearly-bought riding dress.  It had been a while since he’d been able to earn such extravagant and unfeigned joy.  At first it seemed like this attempt too would generate one of her subtly forced smiles and get folded away in the bottom of her trunk until she outgrew it.  As soon as he had explained its provenance, however, it seemed sun had come from behind clouds.  Not for the first time, he thanked the Seven for the inspiration to send her on riding lessons.  At the moment he felt as if the first sun of Spring shined directly on his heart.
“It must be so expensive, though!” she said, looking guilty even as she hugged this penultimate Meet-Feast present tightly to her breast.
“Oh, don’t you worry,” he said, mussing her hair a little after his old habit, though she wasn’t so much shorter than he any more.  Still growing like a weed, she was.  “As it turns out a quoin arrived here today, a nephew of Mul-Hattas Winter Hall with a caravan of merchants in his train.  He’s set to spend the season in Meikhei and had sent me a letter requesting a set of swords made for his retinue of guards.  I sent him the measurements the tailor made for your riding clothes and they made this ready as an advance payment.  You can see it’s got material enough to be let out a bit as long as you don’t shoot up too much taller.”
“You saw Neikhinmen at the Buran Feast?” She asked, her tone equal parts incredulous and envious.  Her chair creaked slightly as she leaned back in her lambswool nightgown, gift not-quite forgotten in hands that still caressed the plush meikta-fur lining.
Dubei chuckled.  “Don’t call them that within earshot, Eleihas.  Those who live in the Castles of Nok-Hein surely count themselves well above their cousins in the mountain Neikhinman tribes.”  She shrugged at his admonishment, but he’d bet heavies to tin caps she’d taken note.  Few facts about outlying lands slipped her memory, even if she could barely remember how many measures of spice she’d added to broth.  “But they have with them Scouts, in the oldest Nok-Heini style.  And one of them is a Neikhinwoman.”
Dubei was rewarded with a look of astonishment and wonder that took position next to the best such expressions his stories had ever elicited.  “They let women become warriors?  Even Scouts?” she asked.
Something about her excitement made Dubei vaguely uneasy; it sounded somehow deeper than appropriate to a mere tale of bizarre foreigners, though she was always interested to hear tales of distant lands.  “Well, Winter Hall and, I think, Tower Eind, are known for being situated in desolate wastes and surrounded by barbarians.  Destitution and the press of Hinter tribes, I suppose, forces the Nok-Heinis to sometimes allow the indignity of women under arms.  To my eyes it seems cruel to expose the poor woman’s shame in civilized lands, but I suppose some Nok-Heini quoins don’t care overmuch about their women nor the honor of their oathmen.”
Dubei wished he had kept his disapproval of their disreputable ethnic cousins to himself, now, since it seemed to have saddened Eleihas.  Perhaps she had already figured that there was likely more than a little Neikhinmen - or worse - in her father and thus in herself.  Back to a better subject he steered things.
“So I have another surprise that goes with the dress.”  There, that perked her back up.  “I’ve avoided for some time the opening of the box...”  He paused for effect, watching her eyes look toward the sconce in which the masons of the mastersmith’s house had encased a strongbox for the storage of the master artisan’s wealth.  She stared, really, in an muddle Dubei could identify as confusion between anticipation and speculation.  He continued, “But things have been going very well for your teikhti, meikta, for some years now.  Time has proved we can afford to spend some of our modest horde, and I have not been blind to how much you have enjoyed riding.”  Her grin practically blinded him, now.  “What would you say about a place in the Pommel and Bit?”
Her mouth had opened to say something and she had looked ready to leap from her seat, but clearly it had surpassed all expectations, for she froze in frank astonishment.
Before she had a chance to start babbling thanks or whatever was on her lips, he resumed his explanation.  “I’m a famous man now, in my own small way, and the Kei-Bur herself is known to consult me on occasion, so when I approached the governors about you, they were very warm toward the idea of your accession to their ranks.  You’ll ride the best bred, gentlest horses as a peer of the finest families in Heiras, and I’ve arranged to rent real jewelry.  Now, we’ll need to get your hair darkened and oiled, and we’ll need to see a lady’s glover about your hands, but this is the real thing, meikta.  From here you can set your sights as high as you please, I promise.”
It was a desperate conviction; she’d round out into a beauty like her mother, and they’d see her as the gem she was, whatever mistakes he might have made in the past.  Brought out right, guided by a suitable woman with respectable connections, her brilliance would dazzle young Worthies of pure stock - even Sarrin, if he could afford to hire a Lady's auspices.  Eleihas might be an orphan’s daughter, but she would be no common woman, by the Seven!
He waited expectantly for her reaction to reflect his sunny daydreams, but none was immediately forthcoming.  Instead her face had frozen in an unreadable middle ground between a half dozen different expressions. As time stretched without event, he started to get a little impatient.  Certainly it would be a grand surprise but he couldn’t see a reason for such extended silence.
When he could no longer withstand the itch to break the unbearable tableau, he asked, “Well?”
“Why couldn’t you have bought me a horse?” she asked in a voice so thin and despondent he could almost believe he had misheard.
“What?  What would you do with a horse, meikta?” he asked, since he couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“I would ride it, father!  I could go and see things!  They don’t ride horses there, they sit on them like... like... like couches with hooves while they plod around in the same garden over and over.”  She stood up with the force of her complaint.
“Eleihas!  Sit down!  Don’t you understand that this is bigger than horseback riding?  This is your chance to become something better.”
“Better than what, Father?  Better how?  Anyway, the others, the sort that ride there – they  all hate me.  How do you not know that?  Actually, they don't even hate me, they make up foul limericks and mocking songs about me just to pass time.  Join them?  It would be a great joke.”
The truth burrowed into his gut and bit like a mass of rats that had finally decided to swarm from a dark gap in the mortar - a plague the presence of which he’d always been dimly aware but never before had to acknowledge.  The tears spilled from his daughter’s angry, pleading eyes now, and the anger welled up in him.
“Who?  Who does that?  I don’t care who their father is, I’ll pound on his door until he comes and kneels you an apology.”  Somehow his medium bronze hammer was in his hand and he realized he had been shouting at the end.  Well, Gods curse them all, they’d see that his daughter was no mere orphan’s whelp!  The last thought he punctuated by slamming the hammer back down on the little table from which it had come, splitting it neatly along the grain and sending it clattering in two parts to the floor.  “Damn the Gods and Their perfidious noble sons!  Thieves and poltroons, the lot of them!”  He kicked a remnant into the wall, where it shattered into a satisfying spray of wooden shards.
After a moment of staring at his destruction, he started to feel foolish, and he turned to see what Eleihas made of his tantrum.When he turned around again, thought, she had withdrawn to her loft and rehung the curtain on its hooks.  
Neither mentioned the Pommel and Bit again.

“Go on old shag, get out of here!  Go die in a hole!” the youths shouted, throwing pebbles at a disheveled, half-starved dog, who shied away as a few stones thumped against its side.  Despite the ribs that showed through the shag of its matted coat, it had been a powerful dog once and Eleihas thought it could still have torn apart the gaggle of tormentors if it turned on them.  Instead, another rock rebounded tellingly off its head and it yelped in fear.  The taunting rose to a crescendo of jeering laughter as the youths saw it turning to flight.
Still it only limped in a shuffling trot a little farther from them, as if too spirit-weary to commit even to running away, and Eleihas could endure it no more.
“Stop it!  Get away from it!” she said, clenching her fists and stepping from behind the crate where she had been crouching.
The gaggle turned their attention on her, taking in her household work garb.  Her speech also marked her as being from the keep up the hill.
“Oh ho, the server tells us on to leave the old shag to his bone, she does?” the leader said, and the others laughed.
“I do,” she said, wishing she had something other than a gourd of goat’s milk and a round of cheese with which to defend herself.
“You going to make us on to leave him alone or you have a badgeman with you?”
“Just leave him alone.  How can you be so cruel to a poor starving creature?”
“I didn’t see him crying tears for my empty stomach.  I’ll throw a stone for my own fun.”
“Then I’ll throw a stone at you.  He didn’t take your food.”  Further down the hill she saw some older boys – almost young men – looking on.  One of them started walking toward the little scene.
“I’ll see you eat dirt,” the leader said, also noticing the approach of the bigger boy.
“I’m not afraid of you,” she said, deathly afraid as she picked up a rock
“You should be, keep frill.”
She threw her rock then, prudent fear forgotten.

A tongue lapping at her collar brought back her senses, though they seemed jumbled and confused.  Her cheek throbbed and her stomach felt rebellious and bruised.  The tongue switched to the heel of her hand and she jerked it back in sudden pain.  Her hand was well-lacerated, but she couldn’t remember how it came to be so.  Mostly she remembered successfully knocking down a couple of the boys before the others overwhelmed her.  She thought maybe the big boy had become involved somehow, but it got hazy toward the end.
“You okay, server?” a child’s voice asked, nudging her shoulder with one toe.  Through Eleihas’ cracked eyelids he looked like a ragged little shadow standing over her.
Eleihas just groaned.
“Took a knock on your head, server.  I think your dog ate your cheese too.”
“Oh no, the gourd!” she said, since she had the idea it was broken.  It felt like her skull would break after her outburst as a previously quiescent headache flared.
“It’s not holding no more.  It’s broke.”
She groaned again.
“You shouldn’t have taken against Big Kalra's boys like that.  He decided on to leave you a wedge of your cheese, but your dog ate it.  Must have showed to something big with your crazy, to make him up to throw in for you.”  He said it with both respect and a too-wise child’s equanimity.  “Dog’s just a shag now, you know.  Some kennel master turned him out - too old to be a proper war dog no more.”
“Poor thing,” Eleihas said, thinking about how horrible it was that a kennel master would do that to a dog.  Master Hurin would never do that to his older dogs, who he coddled well into their dotage, eventually feeding them painless poisons when the troubles that afflicted elderly canines became too much.  One wondered at the humanity of a man who could raise dogs and not love them a little.
“Likely his keep came too much,” the urchin explained with a shrug of the shoulders.  “Like with the batch of us orphans.  We get by as can.”
“I wish I could offer you something for your kindness,” Eleihas said, getting slowly to her feet, “But I have no money.”
“Oh, I knowed that,” the child said easily, steadying her with a thin, wiry grip on her arm.
Eleihas had to grin, though it hurt.  “Checked, did you?”
The urchin just shrugged as if rifling the pockets of the unconscious was hardly worth mentioning and watched her scratch behind the homeless dog’s ears.
“You know Sar Dog, cheese is bad for you,” she said affectionately through swollen lips, “I’ll bring you something better next time.  And you too, young man, if you can introduce me to this Big Kalra.”
The orphan boy looked askance at her stilted address but shrugged again - the noncommittal expression seemed to be his commonest movement.  “Sure I can.  He’s my brother.”

Father’s initial fear boiled into one of his rages when he heard her story, though not directed at her this time.  Had she not assured him she had suffered no serious hurt he might well have roused the guards or gone down to Neibol himself.  Dugei helped for once, pointing out that it was hardly reasonable to send full grown men-at-arms to hunt down a pack of orphan waifs.  Father grumbled that he’d never been a little ruffian for lack of parents, but settled down in the end at the idea of her downtrodden antagonists.  Remarkably adept at using Father’s words against him, Dugei had become, having learned from Eleihas’ sophistic example.  She could almost be proud of the little scamp.
Of course, Father extracted a solemn promise to be more careful on her next trip to the market, a promise Eleihas by no means meant to keep.  She jogged the whole way at a steady pace to make sure she’d have time to visit the run-down old neighborhood where she’d been assured Big Kalra could be found.  Once in that dingy, dangerous place with its hungry-looking human predators, she nearly repented of her mission, but she almost literally bumped into Kalra before she had time to change her mind.
“You!” he said, rounding on the tall, bruised girl who burst suddenly on his circle of cronies.
“Me!” she said, dancing out of reach with a nervous smile.
“Want another round of it, do you?” he asked with only desultory menace.
“Sure, I’m willing to trade for it.”
That clearly confused him, but he still restrained the other rough-looking boys around him.  Seven Gods he was a handsome boy from up close.
“I mean, I want to learn to fight,” she clarified.
“What a Keep server girl want with fighting?” he asked, bemused.
“What’s it to you if I can trade?” she returned.
His companions began to take offense on their leader’s behalf but again he motioned them to stillness.  “Alright server, what can you deal?”
“My father is the mastersmith of the Forge of Meikhei.  I can trade good steel.”
A surprised silence passed as the urchin gang took in that revelation.  Big Kalra cocked his head and said the words for which Eleihas had been waiting, “Prove on, girl.”
In a motion Eleihas had practiced over and over until she could do it with her eyes closed mid-tumble, she produced her knife.  She was so nervous the performance still felt jerky and awkward to her, but by their reaction, the boys thought the small flourish well done.  They didn’t seem particularly worried, but her esteem in their eyes rose visibly.
Big Kalra, for his part, simply smiled rakishly.  “I call that good pay for two tendays.”
Even though she had expected it, his lowball offer sunk her stomach somewhere below her knees.  His grin, meanwhile, struck her somewhere else.  She clenched her teeth and looked insulted.  “This knife is worth a pair of heavies at the least.  I should call it good pay for two years of twice a tenday.”
Now he pretended - hopefully it was just pretense - to be insulted.  “Your life isn’t worth two eights if I don’t say so.  A season.”
“A year and I bring a loaf of bread when I come to see you.”
“Add two eggs and it’s sealed.”
“One, if I can get it.  My father is partial to eggs.”
The boy chuckled gutturally, but shrugged.  “Alright. Hand over the cutter, then.  I'm on to inspect it first, a course.”
“I'm not such a fool,” she said.
“You don’t trust me?” he asked, smiling wickedly.
“Should I?” she asked, trying to match his expression.
It seemed to amuse him.  “I swear on the Stranger, so’s he cut me strings if I forswear.”
“I swear on the Soldier,” she added, and some of the boys laughed.  She clenched her jaw and glared.  Big Kalra merely looked curious, then held out his hand.
Still glaring at the others, she placed the fine knife’s hilt in his curiously delicate-looking hands.
He examined it briefly, weighing it in his hand.  The other boys edged away in anticipation of Kalra's ensuing trial.  Watching him spin the flashing blade through a stupendous succession of different grips, jabs and slashes, Eleihas conceived a sense of longing – she wasn't quite sure for what, exactly.  When he finished, he looked up at her again where she still stood.  “Are you simple?  Don’t you know better than trusting an orphan?”
“How could I not trust my own father?” she said defiantly, to the confusion of his whole set.  But comprehension dawned in Kalra’s eyes after a brief moment, and he smiled with roguish appreciation. “I’ll meet you tomorrow after the night bell,” Eleihas dared.
“It isn’t safe here at darktime,” he said seriously.
“Then where?” she asked.
“Meet me ahind the Broken Lantern.  If all’s well, there’ll be a tart a-called Eleihas afront the taproom and she'll point you.”
Eleihas winced.  Common names had their drawbacks.  “I’ll be there, then.  As a last item...” she froze her reach into her pocket when the pack of urchins stiffened with suspicion.  “Uh.  It’s just a couple wedges of cheese for your brother, Kalra.  I promised him.”
For some reason this dissolved them into laughter, which, she supposed, was better than being stabbed to death and left in the street, but still left her feeling dangerously ignorant.  Fortunately, Big Kalra took mercy on her.
“Half the boys these parts be me brothers, even the ones as ain’t.  I know the one, although.  Bistas be he name and the lucky one’ll have he cheese in place of me point, seeing the deal was good.  And, as I sweared, here's the steel.  Don't bring it with you, server.  Liker to catch a point for it than it going to save you a poke.”

Her finger still came away with traces of blood on it and the lip was definitely swollen.  Would Father notice?  Eleihas shrugged at that thought - there was little she could do now.  Even the prospect of being caught didn’t much dampen her glee: Big Kalra had hit her!  Her!  She had finally pressed him so hard during sparring that he was obliged to actually strike instead of constantly turning every blow with intimidating elegance.  His brothers had looked at her differently afterwards, as if she was finally a presence in her own right rather than a wisp that their leader might dispel at any moment.  She wondered how many of them had never been able to win the same honor.
The spread of her smile sprang to her attention as it cracked the incipient scab on her split lip and renewed the taste of blood in her mouth.  She briefly considered claiming that she’d fallen and split her lip, but her father was damnably good at spotting her lies and he’d probably make her show her arms which were, of course, bruised and swollen in places.  She licked her lip unconsciously as she walked, considering.
The Fortunately she had come back before he had finished one of his long days at the forge. if and she woke up early enough she might be able to get eggs and a loaf before he stirred.  She didn’t bother to even heat her water bucket before she washed for bed, but the cold water couldn’t douse warm thoughts of the handsome young rogue that weren’t at all martial once she was under the covers.

“Your name is Eleihas too, eh?  Funny.”  The tart grinned to expose several pewter teeth of passable quality.
“Yes.  Eleihas at'Dubei,” she answered, moving to grasp wrists.  The woman didn't seem to recognize the motion, though, so the girl dropped her arm awkwardly.
“Well, Eleihas at'Dubei, Big Kalra ain't around so early.  I'll send a boy to let he know you're here.”
“Oh.”  Eleihas was disappointed and anxious, standing in Lowside Row with a loaf of bread and two eggs at nighttime.
The older Eleihas read the younger's anxiety and took pity.  “Eh, it's early.  Come on in, girl.”
“I don't know, Eleihas,” Dubei's daughter answered nervously, not liking the look of the place.
“You ain't on to worry, lass, we'll put it about you're Kalra's business.  Even the bigger bully men give he space, you know.  And ye may as well call me 'Eli.'  Less confusing with us both having the same name, and anyway it's as most people do.”
Once inside, Eleihas' apprehensions were confirmed, with a number of rough-looking men leering at her with bloodshot eyes through the dingy common room.  “New drab, Eli?  Not much to look at.”
“Snap up your looking-balls, limpwick,” Eli/Eleihas shot back, “This here's Eleihas at'Dubei and she's a respectable server as got business wi' Kalra.”
That occasioned another round of snickers as Eli shepherded Eleihas through a miasma redolent of strong spirits and toward the back.  “Respectable, sure.  Business w'Kalra!”  they were all laughing now.  Eli smacked a hand away and boxed the offender smartly below the ear.  The tart wasn't a particularly big woman, but the jab told well enough to dissuade any other half-sprung patrons from trying her temper as they passed.
Past the kitchen they came to the stairs and a smaller room with a group of almost pretty women sitting around a table with little cups of clear liquid that Eleihas didn't mistake for water.
“Eh, what's this?” asked a woman of indeterminate age who must have been gorgeous before years of hard liquor had leached away much of her comeliness.
“Bidi, this is Eleihas at'Dubei, who's here to see Kalra.”
Bidi cackled, “You sure, girl?  Big Kalra don't lay wit' just any bit, yer know.”
“Too tall,” criticized one.
“No bosom, brows like a regular leatherhand and spotty” added another.
“Don't look like she got a waist, neither.”
“Button your holes and be polite,” Eli broke in, “She ain't got that sort to do wit' Kalra.”
“Oh, well, if you was, we wouldn't blame yer,” Bidi told Eleihas, somewhat unconvincingly.  Nevetheless, she patted the space next to her on the bench and offered her a cup of their noxious brew, which Eleihas declined with a mighty effort not to wrinkle her nose.  “Plenty as should know better set they cap at he.  Well, I won't ask ye what as don't concern us, but beware that bit of man.”
“Thank you for the warning, but I wouldn't even dream of... that,” Eleihas lied.
Bidi winked.  “Course not.  Squeaky, get this girl a mug of amber for me.”
A mousy woman who hadn't said anything yet hopped up and went into the tavern's front room, ignoring Eleihas' protests.  Happily, the mug proved to be passably clean and the ale itself of fair quality.
“Alright, the girls'll look out for ye till Kalra gets here, lass.  I've got to get out front again so the coinies know where to go.  Been nice to meet ye, Eleihas.”
“You too, Eli,” Eleihas told her, a little apprehensive to be left alone with the gaggle of tipsy prostitutes.
“Don't worry, dear, Eleihas wouldn't leave you with a shabby set.  She's alls-fair with the  coinies she hooks for us, a course, but she's honest as the bur's penny to her sisters.”
Their visitor blinked, catching the gist of Bidi's dialect but compulsively driven to understand what all the phrases meant.
“Yeah, she's a true one, as front girls go.  She has a regular man and doesn't try to poach the brass,” said another woman whose name Eleihas hadn't heard.
“Talei means that Eli plays fair when bringing in the coinies.  Some as play favors or expect a girl to pay to get the fellows with heavier purses, ye see,” explained Bursa.
“Oh,” Eleihas said, trying unsuccessfully to be nonchalant.  
“You want something to eat?” Bursa asked her, “The Lantern's cold ordinary ain't bad, so's you get it early.”
“I ate before I came,” she lied again, because she didn't want to explain why she preferred the shop biscuit in her pocket over anything issuing from the Broken Lantern's kitchen.
	“She's got a whole loaf of bread,” Squeaky pointed out.  “A couple eggs, too.”
	“Squeaky, you're eight parts short a coin,” Talei said, shaking her head.  “Those are for Big Kalra, you know.”
	Squeaky didn't seem to even notice the insult, simply saying, “I guess that makes sense.  Big Kalra is nice.”
	Talei opened her mouth to say something exasperated but Bidi instead launched into a long and foul-mouthed complaint about the new baker that had the others in gales of laughter and Eleihas totally lost.
	The conversation had segued to an intriguing but almost impenetrable survey of – as far as their visitor could tell – tradesmen's sexual peccadillos when a small girl entered to announce that Kalra had arrived.  Eleihas bowed her way out with mixed relief and regret.

	“Two eggs?” he asked when she reached the intersection of three alleyways which seemed to serve as a meeting place for young hooligans of whom Kalra was chief.
	“I was lucky; there was a heavy lay in the henhouse today.”  She clasped wrists with him in greeting.
	“So, boys, she name is Eleihas,” he announced to his audience.  Some of the boys snickered.
	“Eleihas at'Dubei,” she said, lifting her chin a little.  “My father is mastersmith of the Buran Forge.”
	“Likes we're on to call she lady,” one of the boys said contemptuously.
	“Can't call ugly bits like that lady,” jumped in another.
	A third, a disturbing individual whose teeth were already starting to rot said something a great deal cruder that Eleihas understood well enough to respond with her fists.  She got one good hit in, but though he stumbled back, it seemed to do little more than anger him.  Within a few seconds she had her pushed against the wall with her arm twisted behind her, murmuring threats through gritted teeth.  She scrambled to get at the little stiletto she'd hidden in her waistband, but before she could draw it the boy at her back had let go of her hand and substituted yelps of pain in place of threats.
	“Alright, you meikhfa rat turd,” Kalra said, sounding calm, “Eleihas at'Dubei is me guest.  Those were me eggs you just broke.  That's me bread in the dirt.”
	“Sorry!” the boy yelped, on his knee with his hand twisted painfully in Kalra's grip.  “I'm sorry!”
	“You's also stupid.  She had a point in she britches.  Fancy being a cripple?  Eleihas, put a hole in him as you fancy.”
“I weren't in the way to kill her!” the boy protested.
“No, but you said you was in the way to poke her, so I think she's on to poke you.  Come here, Eleihas, make him leak.”
She'd regained her feet and retrieved the blade by then, and by the way the other boys stood back she could tell that they didn't intend to involve themselves.  It was just the three of them, Big Kalra with a dangerous smile stretching his face, his body oriented toward Eleihas but his eyes turned to transfix the brown-toothed boy.
“I don't want to, Kalra,” she said, still angry but unable to imagine stabbing a boy who was no longer attacking her.
“I knowed it.  Ye were on to do it a few count back, though.  I saw your fingers ont.  So next time, I'll let you make him leak.  And then I'm on to take my own action, too, because this is disrespect.  Understand, Spotty?”  He directed the last two words at the boy with bad teeth.
“Sure, Big Kalra.”
“And you all?”
A chorus of assent ensued, voices variously pleased and worried, and Kalra seemed satisfied, but she still felt very precarious, and the stupidity of what she'd done was crushingly obvious now.

“You got big hands for a girl.

“How do you squeak out the Keep with naught seeing?” Big Kalra asked with languid idleness, possibly drunk, Eleihas thought.  He seemed more relaxed than she’d ever known him; the tightly wound alertness that was usually just beneath the surface seemed to have receded considerably, though even now she didn’t think he was quite as relaxed as he seemed.
Certainly she wasn’t; it was well known that this is where he brought girls to lay with them.  Eleihas felt at the surprisingly clean blankets on which she sat and wondered if she would ever sleep there.  Would the others assume that was what they were doing in here?  She blushed with guilty pleasure at the thought.  Big Kalra was, she thought, absolutely exquisite.  In the darkness, of course, she couldn’t see the very slightly broken nose that gave a rugged sort of relief to an otherwise achingly fine visage nor the lips about which she had dreamt on more than one occasion.  He was so pretty that very handsome girls - girls almost as beautiful as Maleris, she thought a little wistfully - vied for his company, yet tonight he had invited her to stay with him awhile.  Some small portion of her that the prudish might call “good sense” told her that she was being very foolish but the much greater part hoped giddily that at any moment his dextrous hands would stray to her.
“A secret, eh?  Fair’s it is,” he said, chuckling as if he’d been caught in a minor indiscretion.  Truthfully she had only been distracted but now that she considered, she realized that her knowledge of ways to avoid the guards was worth a great deal to certain people.  “You’re a right clever girl, you know?  Cannier than you’d think of a server, famous smart teikh or no.  Amazing quick hand in a sticks and bricks question, too, but I'm not on to say it: all's know it well enough.”
Perhaps he didn’t strictly need to say it, but he had and now she was giddily hopeful that a proposition was coming.  Seven Gods, please send her such luck.
“Eleihas,” he began with uncharacteristic hesitation and using her full name as he rarely did, “I was thinking...”  Here he stopped and her heart pounded.  Was he uncertain of her, of all people?  Big Kalra, her senior by probably two years and dozens, maybe scores of liaisons?
“Ask for anything,” she said, trying to tame the bald urgency in her voice and the tension in the hand she used to capture his.
After a pause, he continued.  “Well, what I’m on to say is that I don’t really have proper speech and I were hoping to learn the pretty Arimisan that you can speak like a right noble.”
Her disappointment was immense and immediate, but his diffidence and vulnerability made her desire even more to seize him in an embrace and, well, see what followed.  She was on the point of rolling bodily onto him when he withdrew his hand and began speaking again, hastily.
“You aren’t on to do it or nothing.  I just ask as we’re mates, like.”  She heard him stand up - another disappointment, but she supposed her silence might seem disapproving.
“Of course, Kal.  Anything.”  She said it softly, knowing the moment had passed beyond recovery, if there had even been one in any mind besides her own.  Damn boys and their inscrutability.
“I were supposing we could come here atimes - none interrupt me when I got company - and practice talking like witty cads without me other mates making fun.  I'm not on t'be a court heavy, but a dockyard tongue makes a dockyard life, an I ain't on to be that for , I hope.”  He sounded embarrassed.
“Of course, of course.  We could start now, if you like,” she said.
“For trues?  Alright, then,” he said, receding back to what passed for relaxed in such a wary soul.

It wasn’t until the second tenday that she started to notice the resentful glances and the upturned noses of young women who had been heretofore tolerant of the odd duck in their midst, frequently outright kind as if to a little sister.  Most of a season passed and she still couldn’t figure the source of the change until Bursa, the kindest of them all, beckoned to her one day when they spotted one-another at the Fifthday market.
“Hi Bursa,” she said tentatively as she reached earshot range in the cacophony of haggling.
“Eleihas,” Bursa said in a reproving tone, “I thought you was smarter than to get into all that.  You think you’s to be different than all the rest?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Eleihas said, though she suspected that it had to do with whatever had soured her to the taste of the young women of the lower docks and brothels.
“You’re a fool or a liar, then,” Bursa said crossly.  “You think that Kalra hasn’t kicked you from his bed yet because you’re different than the rest of us.  I ain't went to think you proud because you’re a rich Keep server, but I wonders was I too kind.”
Eleihas could feel herself blushing; she’d almost forgotten how it must look to the others.  But Kalra still bedded women as he had, did he not?  She assumed so, though she hadn’t asked or wanted to know.
“Does he lay with anyone else?” Eleihas asked, realizing how it sounded only after it was out of her mouth and Bursa recoiled as if struck.
“Seven gods ye arrogant...” Bursa whirled without finishing and strode angrily away.
At one level Eleihas was mortified that she had accidentally confirmed the fiction that she and Kalra were fornicating.  Ascendant, however, was the revival of her hope that Kalra might harbor some well-hidden interest in her.  After all, who had ever heard of Big Kalra lacking for female company?  Yet Bursa wouldn’t have taken her question as rhetorical if Kalra was meeting with other women.
She was a little sad that the other women shunned her, but she realized she had subconsciously assumed that it was just a matter of time before they viewed her with the same contempt as did most in Meikhei.  And it wasn't as if they'd ever had anything in common except sharing a sex.  No great loss, set against the prospect of winning Kal’s affection.  Did that mean that she was in love with him?  What would it be like, being the consort of a man like Kalra?  Her imagination failed her at that point, but nevertheless her ill-defined elation lasted the rest of her time in the market and beyond.

The meeting on Eighthday couldn’t come quickly enough, though once she laid eyes on the man himself, a large portion of her anticipation turned to anxiety.  He didn’t seem to notice as he patted her familiarly on the shoulder in greeting.
“How are you, Goodwoman Eleihas?” he said in a playful and mildly inaccurate Meikhei accent.
“I am well, Goodman Kalra,” she was able to respond with some facsimile of calm humor.
“Shall we escalate the stairs?” he said
Eleihas winced just barely.  “Yes, let us ascend the stairs,” she responded by way of correction.  He nodded in acknowledgment that didn’t seem to impact his apparent good mood, then followed her mutely up the stairs.  As she walked ahead of him, she risked a much-attenuated version of the sashay the young landsladies used when they were within sight of eligible young landsmen.  It was risky, she knew, but she was feeling recklessly confident again now that she didn’t have to look at him.  Was she doing it correctly?  She wished she had practiced in Father’s mirror. Too late now; they had reached the top of the stairs anyway.  Eleihas studied him surreptitiously in profile as he unlocked the door.  He looked relaxed in his coiled, perpetually poised way.  Seven Gods he was graceful, she thought as he wiggled a little burred piece of metal just so and the tumblers slid into their appointed places.  A tap and a sweep of the hand offered the opened doorway elegantly to her as if he were a courtier offering entrance to a lady.  Silly and half-facetious it might be, but he moved so naturally that she might have thought him born to it.  She felt tight like the first time she saw him knife dance, but this time the feeling was stronger because this display was for her.
Probably, she edited, trying to instill in herself some kind of discipline.  She should feel ashamed of herself, she knew, harboring such promiscuous aspirations.  Would she be one of those women who had to fake the pain of first intercourse on her wedding night?  At the moment that eventuality seemed very distant and unimportant.  All dangers seemed very remote compared to the imperative of feeling his hands on her, of some sign that her ache was not wholly her own.
“So what did you want to do today?” she asked with what she thought was a sultry grin.
His answering smile coyly asked what her game was, but he answered the surface question.  “I don’t think my accent is quite it.”
Maybe he wasn’t quite ready to out with it, she thought.  Of course a man as worldly as he would have a better sense of restraint.   Very well, she’d play it straight until the time was ripe, then.
For a half bell it was much as these sessions always were and her early impatience slowly faded into the earnest rhythm of practice and correction.  Throughout it all he seemed to be in an especially good mood, though, which kept her slightly expectant.
“Alright, I think that’s about as much as I can take of that,” he said, laughing after his extended series of attempts to pronounce Arimisan ‘thick’ consonants dissolved into a gargling mockery.
“As much as you can take?” she responded, “I was the one listening to you trying to free a fish bone stuck in your throat for a summer bell.”
“Well, you were the one who made me eat the fish, Lady Arimis.”
“Made you eat the fish?” she said saucily, “Not yet I haven’t.”  Then she blanched at her spontaneous temerity in referencing the crude version.
Kalra, however, just chuckled appreciatively as if he was surprised by her unusual purple humor.  “That’s a touch to you, hey, like one of the boys.  But can't say as the boys would make that one.  I mean, they's boys for real an all.”
“They are really boys, or they're,” she corrected automatically, trying to understand what he meant by his speech.  Did he think she wished she was a boy?  She didn't really, even though she was so very bad at being a girl.  Most of the time she didn't even want to be like other girls, though she knew the almost physical pain she felt when she looked at Maleris was at least a little bit envy.  Gods, what was she doing, pretending to a place amongst the exquisite?
“Eleihas?”  Kalra asked her.  He'd said something to which she'd not responded.  A joke, she thought, but she'd missed it.
“Sorry, I was just distracted.”
“Weren't very funny anyhow,” he said, shrugging.  “What's got Lady Arimis' wits wandering?”
“What has Lady Arimis' wits wandering?  I suppose I was just considering.  If the Gods gave me a choice I'd still choose to be female.  I kind of wondered whether I'd prefer to be just like I am, or more like Maleris.”
“Who?” he said, sounding interested.
“Ser Maleris Condier.  I'm surprised you've never heard of her.  She's the most beautiful girl in Heiras, and Lord Condier's eldest daughter to boot.  We... I guess we were playmates when we were little, though she hates me now.”
“Why does she hate you?”
“I don't know.  Maybe hate isn't the right word, but she likes to play tricks on me and embarrass me.  I was so stupid when I was little.  She would be nice to me sometimes and totally cruel other times, and I kept falling for her tricks because I thought maybe we could be friends again.  She's so pretty that when she smiles, you feel like she couldn't be faking it.  I learned in the end.”
“You can't be wanting to be like that, can you?”
“Of course not.  I just meant I wondered if it would be preferable to be beautiful and highborn, which I wished I could be when I was little.  I still think I would prefer to be beautiful like Maleris – you might not believe it, but people say my mother was beautiful, though they say I don't look at all like her.”
He murmured a protest that was sweetly loyal but so unconvincing that it confirmed he could find no fault with others' judgement.  As disappointing as it was to have what was left of her hopes dashed, she had to laugh.  “No no, Kalra, don't attempt to convince me of the preposterous, kind as your motivation may be.”
“Convince you of the what?” he asked with theatrical incomprehension.  Trying to distract her from the sad truth of it.
	“Preposterous means 'entirely unbelievable,' and that's what the idea of me as a beauty is.”
	He was quiet again for a moment, and she was seized by the conviction that she'd said something terribly wrong.
“You know, Eleihas, you be a girl, and you got the most wicked head I ever met.  The most smart of anybody, be trues.  If you was a lad you'd be some kind of... some kind of fellow on high.  You're well done in the sticks and bricks, too, so I bet you'd be in a way to boss the docks or such, if you was a lad.”
Strangely irritated by this praise of this notional male alternate self, she cut in, “I'm not though, so what does it matter?”
He looked a little taken-aback.  “I just mean, well, why do you do it?  Why are you on to learn to cypher and figure and fight, like you was a lad?  If it aint' your teikh as wants it, an I know it ain't, then why?”
“I can't be what I'm supposed to be, so why try,” she spat.  “So I'll do what I want.”
	“I think I get that bit.  Question is, why do you want all the lad stuff?”
	“In Nok-Hein, women sometimes serve as soldiers, and remember the woman who lead that twenty wagon caravan from Giant's Hearth?  If I was a Nok-Heini, I could do what men do.  A little, at least.”
	“But you ain't, Eleihas.  You's Heiran, and ain't too much young for marrying.  Your set ain't going to see things like a Northron or such.”
	“You think I don't know that?  I know everything will end with disaster and I'll be an embarrassment to my father, but I can't do it.  I can't be a proper woman.  That's not how teikhti raised me and it's just not how I'm formed.”  Kalra's own palpable disinterest being only the latest proof of this, Eleihas thought bitterly.  “Nobody has ever explained to me what a girl can do, who is seventeen and a half hands tall, bleach-haired, bone-faced, leatherhanded and vulgar.  No, everyone just tells me what I'm doing is wrong and disastrous.  I don't need you to tell me so.  Seven Gods, I never thought you'd be like all the others.”
	“I'm not!  I figure you're me brother, more n less, and I help brothers in trouble.”
	Normally she would be touched by the underlying sentiment, but at that moment she just couldn't bear another erasure of her gender.  “I'm no one's brother, Kalra.  Maybe I'm all wrong as a girl, but that's what I am.  If I ever forgot it, everyone would remind me quickly enough.”
	“What do you want?  Am I on to treat you like a brother, or a girl?  You say one thing then flip it to say the other.  It's impossible!”
	“Yep, that's exactly how things are.  I'm going home.”
	She left before he could finish sputtering.