What’d you want me to do, starve? It being the day after year-turn, I knew every Hina with spare coin and unwed daughters would be burning incense by the fistfuls. I spotted a wool merchant with a fat purse dangling from his belt and started edging up to him. I get so busy checking out running room and easing through his herd of daughters, I forget to look out for pressgangs. Hadn’t been for those giggling geese I might’ve heard them and took off. I don’t hear them and they get us all.

They take us, me and the wool merchant’s daughters, across the causeway, me hoping to be put in some little havalar’s House where I can get away easy and take a thing or two with me for my trouble, but I see we are heading all the way up the high hill to the Tekora’s Palace. I am cursing you, brother, and thinking when I get home, I am going to peel your skin off a strip at a time.

She was much calmer at this point in the story, drifting about the room, touching familiar things with urgent strokes of her immaterial fingers as if she sought reassurance from them. She hovered a moment over the teapot, smiling as she absorbed its fragrance.

I know I can get loose again easy enough, but the Tekora’s a mean bastard with girls that run away. You wouldn’t know that, would you, brother? Only women you bother about are those no-good whores in the joyhouses.

Aituatea scowled; dying hadn’t changed his sister’s habits in the least as far as he could see. Shut up about that, he said. Get on with what happened.

Branded on the face, brother, branded runaway and thief, who’d let me get close enough to lift a thing? So when the Temueng Housemaster puts me to work in the Tekora’s nursery, I am ready to act humble before those Temueng bitches when I’d rather slit their skinny throats! She grimaced in disgust. You know what they do to me? Hauling slops, picking up after those Temueng nits, not lifting a finger to help themselves, running my feet to the bone fetching things they could just as easily get for themselves.