"Finally, some privacy."

Lord Zier mused airily. He and Meya were standing under the shade of a large oak tree outside the castle's town gate, overseeing the charity tent in uneasy silence.

Meya flicked her gaze to meet his sly, knowing grin, then quickly glanced back at the rowdy marquee.

The castle's almoner stood under the crimson canvas, decked out in a plain magenta robe reaching to his ankles. He was hurriedly ladling stew from an enormous pot into all sorts of containers (Meya could've sworn she saw some grandma with a flower vase). Half a dozen castle servants flanked him right and left, following suit.

A long wooden table splattered with dollops of stew separated the castle workers from the poor and the crippled. Basked by the sun, the ragged commoners stood in a dozen lines, waiting anxiously with their 'bowls'.

Meya noticed that the stew wasn't the usual leftovers-thrown-in-a-vat, but newly cooked and simmering merrily over a freshly-dug hearth. It really was a special charity tent.

Meya thought she heard a buzzing near her ear. It sounded as if Zier was saying something else, but there was a redheaded, freckle-faced girl bobbing among the crowd, and the sight of her whisked Meya to the past.

Whenever Mum ran out of coppers for breakfast, one of the Hild children would walk to the castle and line up for leftovers. Marin would grab a pot and come home with it filled to the brim, without having to line up, while Meya would be lucky to make it back with some soup left in her bowl.

"Ahem!" Zier's cough jerked Meya out of her reverie, and she whipped around with an apologetic grin.

"Yes, my lord?"

Zier scrunched up his nose in slight distaste.

"Just Zier, please." He rolled his eyes, then reiterated. "I was asking, how shall I address you? Normally, I'd use fair maiden, or Lady Arinel, but seeing as you're neither fair, nor maiden, nor Arinel?"

Zier leaned forward, an eyebrow raised in amusement. Meya glanced covertly at the almoner. Seeing him still busy rationing stew, she whispered out the corner of her mouth.

"I may not be fair nor Arinel, but I'm still a maiden."

"And I might have believed that," Zier cocked his head, sly grin growing even wider. "If it didn't so happen that Mother sent Fione to put an ear on your door that first night, and now, pretty much Mother's whole gossip ring has heard what she heard."

As Meya gawked, Zier drew up his hands and counted on his fingers. "To summarize, mostly you screaming my brother's name, how well-endowed he is, several words I'm not allowed to utter, and a few Fredas thrown in."

Meya's cheeks grew red-hot as Zier topped it off with a cheeky grin. Events of that night flashed by before her eyes, and she felt like drowning her head in the almoner's boiling soup vat.

It was embarrassing enough waking up in the middle of the night and hearing Mum and Dad making love on the other side of your one-room cottage. But this!?

"W-w-why haven't your parents said anything?" Meya spluttered, her face still burning. "I keep telling them we haven't done it!"

"They will. After the guests have left." Zier cocked his head, his smile abruptly replaced with a vacant expression. He shrugged at Meya's raised eyebrows. "Of course they want grandchildren, but Coris is dead against it. You should've heard them quarreling in Father's study."

"Coris just told me he's impotent." Meya argued, a wary frown on her brows. Zier tilted his head from side to side.

"He may or may not be. No-one can prove that, can they?" He enunciated, leaning close to stare into Meya's wide, fearful eyes, then looked away as he jammed his hand down his cloak pocket. "He's never slept with anyone before. So be safe and Silfum up, peasant lass."

An oblong package wrapped loosely in crumpled brown paper was tossed into Meya's fumbling fingers. The sharp scent of herbs mingled with the dull smell of moldy paper. She could feel the raised whorls of a spiral pattern pressing against her palm. Silfum Candles. She glanced aside and raised an eyebrow at Zier.

"I got this from Arinel. You're a commoner, Coris's a nobleman. A babe would only complicate matters. No offense." He added with another shrug.

"Yeah, none taken." Meya muttered with a scoff, stuffing the candles into her dress pocket. Zier hitched up a smirk, then steered the topic back on course.

"So, now that we're on the same page, how should I address you?"

"Just Meya, most gracious." Meya waved it off carelessly, then demanded in a strained whisper, "But that aside, you've met Arinel. Have you two discussed what we're gonna do now that Gillian is gone?"

"Don't worry, everything stays the way it is." Zier raised two pacifying palms, his manner reassuring to the point of patronizing. Noticing Meya's eyebrows disappearing behind her curled fringe, he elaborated. "Arinel said she doesn't feel worthy of her title yet, so you can keep it for now."

Meya considered it for a beat, then narrowed her eyes in suspicion.

"Arinel is a lady of honor, so I kind of expected that. But what about you?" She shot back without warning, and Zier betrayed a slight jolt. "You're gonna let your sister-in-law be a maid for the rest of her life? You don't want her to marry Coris that much?"

Zier faltered, his lips soundlessly parting and closing, and the realization hit Meya like a bolt out of the blue. Her eyes widened, then narrowed as she gazed off unseeing into the distance. She nodded slowly.

"I see. That was why you tried to steal the Axel for Baron Graye, wasn't it?" A cold smile crept up on her lips, as her eyes slid back towards the young nobleman, who remained wordless and pale.

"Lord Crosset only wanted Coris as his in-law for your family's power. You hoped, if the Axel were taken from Hadrian, he wouldn't force Arinel to marry Coris anymore."

The back-and-forth paused at Zier. Meya weathered out the stretch of silence, staring intently at the young lord's fair, chiseled profile, shrouded in the leaf-shade. But just when Meya was sure she'd have to give him a nudge, he finally gave in.

"She's a year older than me. And I'm the second-born. The spare."

Zier spoke quietly, his expression solemn and his bright blue eyes bitter like she had never seen—no, she had seen it once. Just last night, in fact.

"Those are the two reasons I couldn't marry her. Reasons that there's nothing in the three lands I could do to change. Age isn't that big a deal if you don't make it so, of course, but if only..."

His strained voice petered away, as if he had hastily strangled the life out of it. Yet Meya knew what he had been bursting to say out loud but couldn't. The same thing she'd silently wished upon her brothers and sisters sometimes, on days that were particularly harsh.

If only they were never born.

Such a thought would give birth to tremendous guilt. Yet, at the same time, it was liberating. And for a moment the embittered ones simply basked in the shared glory of jealousy, before Zier shook his head out of it. Literally.

"Anyway, Christopher's taking Arinel to see Bishop Riddell today, and she couldn't be happier." Zier resumed in a more chipper tone, bouncing on the balls of his feet. Then, his gaze wandered dreamily into space, his train of thought shrouded in images of his sweetheart.

"She's always liked tinkering with alchemy sets, Arinel. But she couldn't so much as touch one as a Lady, of course. Considering how her mother had died."

Zier ended on a cryptic note, a troubled look on his handsome face. And Meya couldn't tamp down her curiosity.

"How?" Those bright blue eyes twinkled slyly at her. Once he was satisfied with Meya's disgruntled scowl, Zier meekly obliged.

"Arinel's mother was a peasant maid in the alchemy labs of Crosset Castle. Then old Lord Crosset took a fancy to her. You know the pattern." Zier waved his hand dismissively before moving on, "The alchemist she served was boiling vitriol when the lab caught fire. She was with him when it happened. They cut Arinel out of her before she died."

The gruesome tale left Meya scrunching her face into a grotesque mask. Mum lost her voice having Meya. Deke's mother lost her dignity having Deke. Jezia's mother lost her life having Jezia. And Arinel's mother got cleaved in half. If the creation of life was indeed Freda's dearest mission like them priests were parroting, then the goddess was doing a damned crappy job of it.

"And Arinel couldn't get over it?" Meya continued, having finished her daily entry to the heresy diary, whispering somberly as if in mourning. Zier heaved a melancholic sigh.

"They were just experimenting for a potion to make fruits ripe. She shouldn't have to die young like that." He shook his head, then added in slight bemusement. "Only consolation was, she seemed to be sleeping peacefully."

"And you're going to let Arinel follow in her footsteps!?" Meya demanded, ignoring the macabre detail. A dire mistake, as it would turn out much later. Yet, Zier wasn't unduly worried for his sweetheart.

"She won't be following blindly, will she? Dead alchemists marked out sinkholes and quicksand with their lives. And Hadrian's labs now are much better than Crosset's sixteen years ago. She'll be fine." He patted Meya's shoulder with a warm, slightly sweaty hand, then abruptly shifted topics again.

"But back to your question. You have me and Arinel's full support, so the rest is up to you. Do you still want to be Lady Hadrian?"

Zier laid considerable weight on that last sentence. Meya blinked in astonishment as those blue eyes locked hers in a vice-like grip, then pointed out the most obvious pitfall.

"But what about Coris?" Zier simply cocked his head in casual acknowledgement. Somehow, this seemed to bother him just as much as the risk of his beloved Lady being blown to smithereens in an alchemy lab.

"You two get along well, in bed and out, and he seems happy with you as his wife. What he doesn't know couldn't hurt him, could it?"

Zier suggested, his expression deadpan save for one elevated eyebrow. And though all her life Meya had always taken it upon herself to make her own choices, even when there wasn't supposed to be any, more often than not to dire consequences...this time, she was inexplicably torn.

Was it because up until now, her goals had been clear-cut: Earn as much gold as possible, and make Dad nod? And her means had been straightforward: Exploit any loopholes she could find?

But this time it was different. She wasn't doing it for gold or Dad's approval; she was doing it for her own life, and for the lives of twenty people. But now that the threat had passed, what was she still doing all this for, exactly?

Claiming a name that should never have been hers. Giving away her virginity to a dying man she barely knew. Taking on a role she had not the slightest idea how to fulfill.

Greeneyes. Dragons. Nostra. The Axel. Heists. Kidnappings. She was tangling herself in a mystery much larger than her puny, worthless life. Three days ago, she was sure she knew what she had taken on, but now Dockar's words haunted her, and she realized she had barely scratched the surface.

Then Dad's twisted face flashed into her reverie, his mouth moving in a bellow.

"You leave, and we get your fine back. And I accepted!"

He sold you off for three months of wages.

The thought brought a wry grin to Meya's lips. Three months of wages. How many Latts was that? If that was all she was worth to her own father, then what did she have to fear?

She had given away her virginity. The only valuable thing she ever had. Who knew, she was probably not even worth three months anymore. Maybe one at best. Or maybe...just dung. Like everyone in Crosset had been hammering into her skull. Or pebble, like the official documents told her.

If she failed, what more did she have to lose, apart from a life worth less than dung? And if she succeeded, how much more gold could she add to her worth?

So long as there is gold on this land, there is no limit.

Meya's calloused hands clenched into trembling fists, and her voice when she spoke was heavy as molten gold, shining fiery in a crucible blasted with determination.

"I'm in."