I could ask you to call me Mama. No, that sounds like a terrible idea, and my traitor of a face with its rapid-onset blush doesn’t get a vote.

“We could each do a lot of things.” Her smile isn’t any less devastating with a hint of a teasing smirk to it, nor is it any less… well, any of the other things it is. I somehow manage not to stammer, anyway. “Some of them would be unwise.”

“Shulemi, then, Adam. And my question?”

It takes me a split second to wind back my memory. Multitasking isn’t real, not for humans, but you can learn, if you spend enough time around people whom you don’t want to pay attention to but whom you don’t want to offend by failing to field a question, to have something of a data buffer; I mean, don’t, but you could if you wanted to, it’s just maladaptive, unhealthy, and dishonest. “I don’t drink caffeine, as a general rule, no. Call it a cultural thing.”

“Then I think you’ll find your tisane to be somewhat novel.” She sips from her tiny cup, somehow managing to be perfectly elegant without making me feel like I have to mimic any degree of elegance myself. “You are guests here,” she says softly, when she sees my hesitation. “Be not so afraid; I would no more violate hospitality law by poisoning you than I would simply murder you where you sit.”

She carefully doesn’t say and the latter would be just as easy, doesn’t even imply it with body language. Zidanya nods at me, so I lift the cup—no handles, but it’s a thick ceramic and the mug itself is pleasantly warm, rather than the heat of the liquid inside—and take a long sip of it, eyes closing in genuine pleasure. There’s mint in there, and something else in the ultra-high-palette, and a blend of flavor profiles that goes down from there; it settles into my sinuses, relaxes into the back of my throat, and leaves a warm trail down into my stomach.

Clarity hits me like the wave of cold air when you leave one of the hothouses, stepping out of the humidity after pruning the multicitrus bushes. There’s three different kinds of tea, or tea-like drinks at least, on the table; Matriarch Shulemi and I have one kind, her two daughters have one that’s a very pale yellow-green, and my three companions have a tea that’s a dark brown. So not only did she make a point of dazzling me and then serving me tea that would be a bucket of ice water on my libido, she also either has a clever enough trick to invisibly switch around the cups from a distance or she outright predicted that I wouldn’t want it to be the four of us and the three of them, sitting across the table from each other, when I’m not even sure myself why I tried to throw her off balance that way.

Ah. Plus, she’d made a point of saying she wouldn’t poison me, and then drugged me with something that let me think straight after she used purely socially-acceptable means to get me off my game, means that weren’t at all a violation of hospitality. Three tricks, in fewer minutes.

“Matriarch,” I say quietly. “That was educational.”

“Didn’t I ask you to call me Shulemi?”

“You asked,” I retort with a broad grin, “that I forego false deference.”

“Titles are a tool.” Her voice is dismissive, but her smile is broad. “For the sake of the question you came here to ask, I ask that you use my name; I have doubts about neither your degree of respect nor your grasp of propriety.”

I’m fairly confident that means that she figures I have a sufficiency of the one and none of the other, which, fair. The way I’d been staring was, in hindsight, wildly inappropriate; how had I managed to not lethally piss anyone off thus far? Well, other than the extraordinarily good luck to run into Zidanya—and arguably Amber, but calling that good luck was a tangled mess of wildly fraught ethics and a still-kicking obligation to ensure her capacity for free will inasmuch as it’s even possible.

“Then since you insist, Shulemi.” I take another sip. The byplay of warm and cold in the tea, both so distinct and powerful, is fascinating, and I’m busy enough trying to understand how it works that I manage to not say anything else.

She gives me time, and then her smile changes; still broad, still welcoming and all of those things, even though those aren’t reaching down into my spine anymore and telling me that I have a need that can only be filled by this woman’s kindness and grace, but it’s different. “Vonne, Shalma.”

The two girls rise, perfectly silent, and take the lids off of the second level of the side table’s trays. It takes them only a moment to get the plates onto our places, and then they’re sinking down into their seats, calm and poised. I glance at Vonne, and she’s smiling; I’m pretty sure it’s genuine, but that’s only because I can’t imagine her faking a smile.

So everything is going fine, and we haven’t, I haven’t fucked anything up irreparably.

The food on our plates is just on this side of the awkwardly elegant mark. It’s a collection of green rolls that catch the light and shimmer a little, with rivulets of sauce that have dripped off of them onto the plates to join geometric patterns of different sauces. It smells amazing, or at least the sauces do, like salt and yeast and soybeans and a mercifully small number of different aromatics all blending together, and it’s a relief when the four people at the table who know how to behave in this context grab a roll, trace a line across the plate, and chow down. I make a note of the timing; Zidanya grabs her roll when the fifth plate touches down, but doesn’t actually eat it until everyone is seated again.

If the Matriarch, her two daughters, and Zidanya are all eating, I figure I can too; with a barely-stifled sigh of relief that we’re not going to be having some sort of etiquette-off, I mimic them. I’m unsurprised at it being absolutely delicious, crunchy and full of flavor and soft chewy bits all at the same time, and the rolls vanish one after another, all eight of them. They’re small, so I’m still hungry afterwards, and lo and behold, without so much as a look from Shulemi, Vonne and Shalma cycle the plates.

If they weren’t on the outside seats, if they weren’t eating the exact same food at the same table, if they hadn’t let me pass them my plate, if they weren’t so obviously, in Vonne’s case nearly-bubbling-with-excitement happy, I’d be a lot more bothered by the fact that they’re changing out the plates. Those elegant, flowing motions have got to have been practiced and trained, and it grates; the Spirit had a taboo against having other people serve you, you personally as opposed to the community, and that taboo never sat entirely right with me but it still obviously seeped in.

As it is, I squeeze Amber’s hand, grateful that she’s there, grateful that she squeezes my hand back despite obviously having no idea why I’m flustered or bothered.

I take my cue, or rather, we take our cues, Amber and Sara and I, from Zidanya and don’t say anything. There’s a second course, some sort of open-faced buns that taste of nuts and something dark with a gooey texture along with a fatty, salty meat and alliums; there’s a third course and a fourth, all coming out of the same trays in a bit of magic that is somehow both subtle and elegantly blatant at the same time.

There’s tea, after the fourth course. It’s a different tea, something that tastes of three different kinds of citrus and honey and a sort of grassy, earthy something that I don’t recognize at all, but which if I had to guess I’d say is some kind of root rather than some kind of grass. This time the seven of us are all drinking the same thing, and after one sip, Matriarch Shulemi places the mug onto the table with a quiet clink.

“Dame Ashborn.”

“Matriarch.” Amber’s voice is serene, a mirror of calm.

“Do the people of the surface still call upon the Gods to bless a meal?”

“They do, Matriarch, after it is eaten.”

“Generally before the desserts, I believe.” I can hear the humor in her voice, a thread of ah, I bet you kids want your sweets, but it doesn’t touch her face. “Grace us, if you would.”

Amber gives it a beat, drawing a breath. “The fruits of our labor, enjoyed in peace and with joy; strength that compounds and begets strength, rising rather than falling; the community to celebrate these with. Kazir of the harvest, Kazir of growth, Kazir of festivals.”

That seems to satisfy everyone; a tension that I didn’t notice building leaves, or maybe I’m just imagining things. Mostly I’m fascinated by the invocation, now that I have so much less social pressure than there was at the party and the tea’s clarity to think on it with; the structure of it is wildly different from either of the Spirit’s traditions, Old Faith and Voidfaith alike.

“So, Magelord James.” I’m startled out of my near-reverie by the level, expectant tone, and I more or less come to attention at the sudden sense of depth-of-power sitting across from me.

“Matriarch Shulemi,” I reply, matching formality to formality.

“My daughter suggested that you might have a question to ask of me.” I start to open my mouth to respond, but she raises a finger and cuts me off after just long enough to make a point of it. “I hope that you will go in peace, once you have your answer. I will brook no Outsider, no Magelord believing, as so many have before, that I can be taken from.”

A few things click into place as a result of that, and my brain undertakes a rapid reshuffling of ideas and conclusions. I consider and discard the top three questions I had for her, plus a few ancillary ones, in the time it takes me to draw breath in preparation for speech, but that’s what thinking things through ahead of time and having a wide array of contingencies is for.

“Who,” I ask in the most casual tone I can manage, “should be the first sed to walk again the surface of Cador?”

Her face contorts in what I’m pretty sure is surprise. I’m almost too relaxed to even notice, my self-satisfied pleasure at having gotten that reaction from her having me practically melting into the pillow I’m sitting on, and ah, the second mug of tea had a relaxant or a sedative of some sort, that’s quite clever.

I’m still mulling over what that implies, and what else might have been in the tea, when the titanic presence of Matriarch Shulemi fades into the welcoming love and joy of Mama Vix, and she begins to laugh.