The Baker and I sat down at the small table in the kitchen while Patches busied himself elsewhere. My landlord was wider than the table between us, and when I looked up at him it seemed like there wasn't enough space between his wagon wheel of a face and the plaster ceiling above. A day ago I would have been intimidated, but now I had a daemon in my hair.

"This is about Porus," I said.

"I don't give an eff about Porus." His tone was bland, but his presence was emphasis enough.

"He attacked me."

"You cut off his effin balls," he said. "I don't care. Kid's a rat."

"Cut... I didnt..."

"How do you know Castor Livius?"

"We met at the party."

"Eat that shit. You didn't meet at the party. If you're not going to answer don't answer, I won't be lied to."

"Okay." I'd never been talked to like this in my life. Thomas had been unbearably unmannered, but this was outright offensive. It was also very efficient. "I won't answer that," I said.

His mouth twitched like a crack appearing in a cliff side. "Fine. You know his dad's an effin senator? Consul for two terms. I can't afford that kind of interest."

"He said he would talk to you."

"I don't want to talk to him. Someone like him shouldn't be seen here, it would be bad for his effin career. You can be the messenger. First tell me what you're still doing here if Castor effin Livius is ready to have somebody castrated for ruffling your skirt."

"He can't be seen with me either."

"Uh-huh."

"It has to do with him being married soon."

His shoulders dropped. Apparently, the Baker did not enjoy mysteries, but the suggestion of adultery and a hidden mistress fit perfectly into his model of the world. This, a least, was something he could understand.

"So he's going to put you up here?"

"Is that a problem?"

"Ten birds a week. Pay in advance."

That was a lot of money, twice what he was charging me currently, and I had no idea what Castor's resources were.

"I'll have to talk to him."

"Do that. You don't work for me anymore, and you can have the room above the one you're in now."

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me, it's business. You need anything, I'll start you a tab, and your boyfriend can pay for it."

"He's not my boyfriend."

"I don't give an eff. He can afford it. Should I be worried about someone coming to look for you?"

Like the nation of Euphoria? "I don't think so."

His eyes narrowed, nearly disappearing in the shadows of his sockets.

"I mean," I said, "I'm not going to answer that."

"Fine. You already dyed your hair, keep changing your looks. Let me know if anyone comes creeping around, I've got enough eyes on this place, and if you're bad for business you're out, I don't care who your boyfriend is."

"Why would I be bad for business?"

"Don't be coy. You're smart enough to bag a Livius, you know exactly what goes on here."

"The Bakery." I wasn't trying to be stupid, I'd just been so preoccupied with other things I hadn't put it together yet. With Marisa he was running some kind of escort service, and he'd had other girls before. I was saved from that because of Castor, who made me a customer instead of a lost girl to be exploited. But that isn't what he was referring to, it was the special rolls.

"You mean selling leaf," I said.

The look he gave me could have frozen a windstorm, and I felt Hikami growing restless because of my anxiety. Why did I want to stay with this man again? Because this is exactly where I needed to be to see the world I'd been sheltered from in Euphoria. This man and his way of life were what Ahriman supposedly protected my kingdom from.

"I'd actually like to learn more about that."

"About what?"

"About your business. I want to see what its consequences are for society as a whole, and why people choose to live this way."

"Are you effin kidding me?"

"I'm not. I want to learn, and I'm very good with mathmatics. I could probably help you."

The Baker seemed at a loss for words, but not for uniquely lifeless facial expressions.

"You won't have to pay me, I just want to learn."

"Why?"

"Because I'm concerned I may have to rebuild a kingdom from scratch at some point in the near future and I feel like this is something I need to understand."

"You're effin crazy."

"Is that a no?"

He started to make a noise that I didn't initially understand, because he looked like he was choking on his own spit. But he was laughing.

"Sure, princess. Why not."

That was how I sort of became a leaf dealer. It wasn't as exciting as it sounded. The Baker reopened his shop and the rest of the day went by pretty normally. He put me back at the counter because Marisa was sleeping and he wanted me to take note of all the people who came in to make payments and who was buying the specialty rolls. Some of the rolls were marked with letters that corresponded to customers, and I matched them in my mind without difficulty.

After the shop closed, we went back into the kitchen and the Baker opened a ledger on the table.

"Not everyone picks up what they're supposed to. You've got to check off the pick ups that were made, and dash the ones that weren't over to the next day." He produced an ink quill.

"Tell me who you mark," he said. The ledger didn't use names, it had letters and signs that corresponded to those used on the rolls. I blithely listed the customers I'd seen during the day, confident in my inerrant memory.

The Baker may have been impressed, it was impossible to tell. That day we were visited by Towark, who was very muscular but looked puny and fragile beside the Baker. They worked out a deal with very few words and Towark handed over a fat sack of coins. So I wouldn't have to play the middleman after all. It was disappointing knowing that I wouldn't have an excuse to see Castor again, but price obviously hadn't been an issue. Towark nodded at me before he left, but the Baker didn't make a thing of it, one payment among many.

"Why is leaf illegal?" There were other drugs that you could sell as long as you were licensed by the Hermetic Society to do so, and some of them were more dangerous than leaf.

"Effin politics," the Baker said. "Laws come and go with the senators that make them. Leaf got banned because it was putting the apothecaries out of business. It's too easy to grow, people had it in their back yards. They couldn't make any money from it."

"But apothecaries don't make the laws."

"The Hermetics buy and sell the senators as they need them. Those old families, effin inbreds, they can't survive on their own. They have to sell their votes. I don't give an eff what the law says, it's something to work around. "

Gracia was completely different from Euphoria. Our monarchy held total power and delegated portions of that power to court officials. The compass diagrams gave direction to our labor and our laws, and the high king was a direct link to the power of the compass. There were no illegal medicines in Euphoria, anyone who abused a substance like leaf would be given help in the form of retraining, and ostrasized if it failed. Medicines weren't ever sold for profit. Profiting from a public good was just...wrong. It wasn't done. I could see that this wasn't the case in other societies.

"What would happen if you were caught?"

"Trial. But I've got the money to pay for representation, and to buy a jury if I need to. I'd lose business, that's all." The eyes narrowed into darkness again. "Where do you come from, princess? You look like a Euphorian, and they don't come down from on high unless they been kicked out. Why're you here?"

"I don't want to answer that."

"I'm answering your effin questions, aren't I?" He wasn't angry, just conversationally expletive. "You think I'm this chatty about the business with everyone?"

Hikami shifted, and my neck grew hot. "It's alright," I said to both of them. "I am Euphorian, but I wasn't kicked out. I wanted to see the world."

"And you're friends with a Livius?"

"Yes." That was all I was going to give.

The Baker bought leaf from a grower on another island, packaged the leaves, and sold them through his shop. Some of his customers bought larger amounts and sold it themselves. It was clear very quickly the profits from this enterprise dwarfed his legitimate rents and sales.

My new room wasn't much different from the last one except that it wasn't festooned with other peoples clothing. I planned on going shopping the next day, but the most pressing issue was making the room my own.

"You can come out now," I told Hikami after I'd shuttered the window. The ball of light with blue flame eyes slid out of my hair and onto the floor. It seemed to need to be on a solid surface, so it sat on the boards, a heatless sphere about the size of a melon. It only burned when it needed to.

"Stay there," I told him, "I need to do some diagramming."

Hikami signed his consent and I retrieved my charcoal sticks. As I made a complete circuit of the room, I began plotting the signs I would need. The 72 symbols of the compass were all inside my head, as well as a their five thousand one hundred and eighty derivations. What I needed to do was protect myself from my father's divinations. He would have already sent daemons out to Gracia to search for me. Some of them would have run aground of Kyren when she turned back toward the mountain, but I was sure there were already spirits of wind and light searching for me in Kouros.

I'd avoided taking measures when I was in a room with Marisa, so as not to out myself as a magic user. Now that I was on my own, there was no reason to delay any further.

The trick was not to stop the searching spirits, but to divert them. A magical barrier would be noticed, so I needed to create a diagram that was subtle enough they wouldn't realize they were being influenced, but firm enough to turn them aside.

I spent most of the night working by the light of Hikami, scratching signs along the moldings and the fixtures. The task involved me so completely that the minutes passed as easily as breathing, and my mind was empty except for the multifarious workings of the diagram. What I created would tell a story to any spirit searching the area just as a compass reading told a person's fortune. This room was empty. They were free to enter, but they had no reason to do so.

When I was done, my tightly wound script had fenced the entire room, and I was out of charcoal, another item to pick up in the market.

A part of myself that had been relegated to stasis while I worked now noted that the door to my room was cracked. There was no one in the hall. Had the Baker been checking on me, or Marisa? I closed the door, but there wasn't a lock.

Hikami had been seen.

I sat cross legged in front of the blue eyed spirit. He'd been perfectly content to watch me and provide illumination all night. Maybe content wasn't the right word, daemons didn't seem to experience time the way we do. Otherwise, being a boat would be unbearably boring.

"I should have lit a candle," I said, "but I thought you'd like some time out of my hair."

Hikami didn't respond, though I had the impression that he was listening with rapt attention.

"Did you see who looked in on us?"

Yes, he signed.

"Who was it?"

Female aspected. Youth.

Marisa. I had to talk to her. I extended my hand and Hikami crawled back up my arm and onto my head. It wasn't as dark in the room as it should have been.

"You have to be dimmer," I told him, and the room went black. With my hand to the wall, I felt my way out and carefully down the steps to the room I'd only recently shared with Marisa. I knocked, then let myself in.

"Marisa," I said, "can we talk?" The window was open, and the palest edge of moonlight had encroached upon the shadows. I could feel her looking at me in the dark.

"I can't stop you." Her voice wasn't foggy at all, she'd been lying awake.

"Did you come up to check on me?" I asked.

"It isn't fair," she said, unmoving. "You just got here, and somehow you've got a senator's kid in love with you. Protecting you. It didn't make any sense, you know. Nobody protected me."

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry about whatever happened to you. But you're okay now, aren't you? You're doing what you want?"

"Eff you." It was harsh and she meant it.

"What did you see?" I asked, "When you checked in on me?"

"I know people too," she said. "Important men will take me home, at least for the night. They tell me things, mostly junk, you know. They talk crap about their wives, maybe their boyfriends. Their kids. The other rich people. It's boring, you know. Rumors sometimes."

"Marisa," I said, "what are you talking about?"

"I'm saying it didn't make sense, you know, you're nobody, but your snatch is clamped around Castor Livius so tight he can't see straight."

My face got red. "That's not what it is."

"Whatever. Good for you, it just doesn't make any sense if you're nobody." She sat up and scooted forward on her bed until her face caught the barest echo of the light. "But you're not nobody, are you Juno?"

I sat down on the empty bed next to hers. "I'm not anyone important, Marisa. I'm a runaway, like I said. And I'm from Euphoria. I screwed up there, and I hoped the world outside the mountain would be different."

"Euphoria is paradise. That's what people say about it."

"It's different than what people say."

"Sure. So how do you know Castor?"

"He was a foster there for years. He was kind to the servants."

"I bet he was."

"It isn't like that."

"Sure." Her eye glinted when she shifted to look a me more closely. It reminded me uneasily of the spirit hiding in my hair. "Is it true that people in Euphoria can do magic?"

"Only some people. The royal family." It was out of my mouth before I realized I should have lied.

"I heard a rumor from a rich friend," she said. "The princess of Euphoria is missing."

I didn't say anything.

"Why is your hair a different color?"

"Marisa," I didn't know how to finish the sentence.

"What's your name, runaway?"

"My name is Juno."

"Sure. And that fire thing, what's that?"

I sighed, she had seen him. There wasn't any point in trying to pretend any more. "You can come out, Hikami." I felt him drain down my arm and onto the bed as the room grew brighter.

Marisa had frozen in an expression of surprise. She looked like she hadn't slept properly in days.

"He won't hurt you," I said.

"Why doesn't it burn?"

"I think he only burns when he wants to." I touched him, "Hikami, meet Marisa. She's a friend." That simple statement caused her to flinch.

"What is it?" She asked.

"He's a daemon.That's about all I can tell you about him. We've only recently met."

"And you hide him in your hair?"

"It works. Castor said Gracia had stories about a warrior woman with fire in her hair."

"Aurelia," Marisa said immediately.

"Yes."

Marisa was merserized by the flame spirit, she didn't want to tear her eyes away. "This is a trip," she said.

"A trip where?"

"No, being high, sometimes you see things. Especially if you haven't slept."

"You're not high now though."

"I'm buzzing a bit."

"Hikami is real."

"I know that. I know. It's why I'm going to turn you in."

"What?" Hikami flared, and the bedspread began to smoke, the linen blackening underneath him. "Stop! Stop, Hikami." I grabbed him and picked him up, he was hot but it was bearable. He looked chastened.

"If I turn you in," Marisa said, "you're worth a thousand eagles."

"You can't do that." I was as focused on keeping Hikami from flaring again as arguing with Marisa.

"That's enough to get me out of here, buy me my own place, you know. I'd be free."

"Please," I said, "don't do this."

"You're a princess, you don't understand what real life is like. It's not you're fault, but I have to do it. I can't live like this anymore, not if I don't have to. You can go back to living in a palace, and if you really want to leave, just runaway again."

"I can't go back."

"What, were they going to make you sleep with some old dude for money?" It didn't sound like she had a lot of sympathy.

"They were going to make me kill my baby," I said.

Marisa burst into tears.