Aisha’s hands trembled as she held onto her clay mug. It made the wine bounce and splatter as the elderly servant poured it for her. “Sorry,” she said, forcing herself to smile at him.

All present could hear the shouting of her brother on the other side of the estado. “A headless corpse? This is what you bring me? What am I supposed to prove with this?”

The old butler smiled and righted the amphora on the dining table. “I understand. Would you like a bit of fruitbread?”

“Please,” she said.

The servant bowed and left her alone for a time, among the halls of mosaics and in the light of golden sconces. Personally, I have my suspicions about the purity of the gold, but the structure had long since been pillaged by the time I returned to Puerto Faro. As the daughter of a merchant, and talented enough to be a treasured guest at many an event, she was no stranger to the plaster moldings, the artwork, the delicacies of food and drink. What struck her were the servants.

They were old.

Of course, any household of means tends to accumulate a cast of workers, for a great many things needs to be done to a large house. The food must be cooked, the linens washed, the candles trimmed, and so on. Naturally, some servants are particularly well suited to the task, even to the point of enjoying it, and they end up managing the others. That still leaves the majority to be, traditionally speaking at least, easy on the eyes. Pouring drinks and washing pots gives enough time to determine a better use for a servant.

In Giordana, house slaves were also common.

The Medini family had neither of these, but rather an aging cast of helpers that bespoke their shrinking influence. Still, they were quite attentive to the young girl there to speak about her brother’s vendetta. Aisha was mulling her thoughts with a cup of wine in the early morning when Stella Medini finally met with her. Both of them could easily hear the ravings of her brother, all of a menial and bureaucratic nature. With blood still wet on the ground, the game of logistics had begun. To chase the Vassish meant hiring a ship or a caravan. Both cost money, and the ferocity of his men depended as often on their grievances as on the plunder he stood to gain.

His anger haunted the halls, and yet the lady Medini strode in to meet with Aisha bearing a smile. She was a widower without children, which gave Aisha the illusion that they shared a kinship of sorts. “Stella-ima,” she said. Aisha had the relieved smile of one who has found their rescue.

“Aisha, shouldn’t you be back home in Tavina?” the blond merchant asked. Her hair was her most striking feature; a blond so bright it bordered on silver, as though all of its color had been sucked into her complexion. It would have served her well to appear sun-touched in the central plains, but it won her only distrust in Giordana. She at least had no fear of men eyeing her wealth; she had a guardian.

A temple hound nearly four feet at the shoulder, by the name of Dune, shadowed her at all hours. With fur like fox and ears that never drooped, he still had a puppy look to him despite his age. His teeth could rip a man’s arm from its socket; but, Aisha giggled and squealed when he trotted over to clean the sweat from her cheeks. “Dune! Stop, stop. I’m here to talk, not to play!”

“Dune, sit,” Stella ordered, and the furry beast complied, though he gave a disgruntled huff.

Aisha composed herself and brushed her sticky hair back. “Isn’t it obvious?” she asked, but Stella didn’t have the answer. “Our family is ruined the moment word reaches back to Vassermark. Even if it weren’t for the Vassish; most of our investment was lost in the southern continent. Medo will get only blood for all his anger.”

As though in response, they heard Medorosa’s barked order, “Bring me the prisoner. I’ll kill him myself!”

The Medini family estado had few proper doorways, only secured rooms could be fastened shut. As such, both them and the servants could look across and see when the blue cloaked figure of a Vassish prisoner was dragged inside, sobbing. The sight made Aisha gasp, for she recognized the man from the night before. He had laid beside my pupil in the infirmary without the strength to even rise, sick with dysentery. The grief of his body having betrayed him painted his face as the Cynizia dragged him to his death.

There was nothing she could do about it. Her brother had not so much as consulted with her upon his return. No hope remained for that poor prisoner.

Stella sighed and took the seat opposite Aisha. A servant immediately placed a cup of wine before her, and she sipped it. “I told your brother the same thing two nights ago. Your family should have known the risks in dealing with the desert. That’s how things are here, in Puerto Faro. The sailors gamble wages, the merchants gamble ships. His gamble lost. He should have been thankful that he hadn’t lost his life.”

Aisha bit her lip, but no answers came to her from her wine. “I imagine he hated the idea of starting over from nothing.”

The lady Medini smiled. “I tried offering him a loan. He’s a strong, ambitious young man. There are certain opportunities that you can’t just offer anyone. Stealing Aillesterran tea seeds didn’t have the same allure to him that violence had, and he didn’t even wait to think it over.”

Aisha scoffed. “Of course; if he had waited no one would have joined his cause. What a perfect excuse to be impulsive, no?”

Stella laughed. At the same time, the servant returned with a plate full of fresh baked breads and sliced fruits. Though they would never have seen the light before a nobleman in Vassermark, by the standards of Giordana it made for quite the pleasant breakfast. Both women filled their mouths with bites of the softly leavened bread and held bits of apple or fig as they continued.

Stella said, “It also forced my hand. That idiot Solhart attacked me because of it. My guards still haven’t finished cleaning up the mess. I hope the smell didn’t disturb your rest this morning.”

The pyre of oil and corpses had fouled her room, but Aisha wasn’t one to complain about something like that. “Don’t you think the Vassish will retaliate against you?”

“Perhaps,” Stella said. “But that will be years from now, when they deem it worthwhile to send an army back here. It wasn’t us who drove them out, but the cost of their shipping. And besides, I can buy them off.”

Aisha arched an eyebrow. “You can?”

Stella smiled. “Come with me. If you won’t go back to Tavina, I imagine you’ll be riding with your brother as soon as he goes to chase them down, yes? I could use a negotiator who knows what cards I have.”

The two of them rose from the dining table, and passed through her gardens. Flowers and vegetables and sturdier sorts of plants turned her halls green with the dawn light, and the alluring scent of nectar filled the air. Even the most stubborn of vines had a beauty to them, spilling out of their pots and down the walls such that they begged for water with the promise of future fruit.

Stella strode through all the garden halls and to one of the estado storehouses. Still secure within the walls, she waved off the near-dozing guard and let the Canta girl inside. Medorosa’s shouts at last waned from their ears, filtered by the walls. The closing of the door behind her gave physical relief. Then her eyes revealed to her the contents of the room. “Stone?” she asked, seeing nothing but piles upon piles of quarried rock the color of sandstone. The room was full of it, in all shapes and sizes, even some rough boulders dug free of the sand and carried in upon sleds. The barrels seemed to her to at least be something, but they too were filled with stone as rough as gravel or as fine as sand.

“Not stone,” Stella said. She walked over to the nearest barrel and took out a pebble. “This is the treasure the Vassish sought.” She dropped the rock to the ground.

It struck the masonry like a blacksmith’s hammer and leapt back into the air, flying to the side, where it struck the wall. Again, a deafening hammer blow before it ricocheted into one of the boulders. Then the sound was more like a bovine falling on its side, and the sled it sat upon creaked from strain. The pebble tumbled to the floor, inert. Stella smiled, for she had proven it to the girl.

Aisha’s mouth gaped. “Ley? You have their lost shipment?”

“Medorosa escaped with more than just his life,” she said. “But, this too is a gamble. The Vassish are the only people in the world looking to buy this… stuff. They’re the market makers as it were, and if they decide that my little empire of connections is not worth this pile of rocks, then I have no bargaining leverage at all.”

“I don’t understand,” Aisha said. She pulled her hand away, afraid to even touch the reactive grit. “Are you on my brother's side, or are you not?”

“Do I look like a revolutionary to you? Giordana isn’t a nation, we’re not an empire, we’re not even a theocracy. We’re a tangle of self-interest bound in only the loosest of ways by laws older than humanity. Who am I to stand against Vassermark?” (1)

“You could care about what’s right.”

“Only the strong get to care about what’s right, rather than what must be. So, what will it be? Will you be my agent? I’ll pay you well enough.”

Aisha nodded. “I’ll do what I can.”

That was the strongest thing she could say, for she too had been bound to her word into my conspiracy.

An admirable statement of humility, but she believed those laws to come from the gods, because they were carved in pillars older than any recollection save my own. My people wrote those laws. Still, they were a good set of instructions, and they did well to abide by them.