The cup of seretto tea sat at Ammas's fingertips, undrunk and stone cold. Carala had wept during the course of her tale, though she had never fallen into sobs, and now her face was red and faintly swollen, her hazel eyes glassy with tears and distressingly vulnerable. Against his will Ammas felt admiration for her strength in relating this story to a man some considered to be one of her father's deadliest enemies without breaking down entirely. She had not told him everything, of course, particularly the details of what she and Tacen had done together on those moonlit nights in the Judge's Conservatory (and oh how his own father would have hated that), but the cursewright had enough experience with werewolves and their hungers to guess most of it. When she had begun telling him about her first visit to the Three Harts, Ammas had instructed Casimir to return to the Othillic Libraries to complete his assignment on his missing Academy. He had known at once where this story was going, and whatever he had seen in the Prideful Lioness, the boy was too young to hear such details.

However, she had not told him how she even knew he was alive, much less how to find him, and this he could not guess. Ammas supposed there must be rumors about him drifting around the Chalcedony Palace, and cursed himself for settling in Munazyr. Anyone who knew his history might guess he'd return here. But that hadn't troubled him, for he had the Argent Council to protect him. It had been his service to this city as a boy that had partly inspired that protection in the first place. Whether that protection would extend to him speaking to the Emperor's missing daughter, much less illegally treating her, he could not imagine.

Lightly Princess Carala, the sister of the man who had butchered his aunt, uncle, and cousin; the daughter of the man who had personally overseen the deaths of his parents, the destruction of his house, and the murder of almost every friend and colleague he had ever known, touched her fingers to her throat, again flashing the priceless bangle that had given away her station. "I am quite parched. Might I have a glass of water?"

"Of course," Ammas replied neutrally, trying with all his might to master the nausea that had roiled his belly once he realized who had strolled into the abandoned temple. It had subsided while he had listened to her tale -- he was too proficient in his craft to forget how to listen to a potential client and catalogue every detail as he did -- but now that she was asking something of him, it returned full force.

For two decades, for all of this girl's life, he had entertained idle fantasies of what he might do if Somilius Deyn III ever appeared before him. He dreamed of it as he lay sleepless in vermin-eaten beds that reeked of old sweat. Images came to him while he hid in haylofts, disguising himself as a common laborer. Such thoughts kept him warm during icy nights during the two years he'd spent on the edge of the Scorched Desert. In most of them he unleashed the full force of his abilities against the Emperor even though such a thing would probably kill him as well; watched the forces from the worlds beyond tear him to pieces as the fat shit shrieked in terror until his divine voice was a croaking rasp hideous enough to match the rest of him. But such things were a childish waste of time and energy. In the last five years, when he finally began to practice his trade again in this abandoned temple in the Munazyr slums, he put them away, even if they were never quite forgotten.

Now that man's daughter, frightened, achingly beautiful, and infected with the wolf's blood, had come to him for help.

"Casimir, would you fetch a ewer of water and some cups for us?" he called out. Carala blinked at him, perplexed, and after a moment he realized why. A thin smile he didn't feel curled his lips. "Forgive me, your highness. One gets used to having an apprentice so quickly. If you'll excuse me for a moment?"

He rose from the table without waiting for a response and swiftly strode behind the altar to the discreet postern door that led to the little plot of land behind the temple. There was solitude there, and just now he needed it like a man in the desert needed water. The princess might simply up and leave as she waited for him -- she had seemed skeptical of him to begin with, and he could only imagine what tales she had heard about him from her father and his sycophants -- but that didn't concern him. Undoubtedly he was the only cursewright she knew of, or she'd have gone elsewhere for assistance.

The plot behind the temple was of an eccentric shape, confined as it was by the contours of the temple's chancel and the deeply weathered bricks of the vast warehouse that defined its far end. Once this place had been a cloistered garden fit for quiet contemplation by the temple's priests, or else an open air chapel for intimate weddings or coming-of-age ceremonies. Now Ammas had repurposed it as a vegetable garden. Cabbages, carrots, potatoes, garlic, and leeks grew side by side with the more exotic herbs he required for his craft. What he could not grow himself he purchased in Munazyr's markets and apothecaries.

Tucked behind a fluted column was a well-worn water pump. Some of his crockery and tableware Ammas kept out here in a roughly built cabinet, simply for ease of cleaning as it was closer to the pump and so he could use bits of castoff food as compost. He retrieved a battered tin ewer and a pair of clay mugs, then sat on a weatherbeaten stool as he began priming the pump.

I could kill her.

Yes, he could. Quite easily. All he would need do is tell her he accepted her as a client, begin the examination that commenced a werewolf's course of treatment, and while she was lashed to the altar thrust his skymetal dagger into her throat or her brain: a cursewright's badge used to murder the daughter of Somilius Deyn III. It would be fitting. Revulsion rose up in him as he considered with what ease this temptation occurred to him. But revulsion gave way to righteous anger as he remembered the stories of his poor cousin Jan, five years old, weeping over his mother's body, that wretched bastard Silenio seizing the boy's blonde hair and cutting his throat.

I wonder how her throat would look cut just the same.

What Somilius Deyn III had done to his parents he struggled not to remember at all, for if he did he feared this girl would never leave the temple. The stair to the catacombs was right behind the altar, and the catacombs stretched far into the endless night beneath the city, where traces of the Yellow Death yet lingered. Casimir would not return for hours. It could be done and hidden in a matter of minutes. Strictly speaking, it wouldn't even be murder. Under both the laws of Munazyr and the Emperor's own Code the prescribed action for a werewolf was death if a cure was not possible. That he had not actually diagnosed her condition could be overlooked as a technicality. Even his father, one of the most severe Overseers of the Curia who had ever lived, wouldn't have sentenced him to more than a year of hard labor. Oh, his cursewright status would have been broken, but that seemed a small price to pay. And who would care now anyway? Her father had seen to that.

Ammas Mourthia clutched his graying curls in his hands and thrust his head between his knees, a grimace of utter anguish on his face. Water from the primed pump continued to trickle into the ewer until it lightened to droplets. When he looked up he found himself staring at a cheerful cluster of aardgold blossoms.

Yes. That was another option. Dried aardgold, or even fresh, the chief ingredient in one of his most popular concoctions. The tribes that had once ruled the Scorched Desert had nearly harvested it to extinction, and his own cultivar had come from the ruins of Sailor's Crown itself. A pinch would put steel back into a fellow's manhood, or the honey back into a woman's cleft. A spoonful would do the same, but would also explode the imbiber's heart and liver within minutes. Ammas imagined the princess would, at least, die in more pleasure and less agony than his parents had.

His fingers had actually stretched out to caress the blossoms before Ammas realized just how terrible this madness that had seized him was. He withdrew his hand as he might from the top of a hot stove, fingers clenching together, forcing himself to return to the pump, filling the ewer. Half the water he spilled onto the damp earth, his hands shaking as if palsied.

Is this the real reason you sent Casimir away? Because you knew the moment you saw the Deyn crest that you were going to kill this girl?

"Girl." She was an infected wolf bitch. Perhaps she always had been. The werewolf who had changed her blood had apparently had no trouble luring her into congress with it. Her father was practically an animal himself; some of her siblings even more so.

And is she? You know nothing about her. She was born after the Academies fell. Until this morning you had forgotten her existence entirely. You know damned well her eldest brother is nothing like his gods-cursed father.

That was all true. It was also true that if Perseun had been the one to come to the temple asking for his aid, he had no doubt he'd be feeling the exact same things.

The ewer shook harder, spilling most of its contents, and he swore under his breath as he went about refilling it, forcing his hands to be still. Thinking about what the Emperor had done to his parents on a pleasant spring night in the heart of Talinara in front of a crowd of horrified nobles was enough to make his heart jump sickly in his chest, his breath to flee his lungs, and his outraged mind to spin helplessly, even all these years later. So he forced himself not to; had almost forced himself to forget it had happened. Perhaps once a month, though, he still woke in the musty darkness of his adopted home with screams behind his lips and tears flowing down his cheeks. If he kept thinking of it, then the Princess Carala was certainly doomed.