When Nua went out to her temple in the middle of the night, she was somehow unsurprised to feel a presence behind her. “Come along, Kaiji.” She said without even looking over her shoulder. “I know it’s useless to argue with you, and even if I ordered you… you’d rather take a punishment than obey.” Nua hoped she sounded slightly annoyed, but the truth was it was warming her heart.

The night was warm, and around her the insects that lived on her grounds were chirping, glowing, crawling, all the different things they did to tell the world that their brief lives were going on. Nua’s feet were bare, and she felt a rush of pleasure when she curled her toes into the grass and soft earth beneath her feet. A light breeze picked up the remains of her once long hair and carried it about behind her.

She ran her left hand through it at the side of her head while she waited and Kaiji scurried to catch up. When the demon-elf reached her, she folded her hands in front of herself and bowed her head. “Forgive me, mistress. I came too close to losing you before. I won’t risk it again.”

“How did you even know I was coming out here?” Nua gave the slave a curious, cockeyed look. “I made sure I was silent, I even used several of my martial skills.”

Kaiji gave her a winsome smile, “Because I know you. Nobody else in all of Mict’aratz knows you as I do. Not the man you aim to marry, not Freyjin, not even Priceless, and perhaps not even your Teacher. Even she sees only one part of you, I think.”

Nua looked at her in a long, brief, silent stare, and then waved her right hand toward the little temple. “If you say so.” She concluded, “Come with me, then.”

They walked together into the open doors, and Nua found her next surprise. “Sado?” She asked as if she weren’t sure of who she was seeing.

Sado was prostrated before the empty alcove where Nua intended to put a representation of her god. He was stripped to the waist, and just past where he worshipped, a sword lay crossways on the stone floor.

When he heard her voice, he went up to his knees and looked over his shoulder. “My lady… I didn’t get to say this before but, congratulations. Prince Rasgen is a… a good Prince. A good match. A good man.” He said each sentence as if he wasn’t sure which was the right one, or perhaps, as Nua thought about it, as if he wasn’t getting out just what he wanted each time until he stopped.

She chose not to address his fumbled congratulations and instead asked, “What are you doing here?”

“My lady, I translated the sacred texts, is it any surprise that I would convert?” He rose and went to where a stone lectern sat, reached over it, and plucked a copy up. “I may seem like something of a stubborn meathead,” he looked back at her with a regretful expression in the form of a self deprecating smile, “but I know true divinity when I see it. The stars offer my people nothing, your god offers them dignity. Your god is my god, your people are my people, until the end of my life.” With a slow and delicate motion, he set the book back in its place and asked, “Do you object if your slave worships beside you?”

“...No. But I’m curious, what aspect of him have you chosen to value most?” Nua asked, ‘Probably strength or courage given his warrior nature.’ She mused, only to do a double take.

“Patience and wisdom.” Sado replied with deep regret. “The things I failed most at are the things I most need the divine for. What I can get for myself, I should. I should ask for help, where I am weak. Weakness is a sin, and there I was weak, there I failed my people more than anywhere else.”

Kaiji walked past her mistress to the stubborn fool of a boy she virtually raised, reached up to place her hands on his chiseled jaw and tilted his head down. She kissed his forehead with the softness of a butterfly’s flap of a wing, “Finally you’re the kind of man who would make a great Prince.”

“Too little, too late.” Sado answered when he straightened up to take himself from her touch.

He looked past Kaiji to his mistress. “My lady, is it true what Diana tells me? Adoption, freedom, and offering her as a bride to Yanlim?”

“Yes. Why?” Nua asked.

“She will need a bodyguard. I’d like to volunteer.” Sado shot the words out like an arrow from a bow, and it caught Nua out of the blue.

“Are you unhappy in my service?” Nua asked, and Sado brushed past Kaiji and went to his knees before his mistress.

“Please… please.” He said, and repeated, and went prostrate to her.

“The thrashings of Lady Solution in practice are nothing, assisting the Pain Children barely leaves a mark… and you’ve been good to my people. But you must understand… my… indiscreet heart, that was sincere. If you order me to remain, I’ll live with the bitterness of serving while seeing you married to my old friend. I’ll live with it all, I have no choice. Not about anything anymore. But I beg you, don’t make me stand and watch as the woman I’ve come to love, marries another. Set me to some other task where I can still be of some value to your cause. Send me with Diana, I will keep her safe, I will train a cadre of warriors to fight in the Komestran way and blend it with Solution’s teachings.” Sado felt his heart break again as he gave voice to his own broken dreams.

Her old hatred of powerful humans simmered in her guts, and Nua reviled its existence, drowning it instead with pity for the beautiful broken warrior Prince. “I told you not once, but twice, that I was far too cruel to you, Sado, crueler than you ever really deserved. I hated you for your humanity and for being powerful. I hated you for owning slaves. I hated you for loving me. I was wrong in every one of those things, you never deserved the rage in my heart, and for what ash it is worth, I knew it. I knew it and I hated that I felt it. I tried not to let it influence how I treated you, and… I wasn’t always successful.” Nua sat on one of the stone benches that lined the temple.

“In the sight of my god, I swear that is true. We’re told never to despise someone for what they can’t control. All I did was prove how warped and how much of a failure I was.” She frowned a little, “I actually feel bad for the people of that dead country, I wonder how many struggle the same way I am, getting rid of old hate is like peeling off a scab, you can pick at it, flick bits of it away, but it just grows back. If you’re lucky, it grows back a little less each time, but it’s stubborn about staying with you as long as possible. Unfortunately, there’s no healing spell for hate.”

Nua closed her eyes while facing the alcove, “Sado, I wanted to make things up to you… the truth is, I wanted to make up a lot of things to a lot of people. I would offer you your freedom if I thought you would take it.”

“I refuse, mistress.” Sado replied, “While even one of the once free of Komestra are in collars, I will remain in this.” He reached up and tugged gently at the gold around his throat.

Nua gave a sullen nod and answered him. “That is what I thought. This would all be easier if all Princes, human and nonhuman alike, were all just evil scum without redeeming virtues. But even Queen Vexia…” Nua rolled her eyes behind their lids. “No, it doesn’t matter, the point is, I’ll give you what you ask. If that mercy is enough for you, then I will send you as a bodyguard with Diana. When I’m crowned in Komestra, she will become my daughter. Protect her as you would any child of mine.”

“Thank you… mistress. Perhaps with distance, and some duty to distract me, I will heal from this. Forgive my selfish desires for what isn’t mine to have.” Sado said as he went back up to his knees.

Nua gave a regretful shake of her head. “Between the two of us, Sado, I’m far more selfish about wanting things that aren’t mine. I can’t hold your dreams against you. Now…” Nua let the sentence hang, stood, and prostrated herself in silence to the alcove to reflect and worship.

She heard the small rustling of clothing as the others did the same, but paid no attention to that, or to the sound of other feet finding a place to sit or prostrate themselves behind her. That didn’t make it less of a surprise however, when she realized her temple was entirely full.

Yori bound the rag around his head and stuffed his nose with bits of cut up cloth before he even left his filthy one room hovel. The ceiling was half rotted, the door was less ‘wood’ and more ‘termites holding hands’ the walls were moldy and the floor hadn’t been truly dry in years. Broken blackened bits of wood remained, but thanks to the constant flooding, it had long been rendered worthless. ‘Why they even bothered, I will never know.’ Yori thought with an indifferent shrug as he grabbed his rusty pitchfork and rusty shovel and exited the cheap room for the day.

‘At least there’s work now.’ He thought with at least some contentment, a thought he knew was shared by hundreds of others who were busy with the new channels being dug that actually went all the way outside the city. The project funded by the House of Aiwenor was, as the proclamation put it, “to enhance the safety and cleanliness of the poorer districts and improve the quality of life for the entire city.”

The cynic would say she was pronouncing, “Your city stinks.” The realist would acknowledge the cynic and reply, “She’s right.” Yori fell into both camps, but walked with a spring in his step because clearing out the foul smelling areas that had never been truly drained, was going to pay a full fifty coppers per day, plus a five copper bonus for every bag of ‘useless refuse’ filled.

The stench grew thicker as he moved past the warehouses, where the human and animal waste was stored, and into the ‘wet district’ as it was affectionately known. A fouler place there had never been than where the rains collected with the various disgusting wastes were deposited, along with any garbage people generated along the way.

He waved to his fellow workers when he arrived and climbed into the little rowboat that had cheap brown sacks laid out already, and rowed himself out into the waters to start the more profitable collection routine before he would take his turn digging beyond the wall.

He glanced around him at the foul piles of floating waste that passed by him and did his best not to vomit and add to it all. He restrained the urge largely by having skipped a morning meal. More than one worker was actively losing weight as a result of losing the desire to eat, or the ability to keep food down around the retch inducing filth. It was a relief at least that the water was lower now than it had been a week or two ago, his pitchfork actually scraped the bottom, and the drainage had actually begun to work. ‘When was the last time this was actually emptied?’ Yori wondered, and tried to recall a time in his life when the stench hadn’t been present. He failed. ‘Never.’ He thought as he raised his pitchfork with a pile of ripped up clothing caught on the end of it. He heaped it into a bin on the boat, and thrust his pitchfork down into the water again, the familiar scraping feel went up his body again as the boat drifted, and then stopped dead. ‘A rock?’ He wondered, and tried to scoop it up. After a moment, he gave up and tried again, it felt the same way. ‘Alright, a ‘big’ rock.’ But still that explanation didn’t satisfy him.

He looked around him, other cheap rowboats floated around aimlessly like his, dredging up things that might otherwise stop the drainage process, and several seemed to run into the same problem.

“Hey! I need some help with this one!” Yori shouted, “I’ll split the load with you if you help me get it up!”

Spurred by the promise of easily filling one of their sacks, several men in clothing as dirty and shoddy as his own, dropped their pitchforks and scrambled to their oars to row themselves over to him.

In a moment or two, three boats were near his. “Right, ‘ere’s the deal. You help me get this up, we all go to land, divide it up, then… couple’of yah were having the same problem I was, right? So we help each other and split the load equal like, that good?” Yori asked, and three thickly bearded faces nodded as fast as they could.

“Right then, lessgo!” He said and pushing his boat over the lazy water by poking at the object at the bottom, he positioned his boat horizontally so that it was longside of the big lump at the bottom. The other three men jabbed their pitchforks in the water until they got a good grip beneath, and bracing themselves as best they could in the rocking boat, they began to heave. “Lift!” He shouted with a hardy groan that was echoed by his companions.

The thick, filthy water offered nothing of a view of what was down there, not until it was nearly to the surface.

When Yori got a look, so did the others, it was a long burlap sack with two ropes hanging down and stretched taut from both ends. But what was notable was far more important than the nature of the weights still hidden by the murky water.

The notable thing was that the outline of the sack was very clearly that of a body. “What the hell?!” They shouted and lost their grips, a pitchfork fell into the water after the body that rapidly sank down to the bottom. ‘He probably won’t want that one back.’ Yori reflected before a sick realization hit him. “Err… them heavy things you guys tried to lift but couldn’t… they about yeah long too?” He waved his hand out toward where the body sank, and their faces went pale behind their cloth coverings.

“We better say somethin… this idn’ good… but…” Yori scratched his greasy brown hair, “Maybe we get a reward for findin these bodies, yeah? At least get paid for the day without havin to work more.”

That had them all scrambling back to their boats as fast as they dared without risking fallin in, and each one rushing to row back to where one of the Duchessa’s people stood supervising.