Kip was so aghast that he couldn’t say anything. Tisis snorted. Kip just shook his head, acknowledging that she’d scored a point.

Her mouth pressed to a line briefly to avoid smiling, Verity walked out the door. “I’ll return in due time to dress milady and take the dishes. My lord. My lady.”

It was only as she closed the door behind herself that Kip realized the parting tease had been a test, too: Was Kip the kind of master who would hurt her at any provocation, or had her adultery insinuation crossed one of a relatively small number of important lines? It was the kind of thing a slave would want to know.

He sat down on the bed, not knowing whether he’d passed or failed, or what either meant about him.

Tisis had pulled the screen back into place, and she was continuing her sponge bath. “You scared me, but it was a good distraction.”

“Huh?” Kip asked, coming out of his reverie.

“Distracting her like that so I could wash myself. She told me yesterday I didn’t smell like sex.”

“As if I’m that smart.” Kip only realized he’d said it aloud afterward, but Tisis said nothing from behind her screen. Kip pulled on his underclothes and his clean blacks.

When Tisis emerged dressed in her moss-green tunic and breeches with a leather belt that emphasized her slender waist, she had an odd look in her eye. “So you knocked down the screen because you were actually angry?”

“Yes?” Kip said. Was this a trick question? “Am I a bully?”

“You’re a lord,” Tisis said as if it were a strange question. “The gentry know your titles, but they also know what you were before you came to the Chromeria. We’ll devour you if you let us, Kip. Even our slaves. That’s what we do when we’re threatened.”

“Is it always to be battles and contests, even with my own side?” Kip asked.

“Only if you lose the important ones,” she said. She saw he didn’t understand. “Kip, in Lucidonius’s time, Karris Shadowblinder was a theatre girl. It was considered the next thing to a prostitute by polite society. No one talks about her as a theatre girl now. She became a Name. There is no middle path for people like you and her. You’re suddenly elevated greatly, and everyone wants to know if you deserve it. Me? I can be some lady born to a great family with one or two excellences, but little else worthy of comment. That path is closed to you. You come in suddenly at the top, and everyone else feels like they’ve been knocked down a notch. You have to prove yourself.”

“Even to slaves?”

“Slaves take not only orders but also cues from their masters. Verity was Eirene’s governess. Eirene sending her to serve me? You think that wasn’t a little dig? My sister was implying that I was acting like a child. But it’s also because she trusts Verity.”

“If I’d known that, maybe I wouldn’t have threatened her with death,” Kip said, grimacing.

“About that. Were you angry because it was true, or because you wanted her to think it was?”

Something about her intensity drove all thoughts out of Kip’s mind. “Because what was true?” Kip asked.

“That you keep your oaths.”

So of course Kip thought immediately of the oaths he hadn’t kept: one to his mother, to avenge her rape by his father—a story that had all been nonsense from an addict. And then he’d sworn to Gavin that he would destroy Klytos Blue. He’d been doing his best to investigate the Color through the forbidden libraries, but he’d never found anything damning there, and had broken that oath, too. He said, “Maybe I was so furious because I’ve failed oaths before.”

And he told her about them, without too many specifics. She was still a Malargos, after all.

“But you consider your wedding oaths binding, and plan to do all in your strength to keep them?” she asked.

“Yes! Absolutely,” he said.

“But you love her.”

Her. Teia. It was a gut punch. So Tisis wasn’t oblivious. Kip hadn’t said a word about Teia. Tisis had picked that up from what? A few glances?

Do I lie?

After a pause this long, a lie would be pointless, wouldn’t it?

“Yes. I think so. I don’t know. I’ve been infatuated with like four girls in the last two years. Always the impossible ones. Maybe that’s why you’re terrifying. You aren’t just not impossible; you’re not just possible; you’re actual, and the rejection will hurt that much more when it comes, won’t it?”

He’d meant to use the technique his grandfather had taught him: use his blunderbuss of a mouth to his own advantage and see how the other person reacted to whatever outrageous truth he’d fired at them.

Except that Tisis didn’t respond at all. She merely looked at him.

Well, now Kip felt naked in a new way that was nearly as uncomfortable as the first.

Then she said, “When you wouldn’t take off your tunic, were you hiding your scars, or your… stomach?”

“You can say fat,” he said.

“I will not.” She said no more, and he couldn’t help but be impressed by her quiet dignity.

“Did they teach that in lady school?”

He didn’t mean to say it out loud. But she didn’t respond. Again.

“Sorry,” he said.

“How did you get those?” she asked, as if he were being a willful child. Which was sort of fair.

“Too much pie.”

“The scars,” she said, missing his attempt at humor, though he couldn’t tell whether it was on purpose or not.

“I lost a bet,” he said. He was taking the totally wrong tack here, sailing straight into the storm instead of quartering the waves.

“With some kind of animal?” she said angrily. “Kip, there was a part of our vows that said, ‘Let there be no darkness between us.’ Why are you lying to me about stupid stuff?”

It was supposed to be the setup for a joke:

A bet?

I bet dinner that I could get out of a locked closet. The rats bet I couldn’t. I was dinner.

No one had ever really laughed at that joke, but he thought that was maybe in the delivery.

Right as he was about to explain and apologize, she said, “About those vows. If she showed up, and she became possible, and I would never know…”

“I’m not adding ‘cheater’ to the list,” Kip said.