“I’m sorry, Kip,” she said. “I’ve been preparing myself to talk with you for weeks now, trying to work myself up to it, and all the time I was readying myself, I was readying myself to speak to a Guile, and I forgot that you’re a sixteen-year-old, too.”

That’s me: underwhelming.

He had a sudden memory of telling his grandfather he liked to be underestimated. And here was the opposite. “What do you want, Tisis?”

She raised her hands in mock surrender. The movement coincided with her sitting up straighter and rising perilously high in the water, her bare shoulders and chest confirming that she was not wearing a bathing robe. “Kip, we have good reason to hate each other,” she said. “Though I like to think my reasons are more substantial than yours are. I know you think there was some big conspiracy against you at your Threshing, but there wasn’t. We always try to scare people. And when you threw the rope out of the hole, I really thought you weren’t allowed to, so I gave it back. It was an innocent mistake. On the other hand, you killed my father.”

When you put it that way…”Whatever that thing was, it stopped being your father long ago,” Kip said.

“Something it would have been nice to judge for myself, rather than assured that by the man who killed him. Besides, your father and uncle destroyed half the world, I—”

“And your family joined the wrong side to help do it!” Kip said. Man?

“An error we corrected,” Tisis said, her chin drifting up.

“You came out against Dazen? When? After he was killed at Sundered Rock? Brave.”

“I would think of all people, Kip, that you might not be the first to blame a person for what their family did when they were young. You weren’t born yet; I was two. Should I blame you for what your mother did? Because I’ve heard stories—from people who heard them from you. So maybe we should focus on where we are today, and not old fights that we had no part in.”

“That sounds … remarkably sensible,” Kip admitted. It was easier to focus when he was having to dissect her argument, but at the same time, she’d leaned forward and up as her temper got going. He cleared his throat. “Could you, um…” He took his hand and gestured down a smidge.

She looked down, and saw that her nipples were right at the waterline, and the water wasn’t that soapy. “Oh!” She blushed, and with her pale skin, he could tell immediately. She sat lower in the water. “Thanks,” she said. Something touched his naked thigh, and he nearly shot out of the water.

She burst out laughing. “Come on, Kip, as you so pointedly, uh, pointed out, you have seen me naked before. It shouldn’t be a surprise.”

I don’t think that’s how seeing a beautiful woman naked works. “The first time I saw you, I was about go into the Thresher and you looked into my eyes and lectured me about self-control. I thought you’d tear my head off if I dared—and the second time! My grandfather?!”

Her lip twisted. “Believe me, I know I actually owe you for stopping that before it went any further.”

He looked at her and they both burst out laughing.

Her laughter wasn’t seductive; it was hilarious. Full-throated, distinctive, it was the kind of laugh you could pick out of a crowd of thousands, the kind of laugh that snuck out of its cage infrequently and burned the town down when it did, ’cause, hell, it was just going back in the cage again anyway, right? And then she snorted.

They laughed harder, and she blushed and laughed and snorted so hard she ended up trailing off in tears.

They drifted into a companionable silence as Tisis wiped her eyes. She ended up cleaning off the kohl makeup dripping from around her eyes with a little towel. When she was done, Kip stared at her quizzically. Without her makeup on, she didn’t look twenty-five years old like she did with it on. She didn’t look her actual nineteen years. She looked about seventeen. No wonder she wore the makeup.

She was just a teenager like him, and they were both very, very alone here.

“Kip,” she said, “the truth is, my family’s in a bad spot. The False Prism’s War wiped out the other branches of the family. Perversely, that strengthened us, because with all the wealth and lands of our entire clan in my uncle’s hands, we became a major family. I think that your grandfather thinks we’re a threat to him. We proposed that I marry your father Gavin to make an alliance, and we thought your grandfather was going to accept. Instead, Gavin married Karris. It was a slap in our faces. Never explained, never apologized for.”

She had been intending to marry Gavin? And she’d had to go from that to putting her hands under the blankets for my grandfather? Now there was a turn of Fortune’s Wheel.

But Kip kept his features carefully blank. There’s a time not to use the Lip.

“I don’t know why, but I fear Andross has decided to let us be destroyed. The war isn’t going well, everyone knows it. Our richest lands are those nearest the Color Prince’s army. We’re afraid the promachos plans to let the Color Prince take our lands and wealth and only stop him after he’s destroyed us. Kip, you have no idea what it feels like to admit this—especially to a Guile—but my family is right on the edge. My mother passed away two years ago. My father’s dead. If it were a will, my older sister Eirene got all the family intelligence, I got all the looks, and all the charisma I should have gotten went to my little cousin Antonius instead. Eirene will continue the family line if she absolutely must, but it would be hell for her, and I won’t do that to her if I can help it.”

“What?” Kip asked. Sure, some women didn’t want to get stuck raising children, but a wealthy family would have slaves for that, wouldn’t they?

A scowl. “I forget you’re not in the gossip circles,” Tisis said. “Her interest in taking any man to bed is about equal to your interest in taking your grandfather to bed.”

“Oh,” Kip said, not understanding. Then, “Oh!”

“My cousin Antonius was on his way here to bring orders from my sister. His ship was captured by pirates. They haven’t asked a ransom, which they would, if he were alive.” Her eyes went vacant, her voice an echo of itself. She obviously loved him very much. “That leaves me,” she said. “Kip, our southern plantations and forests can be defended. But if they aren’t … those are my people. More than fifty thousand of them. I grew up in those lands. I played banconn in their festival parades. I was taught farming and husbandry and logging in those little towns. I played with little boys and girls there. Many of those little girls I played with have children of their own now. Life moves faster out on the farms. I will do anything to save my people.”

Including getting on your back for my grandfather.

“Yes,” she said quietly, reading his mind. “Even that. My virginity for their lives? I’ll take that trade any day.”

For some reason, the statement made Kip deeply ashamed of himself. He’d judged Tisis as if she were merely angling for the attention of the most important man in the room, willing to debase herself even with Andross Guile. Like she was a tramp or a prostitute.

Some of the noble families had made their base on Big Jasper for so long that they had little to no connection to their ancestral holdings. Perhaps the lord or lady would make one trip a year to check how the stewards were keeping things together, but their children were left vying with the children of other nobles for who could throw the most lavish party, who could gamble better or dance better or ride better, with constant talk of who’d bedded whom that morphed into who would marry whom, followed by more gossip of who was carrying on affairs with whom. Or they used some tiny sliver of magical talent to get into the Chromeria, where they ended up doing much the same, with a side of studying. Kip hadn’t been part of those circles despite his pedigree, his time taken up entirely with studies or training.