She put that letter down in a different stack. She’d have to answer that when she was no longer furious. Sometimes she hated her work. She caught a glimpse of her lover stirring in her mirror.

The work did have its perquisites, though, she supposed.

With her unfashionable red-red straight hair and freckles, many other women of thirty-five years would find it difficult to procure lovers. She did what she could to darken her skin and hide the freckles and the worry-lines, and few would guess that she’d had twelve children (though, honestly, most would guess she’d had one or two), but even dressed well, Arys’s beauty was not the type of beauty that was celebrated at the Chromeria. Her blue eyes were her best feature—everyone loved blue eyes. But she’d had a lover—in her younger days, before she figured out how to pick men who knew the proper use for their tongues—who, immediately after they’d made love, had told her that her freckles were a tragedy. That otherwise she would be a beauty men would praise to the stars.

She’d been young, and not so good with her impulses as now. She’d grabbed his stones and tried to rip them off. She’d broken all of her nails, but his scrotum had torn in her hand. And then he’d beaten her fiercely.

It was easy to forget when you had so much power that sometimes the only power that mattered was the power of muscles.

It had taken her a minute to even remember she could draft while being battered and thrown against the wall by that screaming, terrified, furious man, holding his torn scrotum in one hand and making a fist with the other. And then, drafting at long last, she’d burnt him to a husk. She’d lost the baby she was pregnant with at the time, and had never known if it was from the beating or from the huge amounts of heat that she’d drafted. Either would have been sufficient, she supposed.

She was at peace with her relative good looks now. Power made up for it. Pretty men and boys sought her out. Mostly, though, she preferred those who were not too pretty, but were instead strong enough to bring good blood to the Greenveil family, either drafters, or intelligent, or charismatic—they had to have some excellence, when she was looking for a father. Her current lover was probably a short-termer, though. Elijah was terribly interesting with his amber eyes, and wonderfully willful, a skilled lover, intelligent, and there was something oddly dangerous about him. But she wasn’t sure she wanted him to be the father of child fourteen. She doubted she would keep him for another six months. But in the meantime, she planned to enjoy herself.

Drafting a little sub-red, she inhaled deeply. The sub-red blew on the coals of her lust.

“Elijah?” she said.

He sat up on the bed. He was exactly what she liked at this point in her life. Lean and muscular, with some interesting scars on his arms and chest, he kept his orangey-red hair cut close to his skull, his freckles were faded on his face and arms, his skin was ruddy, and he had beautifully white teeth. He looked at her—pregnant as she was—with undisguised desire. Having a man who would worship your body when you were hugely pregnant and awkward was perhaps the greatest luxury a woman could have.

But as she stood to go to him, she felt the familiar tightening in her belly. She hesitated. She’d been having practice labor pains for months, and she wanted to be sure.

Elijah stood and walked over to her, naked. “Is it time?” he asked. He held her from behind, kissing her neck and cupping her swollen breasts in his hands.

She couldn’t breathe for a moment. Her stomach felt as tight as a drum.

“Yes,” she said finally, pushing his hands away. “I have to prepare myself. If there’s time between cramps, I may need you again. Get dressed.”

“Do you need me to summon your slaves?” Elijah asked.

She hesitated. The pain passed. “Not yet. It may be hours yet. Maybe you can put on that cloak of yours and nothing underneath,” she said. Truth was, she couldn’t imagine making love now that she’d actually started labor. But if it was false labor, she wanted him here. She could fuck out her frustration.

If she were honest with herself, she wanted him here regardless. If there was one thing she regretted about not having married just one man, it was in a few times like this, where she wanted someone to love her and worry about her and try to protect her foolishly from things he couldn’t protect her from. She wanted to tell Elijah she needed him for that, but she couldn’t.

She sat at her mirror, drew out her kohls, powders, paints in grease to withstand the sweat that would be her lot for the next hours. The Greenveils were from the deep forest, and they kept the old ways in this. New lands and new titles were well and good, but he who loses the center of his circle is lost. Like the pygmies from whom they were long ago descended, the Greenveil women prepared for childbirth as for battle. Arys was a good hand with the paints. Before she’d risen so high that it was unseemly for her to help other women with their makeup, she’d done it often. She missed it.

For her first few children, she’d planned elaborately what her paint would look like, believing it would be an omen for how the child’s spirit would turn out. She’d given up on that, and drew as the whim took her when she sat. She bound her long red hair back in simple braids, and applied the nine black dots across her forehead symmetrically around what would become a drawing of a fire crystal, then she connected the dots with yellow paints, making wings sweeping out toward her temples. An inverted triangle under one eye, a tear under the other. She had barely touched the rouge to her lips when the next cramp hit her, taking her breath, sending lightning through her belly to her back.

She paused, eyes closed, for a full minute. Then, though the pain hadn’t passed, she continued with her rouge. Lips full and red, exaggerated. Lines of gold paint to emphasize her cheekbones. The contraction eased and she worked more quickly. Thorns.

How could one forget this pain? How could anyone want to go through this more than once?

Arys drew black thorns on the back of each hand, down the fronts of her thighs, in the center of her chest, bracketing her breasts, bracketing her swollen belly.

It wasn’t good enough for the perfectionist in her, but as the next contraction hit, Arys decided it was good enough. She reached for her bell.

And Elijah trapped her be-thorned hand.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“I could ask the same,” he said. “Nine points on your forehead? For nine gods you never knew?”

There was something odd in his amber eyes. His smile was a little too big, and so white. “Elijah, this is not the time,” she said.

“Oh, Arys, but this is exactly the time. I need you to listen closely to me for a very few minutes, and then make the most important decision of your life.” He lifted her hand from the bell. “Would you like me to help you with your paint? I’ve got quite a delicate hand for this sort of thing.”

“No!” she said. “Take your hands off me or I’ll scream.”

“If you scream, you and your baby both will die.”

He said the words in such a pleasantly neutral voice that she couldn’t believe she’d heard him correctly. She froze.

“I seduced you so that I could be here at this very moment, Arys Greenveil. My name isn’t Elijah, it’s Murder Sharp, of the Order of the Broken Eye. But I do some sidework, too. And when I can satisfy two factions at once…” He smiled. “I’m a very special kind of drafter. I can kill you without leaving a trace. And I can get away with it. Childbirth is so very dangerous, isn’t it? Especially for an older woman like you. And before you try anything, please know that I can kill you very, very quickly and silently. If you say anything, you’ll die. Your death would please one of my employers more than the other, but it would upset me greatly. Nonetheless, all are free in the light. Light cannot be chained, nor can the will of any drafter.”