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1
A small place, unmarked on any map. Low houses of stone, set in the lee of a dune. The sun keeps long hours here and the people keep them with it, out before it climbs, gone to shade at its height, back in the streets only when it slants.
She is a child. No one remembers her arriving and no one will say where from. She is fed at one house one season and another the next, and called by the same name at both, and claimed by neither.
In a crowd of the village children she is the one the eye goes to first. They leave a little room around her in their games. She fills it herself, or does without.
When the grown ones ask each other whose she is, they lower their voices, and the answer is always the same short length. An orphan.
She watches the grown men at the well. One of them counts a handful of coins into his palm twice, and then a third time, before he puts them away, and her gaze stays on his hands the whole while. When he looks up she is already looking elsewhere.
She drinks from the cup they give her and sets it down with a finger of water still in the bottom. No one had taught her any better. She does it at every meal.
The wells run dry by turns, and the village turns with them.
When the water holds, there is noise in the evenings; a man with a stringed thing and a voice, children kept up past the dark. When a well caves, the noise stops. The same families who sang stand at the edge of the dunes in the morning and look north, where the next well is supposed to be, and say nothing, and go back inside.
There is a man she runs to. He sets a hand on her head and calls her a name that is plainly fond, and the people who pass them slow a half-step and dip their heads to him. He talks to her about somewhere better. He points at the horizon when he does it. She looks where he points and then she looks at his face, longer than she looks at the horizon.
He goes out for a bounty and comes back with it and the whole village breathes again. He goes out the next time and the village waits at the dunes' edge, looking north, and the watching lasts longer than it did before.
The green comes after, and she does not fit in it.
Everything grows. The air is wet enough to chew. The buildings climb instead of crouching, and the sun comes down soft through leaves and never once lands on anyone the way it landed on her at home. She moves through it in a student's clothes. She keeps to the walls of the wide bright rooms.
She is handed her work and the others are handed theirs, and hers is thinner. She sets her sheet beside a classmate's, reads both, and hands the classmate's back without a word. She finishes early and sits with her hands folded while the rest still write.
A teacher passes her the next assignment and does not look at her when he does it. He looks at the desk, the window, the middle distance. She takes it from him and thanks him by name, evenly, and he flinches at the evenness more than he would have flinched at anything else.
There is a stretch with no clear view of her.
A bag packed in a narrow room. A classmate at a doorway who holds on too long to a hand that is already drawing back. The classmate says a thing about being more than classmates. She says she will remember, and shoulders the bag, and is down the corridor before the other had finished the goodbye.
When she surfaces again, it is in the heat once more, dressed wrong for it, dressed for the green that she had left.
She walks into a camp of armed men and does not slow at the edge of it. A chief puts a curved blade to her throat partway through the talking. She keeps talking. She names a sum of money so large it changes the shape of his face, and she lets him keep the blade where it is while she does, and when he lowers it himself, it is because she has given him a reason to want what she is selling more than he wants to frighten her.
Days later there are bodies on the sand between two wells, the men of one camp and the men of another, and she walks among them. She crouches by one and turns the face toward the light to be sure of it, and sets it back down as it was. It thuds as it hits the ground. She is the only thing still breathing.
Then the cold, which is the farthest she has gone from where she started.
A country turned inside out from the first one. Wet underfoot. Dark by the middle of the afternoon. A sky that goes from dim to dimmer and calls the difference a day. She comes off the water in clothes meant for somewhere with a sun, and the wind finds every gap in them, and she does not pull the coat she does not have any tighter.
She finds the windows that look down on the streets and she sits at them. The people pass and she reads them off their coats and their walks: the trade of one, the debt on another, which way a third is hurrying and from what. She says these things aloud sometimes, to whoever is in the room, and she is right, and being right does not seem to be the point of it.
She drinks water all day, in a town where it runs loose down every gutter and no one thanks it for running. She leaves a finger of it in the bottom of every cup. She has carried the habit across a continent that has no use for it, out of a country she will not name, and she sets the cup down each time with the same small measure held back, in a place where the next one is only ever a tap away.
She turns up at the edge of every place dressed for the last one. She arrives in each new country wearing the country before it, and she does not seem to mind being out of season, and she does not change to suit the weather. The desert's lessons ride north with her into the snow and keep their hold on her hands long after the desert is a continent behind her.
The cat came north with her. It sleeps in the one patch of sun the rented room gets, and at night it lies along her shins and she lets it. She talks to it when the door is shut. She uses a fond voice for it she uses for nothing else, and she stops the moment the latch turns.
She takes the window most evenings, before she takes off her coat. The street does its business below and she does hers.
Then she draws the curtains, against the street, against the low near moon, against the rest of it. The curtains stay shut till morning.
2
The window faces the square, and the square is never empty for long.
She watches a man cross it the same hour each morning, always by the long way, always giving the fishmonger's stall a wide berth. The third morning she has worked out he owes the fishmonger money. The fourth she has worked out it is not much, and that he could pay it, and that the walking around is cheaper to him than the paying. She watches him take the long way for a week and then he stops coming, and she does not learn why, and it does not trouble her to not learn.
There is a girl who sells nothing and stands by the well all afternoon. There is a pair who meet at the same corner at dusk and stand too far apart for people who are only friends and too close for people who are nothing. There is an old woman who counts the boats coming in and is short a boat by her counting, every evening, and waits past dark for the one that does not come.
None of them look up. None of them feel the window on them. A person could be read down to the floorboards and never once know the room was occupied.
She catches the pale woman on an ordinary afternoon, in the middle of the market, doing nothing of any use.
Hair the colour of frost on iron. Skin like the underside of a cloud. She moves through the stalls and the stalls turn toward her, the sellers and the buyers both, the way a field turns through a day. She is handing things out. Fruit, bread, a coin pressed into a palm and the hand closed over it before anyone can refuse. She stops at a child and bends and says something and the child laughs. She stops at the next and does the same. She is in no hurry. She gives the morning to it
Nefer reads her and gets nothing.
There is no trade on her, no debt, no errand bent toward a private end. The walk gives nothing away. The hands give nothing away except what they are openly giving away, which cannot be the whole of it, which is never the whole of it with anyone. She watches for the seam every person has and does not find it. The woman finishes her giving and packs the rest into a basket and goes, and the market loosens behind her, and Nefer is still at the window with nothing written down.
After that the square is full of only one person.
The man who took the long way, the girl at the well, the lovers at the corner, they cross the square the same as ever and she lets them cross it unread. The account she keeps thins down to a single name she does not have yet. She takes the window at sunrise, wakes up a few hours earlier than usual. She takes it on afternoons where the woman has no reason to come, just in case she does.
She sees her at the harvest stall, giving fruit away with both hands while the birds line the rail and wait their turn, and she feeds the birds too, last, one at a time.
She sees her down a side lane at dusk, kneeling to something low in the dark, talking to it, low and even. Whatever it is shifts in the shadow and the woman waits for it to finish, and answers it, and waits again. There is no one else in the lane.
She sees her in a crowd on a festival night, lit gold from the lanterns, a head taller in standing than the people pressed around her, and the crowd parts and closes around her without being asked to, the way water does for a stone it has decided to keep.
She sees her in rain, with the hood down, letting it fall on her.
She sees her, and sees her, and sees her, and writes none of it down, because there is no client for it and no Mora in it and nothing about it that resolves into use. The whole point of the watching has always been the use. This is the first thing she has ever watched for no reason she could name to a buyer.
The woman never once looks up at the window.
The whole town can be read and not feel it. But this one, this one gives herself to every eye in the square, openly, all day, hides nothing, withholds nothing, and still the watching does not reach her. She is the most watched person in the town and she does not know she is being seen.
3
The trouble with watching one person is that the day has to be spent doing it.
She has nowhere to be. This is the plain shape of her life that year: a room, a cat, a box, a name she has invented and not yet hung over any door. The watching fills the hours the work would fill if there were work. She names it practice.
She moves the watching out of the window, in the end, because the window only faces the one square. She begins to take walks that happen to cross the places the woman is. The market in the morning. The harbour at the turn of the tide. She buys a single fish she does not want so as to have a reason to stand where she is standing. She eats it later out of spite at the price.
The woman makes it difficult, which is to say easy, which is the trouble.
She is everywhere. She gives the morning to the market and the afternoon to whoever needs her and the evening to the animals, and a person with nothing else to do can fill a great many days this way without ever once having to invent a destination. Nefer fills them, and she learns the route by heart and tells herself she is learning the town.
She learns instead the small things. That the woman feeds the loudest gull first to quiet it and the rest follow in peace. That she carries more than her basket can hold and gives the overflow away before it can spoil. That she stops for the same blind dog at the same corner and the dog knows her step and is already standing when she comes.
The watching ends the way it does for the careless. The watched one turns around.
It is a narrow lane and a wet afternoon and Nefer has followed her down it without meaning to. The woman stops. She does not startle. She turns, and she looks straight up the lane to where Nefer stands, and she finds her at once, with no searching, having known the whole while which doorway she came from.
She does not look afraid. She does not look caught-out, either, which is the other thing Nefer would have expected her to look. She looks at Nefer the same way Nefer had spent months looking at the town, taking the read, and Nefer, who has never in her life been on this end of it, holds still under it and lets it be taken.
"You've been at this a while," the woman says. There is no edge to it. "I kept waiting for you to come and say something. You never did."
So she waited, the whole time, the woman had known the room was occupied and let the watching go on and did not once look up, on purpose, leaving the first move where it lay, to see who would finally bend down and pick it up.
The lie comes, easily, though the truth is available. The truth is a rented room and an empty box and a few months spent trailing a woman through a town for no wage. The truth would fit in a breath. She straightens instead, and the slump of the idle watcher goes out of her, and something else stands up in its place.
"I run an information service," she says. "Discreet. People bring me what they can't take anywhere else. I find what won't be found." She lets that sit. "You'll forgive the surveillance. It's a habit of the trade. One watches. It's how the work gets done."
There is no service. There is a name in her mouth she has said only to a cat, "The Curatorium of Secrets", she had called it. Humorous, to think of it, the thought of her curing someone else. She hangs it over the empty doorway now, in the air, in the lane.
The woman listens. She does not say I have watched you buy a fish you did not eat. She does not say there is no sign over any door in this town with that name on it.
"Lauma," she says instead, and offers the name plainly, her own. "I lead the Frostmoon Scions. I've led them since I was a girl." A beat. "I'm sure you knew that already. You seem to know a great deal."
"Some," Nefer says.
"Mm." And the woman, now known as Lauma, looks at her one moment longer. Then she lifts the basket back onto her arm. "Beautiful thing, aren't you? Walk with me, then, since you've walked everywhere else I've been. You can tell me about your service." The corner of her mouth does something small. "All of it."
4
The knock arrives on a morning with no client behind it, because there are no clients, not yet at least, and Nefer opens the door already composed for one. The woman at the door is on the step with a basket on her arm and the day behind her.
"You're not working," Lauma says.
"I'm always working."
"You're standing in a doorway in your house clothes at this hour, and there's a cat on your shoulder."
Nefer does not look at the cat on her shoulder. "He's a colleague."
"Come out of town with me. I have to walk to the enclave and back, and it's a long way alone." A pause. "Bring the colleague."
The road out of Nasha Town climbs through low pine and then opens, and the cold loses its closeness up here and turns into something with room in it. The cat does not stay on her shoulder. He comes down and walks the road ahead of them both, tail up, stopping to be sure they follow.
"He won't run off?" Lauma asks.
"He never has. He decided I was his a long time ago. I had very little say in the matter." Nefer steps around a root. "I found him in a temple, if you must know. Sitting outside it like he'd been waiting. I do not believe in omens. He has done his level best to change my mind."
"What's his name?"
"Ashru."
"Ashru." Lauma says it once, to feel it in her mouth, and ahead of them the cat's ear turns back at the sound of it from a stranger, and then he keeps walking. "He likes the sound of your mouth saying his name better than mine."
"He has taste."
They walk a while. Lauma gives a word to everything they pass, a nod to a goatherd, a hand laid flat to a tree, a long low murmur to a bird that drops out of the pine, hangs near her a moment, and lifts off again. Nefer watches her do it.
"You do that a great deal," she says. "Talk at the animals."
"To them."
"At them, to them. You're fond of nature, I take it. Or lonely on these roads." Nefer steps around another root. "You've a soft way with the strays. I noticed it at the market, you feed the loud gull first, to settle the rest, and then —"
She stops. The sentence has gone somewhere she did not send it.
Lauma looks over, unhurried. "You noticed which gull I feed first."
"I notice a great many things. It's nothing." Her face disobeys her, and the flush at her cheeks rises.
"From the market." A beat. "You were close enough to the stall to see the order I feed gulls in."
"I have excellent eyesight."
"Mm." Lauma lets it go and walks on. "It isn't fondness. Or it is, but that's not why. They talk. I hear them. I have since I was small, clear as I hear you, most days clearer." She says it plainly, unaware of the absurdity of it. "The gull was telling the others to wait their turn. I only agreed with him out loud."
Nefer walks a few paces with this.
"You're telling me the bird spoke to you."
"I'm telling you the bird was rude to a smaller bird and I sided with the smaller one." Lauma's mouth tilts. "You don't have to believe it. Most don't."
"It's a useful trick, if it's real. The things a town's animals see." Nefer considers the road. "You could make a great deal of money."
Lauma laughs, once, surprised by her interpretation. "Is that the kind of thing they teach at your service?"
When Nefer's gaze shifts to her, the antlers catch the light when she turns, and Nefer, who had spent a great deal of time cataloguing this woman from a distance, had never once been close enough for this, so she looks at them openly, now that the looking is allowed. She ignores her question, for now.
"And these," she says. "Are these the same story? The hearing, the giving everything away, the —" a gesture at the crown of her. "Does it all come together?"
"All in one piece." Lauma does not touch them. "I was born with the start of them. They came in as I grew. The Scions take it for a sign, and follow me for it, and have since I was a girl who hadn't earned a thing yet." A pause, plainer. "It's a strange thing, being followed for what you were born as. You'd know nothing about that."
"No," Nefer says. "I was followed for nothing at all. Had to arrange it myself."
Lauma laughs, "Arrange it how?"
"The usual way. You decide what you are, out loud, with enough certainty that the correcting becomes someone else's work, and most people can't be bothered with the work." Nefer keeps her eyes on the road. "You build a name and you wear it until it fits. The Curatorium of Secrets. People will bring it what they can't take anywhere else."
"The Curatorium of Secrets," Lauma repeats, fitting it in her mouth the way she fit the cat's. "And how long has it been open?"
A pause, the length of a decision.
"It hasn't."
The road goes on under them. The cat trots ahead. The admission sits in the cold with nowhere to go.
"There's a name," Nefer says, because the silence is hers to fill and she would rather fill it well. "There's a name, it's a room above a dead cannery, and that's the whole of it. I made it up. I say it to Ashru. I said it to you in a lane because you'd caught me following you, and I would sooner have died than tell you the truth, which is that I had nothing better to do than follow you."
"That's a great deal of truth at once. For a liar."
"You started it." Nefer adjusts the fall of her coat, which does not need adjusting. "You go around telling strangers the birds talk to you and showing them where your antlers came from. It's contagious, apparently. Don't expect a relapse."
The enclave is still an hour off when they stop to rest on a flat rock, and the cat climbs straight into Lauma's lap and turns three times and settles, and Nefer looks at this betrayal with open offence.
"He doesn't do that," she says.
"He's doing it."
"He doesn't do that with anyone. He bit the landlord last week for less."
"Maybe he can tell." Lauma rests a hand on the cat and he leans up into it. "Animals are simple. They know who's safe. He's known you were safe his whole life, that's why he picked you. And he's decided I am too." She looks up. "He has taste, you said."
Nefer has no answer ready, which does not happen to her, and the lack of one sits on her face for a moment before she gets it covered.
"He's been bribed," she decides. "You smell like fruit. It's mercenary. I respect it."
"Of course." Lauma scratches the cat under the chin. "Mercenary."
They eat a little from the basket. Lauma gives her the better half of everything without making a thing of it, and Nefer notices, and keeps the smaller piece she was handed first.
The cat sleeps between them in the sun.
"You could come the rest of the way," Lauma says, not pressing it. "Meet the Scions. Or you could turn back here, and tell yourself you came out to keep an eye on a mark."
"That second one is much more flattering to me."
"It is."
Nefer looks down the road they came up, toward the town she has nothing in, and then up the road they have not finished, toward an enclave she has no business at, with a woman who caught her looking and waited a long while to be approached and gave her her real name first.
"I'll come the rest of the way," she says. "For the record, it's reconnaissance."
"For the record." Lauma stands, and offers a hand down to her, palm open. "Naturally."
Nefer looks at the hand a moment. Then she takes it, and lets herself be pulled up, and does not let go the instant she's standing, which she means to, and doesn't.
The cat wakes, and stretches, and goes on ahead to be sure they follow.
5
The sign goes up on a Tuesday. It is small, and the paint is not quite even, and it carries a name now, at last, to the street: The Curatorium of Secrets. She does not stand back to admire it. She goes in and shuts the door and starts the work that does not exist yet but soon will.
She does not tell anyone. There is no one she would think to tell. The opening of a door is the opening of a door.
Lauma is at it within the week regardless.
The girl who answers is new and loud and missing half an arm.
"Welcome to the Curatorium of Secrets!" Jahoda has the door open before the knock has finished and a grin on like a banner. The right sleeve is pinned up at the elbow, the bandage still fresh under it. "We do secrets, information, discretion, the works. You got a problem, we got — oh. Oh, wow. You're —"
"Lauma."
"You're the Moonchanter. The actual one. With the —" Jahoda gestures at her own head, both antlers, with her one hand. "Boss! BOSS. The Moonchanter's at the door!"
"I have ears, Jahoda."
Nefer comes through from the back. She does not hurry. She takes in the woman on the step and the basket on her arm and the book in the basket, and she leans a shoulder on the doorframe of her own establishment.
"Lauma. To what does the Curatorium owe the honour. We're very exclusive. There's usually a waiting list."
"You opened four days ago."
"It's... a very fast list..." Nefer mumbles with a hint of embarrassment, and Lauma can't help but smile at how adorable she suddenly looks.
Lauma steps in and looks around the shabby room of it, the counter, the second-hand chairs, the damp patch in the ceiling corner that no rent this low will ever fix.
"It's better than it was," she says.
"It is." Nefer feels a warm jolt of pride.
"The cannery smell's nearly gone. And you've got the window facing the square. Good light by afternoon." She sets the basket on the desk. "It suits you far more than the bare room did."
Jahoda's grin slips by a degree. She looks at Lauma. She looks at the room. She looks at Nefer.
"...Wait," she says. "The bare room? You been here before? When'd you — "
"Jahoda."
"Cause this place was a dump when I got here last week, and you're talking like you — "
"Jahoda." Nefer does not raise her voice. "Weren't you going to inventory the back?" She smiles, part danger and part flustered.
"We don't have anything in the back."
"Then it won't take long, will it."
Jahoda looks between the two of them once more, at whatever is in the air of the room, which is not the cannery smell, to be sure, and arrives, visibly, at the decision to be elsewhere. "Right. Yep. Big inventory. Lots of nothing to count. I'll just —" She backs toward the door, points finger-guns that come off strangely with the one hand, and is gone.
Lauma watches the door she left by. "She's new."
"A week."
"What happened to her arm?"
Nefer pulls a chair around and sits, and gestures Lauma to the other, and does not answer at once. When she does it is flat.
"There's a gang that works the harbour district. Seahook. I had occasion to look them over, early days here, I was taking the measure of who ran what." A shrug. "They're losers. Every one of them. Cheap muscle and cheaper loyalty, the sort who'll sell each other for a hot meal, and most of them did, in the end. I wrote the lot off." A pause. "Except her. She had a thing the rest didn't. I couldn't have told you what to call it. I kept her name and threw the others out."
"And then?"
"And then she went and got herself half-killed avenging a boss who'd have sold her too. Tracked the man who broke the gang halfway across the region and finished it. Took a great deal of damage doing something with no profit in it whatsoever." Nefer's mouth does something at the corner. "Stupid girl. I found her bleeding out behind a warehouse. The hand was past saving. I had it taken off so the rest of her could stay."
"You saved her life."
"I made an investment." She says it too quickly. "She couldn't pay for the surgery. She offered to work it off. I have a great deal of work and no one to do the dull parts of it." A beat. "She's the best employee I have."
"She's the only employee you have."
"Yes. And the best of them. I'll thank you not to tell her the field was uncontested. She's proud." Nefer glances toward the door, where a great deal of nothing is being loudly counted. "I'm getting her an arm. A proper one, metal, the work of an expert. It'll cost more than this entire building. She doesn't know yet." She looks back. "Don't tell her that either."
Lauma is quiet a moment. "You talk about her like she's yours."
"She works for me."
"That isn't what I said."
Nefer does not answer that one at all. Lauma finds it fond, the care she shows for the girl, it's visible all over her face, a rare sight on Nefer.
"I brought you something," Lauma says, and lifts the book out of the basket.
It is old, and well-handled, the spine soft with reading. She sets it on the desk between them.
"For the opening. Which you didn't mention to me, by the way. I heard it from a fishmonger."
"It wasn't an event."
"You built a thing out of nothing and put your name over the door." She nudges the book an inch closer. "It's from my own shelves. I have a great many, and I'm fond of all of them, which is the only reason it counts as a gift, giving away a thing you don't want isn't generosity, it's tidying." A small look. "This one I wanted to keep."
Nefer turns it over. Desert folklore. The complete tales, the old versions, the ones a child in a low house made of palm might have been told before sleep, in a country she has spent a great deal of effort not naming.
She does not open it. She sets a hand flat on the cover and leaves it there.
"You went looking for where I'm from."
"I went looking for a thing you might like. Where you're from came up." Lauma watches her hand on the book and not her face. "You don't have to read it. I just didn't want to give you something with no thought in it."
"I'm trying to sell information for a living. Do you know how rare it is that someone hands me a piece of myself for free." It is not quite a question. "It's terrible business. You've no instinct for trade at all."
"None," Lauma agrees, a light laugh. "I give it all away. It's a character flaw."
The afternoon light comes around to the window the way it promised it would, and lands across the desk, and the room, shabby, hers, smelling less of fish than it did, goes warm with it.
Jahoda has stopped counting nothing. The quiet from the back is the specific quiet of a girl who has fallen asleep on a crate rather than interrupt.
Lauma is close, across the small desk. She has not moved and neither has Nefer, and the not-moving has acquired a weight, the air gone careful, the way it goes before a thing.
Nefer looks at her. No window between them now and no lane and no crowd, only the desk and the warm light and a woman who came uninvited because a fishmonger told her, and brought a book she wanted to keep.
It would be the easiest thing in the world. It's right there. She can feel exactly how it would go, the lean and the close and the rest of it, and she knows the shape of it.
She sits back instead.
"You'll want to start home before dark," she says. "It's a long walk, and the road ices after sundown."
Lauma holds her look one moment longer, then she stands, unhurried, and lifts her empty basket, and lets the moment be set down where it lay.
"It is," she says. "Goodnight, Nefer."
She goes. Nefer stands in the warm room with her hand still flat on the cover of the book, and does not draw the curtains for a long while.
6
Come by after hours. I'll have closed.
— Nefer
She sends it with Jahoda and regrets it the moment the girl is out the door. It's the first time she has asked anyone to come.
Lauma comes after dark, when the square has emptied and the lamps have gone to their low burn.
"You closed early," she says, stepping in. "For me, or for everyone?"
"There's no one to close early for but everyone. It amounts to the same."
"It doesn't, but I'll let you have it."
The front room takes her in, the low sofas facing each other across a table, the lamp throwing everything soft. Past them the arch, its curtains drawn back, the desk beyond it and another pair of seats in the inner room. It is still messy, but it is with intention now, arranged.
"You've made it a real thing," Lauma says, taking the sofa without being asked. "Sofas facing each other. So your clients have to look at one another while they wait."
"So I can watch them look at each other while they wait. You learn a great deal from those who can't stand the silence."
"Of course you do." Lauma's mouth tilts. "Does anyone ever just come here to sit with you?"
"No."
"No?"
"You're the first." Nefer says it before she has decided to, and then, because it is out, lets it stand rather than chase it. "Tea. I have tea. Sit there and stop reading my furniture."
She brings the tea through and they sit a while, across the table, the lamp between them. It is easy in a way she did not imagine. Lauma talks, the enclave, a sick goat mended, a weasel that has taken to following her and will not be discouraged, and Nefer listens.
"You've a room back there," Lauma says, nodding past the counter to the door near the entrance. "What's in it?"
"Work, and the rest of the work." Nefer stands, because she would rather move than be looked at while she decides whether to show her. "Come on, then. You've seen it before it was anything. You may as well see the rest."
The drape pulls back on the work side: the shabby desk against the wall, the boxes she has not unpacked and may never. The floor here is laid in checkered tile, dark and pale in squares, a board she stands a great many problems on. And along the back, a desk, and on the shelf: a row of candles, and the incense burning in its dish, the smoke going straight up in the still air.
"The incense is from home," Nefer says, before Lauma can ask. "There are ruins near where I grew up, thick with the plant. Worth a fortune anywhere else and nothing at all to me. I burn it like a rich woman because I'm the only one alive who knows it's free." She looks at the smoke and not at Lauma. "It makes the place smell of that place I left. I haven't decided whether I like that or only got used to it."
Lauma looks at the candles, and the tiles, and the unpacked boxes of a life half set down, and keeps whatever she makes of it. "It's a good room," is all she says.
They go back through to the front, and the couch, and the tea going cold on the table.
Lauma settles deeper into it, and her hand finds the worn dent at the end of it, the give of a seat that has had a great deal of use. She looks at it. She looks at the drape, the work side beyond, the absence anywhere of a bed.
"You sleep here," she says. "On this."
"For now." Nefer says it without a flicker of apology. "There's no bed yet. There will be. There'll be a great deal, a proper office, rooms, people under me who are not Jahoda, a building with my name cut into the stone of it and not painted crooked on a board." She turns her cup. "This is the lean part. Every empire has one. It doesn't trouble me. I read until I sleep and I wake when the door does. It suits me." A small look. "I'll get better. I always do."
"I believe you." Lauma runs her thumb along the arm of the couch. "Although. If the trouble is only that there's one couch and no bed —" the corner of her mouth goes "— is this you inviting me to your bed?"
"To the couch."
"To the couch. Aren't you so romantic? The whole of Nod-Krai would swoon." Lauma giggles as she turns her face away, enjoying the blush that had now crept unto Nefer's face.
"I don't do romantic. I sent you a note. You came. That's the most I've ever done for anyone." Nefer sets her cup down, the corner of her mouth enjoying whatever they seem to be sharing. "Savour it."
"I have been." Lauma has not moved away. The couch has gotten smaller in the sitting. She is watching Nefer's face with open enjoyment. "Since the market. You were terrible at hiding, you know. For a spy."
"I hid perfectly well."
"You did not." Lauma's smile widens, slow. "A woman who looks like you doesn't get to hide in a crowd. You stood out the second you walked in."
"That was strategy."
"Mm. How's the strategy going?"
A beat. They are looking right at each other now, neither of them pretending to do anything else.
"...Well," Nefer says. "Very well, actually."
Lauma laughs, low, and the look holds.
They are close, side by side on the couch. The lamp is low. The incense reaches them from the back, heavy and sweet, the smell of a country in a room that is nothing like it. There is no table between them this time, no lane, no crowd, no afternoon errand waiting, no client, no light to send her home before it ices, nothing at all but the two of them and the seat she sleeps on and the whole long months finally run all the way down to here.
Lauma does not move first. She has not, the whole time, not in the lane, not on the road, not over the desk with the light coming round. She gives everything away and she will give this too, but she will not take it; she leaves it where it lies, for Nefer, the way she left the first move in the lane, to see who finally bends to pick it up.
Nefer looks at her. The easiest thing in the world, and the most expensive.
She bends to pick it up.
The kiss is not a falling. It is a decision, made slowly, and Lauma's hand comes up to her jaw, warm, unhurried, the same hand that gives fruit to children and words to birds, and it stays there.
When they part Nefer does not step back. She stays where she is, on the couch, in the smell of home, close enough to feel the other woman breathe.
It does not stay a single kiss. She leans back in and it is different the second time, slower and then not slow at all, her mouth opening under Lauma’s, the tip of her tongue finding hers, and the careful thing they had been all evening, all these months, comes apart by degrees. Lauma makes a low sound against her mouth and Nefer takes it like something to keep, and gives one back.
She moves without meaning to, a hand flat on Lauma’s shoulder, a press, and Lauma goes where she is put, down along the couch, unhurried, letting herself be moved, until Nefer is over her with a knee between hers and both hands braced and the whole long height of the Moonchanter laid out underneath her on the seat she sleeps on alone every other night of her life.
She kisses her like that for a while, slow and deep, the lamp blurring the two of them into one shape. Then she breaks from her mouth and sets her lips to the line of Lauma’s jaw, and lower, to the side of her throat, where the pulse is, and stays there, where she feels it jump under her mouth, quick and warm and entirely beyond Lauma’s careful giving-away, she pulls back for a moment, catching a gaze at Lauma's cheeks, reddened now. Then she presses her mouth to it again.
Above her Lauma’s hand has come up into Nefer’s hair and stays there. Nefer lifts her head and looks down at her, beautiful, undone a little, looking back up with that same open enjoyment she has worn since the lane, and the thing Nefer has carried since the first afternoon at the window goes quietly out of her at last, into the warm room, into the woman under her, with nowhere left it needs to be kept.
"For the record," she says, against Lauma's mouth, "this is still terrible business."
"Catastrophic," Lauma agrees.
"You'll bankrupt me. Giving everything away. Taking nothing." Nefer's hand has found the front of Lauma's robe and is not letting go, sliding up to meet the middle of her thighs. "Someone has to teach you the value of things."
"Mm." Lauma kisses her again, slow, unbothered, sure. "You can try."
The lamp burns low over the couch, and for once there are two of them on it, and no one is being watched from any window at all.