Castin didn't let the fact that Tannix was paying him stop him from treating me like he always had, and I was relieved. Bickering with Castin was comforting. I was curious about what he had been through, but he didn't want to talk about the march from the Tol River to East Draulin. I didn't press. And as much as he grumbled about being left behind to watch me, I had the feeling part of him found arguing with me just as comforting as I did.

He put on a good show whenever Mayah was around, standing at attention and quietly blending into the background. When we were alone, he was mostly back to himself. He would sit in chairs instead of stand, and talk to me without the polite tone he used in front of Mayah. But I knew Castin well. I could see that even when he looked at ease, he was alert. My brother hadn't been trained as a bodyguard, but he had been doing the job for most of his life. Sometimes the knights gave the same impression—like they were relaxed and unaware, while they were actually paying very close attention to what was going on around them. Castin managed that look effortlessly, because he hadn't been taught to do it. He had survived because he could do it.

When Castin and I weren't alone, holed up in Tannix's room, we were with Mayah. Spending time with her was anything but boring. Mayah was constantly busy. She liked having me around and I was happy to let her distract me.

Mayah split her time between meetings, going out into the city to check on the progress of repairs, and the training sessions with Angelys. The meetings might have been boring, except that watching Mayah speak to people easily twice her age was fascinating. Mayah commanded power in a completely different way than the men I was used to being around. Tannix, Tandrin and the other lords, although polite towards each other, always seemed like they were sizing each other up. They carried around swords or knives and made it quite clear that they were willing to use them if need be. Mayah didn't need a weapon to get respect. She was always polite and always charming, but there was a firm edge to her voice that seemed to catch older men off guard.

Oftentimes, while I watched her lead discussions, I wondered if the advisors and generals really knew who they were talking to. Mayah was a young woman, but she had been born to lead East Draulin. With her city back under her control, her authority was unmistakable. There was nothing she wouldn't do to fix and improve East Draulin. She approved repairs, offered monetary assistance to refugees willing to return to the city, and kept the army reserves that had been left to guard the city in line. Less than a week after the bulk of the army had left, people had stopped underestimating her.

When Mayah led meetings, she wore beautiful green dresses and jewellery decorated with emeralds. Nobody would know that she had a knife tucked into her sleeve, and another one strapped to her leg. I only knew because I watched her training sessions. In the private training room with Angelys, all of Mayah's grace disappeared. She wore Navirian style pants and snug tunics, and tied her curly blond hair into a knot so it wouldn't get in her way.

I watched the training sessions the way Acen had taught me to. Angelys could move incredibly quickly. Navirian fighting involved more movement than Telt fighting did. Angelys slowed down for Mayah, but taught her all the movements I had seen the women soldiers use while dueling the knights in Navire. With one of her kukris in each hand, Angelys ducked and twirled, slashed and kicked. Mayah copied the movements, and when they dueled, she did a decent job of holding her own, even if she was slow.

Some days, when Mayah needed a break, Angelys would invite Castin to fight. Watching him was just as interesting as watching Mayah. Castin's army training had focused on sword fighting, but he had grown up fighting with knives, and he wasn't opposed to dirty tricks. He never beat Angelys, but I saw him surprise her more than once. The one time Angelys called me forward, I showed her how I could throw knives. She somewhat begrudgingly left me alone after that.

Letters came from the army regularly. First delivered on horseback, then by ship when they got further away. Most of them were reports that Mayah looked over with her advisors. But every packet came with a carefully folded letter for Mayah, with blue wax stamped by Tannix's crest ring. It was an attempt to be discreet. More often than not, the letter itself was written by Jalor. There was also usually a second letter folded up inside it, addressed to me.

Once Mayah learned that I couldn't read, she was happy to read the letters to me. Tannix obviously knew it would happen, because his letters were never too personal. Still, I loved every letter and carefully kept them all safe in a box Mayah gave me. Sometimes in the evenings I would pull out the letters and look at Tannix's writing. Even without reading them, it made me feel close to him.

"—skirmish between a group of cavalry scouts and a detachment of Zianna's calvary, led by Lord Adeno," Mayah read out loud, nearly a month after the army had left East Draulin. "Adeno was killed in action—that's a shame, I'll have to write to Lady Adeno—but the Deorun scouts were defeated. The Deorans withdrew from Hoask as the army approached, and the city has been taken as a temporary base. Well." Mayah dropped the letter onto her desk. "Hoask is the only big city along the coast before the capital. If the Deorans didn't bother to defend it, that seems like promising news."

We were in Mayah's chamber, where we always came to read the personal letters from Tannix and Jalor. I sat in the chair across from Mayah's, while Castin and Angelys stood back by the door. "Did you know Lord Adeno?"

"In passing," Mayah said. "I'm surprised he was even with the army, to be quite honest. Adeno guards the Navirian border the way East Draulin guards the Deorun border. Some would argue he should have stayed home to keep an eye on movement from Navire." She picked up another letter and slit it open with her knife. Her eyes flickered over the writing quickly. "Here, this is what we want, a report from one of my men." She smoothened out the page on her desk. "Lord West Draulin rides with King Zianna, and as of the writing of this report, has yet to see much conflict," she read. "I hope he continues to avoid conflict for as long as possible."

The news was a relief, even if I knew it couldn't last. "If he has a choice, he probably won't avoid conflict."

"No, I know," Mayah agreed. "He's a brave fool who feels like he needs to prove that he's a good lord, and doesn't seem to realize that the rest of us already know that he is. And, he's surrounded himself with other brave fools who would follow him to the depths of the ocean if he asked them to. I just hope he doesn't do anything too risky. The knights may be highly skilled, but they're still just men." As she talked, she picked up another letter and broke the wax. It was the one from Jalor, and she read it silently, a smile on her lips.

I waited patiently for her to finish, so she would read Tannix's letter to me. When she was done, she neatly folded Jalor's letter and tucked it away in her desk. She began to open Tannix's letter, then paused. "Finn, I don't have any pressing meetings until this evening. So I think, before I read this to you, we're going to practice some letters."

I blinked. "But—"

"No excuses. If you learn the letters, maybe you'll be able to read Tannix's letters yourself. Maybe even write back to him! Don't you think that would be a lovely surprise for him?"

It would be, I couldn't argue with that. But learning to read sounded tedious. "I know some letters."

"Really? Which ones?" Mayah flipped over an old note and slid it across the table towards me. A moment later she held out a quill. "Show me."

I took the quill in my left hand, and paused, expecting her to already correct me. When she said nothing, I carefully wrote out the letters I knew. The ones that made up my name, and the ones that made up Tannix's. Triumphantly, I reached across the desk to drop the quill back into the inkpot. "See?"

Mayah nodded slowly. "All right. Now, can you read those? Or have you just memorized what they look like?"

My triumph faded as quickly as it had come on. "Oh."

Mayah smiled. "Oh? That's what I thought. You memorized these the way you might memorize a picture. That isn't reading. You need to know what letter corresponds to what sound, and then you'll be able to work out how to read or spell words. So, how about it? It'll be a fun way to pass the time, don't you think?"

Anything that could distract us from thinking about the war would be nice. It occurred to me that Mayah might also like something to take her mind off of running the city once in a while. So I nodded, and as I did, I gestured over my shoulder with my thumb. "Castin can't read, either."

"Well, he's welcome to join our lessons," Mayah said, smiling at him.

He couldn't refuse an invitation like that.

We both picked up the letters and their sounds without much trouble. When it came to putting them together, Castin struggled, but it all made sense to me. Practicing became a regular part of the routine. Shadow Mayah when she went to meetings or out into the city, watch her fights with Angelys, practice reading. One day, when Castin was frustrated by the lessons and I was bored, I asked Mayah if she knew how to play Stampede. She didn't, so we invited Angelys over to join us and I taught the ladies the game.

So games joined our rotating schedule. I switched it up occasionally, so Mayah and Angelys could try Commandeer or Sailor's Dice. When I ran out of games to teach, Angelys taught us a Navirian game called Queen and Kel.

Weeks continued to pass. We got reports about our army moving past Hoask, and meeting with more resistance along the way. Small Deoran calvary units flittered in to pick at the army before disappearing back into the desert. The combined Zianna and Navire army was too large to move quickly, so small groups of our cavalry were sent into the desert in an attempt to ward off the Deorans attacks. Tannix led quite a few of them.

In the ocean, Deorun ships clashed with Navirian and Ziannan ships frequently. Our ships were mostly trying to follow along with the army to keep them supplied, and the Deorans didn't want that. Reports came back of whole cargo ships going down, taking their loads of food, fresh water, and sometimes fresh horses down with them. The proper warships did their best, but weren't always close enough to protect the cargo ships. In retaliation, Lord Co and his navy, made up almost entirely of Crelan ships and sailors, had all but completely shut down Deorun's trade from their island, Deor-Morcea.

When our armies finally reached Deorun, reports said the city had completely shut themselves down. Their defenses would hold, and they seemed to have enough food to last for the foreseeable future. It was going to be a long siege, but Mayah and I were relieved. A siege meant less actual fighting, and we took comfort from knowing that Tannix and the knights would be spending most of their time sitting around a camp.

The siege had been going on for little over a month, and not much had changed. The underlaying worry Mayah and I had felt before the siege began had settled into an underlaying exhaustion. We were tired of nothing happening, but we didn't want anything to happen. Somehow it was harder to justify Tannix, Jalor and the men being gone when nothing was happening. But I was doing my best to keep us distracted.

I shuffled cards absentmindedly as Castin and I walked through the castle that evening. Sometimes, it still felt strange to be allowed to just walk around in East Draulin unaccompanied. The servants and guards rarely paid me any attention anymore, just nodding in recognition as Castin and I passed by.

"I was thinking," I said, as we walked down the hall towards Mayah's chamber. "Maybe we could try to create our own game."

"Really?" Castin asked dryly. "Rigged so you'll always win?"

"I don't rig games. I'm just good," I said. He knew it, too, but taunting me about gambling was a fairly common topic.

There was nobody near Mayah's room. She should have had many handmaidens, but after what had happened to her handmaidens during Kalvahi's first attack, she didn't want any. She had Angelys, both to guard her and attend to her.

"Making up our own could be fun," I said, while reaching for Mayah's door handle. "It'll be something different, at—"

I stepped into Mayah's room, and froze. The carpet squished wetly under my foot.

"Finagale," Kassia said dryly. "We can't seem to keep away from each other."