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Through a stifled yawn, she asks, “Where is Alasdare?”

“He wasn’t in his bedchamber.” Rune’s voice is rougher than sandpaper, and I wonder how late he and Samick hit the Gloaming last Quiet. “I checked on my way down.”

So Dare still hasn’t made it back from the human lands.

Of course, Aleana wouldn’t know that because she was passed out by the time we left, and she had to be carried out of the club, so she hasn’t the faintest idea that Dare split off from us before we made it back to the Midhouse.

I’m all too pleased to tell her. The litalf love of gossip is what tugs me to life, some.

“He went home with the kinta,” I tell her—and the fright I get from my own ragged voice is enough to have me reaching for a refill on my water.

Must have been the volume of the music at the club. We all had to practically shout at each other, and so our throats are on the overworn side.

Eamon slumps in his chair. His elbows press into the table; he buries his face in his hands. In silence, he rubs his temples with the pads of his thumbs.

Ridge wasn’t with him when he came down into the kitchens, so I assume he headed back to Comlar to suffer his drink-illness in peace.

Rune arches his brows over his fierce canary yellow eyes. “Dare didwhat?”

Aleana would laugh if she had the energy, that much is clear by the weak smile on her pale lips and the scoff that catches in her throat. “There was a kinta he took a fancy to.”

Samick is an ice statue in his chair. One on the verge of shattering with a sudden explosion of glacier rage.

It takes me a few moments to piece it together.

Kintas are… not beloved.

In Licht, in Dorcha, in the Midlands, it doesn’t matter. A kinta is an abomination everywhere. A mockery to lineage, and a diseased threat to future bloodlines.

Samick runs his hand through his dishevelled milky locks. “I’m surprised… and yet I’m not.”

Rune’s upper lip curls. He aims the look of disgust at his plate of peppered and buttered bread. “I lost my appetite.”

My mouth flattens into a thin line as Rune fingers aside his meal.

Perhaps I sort like Bee now. But I understand their disgust isn’t so much for her, rather for what she is.

Bedding a kinta isn’t something that happens a lot, or if it does, it’s kept in shadows.

“What about that male with the mismatched eyes down the coast?” Aleana thinks aloud and taps her spoon on the rim of her bowl. “Near Dare’s little village, and the male kinta was kept by his family… One eye is white, the other blue… What is his name again?”

Rune frowns on it a moment, then clicks his tongue before he says, “Milak, wasn’t it?”

Samick hums something curt.

“He married last solstice, didn’t he?” Aleana abandons her over-soaked oats, something that has become more like a wheat soup than a filling breakfast. We might need slaves in here to feed us something half edible. “Dare received an invite. I think he went.”

“He married last solstice,” I start, “or he got married on the solstice?”

“He married the second solstice,” Aleana says with a nod. “What else could he do with his life here? It’s not like anyone would actually marry him.”

My mind flashes with images of an ordinary human looking male, a kinta, dressed in the dull brown robes of the priests, the most ordinary and mundane servers of the gods.

Priests have no power, no magick, no gold, only faith.

Suppose it’s one way to spend a kinta existence in the Midlands. Become a priest, because no one will breed with a kinta for fear that the disease will spring up again in the offspring, or in future generations.

Some courts in Licht even believe that the kintas are cursed by the gods, that they are punishment for previous generations and their misdeeds; other courts see them as signs from the gods to swap out their babes for changelings, which renews the bloodlines and booms births throughout the lands.