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Even if she wasn’t planning to set him up, the presence of a man, even if that man is Mer – which isn’t to say Mer is in any way unmanly – he has one of those Imalian beards, like Moromaso’s, only Mer’s is thick and virile and unruly, and the long hair that’s so fashionable on the continent is, on Mer, sleek midnight at the root and a careless, non-egotistical knot at the nape – which doesn’t sound sexy necessarily, so you’ll just have to trust her, that Lilari can see all kinds of carnalities in him – goodness, once you let them go these wretched truths simply overspill! – but Mer is also…visibly a scribe.

Which is to say, Mer thinks he’s getting away with something that he absolutely isn’t. But Lilari’s got secrets of her own, so, you know. A little truth, a little lies.

For example, the kidnapping. It wasn’t, per se, a kidnapping.

Well, listen. You know Adelion – the governor of what used to be Eristoh, which is now just more of Imalia.

Everyone knows Governor Adelion is both zealously pious and corrupt as all hell, which is a common irony if not a pleasant one.

Anyway, Adelion’s in charge of tax collection and of course he skims a little off the top.

He’s a bully and he’s violent (it’s gotten incalculably worse since his wife was, ahem, murdered – the story is she fell victim to Dometico’s pirates, the ‘lawless scum’ who line the new Imalian ports and tradeways) and he’s got spies all over the thing that used to be a country that’s now the savage landmass in his care.

Adelion has one particular spy, Kasalka, who happens to have discovered something damaging about Lilari, a secret he’d tried to use against her in what could fashionably be called a bribe for his silence, until Mer blew him up.

Now the threat of Kasalka is gone, but that’s arguably much worse.

Because what comes after Kasalka is Adelion, and that is… very bad for Lilari.

What she needs now is Dometico, which Mer is not. But he’s here, which is the next best thing.

“Mer. A warning.” Lilari pauses abruptly.

“This place…it’s not too welcoming to strangers.

” Certainly not strangers who dress in Imalian fashions or wear their hair like Imalian aristocrats – she can’t understand how or when that happened, especially as Mer was once so proud to be precisely what he was.

Anyway. “I’m going to need you to play along, okay? Don’t ask questions.”

Mer gives her a look, like, okayyyyy.

“Everything will be fine as long as you follow my lead,” Lilari says as they prepare to enter the grungy tavern with shuttered windows and clear evidence that all might not be well inside.

So, another lie! But who’s counting. At the very least, part of that lie is true – things will be fine for the time being.

She trusts Nicano Asco, even if he does have his lackeys assign three blades to each of their throats the moment she and Mer walk through the door.

***

“Well, well, well,” says a person Mer doesn’t recognize until they step into the dim morning light, which sluices entropically through the tavern’s shoddily-boarded windows.

And then, gradually, awareness sinks in.

Nicano Asco, wanted for trespass, felony robbery, felony burglary, assault on Imalian officers, and arson.

He’s much handsomer than his wanted poster suggests, not that such things matter to Mer.

Certainly they don’t matter more than the reality that Mer could bleed out from an incautious swallow. “Lady Lilari Barzya.”

(Mer marvels a little at how Nicano Asco seems to have no trouble saying her full name without wild interior strangulation.)

“Nicano,” says Lilari. She seems unbothered by the knives presently threatening their necks, possibly because she’s already survived one attempt on her life over the course of the previous twenty-four hours.

Mer considers that, perhaps, he should do his best to become accustomed to danger, as it seems part and parcel with the consequences of his actions. “I need a favor.”

She’s doing a purring thing with her voice, something Mer recognizes as flirtation the way an astrologist might speculate about the stars.

It seems strange now to think she was using the same tones with Moromaso hours earlier, on the other side of the study door from where Mer sat alone, trying not to feel things, attending to his pile of requested spells.

(Most of Moromaso’s household has been replaced with spells, which are single-use, which really means that Mer inherited that work.

Granted, it’s different work. He’s never scrubbed an antique Imalian fireplace grate and will probably never have to, thanks to his benefactor.

But he does have to write the Imalian word for ‘clean’ about a thousand times per night.

Or he did, until he wound up here, with Lilari, at knifepoint.)

The notorious criminal Nicano Asco begins to circle them slowly, something Mer recognizes as a tedious game that Moromaso also plays.

The issue with mortal peril is that eventually, you adjust to it, which leaves room for other things, like annoyance with the peacocking of a man who could just slit your throat and be done with it.

Which would at least express adequate respect for everyone’s time.

“So,” Nicano murmurs to himself. “This is the great Teorestro Dometico, is it?”

“Ha,” says Mer, because Teorestro Dometico is – much like Nicano Asco – a very famous criminal.

A pirate of some sort, out for blood and bounty, though Mer’s only interest in him is as a kind of bogeyman who haunts Moromaso’s enterprises.

It is Dometico who supplies Mer with his steadiest administrative tedium: the inscription of ‘safety’ for every trader Moromaso invites to the port of Gonjain.

Objectively speaking, there’s almost no chance that Mer could be the sort of brawler known for brutality and senseless violence. But is it just him, or does Nicano Asco look…scared?

By the time Lilari purr-whispers, “Nicano, don’t be jealous, it’s incredibly unattractive,” it occurs to Mer this might be exactly what she meant by following her lead.

***

Give or take some twenty knives later, after they’re deemed acceptably unthreatening and the nest of Nicano’s gang makes itself comfortable again, singing their bawdy tunes and getting characteristically drunk before mid-morning, Mer and Lilari are shown to their room above the tavern.

Mer, not unpredictably, whirls on Lilari – who intends to say nothing, thank you very much.

“Why.” It’s the start of a sentence, but Mer’s voice is so terse and clipped that Lilari can only hear it in tiny chopped up bits, like pickings for a stew. “Does. NicanoAsco.” (This, meanwhile, is a single, ostentatious word.) “Think I’m. Some kind of. Master criminal?”

There’s a note of absurdity in there, as if even by asking, Mer has defied the usual constraints on reality and must therefore take several steps backward.

He sinks into the mattress behind him, a faint look of confusion crossing his enviable features.

Not that Lilari is thinking about Mer’s handsomeness at the moment, but truth be told, she loves a pretty thing, and Mer is very pretty.

The way his lashes sweep across the high bones of his cheeks; the graceful look of his elegant fingers; the impeccable furrow of his scholarly brow.

She enjoys this feeling, the one where she allows herself to admire a person, to wonder at the scent of salt and linen and the lovely ordinariness of a body, the way it can so easily be brought to pleasure.

The way running a finger along the curve of one thigh can make anyone shiver, done patiently enough.

Lilari doesn’t even mind the thought of sleeping with her new betrothed, Moromaso, who is an objectively terrible man.

An attractive one, to be sure – thick and brawny, with ice-blue eyes and girthy thighs.

Lilari likes to think she’s capable of complex thought; for example, she can temporarily turn off the part of her brain that dislikes bullies in favor of the dumber, primal one that enjoys an expert cock.

Yesterday, she was confident she could be perfectly satisfied with marriage to Moromaso, at least for the six or so weeks before things inevitably took a turn.

But then, today, Mer. Whose natural loveliness is undeniable, and lingers even when he scowls. It’s really for the best that she turns traitor. How else would she otherwise go on?

“Look,” Lilari begins, doing the thing where she says something with a lot of certainty so that nobody presses her or asks questions, a tactic that worked very well over the course of her marriage and on all the lovers she took during that time.

“I think we can both agree that it’s better if nobody tries to kill us.

No offense, but they might very well succeed. ”

Mer mutters something like excuse me, I saved you earlier this evening in a display of impressive masculinity (Lilari doesn’t actually hear him, but she assumes based on experience and context cues).

“I’m just trying to make things easier for us,” she lies before he can say anything else.

“Nobody’s going to come for you if they think you’re Dometico. ”

“Oh, really?” says Mer, with a dull blow of a glance. “Interesting. So, not the Imalian police, or the Imperial Navy, or Adelion, or—?”

“The truth,” Lilari cuts in, “is that Adelion thinks I have something that belongs to him.” That actually is true, sort of.

“And unless I can get it back, he’s not going to leave me alone.

Especially once he learns that Kasalka is dead.

” There! That’s a cogent point. “Honestly, better for you to be Dometico than for you to be the man who killed the governor’s favorite attack dog. ”

This is a very strong argument, such that even Mer seems to buy it.