When Riasa came down the stairs, Lizzan stood—then sat again when the captain indicated that she would join her there. And so she did, picking up the young monk along the way, who had been sitting alone at his own table.
“Preter, is it?” Riasa asked as she took a seat beside Lizzan.
“It is,” the monk confirmed through a yawn. His rumpled hair and bleary gaze added that he wasn’t fully ready for conversation yet.
Riasa called to the innkeeper for a pot of tea and a breakfast before looking to Lizzan with a rakish glint in her eyes. “You ought to have joined us last eve.”
With a laugh, Lizzan shook her head. After leaving Aerax, she’d wanted only solitude and drink, and sought out the private dining hall where they had met earlier in hope of finding both. There had still been pitchers of mead laid out with the feast—but also Riasa, laid out between the two Parsatheans who’d attended that meeting. So Lizzan had politely apologized for the interruption. Though in truth, it seemed there was no interruption at all as she spent a few moments combining the shallow remains of each pitcher into one container, then left them to it.
“We were all impressed by how steadily you poured while the table was jolting. Kelir said afterward that he’d never seen such fierce concentration.” Riasa sat back as the innkeeper placed in front of them a platter of smoked fish in cream, alongside a slab of bread. “I told him that we might have shocked you terribly.”
“Why is that?”
“You are from Koth.” Riasa dabbed a bite of bread into the cream, eyebrows raised. “Are not such things frowned upon?”
“They are. But people still do them.” The sight of food churned her stomach, so Lizzan refilled her mug. “No one from the nearby villages would ever be seen at the inn that Aerax’s mother kept—so anyone who didn’t want to be seen often went there. And her rooms were always full.”
Now Lizzan’s own mother and brother likely had the same business, since Aerax had given them the inn. They would be shunned even as people used them to conceal their own shameful hypocrisy.
She sipped to ease the sudden burning in her throat before continuing, “When there was a snowstorm or it was too bitterly cold to be outside, Aerax and I would sometimes spend time at the inn.” Though hidden out of sight—and there they had received an education in all the things people did in their beds. “You can imagine how we passed that time.”
“I would have sneaked into the rafters to watch,” Riasa said.
It had been through a hole in the wall . . . but it was the same. “I think that Kothan and Krimathean children are not too different, then.”
“Children?” Riasa scoffed. “I would watch from the rafters now. Particularly if it were Kelir and Ardyl below me. You ought to have at least taken a chair.”
Lizzan snorted into her mug but got no chance to reply when Riasa’s attention moved across the table, where the young monk’s cheeks had burnished a deep red.
The captain clicked her tongue against her teeth. “Now I have made you blush. Have we shocked you, instead?”
Preter shook his head, his blush spreading beyond his beard and down his throat. “I would only say that Tolehi children are no different, either. And that even as adults, sometimes we watch what we cannot have.”
“I see,” Riasa said, and all at once her expression altered from teasing to sympathetic. “Did I tread upon your toes last eve?”
“Not at all,” he said ruefully. “Ardyl and Kelir pay me no attention, because I keep my toes well covered. It would do no good for them to know. Especially as a bedding is only sport to them.” All at once his face blazed brighter. “I do not mean to step on your toes, Captain.”
Riasa shrugged. “It is only sport to me, too. Is it because you are too young?”
Irritation flashed across his features. “I am two years short of a queen’s age.”
Lizzan’s eyebrows shot high. That made him twenty and eight years of age . . . a year older even than she was. “You do not look it.”
His wry glance said he was well aware. A sigh followed. “They prefer to have their sport and move on, with everyone happily satisfied. But we travel together, so there would be no moving on. There would only be awkwardness after.”