as everyone had started doing. Since we’d parted from our escort, no one had approached us, as if they somehow knew she was off duty.
“What did you regret,” Lia asked, “when you were at Vurgmun?”
In the night-muffled maze of shadows, the subtle glows soothing, making it seem as if everything spoken inside its tall walls and under that starry sky would be kept forever secret, even held with a kind of compassion, I could think back—as I almost never did—to those days of toiling in the stinking, stifling mines. The boy I’d been there, the laborer I’d grown into—they were almost unrecognizable to me now. More desperate, savage animal than a person. A monster in a human skin.
Lia didn’t need to hear that, with her own monstrosity so vividly haunting her at the moment. I’d recognized that skittish, wary way she’d looked at herself in the mirror, the way she kept the twig hand hidden in her skirts.
“You’ll laugh,” I said, “but—”
“I would never laugh,” she interrupted, voice solemn as a vow in the shrouded silence, the only other sounds the crunch of our steps on the sparkling gravel and the distant music of gaiety.
“My father would’ve laughed then,” I corrected, “but I regretted screwing off on my lessons. I was a bad kid, you know.”
She did laugh then, but with affection. “This does not surprise Me.”
“Yeah. Rhéiane … she was the scholar, but I drove our tutors crazy. And that’s when they caught me. Half the time, I’d skip out on lessons and they couldn’t find me.”
“Not at all?”
“They didn’t have your trick of seeing me through bats and bees,” I teased her, and she tipped her shadowy profile in acknowledgment.
“Where would you hide?”
“See, that’s where I was clever: I changed it up. Every day, someplace new. Unless I got caught in one of them, then I’d go back to it, because I figured they wouldn’t expect me to return to a spot they knew about.”
“Practicing your strategy even then.”
“I guess.” I hadn’t thought of it that way. “But yeah, once I was in those mines, I regretted that I’d spent more time and effort avoiding lessons than I did learning anything. Sometimes, at night, in the bunks, people would talk about books they’d read, and music and art. Or they’d debate politics or argue about the composition and uses of vurgsten—and I realized I’d never have any of that. That I’d been too stubborn and willfully ignorant when I had all the world offered to me. Instead I’d be an uneducated oaf for the rest of my life.”
We walked in silence for a few steps, Lia turning us at a four-way intersection where all the paths looked the same to me. “Do you know where you’re going?” I asked.
“Metaphorically in My life, or literally in this maze?” she replied lightly.
“Now you sound like Ambrose.”
“He has his moments. The answer is yes to both.”
“You know where you’re going in life?”
“That has never been a question for Me. My life belongs to Calanthe.” Before I could say anything to that, she continued. “And there’s a pattern to the turns in the maze, which everyone knows, even if they never come this way. The maze is here primarily to prevent anyone from stumbling into the heart of the Night Court by accident.”
“Am I going to be shocked by what I see?” I blurted out, figuring I’d better ask.
She gave me an assessing look, eyes glowing with color, like the decorative lanterns did. “You might be. Do you mind? We can turn back.”
“No way. Not after I just confessed to regretting not learning what I could when I had the opportunity.” Besides, maybe I’d get some ideas about pleasing Lia. If I could figure out how to be a better lover for her, she might want to marry me again.
“You could still learn, you know,” she offered. “It’s never too late.”
For a pained moment, I thought she’d read that thought—then I realized she meant reading and stuff. “I’d feel like an idiot.” I could just picture it, sitting there like a hulk in some schoolroom, painstakingly reading aloud from a kid’s book.
“You said you feel like an idiot most of the time anyway,” she countered.
“Good point.” We turned twice more, and I began to get the pattern now. “Two lefts, then a right, and repeat?”
“Exactly. Now you know.”
“Not that I’d come this way without you.”
“You could. The Night Court would—”
“I know, I know. You offered this before and I said I didn’t