Alonnen Tallnose might be a bit . . . casual . . . about his nudity and relaxed about his body in the presence of what he had thought was a fellow man, but at her confession, he had covered up quickly enough. And he had continued to treat her presence in his bedchamber as if she were still Rexei the “lad,” with no difference toward Rexei the “lass” aside from the quick donning of his nightshirt.
Once she got over her shock and realized he was honestly trying to go to sleep, she had thought it safe enough to climb into the bed. That was one reason right there. And he had proved himself a gentleman. Another reason was the fact that the longer she had stood there in the borrowed nightshift, the colder the room had grown, making the thick bedding look inviting. It certainly felt deliciously warm and soft this morning, even if a stripe of her back felt cold and a little stiff from having been exposed above the covers in her curled-over position. Wiggling onto her back, she pulled the covers up to her chin and blushed again.
And the third reason—fourth, if you count how tired I was—that I crawled in here . . . was because I wanted to sleep next to him. It . . . it doesn’t make me wanton or whatever, she asserted in her mind. It makes me human. He’s so different from most men I know. Very open and very accepting. Very friendly and welcoming. Yes, he wants something from me, but it’s nothing I’d refuse to give to anyone in this situation, man or woman.
But she didn’t want to think about Netherhells and priests summoning demons. Snuggling under the covers, she let herself inhale the slightly musky smell clinging to the blankets and sheets. The scent of a fully grown male, but not the sort of stench she associated with rancid, stale sweat. Some of the men she had worked alongside had reeked of the stuff—during her brief stint in the Coalminers Guild in particular. No, the head of the Mages Guild was a man who bathed regularly but without drowning himself in perfumes or heavily scented soft soaps.
Rexei knew she couldn’t lie abed forever, though. Her stomach insisted it was hungry. Adjusting the pillows, she scooted up against the headboard for support and surveyed the room.
The rest of the room, like the bed, was empty. It was lit by the suncrystals overhead . . . and by the headboard crystal, which she had forgotten to douse before falling asleep last night. At the foot of the bed, on top of the bench-chest, she could see her pack and a stack made from the clothes she had stuffed into it. The sight of a scrap of paper intrigued her enough to abandon the warmth of blankets and quilt.
Tapping the rune to shut off the headboard light, Rexei struggled out of the overly soft bed. Belatedly, she remembered to rescue the book and set it on the nightstand. Moving to the foot of the bed, she saw how neatly everything had been folded and that the scrap of paper held a list. On it was a neat accounting of every last item she owned, including all the spare Guild medallions from her earlier days, and a list of the food she had brought, with the beans and the oats counted by volume, the wheel of cheese by weight, and even the cloth-wrapped bread and sausage, which had apparently been rescued from her summer-weight coat, mentioned at the bottom of the page. But she didn’t see her food.
What she did see was an extra stack of clothes. She started to set the note aside and realized more had been written on the back. Turning it over, she read the star-tagged notation that her food had been added to the kitchen stores of the inner circle. The rest of the note listed a sweater, undershirt, undertrews, socks, and sheepskin-lined house shoes, which were the extra garments stacked on the bench-like chest. All of that was in one set of handwriting.
A separate hand had scribed a message in tiny, neat writing on the rest of the page. Referencing the starred line above, it clarified that note.
It’s an inner circle policy to share food supplies; food is something that can spoil if left alone too long, so it’s better to eat now and make it up later in meal-size equivalencies. The clothes are on loan while you’re here. You can trade for others to wear, or even buy them outright at fair prices in either labor or coin if you like a particular garment. If you would rather wear a skirt, the person to see about it is Master Tarani Redgriddle, the housekeeper, same for buying clothes or eventually arranging replacement meals for the amount you brought here.
Depending on when you wake up, there might be breakfast, or there might be leftovers of breakfast. When you’ve eaten, come up to the top floor and knock on my office door. It may take me a few minutes to respond, but don’t worry, I will. Do Not Enter without my opening the door first, or you’ll literally never see me.
Your task for the day, O Apprentice of the Guild, is to finish writing up your detailed report on the doings in the Heiastowne temple. That and to relax. You’re safe here. Feel free to bring up the book.
~Alonnen
There. That right there. That was what he did to her. Touched her somehow with his openness, his honesty, his warm welcome coupled with his pragmatism. She barely knew the man, but she knew that as the head of the Mages Guild he surely could display the greatest of guile in protecting the men and women and even the children of the mages in his care. Yet he clearly didn’t feel the need to exercise any guile with her, and had instead spent some of his time in explaining things instead of dissembling or offering a lie.
It wasn’t a tender love note of the sort she vaguely recalled from her childhood. Her father had sent them to her mother when his expertise at repairing wagons and wains on the roads they broke down upon had kept him traveling around the countryside. Sometimes there would be a flower carefully pressed and folded into the letter, sometimes a bit of colorful ribbon, but always there were loving words. This note wasn’t anything like that—pragmatic, not passionate—but it touched her anyway that he would take the time to explain these things to her.
The warmth engendered by that thought, by that courtesy, warred with her deeply ingrained wariness. His brother Rogen, the leftenant for the Precinct, had made her feel afraid and wary; how odd that Alonnen could make her feel welcomed, even able to relax in spite of her fears. At least, a little.
She needed the refreshing room before breakfast, and with clean borrowed clothes at hand and with the bathing room specifically mentioned last night . . . she wanted a bath. Her tenement didn’t have bathing rooms, just refreshing rooms, and it cost to use the public baths. Rexei had money scattered across various guild accounts, but since she was in Heiastowne pretending to be a Servers apprentice, that meant either dipping into her savings or only being able to afford baths once a week.
Back before her world had fallen apart, her family had lived in a house with its very own indoor pump and boiling tank. Baths had to be taken in the kitchen since that was where the plumbing was, but at least the water had been plentiful and hot. After things fell apart, years of being on the run had given her an appreciation for being clean whenever possible. The trick had been finding a moment of complete privacy in which she could be safe.
Scooping up the stack of clean clothes, she added a roll of bandaging from her belongings and headed for the bathing room. After she bathed, she would rewrap her breasts and hope he hadn’t told . . . there was a note in the bathing room, too. Folded in half and propped up as a tent, it explained in the Guild Master’s neat handwriting how to use the spigots to control the flow of hot and cold water, which were powered by magic instead of the more normal boiling-tank method.