Rori lay propped up by three out of a seemingly countless number of pillows that were piled on and around Karyn’s bed. It was a massive four poster that eight people could have slept on at once without feeling cramped. Right now, Rori was the only inhabitant. The white sheet was mostly tangled around his waist, but his left leg had managed to find its way free of the wonderland of blankets.

  Karyn stood at the window on the far side of the room brushing her hair. Clearly not at all self-conscious about the fact that except for the holy symbol of Meredith around her neck, she was completely naked. Rori certainly didn’t mind. He realized he had limited experience as far as the naked form of the opposite sex was concerned, but in his mind she was perfect.

  She turned and saw him watching her and stopped brushing.

  “What is it?” she asked. “Is there something wrong?”

  “As far as I can see everything is perfect. Perfect legs. Perfect hips. Perfect breasts. Perfect face. Perfect.”

  “Please,” Karyn deadpanned, dropping the brush onto her vanity.

  “You see it how you like. I will see it how I like,” Rori said with a smile and then in as much of a lecherous voice as he could muster, he added, “And I like what I see.”

  “Oh my. I think I’m going to swoon. Someone call a bard to get this all down.” She pretended to stagger but as she did, she grabbed up a pillow and flung it across the bed at Rori. Rori tilted his head to the right and the pillow bounced off of the headboard.

  “What do you think? Should we get up? We could eat breakfast or lunch or whatever meal would be appropriate,” she asked.

  “I’m good. But if you’re hungry . . .”

  “No, I’m fine.”

  She lay down across the bottom of the bed and fiddled with the toes of his foot under the sheet. Across the room, one of her cats, one with short white fur, jumped off the small table near the door and up onto the bed beside her. She quit fiddling with his toes and began petting the cat instead.

  “Karyn, can I ask you something?”

  “That sounds like a serious question. But if the last several days have shown anything, I think it is that we’ve little to hide from each other. So, I guess I will chance it. Ask away.”

  “How rich are you?”

  Karyn rolled onto her back and laughed aloud.

  “Is that worrying you? You afraid I have too much or not enough?”

  Rori frowned and then after a moment’s thought responded. “Neither. I tried to run around your property yesterday. I think I maybe covered a quarter of it. This house is ridiculous. There are two of us, three cats and four or five servants. You could easily fit twenty times that. You’ve got an armory that’s pretty impressive, though nobody to wield the weapons that I can see. So, you either are living in a dream that nothing bad will ever bother you here or there are magic defenses that can’t be seen. And I haven’t even talked about the amount of artwork, gold plated things and other luxuries scattered around the place.”

  Karyn just smiled the entire time he had been talking. She kept on petting the cat, but she didn’t answer.

  “I thought you said we had little to hide from each other?” Rori asked.

  “Little doesn’t mean nothing. But if I do have anything hidden, I’ll gladly tell you if you ask. The truth is I don’t know. The house and all of this doesn’t actually belong to me. It belongs to the Ulbricht family.

  Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  “Gerard has two brothers and a sister, not to mention other extended family and they are all filthy rich. This house is just their collective vacation home. I guess some part of it is mine as inheritance through Gerard, but I couldn’t tell you how much or what it’s worth. I have a house in Willowsbrook, but it isn’t nearly this large or nice. You can come see it whenever you’d like.

  “Oh.” Rori said but before he could decide what else to say Karyn continued.

  “If the entire family is here there aren’t enough rooms for everyone, believe it or not. And they all bring their own assistants, cooks, helpers and whatnot. I don’t like the word servants, but there are actually ten full-time people on staff here. None of them actually work for me either. Oh, and there are six cats, but only Nicky here is mine.

  “As for security, you are right about the magic. There is a slew of wards, fields and walls that I know next to nothing about and mostly didn’t understand when I last asked. The upshot of it is that if someone does attack, armed men will appear and defend almost immediately. Also, we aren’t that far away from a city. Not Willowsbrook, but it is a city. I would tell you, but Nolan made me promise not to.

  “Sadly, this beautiful place often just sits empty. I used to make up excuses for reasons that I had to come here, but the rest of the family didn’t care. Now I live here as often as I can. Sometimes there are others here with me. Most times it’s just me.

  “I’m not exactly poor either,” said Karyn. “My family isn’t loaded but they aren’t hurting. And being a Senator does provide a nice income for a girl.” Karyn rolled onto her stomach and looked at him with her chin propped on her arched hands. “Do those answer pass muster?”

  “It wasn’t like that,” answered Rori. “I was just wondering that’s all.”

  “That tone in your voice says there is something else. Spill.”

  “Okay, but you asked,” said Rori sitting up. “I don’t know how much such things cost or about how hard it would be to set up, but I’m assuming the Ulbricht’s have the money and influence to make it happen. Why didn’t they try to get Gerard brought back alive after he’d died?”

  Karyn’s cheerful face disappeared, replaced by a more somber one. “We did try and you’re right it isn’t cheap. But it didn’t work. The clerics said that sometimes it just fails for no reason, so we actually did it twice. They also said that it also doesn’t work if the person doesn’t want to come back. There’s no easy way to know which is which and at some point, it is just best to leave things the way that they are.”

  “And now I’m an ass,” Rori said. “Sorry, I guess tact isn’t my strong suit.”

  “It’s okay,” said Karyn moving up the bed to lay beside him. “Like I said, no secrets. Now hold me for moment and I’ll forgive you.”

  Rori sat stroking her hair while she lay against his chest. The cat hopped back down off the bed and resumed its original place on the table near the door. The tension slowly leaked out of the room and in time Karyn sighed.

  Eventually she said, “Okay, my turn for a question.”

  “What’s that?”

  “When things have settled down again, are you going to go back to living with the Cunāe? Haven’t you . . . I don’t know . . . grown beyond it?”

  “You make it sound like it’s a bunch of kids playing make believe.”

  “I don’t mean to. I just don’t see how having been exposed to everything that there is in life, from the cities to the people to the excitement and adventure of it all, that anyone, least of all you, could want to go seclude yourself in the wilderness. And there is so much more out there you haven’t yet seen. You’ve never even been to one of the other continents or even to Lorenthia. Of course, maybe I’m wrong and maybe it’s more fulfilling than I can understand.”

  Rori stared at the ceiling and thought it all through before answering.

  “There are times when I think the exact same thing. If I had stayed in a normal Cunāe clan from the beginning, I would never have met Dade, Nolan and the rest and I would have never met you. I would have never found the temple to Meredith and all that has led to. So much that now seems like an essential part of ‘me’ wouldn’t even exist.

  “But then there are other times when there is nothing that I want more than to go back to the clan and live a simpler life. To take care of the others in my clan that I know are all trying to take care of me. To not care what is happening anywhere else in the world, with the possible exception of what is over the next ridge.

  “And then I start thinking that feeling like that is monumentally na?ve.”

  They lay again in companionable quiet for a while. This time it was Rori’s sigh that broke the silence.

  “I guess I don’t need to figure it out right now,” he said. “There are problems to solve and things that I have to do first regardless of how I feel.”

  “Well,” said Karyn pulling aside the sheet, “before you begin tackling the big problems of the world, let’s see how you feel about this.”