“Did you like Kneave?” I asked.

The girl sat and stared at the ocean from underneath the bones of a monster long dead, for there is a reason they call this place the Sea of Skulls. Water swirled around her ankles and stained the bottom of her dress the color of rusted blood. The skeletal monster loomed above her, its remains an arc against the hot sun that scorched the black earth around them. I remembered the elephant-like daeva she had slain mere feet from where I stood, staring out at the world through unseeing eyes with loops of viscera halfway out its stomach. I held my breath, but no foul odors wafted from the spot. No flies buzzed from where its carcass used to lie. Despite the blazing heat, I could see no maggots combing the earth for flesh. Only the bones from other monsters remained—dead monuments, offerings to the sea.

“No. I found the people strange. I found them suspicious of all those who don’t look and act like them. Doubtless they held the same opinions of me but for the opposite reason. You came from Drycht; you understand full well the tyranny of the old guard, the inflexibility of the ruling class. The bourgeois of Kneave entertain more liberties; a Drychta might kill an asha and believe it only follows the will of gods. A Kneavan will claim the higher ground and preach clemency but kill when no one else sees. The runeberry trade influenced Murkwick’s beliefs, but the rest of Odalia takes its cues from its capital city. Even Knightscross.

“But the world will always look different when you open your eyes to what you previously refused to see. It was the same for you, wasn’t it? When King Aadil outlawed the songs that made you famous everywhere else and they took you from your mother’s house to languish in his dungeons for three months.”

“How did you know that?” From above us, the skeletal beast watched, knowing.

She gestured at my heartsglass, at the colors that ebbed in and out of view. She smiled. “You are easy enough to read. I did not like Kneave, but entering that city for the first time remains one of the strangest and most exhilarating experiences of my life. Perhaps because everything felt so new. Perhaps because I was realizing how much wider the world was than the Knightscross-shaped one I had occupied.

“I never got over my dislike of crowds, though I have performed before them hundreds of times. I never liked being the center of attention, which is unusual for an asha. But despite the people’s aversion to us, I had fond memories of my first night in Kneave.”

“Why is that?”

“In my life, I have only ever been attracted to two men. And what is even more unusual was that I met both that very same night in Kneave, though not in the best circumstances.”