My flesh shall exalt the flesh of the Worthy One. My bones shall form a bulwark around the Worthy One. My blood shall spill for the Worthy One down to the very last drop. Let the first children of IWA hear my words! Let them ring throughout the Firmament! And should I break my vow, let the vengeful king of dogs tear my body to shreds, let my soul dissolve in shame.

- Dayam’s Oath, translated from Scriptural Rhuzic to Standard Tet by Scepter Maxwell of House Pines

Sai-em stood up from his seat once more. Nemira’s eyes flickered up his bronze face as he approached, a quick and guilty glance. In the center of his forehead, peeking between the strands of his dark bangs, sat a pear-shaped stone. It possessed no polish, did not shine with any inner light. It looked for all the world cut from a plain rock anyone could have picked up from the side of the road. Sai-em rarely spoke of it, and she would never bring the topic up first, but she knew what it meant. The shame that must have weighed him down each day. 

And as he knelt before her with an elegant bend of his knee, one hand over his heart in a display of ceremony she had long since given up reminding him was incredibly unnecessary, she thought it rather sad that a large part of her suspicion of him was most likely through no fault of his own.

“The Public Guard are weak fools who hold long grudges and a deep envy against their betters,” he said, oblivious to her musings. “But more importantly, Detective North called you a broad, so I thought to provoke her into a fight neither she nor her partner would win as payment for her gross insult.”

Nemira’s face twisted. “Terrible answer. Zero out of ten points. I’m extending your stay outside to a whole week.”

It was a poor punishment and they both knew it. Nemira possessed a vague familiarity with only a few orders of the Knights Allegiant, but she didn’t doubt that there were plenty who shirked the actual work of chivalrous protection of the weak while living like celebrities on the renown of their title. Sai-em did no such thing. Before swearing himself to her, he had spent years in and out of Ewald Vale, the twisted lands that stretched out from the northern edge of Coine’s borders. Traversing through supernaturally-corrupted terrain, slaying abberants, and rescuing hapless would-be treasure hunters on nothing but water, salt pork, and hardtack for days on end was his norm. What difficulty would a bit of dreary autumn weather pose for a nephilim like Sai-em? It was all too easy to envision him foregoing shelter entirely in favor of wandering around the soggy city streets until she let him back into the building.

“The most irreverent Rhuzian in all of the Alliance would not have let that woman’s words go without a challenge,” said Sai-em, more gravity to his tone now. “These Coinish humans treat you poorly, attempting to touch you with unclean hands and foregoing any purification before seeking your presence.”

She plopped back onto her seat, begrudgingly impressed with how unflinching Sai-em remained despite her knees nearly knocking him in the head on her way down. “Firstly: we’re not in Rhuz. According to statistics as listed in the latest issue of The City-State Esoteric, nineteen percent of the roughly two thousand poll participants believe that the last summoners all died off during the Anti-Imperial Defense Campaign, eleven percent think we’re a complete myth, and four percent assume we somehow made a mysterious fourth plane of reality and are hiding from the rest of existence in it. With those odds, I’m not going to bother expecting Rhuzian formalities from the Coinish. That’s silly. I don’t engage in silliness.”

She paused to pull up her legs so that she sat cross-legged in her chair and gave the knight a particularly hard stare. “Second of all: mind how much venom with which you talk about humans. Or are you trying to tell me you’re bravely putting up with my lack of horns and pointed ears out of the kindness of your noble heart?”

The veneer of casual haughtiness slipped off Sai-em’s unfairly good-looking face, revealing an expression that might have been close to remorse if Nemira squinted. “Forgive me, Kha-hesh, I am no enemy of your species, only of any who bear you ill will. Human or nephilim, aberrant or aetherian.”

Nemira could feel another scowl tugging at the corners of her lips. “So…no remorse at all for riling up those Grays?”

A smile flickered across Sai-em’s finely sculpted mouth, there and gone again in a blink. A very rarely used weapon of his, but she considered it nearly as dangerous as his sword, and not just because nephilim had particularly sharp teeth. “I let Detective North turn her back on me unscathed. No need for remorse when restraint can suffice. Your journal, Kha-hesh.”

“My what? Oh, yes.” She took the plain, leatherbound book he proffered, blinking back faint surprise. She had all but forgotten dropping the thing. It was not her journal at all, but if it had fallen open, Sai-em would have seen nothing but blank pages. She slid it down the counter so that it could stay a safe distance away from her, deciding not to correct him. 

Sai-em finally stood back up. “You told the officers we’d meet them at the station in an hour, but we need not keep to so strict a schedule. When do we leave?”

“Hm…” Nemira pretended to consider the question, allowing her eyes to drift over her storefront and take her back to the past. A couple of weeks after the Council had informed her of how they had arranged her post-graduation life and mailed her the key to the building, she had arrived with her head whirling with plans on how to make the store her own and arms full of books and notes on how to run a business, because if she could not become a librarian she was determined to make the book shop the next best option. She had even worn herself down to the nub shadowing her mama at the apothecary during the scant bits of free time she could squeeze in while attending her last week of university just to pick up customer service tips, using up several notebook pages on a list of potential shop names whenever she had a spare moment. 

A flick of the light switch had been all it took to dash away her plans and careful efforts. The bookshelves were ugly, cheap blocks of wood she would have never chosen herself, all neatly lined across the room and already packed with books she had not ordered and organized without her input. There was no furniture for guests, no decoration on the impersonal beige walls, and harsh fluorescent lights in the ceiling. The storage room in the back had a little sink, a table and chairs, and a spare restroom, but nothing that indicated it was supposed to be used to help keep a business running. There wasn’t even a cash register on the countertop. Instead, another letter bearing the seal of the Council sat upon it. She remembered opening it with shaking hands and reading its contents with burning eyes.

WELCOME TO BOOKS ON 8TH. WORRY NOT ABOUT PATRONAGE. YOUR LIVELIHOOD IS OURS TO PROVIDE. YOU NEED ONLY REST, AND WAIT FOR OUR COMMAND.

She huffed out a little breath of air, a sound that hovered between a laugh and a sigh. 

“Kha-hesh?”

Nemira looked back at him and lifted her hand. At some point during the day she had propped her torch in the far corner of the back counter space, next to the stairs that lead up to her living quarters on the second floor. It was a long length of gold-embellished wood that had been with her for many years, the spherical lantern dangling from it looking somewhat forlorn without illumination. Her gesture lit it with her pneuma, a crackling fire that danced in chilly blue-white tints and licks of dark shadows. The torch gave a shudder, snapped up on its end point, shot through the air and smacked neatly into her hand, coming just a hairbreadth from bashing Sai-em’s elbow inside-out on its trajectory toward her. Again, he didn’t even blink.

“I’m leaving for the station right now,” she said, hauling herself out of her seat with her torch. “You are staying here and minding the store.”

Sai-em’s eyes went wide. “But I am your dayam. I have to go with you!”

His protest had been expected, but the word dayam sucked all the pleasure Nemira could extract from finally getting a reaction out of him. Her stomach did a nervous little flip, and she couldn’t quite look him in the face as she replied, “You’re also a knight, Sai-em, and apparently the Grays really take exception to that. I wouldn’t let you follow me even if you had been the very definition of politeness. Stay here. I’ll take you on my next assignment instead.”

“But—”

Nemira thumped the butt of her torch upon the floor twice. “‘But’ nothing! You saw how they reacted when you said you were knighted! This isn’t me actually punishing you, Sai-em, I’m trying not to accidentally start some kind of war between the whole Knights Allegiant and Coine’s Public Guard. Stay here, damn you.”

Sai-em’s mouth opened, then snapped shut. Mutiny roiled behind his eyes. Nemira raised her eyebrows at him and waited.

At last, he sucked a deep breath through his nose and let it back out in an exhale of defeat. “I hear the Kha-hesh and I obey.” 

Nemira leaned on her torch and considered him. “Do you also hear that if I catch you sneaking after me I’ll drag you by your horns over to my parents’ place and have them babysit you until I come back?”

She had meant it mostly as a joke. She preferred not to involve her mothers with her work at the best of times, and suddenly bringing Sai-em to them as though he were some paramour she desired their approval for made her want to dry-heave. But Sai-em’s grave expression didn’t budge as he answered, “I hear it.”

“Good.” She slipped past him and towards the stairs. Whatever misgivings he still clearly had, she didn’t expect further pushback. A knight and a dayam shared one thing in common: their master’s word was law. And Sai-em was nothing if not traditional. “I intend to wrap this assignment up in one go. There’s plenty of leftover food in the ice cabinet. I’ll be visiting the Vale for a while after I’m done with the Grays, so don’t stay up for me, and feel free to wash in my bathroom instead of going to a bath house tonight.”

Sai-em bowed his head as she walked away, and said nothing.