“I’m not, sir,” Sciona said as he rose from the table. “Thank you.”
“And you…” The archmage turned to Thomil, who straightened nervously. “You’re going to do everything this one says, yes?”
“Of course, sir.”
“Then I don’t think we have anything to worry about.” Bringham beamed as Thomil crossed to open the laboratory door for him. “I’ll see you at the next Council meeting, Highmage Freynan, if not before then. You know you can come to me for help of any kind whenever you need it.”
Sciona nodded, and Bringham gave her a last warm smile before taking his leave, Thomil closing the door behind him.
“You can come back to the desk, you know,” Sciona said when the Kwen didn’t move or speak. “And you don’t have to jump up every time someone comes through the door,” she added. “You heard Archmage Bringham. We’re not going to worry about what anyone thinks.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Thomil rejoined her at the desk but continued looking toward the door with an unreadable tension in his brow—like he was thinking hard on the conversation he had just heard.
“I didn’t…” Sciona said after a moment. “I didn’t get this job through favoritism.”
The Kwen gave her an odd look, and Sciona turned on him. “What?”
“Sorry, ma’am. It’s only… you just said you weren’t going to worry about what anyone thought. I was assuming that meant the janitor too.”
“I—wasn’t—”
“I know you’re not here because of favoritism, Highmage.”
That gave her pause. “How could you possibly know that?”
“Because I’ve worked on this floor for over a year and seen how much these other mages care about their work. Some of them care a little, some a lot, some don’t care at all. I’ve never seen anyone care like you.”
“Oh…” Sciona had the feeling that her cheeks had gone a little pink again. “Thank you. In Bringham’s labs, at least, I felt like everyone worked pretty hard.”
Maybe that was because she had always been too focused on her own work to notice. Or maybe it was just that Bringham aggressively and deliberately selected his staff based on talent.
What remained of the laugh faded from Thomil’s features, and his gaze shifted to the door again. “So, your archmage mentor… he specializes in textile production?” Not a difficult deduction to make, based on the updates Archmage Bringham had shared, but an understatement.
“He doesn’t just specialize in textiles—not the way I specialize in sourcing,” Sciona said. “He is the textile industry in Tiran. The dress I’m wearing, my robes, your work clothes, all these papers… every fiber of them started with the experiments in Bringham’s labs and came out of one of his factories.”
“I see.” Something in Thomil’s inscrutable expression had changed subtly, darkening.
“What is it?”
“Nothing, Highmage,” he said, and when Sciona continued to look at him expectantly, he sighed. “A woman I courted a while ago… She worked in one of your archmage’s factories.”
“Oh—” Sciona faltered, immediately regretting pressing the matter.
The information itself shouldn’t have been a shock. Archmage Bringham was one of the leading employers of women in Tiran—a distinction of which he was quite proud—and since his textile factories were mostly in the Kwen Quarter, this meant that he employed a lot of Kwen women. Thousands of them. And Thomil was a decent-looking man—not that Sciona would give her aunt a conniption by ever thinking of a Kwen that way; it was just an objective observation. Of course, he had courted women of his own station: working women. Sciona just hadn’t really conceptualized Thomil as an entity beyond this laboratory, in part because Sciona herself barely existed outside this laboratory, in part because a civilized Tiranish woman didn’t contemplate what Kwen got up to with each other, the mechanisms by which they proliferated so rapidly… The thought made her uneasy—then downright mortified when she remembered the mess she had made of herself in front of Thomil the previous night, her fingers curling into the front of his shirt—
“It didn’t work out, ma’am,” Thomil said flatly before Sciona could disintegrate from embarrassment. “That’s all.”
“Right.” Sciona jolted back to herself and looked awkwardly at her boots, not sure what else to do with her eyes. “I’m sorry.”
“Anyway, ma’am, we were talking about coordinates?”
“Yes,” she said, grateful for the change of topic, “that we were.”
Sciona spent the rest of the day showing Thomil the different mapping methods, how to choose the right one for a given action spell, and how to balance mapping a large area with bringing energy sources into sharper focus. The sun had nearly set when she found him looking at her a little too intently, the suggestion of a smile on his lips.
“What?” she said, suddenly self-conscious.
“You said last night that you’d have made a terrible teaching mage.”
“And?”
“I don’t think that’s true, ma’am.”
“Well, I…” Sciona realized she had rarely gone this deep into explaining her work to someone else. “I think it’s that I never really cared whether another person was following what I did. But if you can’t keep up, I can’t move forward with my work for Tiran. There’s more at stake here than in any classroom.”
“Of course, ma’am.”
But that wasn’t the only thing.
“You’re different,” Sciona said after a moment. “Talking to you is different.” She wouldn’t have been so forward with her thoughts, but she was trying to parse them as she spoke. “You listen,” and it was only as Sciona said the words aloud that she realized this was something she had never had before: a man who listened for what she was actually saying, not just for what he wanted to hear. “I mean you really listen.”
“You’re my boss,” Thomil said, “and you’re teaching me something important. What else would I be doing?”
“I guess I’m just surprised that you’re able to follow, given all my weird quirks and tangents.”
“I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a Kwen in this city who can’t bend to Tiranish quirks,” Thomil said.
Sciona felt her brow furrow. “What do you mean?”
“Kwen who can’t work a job—whatever the job—don’t get to live.”
“My!” Sciona laughed. “It’s true what they say about you people being melodramatic.”
Thomil broke eye contact, and Sciona felt oddly as though she had lost hold of something—bright energy eluding her fingers on the keys.
“Sorry, ma’am. Forget I said anything. I’ll just listen.”
“I have been a goddess. I know you will think me silly, but I am a pious lady of good manners, and I tell the truth. I have been a goddess, but I am a pious lady of good manners, and I know that in this house, there is only space for one god.