A new day dawns. The world changed overnight; it spun and worked in its gyre, like a falcon under the eye of Heaven. The world, as if exhausted by the hard work, breaks slowly into being again, and most of the morning is gone by now. The Adamant, of course, has been full of hard work since dawn, but for almost all of you, that labor has been invisible, beneath the walls and behind the floors.

[hr]

[b]Nahla![/b]

Tickling.

That’s the cover story for why you are completely unwelted from a corrective crop. It’s an accepted form of correction, particularly because of the strictures of the Faith: it’s hard to cause the kind of permanent harm that would see her right to own you revoked with feathers, fingers and tongues, but it’s easy to provoke pleas, muffled screams, and the white-hot lack of thought which is, ultimately, the goal.

This was followed up with Grace-of-Heaven supervising you on a run through the harem gardens: bouncing, jingling, and straining until it was impossible for you to seem too well-rested. A perfect scheme.

So now, here you are, slumped in the shade of an olive tree, driven to your limits, adornments still dangling (and, in some cases, weighted). Grace-of-Heaven daintily kneels next to you, the image of a proud, noble owner, chin lifted just so.

“So, the problem,” she says, her voice low enough that Lila Isa can’t hear her as she suns herself nearby, on very full display. “Is the Fire Wheels! How are we supposed to really, [i]really[/i] appreciate Sjakal with them being brutes?”

It’s not a rhetorical question. Not really, not for you. You have to assume she means for you to provide her with an answer. Why else would she have said it?

[hr]

[b]Soot![/b]

“[i]You![/i]”

Rosethal snaps you out of a reverie of images and flowing brushstrokes with a snap of her fingers and a clash of her bangles, advancing on you in the narrow hallway. An ambush from behind!

“You’ll do,” she says, hooking you by the arm. She hasn’t recognized you, it seems? What else would that mean? And, oh. Now she is pulling you. Now you are being pulled.

Where were you going? Is it more important than staying in the good graces of Rosethal?

[hr]

[b]Silsila Om![/b]

You wake up sticky, in a pile of several exhausted Fire Wheels. Wine bottles and dreaming pipes lay scattered about, detritus of a riotous time. It goes without saying that you are in a state of some [i]déshabillé[/i]. (Were you on top, in the end, or on the bottom?)

The only reason you are awake, in fact, is that someone has said (into your head, which rings like a temple bell): “something something Hai Lin.” Which demands some sort of rather unfiltered response, doesn’t it?

[hr]

[b]Birsi![/b]

Your arms ache. It is too much to ask that they fall off.

The strappado keeps them pointed up, behind your back, forcing you down into a bow, folded over at the waist. You’ve faded in and out of sleep, repeatedly awoken by the strain in your shoulders— and the throbbing of your cheeks and thighs, where your captors made you dance from foot to foot with the kiss of a firm palm and a singing lash. Your mouth is crammed full of volunteered, unidentified items, held in place by perfume-soaked rags, the fumes of which fill up the corners of your weary head. Your hair is loose and lank and only half-dyed.

Finally, someone enters the shack where you spent the night. You can only lift your head so far, but from the look of it, it’s a woman that fills the whole narrow doorway with her curves.

“So this’s the Firehead that snuck past my boys,” Mother Bes drawls, and chucks your chin with a tap of her pipe. “A Firehead with all that fire leaking, from the looks of it. Did you work it out of her, Jekkan?”

“I put her through her paces,” Jekkan, the woman who caught you, drawls, entering the shack behind her. “She’s not a Fire Wheel. They would have broken by now. All spark, no steel— which is very interesting, don’t you think?”

“[i]Absolutely,[/i]” Bes says, turning your face this way and that with the pipe. “Will you be a good girl and answer a few questions for Momma, dear? We might even be able to see about a change of accommodations…”

Do you respond, Palace Guardsman, through that drool-soaked mass between your lips? Is it desperate and pleading, or do you try to salvage some scrap of your dignity in this close, cramped shack?