Please refresh your memory of the first part of this story.

Please also forgive my missing a Monday post. You’ll get another entry in Armen’s story tomorrow as well as Friday, to make up.

Armen’s eyes snapped open.

“Don’t let me interrupt you, Armen. You look like you could use some beauty sleep.”

Marath had arrived as she always did, without a sound. Armen’s senses were sharp, his hearing especially, and every time they met he felt a wound to his pride. She probably knew it, too, knew how he prized his ability to pick out variations of sound that the untrained ear could not detect. And so every time she pricked him with her perfect silence, arriving at precisely the moment when he let down his guard.

“I was beginning to suspect someone had finally killed you, Marath,” Armen growled. His critics had said that his voice sounded like the noise of a bull frog being crushed between two boulders, but even the most vehement of them was also forced to say in qualification: “I do not know how a man creates such beauty with such a voice.”

“No doubt you would have been pleased if it had been so,” she replied. She pursed her lips in something that might have been called a smile. She was no great beauty either, but she wouldn’t have been picked out on the street for being ugly. It seemed unlikely she would have been picked out on the street at all. There was very little memorable or remarkable about any part of her. Armen thought she preferred it that way.

“No doubt,” sneered Armen, and he slumped back into his chair, or at least as far back as the overstuffed cushions would allow. He grabbed his glass with unnecessary force, swirling the wine and spilling some over the rim onto his fingers. He ignored it and swallowed a gulp. Marath always put him in an ill humor, made him act rashly. And unconsidered action was dangerous around her.

Marath sat quietly, watching, no, staring at him as he drank, studying him frankly. The twist on her lips was still there. He caught her eye, and the twist deepened. He rolled his mismatched eyes up into his head, set the glass down — with a little too much force again, spilling red onto the dark wood — and made a gesture of query, his two hands open before him, palms up.

“What?” he snapped, and waited.

She looked out the window and said, offhandedly: “I heard your performance for Duke Cerdig in the East went well.”

He leaned forward, resting on his elbows. “I’ve heard the same thing,” he grated. “But I don’t remember a bit of it, myself.”

She snorted out a laugh and her posture loosened into the chair. Armen too settled back again, smiling a little. He was pleased to have finally made an impression.

The server came up the stairs with a fresh bottle and a fresh glass, which he filled and set in front of Marath. The man refilled Armen’s glass, then made as if to leave. Armen stopped him and asked him to leave the bottle. The man nodded, set down the bottle, and left quietly.

Peevishly Armen filled his glass to the top — the server had left it only half full. When he looked up Marath was watching him again.

“Do you always stare so, sister?” His grandfather had always called people “brother” and “sister.” The old man had been from the South, and said that was what people said there, but Armen had been to the South and nobody had ever called him “brother.”

“I’m looking for weaknesses,” she said, blinking slowly.

This time it was Armen’s turn to laugh, a rough bark that was gone before it’d hardly left his lungs.

“They shouldn’t be that hard to find,” he said, swilling back a gulp of wine.

“Not at all. But they are so numerous, I am forced to catalog.”

He laughed again, then they sat in silence for a while. Armen was enjoying this meeting much more than he’d anticipated. Marath seemed in a friendlier mood than when they’d last met, and he couldn’t help thinking what he thought every time after they spoke, that he admired her as he admired few people in the world. Then again, admiring her would get him in as much trouble as unplanned action. He shook his head and set his wine down. It was stronger stuff than he’d thought, and his head felt a little fuzzy.

He looked out the window and considered what he had come here to do. He wasn’t a violent person by nature. In truth he was a bit of a coward, and he didn’t care to hide it from himself. He reflected that this was the reason anyone committed violence: fear of the other, fear that the other might commit the violence first. So he did violence to protect himself even though it seemed such a waste. He sighed and tugged at his collar, feeling hot.

“It’s Morash. The sorceror,” he muttered across the table, not looking at her.

“I know,” she said.