Tavi looked up from his grotesquely twisted left leg. He ground his teeth and tried to push himself up, but his left arm gave out on him. The pain was unbelievable. He sank back into the snow and fumbled at his belt until his hand found the hilt of his dagger. A moment's concentration, transferring his focus and his thought into the orderly crystalline matrix of high-grade steel, and the pain receded into the calm, detached lack of feeling that came with metalcrafting.
"I'm tired," he said. His own voice felt unfastened, somehow, separate from the rest of him. "Bonesetting is taxing work."
Alera smiled and began to answer when the pool of water exploded into a cloud of flying droplets and angry spray.
Tavi shielded his face against the sudden, icy deluge, and blinked at the pool as Kitai rose out of the water on a furycrafted column of liquid and dropped neatly to the cavern's floor. She was a tall young woman of exotic beauty and extraordinary grace. Like that of most of the Marat, her hair was a soft, pure white. She had shaved it close to her skull on the sides while leaving a long, single mane running down the center of her head, after the fashion of the Horse tribe of the Marat. She was dressed in close-fitting blue and grey flying leathers. The clothes quite admirably displayed a slim physique, significantly more well muscled than an average Aleran girl's. Her canted eyes were a brilliant green identical to Tavi's own, and they were bright and hard.
"Aleran!" she snapped, her voice ringing back from the frozen walls. Her anger was a palpable thing, a fire that Tavi could feel inside his own belly.
He winced.
Kitai stalked over to him and placed her fists upon her hips. "I have been speaking to Tribune Cymnea. She informs me that you have been treating me like a whore."
Tavi blinked. Several times. "Um. What?"
"Don't you dare play innocent with me, Aleran," she spat. "If anyone is in a position to know, it is Cymnea."
Tavi struggled to make sense of Kitai's statements. Cymnea was the Tribune Logistica of the First Aleran Legion - but before circumstance and emergency had forced her into becoming Tribune Cymnea, she had been Mistress Cymnea, proprietor of the Pavilion, the finest house of ill repute in the camp following the Legion.
"Kitai," Tavi said, "I don't understand."
"Augh!" she said, and flung her hands in the air. "How can such a brilliant commander be such an idiot?" She turned to Alera, pointed an accusing finger at Tavi, and said, "Explain it to him."
"I feel I am hardly qualified," Alera replied calmly.
Kitai turned back to Tavi. "Cymnea tells me that it is custom, among your people, that those who wish to be wed to one another do not lie together before they make their vows. This is a ridiculous custom - but it is the way of the Citizenry."
Tavi glanced at Alera and felt his cheeks warm a little. "Um. Yes, well, that's the proper way to go about it, but it isn't what everyone always does..."
"She informs me," Kitai continued, "that those of your rank commonly take courtesans to your bed for simple pleasure - and set such baubles aside once you have found a proper wife."
"I... some young Citizens do that, yes, but - "
"We have been together for years," Kitai said. "We have shared a bed and pleasured one another on a daily basis. For years. And you are finally becoming competent."
Tavi thought his cheeks might actually burst into flame. "Kitai!"
"I am informed that the fact that we have been together for so long will be the source of much mockery and outrage among the Citizens of Alera. That they universally regard me as the Princeps' whore." She scowled. "And for some baffling reason, that is considered to be a very bad thing."
"Kitai, you aren't - "
"I will not be treated that way," she snarled. "You idiot. You face problems enough in assuming the Crown without giving your enemies in the Citizenry such an obvious weakness to exploit. How dare you allow me to be a means by which you are brought to harm?"
Tavi just stared at her helplessly.
The anger faded from her expression. "Of course," she said, her voice very quiet, "this all assumes that you intend me to be your wife."
"Honestly, Kitai, I hadn't... I hadn't even thought about it."
Her eyes widened. Her mouth dropped open in an expression of something almost like horror. "You... you hadn't?" She swallowed. "You plan to take another?"
Tavi felt his own eyes widen. "No. No, crows, no, Kitai. I hadn't considered it because I never thought it would end any other way. I mean, it wasn't even a question to me, chala."
For an instant, her uncertainty was replaced with relief. And then that expression gave way to another in turn: Kitai narrowed her eyes dangerously. "You just assumed I would do it."
Tavi winced. Again.
"You assumed I would have no other option. That I would be so desperate that I would be forced to become your wife."
Clearly, anything he said would only make things worse. He kept his mouth shut.
Kitai stalked over to him and seized him by the front of his tunic, lifting him several inches, despite the difference in their sizes. The young Marat woman was far stronger than an Aleran her size, even without employing furycraft. "This is what is going to happen, Aleran. You will no longer lie with me. You will treat me in exactly the fashion that you would any proper young lady of the Citizenry. You will court me, and do it well, or so help me I will strangle the life from you."
"Um," Tavi said.
"And," she said, a massively threatening quality in her tone, "you will court me properly after the ways of my people. You will do so with legendary skill and taste. And only when that is done will we share a bed once more."
She spun on a heel and stalked back toward the pool.
Tavi stammered for a second, then blurted, "Kitai. It might help if you told me what the customs of your people involved."
"It might have helped had you done me the same courtesy," she replied tartly, without turning around. "Find out for yourself, as I did!" She stalked out onto the surface of the pool as if it had been solid ground, spun, and gave him one last indignant look, her green eyes flashing, and vanished into the water.
Tavi stared after her numbly for a few seconds.
"Well," Alera said. "I'm hardly a good judge of the intricacies of love. But it seems to me that you have done the young woman a grave disservice."
"I didn't mean to!" Tavi protested. "When we got involved with one another, I had no idea who my father was. I was a nobody. I mean, I never even considered that a proper courtship might be necessary." He waved a hand at the water. "And it wasn't as if she wasn't willing, bloody crows! She was more eager than I was! She barely gave me a choice in the matter!"