A/N: I think this chapter is pretty self-explanatory ...I hope.

Disclaimer: Characters invented and owned by Tamora Pierce, transplanted and pruned by me.


4: Competition

"What on earth are you doing?" Numair inquired, sounding amused.

"Trying to press this bloody frock," Daine returned, not amused at all. "As I've got to wear it to another bloody party tonight, thanks to your friend."

His amusement vanished. "Please don't joke about it, love," he said. Then, after another minute of watching her struggle with the travel iron in her hand—she had borrowed it from Alanna; it would never have occurred to either her or Numair to purchase such an article—he said, "And stop that. You'll only burn your fingers. There's a shop downstairs; I'll buy you a new dress after your panel. It's bad form, anyway, to wear the same one to two parties in a row."

She put up the fiendish device with a feeling of profound relief. "Done," she said.

"Daine? Don't forget to unplug it."

A beat.

"And don't stick out your tongue at me. It makes you look twelve years old. Unless, of course …"

She threw a pillow at him.


"What do you think?" Numair asked. Dressed in most of his formal suit, shirt collar and cuffs unfastened, he had let his hair fall loose around his face and was surveying the result in the mirror. "Do I look dashing and Byronic?"

Daine paused in her own toilette to examine him critically. "No," she concluded after a moment. "You look much more like Professor Snape, I'm afraid. Better tie it back."

He looked disappointed but resigned; she grinned at him. "If it's dashing and Byronic you're wanting to look, maybe we ought to stay in tonight," she said.

"Vetkin, you have no idea how much I wish we could."


She learns quickly and voraciously, surprising him not by her intelligence or her quick uptake of facts—this he expected—but by her fierce determination to master anything that initially eludes her. In this she is at least his equal, and his respect for her grows.

His attempts to learn archery, and to become a better horseman, are less successful. He is long-armed and strong enough to draw any bow in the University's equipment shed, and after some practice he is able to hit the standard targets eight or nine times out of ten; but Daine's quick, fluid grace with a bow eludes him, and beside her he feels over-large and clumsy. Her friend General—the big bay gelding—tolerates him, but, he senses, only because Daine has asked him to; Numair does learn to ride a little better, a little more easily, but he will never have as natural a seat as she. He would rather sit on the paddock fence and watch her ride, and tells her so. She laughs. "Only if you'll let me come and watch you fence with Alanna," she teases him. This is such an unappealing prospect—fencing is one of his favourite forms of exercise, and he is good at it, but Alanna is the one opponent he can never beat—that he shakes his head and perseveres.

What she calls her "way with animals" continues to amaze him, and he finds himself looking at the animal kingdom in a new way, as a world at least as complex and subtly differentiated culturally—he cannot think of a better term than "culture" for what she shows him—as it is biologically.

"Animals are just like people," she tells him one day. "You just have to explain things to them."

He shakes his head, smiling.


This party was a hundred times worse than the previous one. King Ozorne's palace was of an ostentatious grandeur that made their terribly grand hotel seem tastefully simple; the food was positively unidentifiable; there were fewer people, but, as most of those present were nervous and ill at ease, and inevitably some chose to cope by means of ill-judged alcohol consumption, the noise level was not appreciably less.

But worst of all was the King himself.

Daine wondered what she would have made of him without the benefit of Numair's background narrative. He was handsome enough, certainly, bearing a strong resemblance to his nephew, though he looked older than his age (he was several years older than Numair, she remembered, putting him somewhere in the neighbourhood of forty), and he exerted himself to be charming—some might have said successfully. Was it only her prior knowledge of the man that made her see a glint of madness in his eyes? Did he make her skin crawl only because she kept picturing him blowing up rabbits and mice? No, she decided, finally: Ozorne was creepy, full stop. He's like a caricature sinister bloke in a film. Only much worse, because he's real. And he took himself very seriously, she could see that. He made elaborate speeches containing no hint of irony; he looked at people, Daine felt, as though he saw nothing in them but the use he could make of them.

The frock Numair had bought her should have boosted her self-confidence. She had seen in Numair's face when she first put it on that it was more than flattering; she had admired herself in it, feeling rather beautiful; even Alanna had favoured her with an appreciative whistle when their group met in the hotel lobby to await their conveyance to the Royal Palace. Instead, the dress—though not particularly revealing—made her feel uncomfortably exposed, as though she was trying hard to be something she wasn't. Which isn't so very far from the truth, I guess.

Prince Kaddar had greeted her with more friendliness than she had expected, given Numair's performance of the evening before, and for this she was grateful to him. On the other hand, he had also introduced her to his uncle with what she considered unnecessary effusions about her talents, and she now found herself engaged to spend the following afternoon touring King Ozorne's zoo and examining certain birds in his private aviary whose behaviour concerned him. She had volunteered to go and have a look at them that very moment, not least because this would have allowed her to escape the party for a time, but the king would not hear of her troubling herself thus—or so he said.

Daine was just thinking that the evening surely couldn't get any worse—and they had not yet begun the banquet proper—when she saw a tall, curvaceous blonde woman in her middle thirties approach Numair, wearing a suggestive smile and a dress that must have cost several hundred pounds. "Why, Arram!" Daine heard her say. "Look at you! Whatever have you been doing with yourself all these years?"

"Varice," said Numair in an odd voice. "How—how lovely to see you again."

Varice held out her hand and Numair, recovering the slightly mocking gallantry that was natural to him, took it in his and brought it up to his lips. "You haven't changed a bit, my dear," he said.

Daine, doing her best to appear unhurried and unconcerned, made her way to Numair's side and touched his elbow briefly. "Your drink," she said, handing him a glass of something pink that she had selected for herself.

"Oh," he said, momentarily puzzled. "Thank you. Daine, I'd like you to meet an old friend of mine, Varice Kingsford."

"Delighted to meet you," said Daine, trying to mean it. She held out her hand to shake the other woman's.

"Varice, this is Veralidaine Sarrasri—Daine—my wife."

Varice dropped Daine's hand as though it had stung her, then tried to look as though she hadn't. "I—I didn't realize you'd taken the plunge, Arram," she said. Her tone was just a little more strident than before. "A student of yours?"

Numair looked taken aback, and no wonder; he surely hadn't expected his "old friend" to be so rude. "A colleague, actually," Daine answered, as though the question had been addressed to her. "I teach animal behaviour at the veterinary school, and I run the Big Cat Rescue at the Edinburgh Zoo. That means wrangling lions and tigers and such," she added casually (exaggerating only a little).

As she had intended, Varice looked nonplussed. "That must be a very—interesting—job," she said in a strangled voice.

"And what is it you do, Ms Kingsford?" Daine inquired.

But she did not find out, at least not then, because it was at this moment that a huge gong was sounded to summon them to their meal.


Daine cursed herself silently for wondering how the evening could get worse. As if Varice herself were not sufficiently unpleasant, the royal seating arrangements had placed her next to Numair and Daine on the far side of the room from them, next to Kaddar and uncomfortably close to the exalted seat of the king himself. She and the prince talked determinedly about their work and the differing customs of their respective homelands, and Daine picked at a plate of saffron rice and fish and tried to force herself to check on her husband no oftener than every five minutes. Whenever she did glance Numair's way, she wished she hadn't; if Varice wasn't touching his arm or batting her eyelashes at him, she was urging him to try some mysterious and exotic dish that Daine knew, if his "old friend" didn't, would probably make him sick.

"She's quite harmless, you know," Kaddar said at her elbow, startling her.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Miss Kingsford," he explained. "She wants always to be the centre of attention—it's her job, in a way—but I should be very surprised if she ever did anything actually malicious."

Daine chose her words carefully. Kaddar seemed sympathetic, but he was, after all, his uncle's heir; it would not do to make him angry or suspicious. "What," she inquired, "actually is her job?"

"She's my uncle's social convenor, I suppose you could say," he replied. "She plans these banquets—he gives a great many of them, you know—and is in charge of planning menus, ordering flowers, and selecting décor for the Royal Palace …"

"So she'd be in charge of tonight's seating arrangements, as well, then." Someone who knew Daine well would have recognized her tone as dangerously polite.

"Well, yes. She's rather brilliant at it, in fact. Although I confess I did ask if she might consider seating us together."

"It looks," said Daine, "as if she was very careful about where she seated herself."

Kaddar followed her gaze to where, at that moment, Varice was leaning up to whisper something in Numair's ear. Numair blushed scarlet—a sight that would have amused Daine if the circumstances had not incensed her—and leaned away, regarding Varice with what looked like outrage.

"Yes," said the prince quietly. "Yes, I do see what you mean. Daine—" He paused, looking troubled, then went on, "I am quite sure Miss Kingsford did not know of Professor Salmalín's relationship with you when she made these arrangements."

"That's all well and good," Daine retorted, "but she certainly knows now."

She found herself speaking—in a low voice, fortunately—into a sudden and profound silence: King Ozorne had risen to his feet to address his guests.


It was a long speech, full of elaborate turns of phrase and grand predictions of the breakthroughs the king expected this conference to produce. Daine took in very little of it beyond the tone—pompous and self-absorbed—and the idea that, in fact, Ozorne was more eager to claim credit for any positive outcome of the conference than to apply its recommendations in his own domain. She was tired, bored, and irritated—with the king, with Varice, with the menu and the seating arrangements, with her dress and her hair and her uncomfortable shoes, and, rather unreasonably, with both Kaddar and Numair.

She wondered why Varice's behaviour toward Numair made her so angry—she's lucky I'd already handed 'Mair that drink, or I might've flung it in her face!—while the many young and pretty women who flirted with him on a regular basis merely amused her and his numerous former lovers bothered her not at all. She acted like I was the other woman, she realized suddenly. And Numair himself had not been amused, or tolerant, or gently condescending: he had been flustered and upset. She isn't just "an old friend." She's the last woman he loved before me.

Varice being what she was, this was a disturbing idea.

From there Daine's thoughts drifted for a time to her husband's extraordinary confession of the previous night. It explained so many things: the intense interest in animal behaviour and animal welfare that so puzzled his "hard scientist" colleagues; his reluctance to speak of his family or his childhood; even, in a way, his odd behaviour with all the women before her: kind, gentlemanly, considerate, careful, but absolutely averse to any sort of commitment. One thing it doesn't explain at all. It doesn't explain me. But maybe nothing ever will. She wondered a little, as she knew Numair had, why she had not been—was not—more upset with him for keeping such important secrets from her for so long, or for leading her into a situation he himself believed might be dangerous. Am I stupid? Am I too trusting? What else hasn't he told me? But it was as she had told him this morning, she realized at last: I knew the important things—the things about 'Mair that make him who he is. I just didn't know the whys.

Though I notice he didn't tell me about Varice Kingsford until he had to ...

Twenty minutes into the speech she looked across at Numair and was startled to see him looking, not bored or irritated, but furious—though it was not a fury most people would be able to detect. (Varice, at his side, was happily pleating a serviette into a fan.) He was perfectly calm—perfectly still—perfectly contained. His eyes were absolutely expressionless. Daine had seen him look like this at the staff meeting when one of their colleagues argued that developing realistic virtual dissection programs to reduce the School's need for animal cadavers was a waste of time and funds, given the city's apparently inexhaustible supply of stray dogs and cats. She had seen it when, over pints in a particularly horrible pub near the campus, Alanna had told them of the arrest of a fellow Member of the Scottish Parliament for raping his twelve-year-old stepdaughter.

This was the look he wore when he was so angry that he didn't trust himself to speak. Daine wondered very much what Ozorne had said to provoke it.

She meant, of course, to ask Numair to explain; but by the time they reached their hotel it was past two in the morning, and she had fallen fast asleep against his shoulder in the back of one of the royal limousines.