{Three Years Later}
Vessa tasted like the candied figs she’d been eating all afternoon, which was distracting, because Katarina was trying to focus on the mechanics of kissing and the sweetness on Vessa’s lips kept pulling her attention sideways.
They were on Katarina’s bed. Vessa was sitting with her back against the headboard and Katarina was in her lap, which had happened naturally about five minutes ago when a kiss on the cheek turned into a kiss on the mouth and that turned into Katarina’s hands on Vessa’s shoulders and her brain going blank.
[Okay. Tilt left. No, her left. There we go.]
Vessa’s hand was on the back of Katarina’s neck, warm fingers threaded through her hair, and Katarina was discovering in real time that years of theoretical knowledge about desire did absolutely nothing to prepare you for the reality of a pretty girl’s tongue in your mouth.
Vessa’s other hand was resting on Katarina’s hip, right where her shirt had ridden up, and the feeling of Vessa’s fingers on bare skin was making it very hard to think about anything else.
Vessa pulled back an inch. Her dark eyes were half-closed and her pink skin had gone a shade darker across her cheeks and down her neck.
"Stop thinking so much," Vessa said.
"I’m not."
"Yes you are. You’re totally analyzing this!"
"I am not analyzing—"
The door opened.
"Katarina, piccola, have you seen the—"
Seris stopped in the doorway.
Katarina stopped breathing.
There was a moment, a single crystalline second where all three of them were frozen:
Katarina straddling Vessa’s lap, Vessa with her hand still in Katarina’s hair, and Seris in the doorway holding a rolled-up trade circular with an expression transitioning from mild curiosity to absolute delight.
"Oh," Seris said.
[No.]
Seris smiled. It was the widest, most dangerous smile Katarina had ever seen on her face.
"Well."
"Mother, GET OUT."
"I didn’t say anything!"
"You’re SMILING!"
"I’m happy for you! This is a happy smile!"
"OUT!"
Seris giggled and backed out of the room with both hands raised, still beaming, and pulled the door shut behind her. Katarina could hear her laughing all the way down the hallway, and then she heard Seris yell "BRYNN! BRYNN, COME HERE, YOU OWE ME FIVE SILVER!" and Katarina’s soul left her body.
[They had a BET?!]
Vessa buried her face in Katarina’s shoulder and her whole body was shaking with either laughter or mortification or both.
All while Katarina was pretty sure she was about to begin her third life in just a moment.
Three years had changed things.
The Montecardi house was recovering.
Not thriving yet, there was a long way to go in that regard, but the bleeding had stopped and the patient was sitting up in bed and asking for water.
Revenue was up for the third consecutive quarter. The vineyard was producing at near capacity after two years of soil rehabilitation that Katarina had orchestrated through a series of increasingly transparent "innocent suggestions." The port tariff arrangement was stable. They’d added one active trade route, a modest coastal line running textiles south to a cluster of fishing villages that couldn’t get decent cloth through their usual channels.
The Ledger’s Holdings dashboard had improved from a wall of D’s to a cautiously optimistic spread of C’s and a single, shining B, which was the vineyard distribution contract that Katarina had restructured herself through Seris, who still thought most of the good ideas were hers.
Was it enough? No. Not nearly enough. But the trajectory was right.
Cultivation had progressed too.
Katarina was mid-Foundation across all four paths, which was unremarkable on paper but deeply strange in practice, because nobody advanced evenly across four affinities. Most cultivators poured everything into one path and let the others atrophy. Katarina’s qi distributed itself across all four with a stubbornness that her tutors found baffling and Brynn found hilarious.
There was the Path of Elements, which was exactly what it sounds like. Fire, water, earth, and wind, and the usage of all of the above as projectiles at people who you don’t want to continue living.
There was the Path of Grace. Healing, purification, all that jazz.
Then, the Path of the Artisan. Placing cultivation energy into objects. Weapon forging, ward creation, formation crafting, artifact development. The kind of magic that made day-to-day life tolerable for someone like Kat, coming to this world from Earth.
But the Path of Whispers was her favorite. Illusions, perception magic.
She’d developed a technique over the past year that she hadn’t told anyone about. It let her read surface-level intentions during conversation. The direction someone was leaning before they leaned. A flicker of resistance before they said no. A pulse of greed before they named their price. It was subtle and unreliable and it gave her an edge in every negotiation she’d sat in on for the past six months.
[Every CEO dreams of reading the room. I can literally read the room.]
And then there was Vessa.
They’d started kissing four months ago. It had happened the way most things happened with Vessa: suddenly, without warning, and with Vessa acting like it was the most natural thing in the world while Katarina’s brain tried to reboot.
Her body was changing, too. Thirteen among the Valdari meant the beginning of real puberty, which for a futanari demon apparently meant everything was happening at once and in directions that Katarina’s previous life had not prepared her for.
She was taller, leaner, and increasingly aware of how Vessa looked when she bent over, or stretched, or pushed her hair back from her face, or did literally anything while Katarina was trying to concentrate.
They were on the cliff that afternoon, the same one where Katarina had delivered her speech about ambition years ago. Vessa was sitting with her legs dangling over the edge, eating, because Vessa was always eating.
"The preservation arrays are getting more complex," Vessa said, kicking her heels against the rock face. "My tutor says I’m ready to start on multi-chamber formations next month. Those are the ones they use on cargo ships to keep different goods at different temperatures in the same hold."
"That’s useful."
"Right? If I can get certified, I could contract with the merchant houses directly. Your house included."
"You’d give me a discount."
"I’d give you market rate and a fruit basket."
"How generous."
Vessa grinned and bumped her shoulder against Katarina’s. The wind off the ocean was warm and the water below was the same ridiculous blue that still looked fake after ten years of looking at it.
"So I’ve been thinking about the coastal textile route," Katarina said.
"Oh no."
"The margins are thin because we’re running a single-product line. If we bundled the textiles with preserved goods, the per-unit shipping cost drops and we can justify a second weekly run, which means—"
Vessa kissed her, firm and warm and tasting like dried apricot.
Katarina’s train of thought derailed, caught fire, and rolled into a canyon.
When Vessa pulled back, she was smiling.
Then Katarina kissed her and she did not think about logistics optimization for a while.
The visitor arrived at dusk.
Katarina saw the carriage from the study window, a sleek thing pulled by two animals that moved with a fluid gait, bred for speed rather than endurance. She didn’t recognize the house markings.
She found Seris at the front entrance. The woman who stepped out of the carriage was tall, taller than Seris, with dark red hair that fell past her shoulders and a face that made you look twice. She walked like she owned whatever ground was under her feet.
[Who is this?]
The woman saw Seris and crossed the distance without hesitation. She took Seris’s face in both hands and kissed her on the mouth. It was slow and deep and Seris kissed her back with a familiarity that made Katarina’s stomach flip.
[Okay. That’s... okay.]
Puberty had come with other revelations. Like, for example, she’d gone from knowing that Seris was the hottest woman in the world on a factual "did you know" trivia kind of level to actually FEELING like Seris was the hottest woman in the world.
Even now, she wasn’t looking at the stranger, she was looking at how Seris kissed and thinking [yeah I can see why Brynn married her. I’d marry her too.]
The woman pulled back, turned to Brynn, who was standing in the doorway with her arms folded and a grin on her face, grabbed Brynn by the front of her shirt, and kissed her too.
Brynn’s hand went to the back of the woman’s head and she deepened it, and Katarina decided she’d seen enough and looked at the sky instead.
Kat sighed. At this point, like the nudity, the open-minded perspective on relationship structures had settled in Katarina’s mind.
They went inside with wine. Katarina was nearby, doing what she always did: being in the room and existing cleverly.
Then the woman said something that made Katarina’s ears sharpen.
"You look good, Sable. Domestic life suits you."
Seris’s wine glass paused halfway to her mouth.
"Don’t call me that here."
The woman’s eyebrow rose.
"Still? After all this time?"
"Yes. After all this time."
[Sable. That’s not her name. Why does this woman have a different name for my mother?]
The woman glanced at Katarina. Her gaze lingered, half amused and half appraising.
"She has your eyes," the woman said to Seris.
"She does." Seris grinned and Kat had to look away.
The visit lasted two hours. Between the flirting and the wine and the way the woman kept touching Brynn’s arm when she laughed, Katarina caught fragments. References to "the old days." A name Katarina didn’t recognize, spoken with reverence. A question about "the others" that Seris deflected with a thin smile.
After the woman left, Seris sat in her chair for a long time without drinking. Brynn put a hand on her shoulder and Seris covered it with her own and they stayed like that, quiet. Katarina watched from the hallway and didn’t interrupt.
She was still thinking about what Seris was hiding when the second carriage arrived.
This one was different. Heavier, better appointed. The house crest on the door was gold on black, and Katarina recognized it from the trade registries she’d been memorizing since she was four.
House Brevaine.
The woman who stepped out was the Valdari equivalent of mid-forties, with silver-streaked hair and a straight back that made her look taller than she probably was. Stellara Brevaine. Signora of House Brevaine. The woman who controlled forty percent of the regional wine distribution and had been waiting for the Montecardi to collapse so she could absorb their port tariff rights.
She was here, in person, at their estate.