Hesi grunted, squirming against the grip snaked around her body. "Let go," she hissed. But with a hand plastered over her mouth, it came out as "Mff pho." If anything, the grip tightened, enough to crush her ribs.

"How did you end up here?" the voice asked more to himself rather than Hesi. Then, he cursed—a whole creative string of them—and began dragging her back into the cloak of the darkness.

Hesi growled and drove her head back, hitting the man's nose. She heard a strangled grunt. The grip around her loosened. She whipped backwards, swinging her arm and catching a sturdy lump of flesh. Another grunt. Finally, she rammed her elbow to what she assumed was a stomach. Something slapped the stone floor in a heavy thud.

"Don't touch me," she gritted her teeth at the tone coming out of her mouth. The only thing left was the forked tongue and she could have passed off as a Mayaware.

The man coughed and shuffled up. As Hesi's vision adjusted in the dark, she traced the wavy locks, the dark skin, and the passive eyes now scanning her from head to toe. "Yeah, I'm sorry about that," he dusted his clothes—which were oddly composed of a knee-length shirt belted at the waist with braided twine—and massaged his sore abdomen. "You're not supposed to be here. They could sense you at any time."

Hesi narrowed her eyes. "As are you," she looked at him the same way he was studying her. "What are you doing in this palace, in Berheqt?"

Instead of answering, the man lunged and gripped her wrist. He began pulling her along. "Stop that," she slapped and clawed at the hand around her arm but it wouldn't budge. Was this man made up of Mayaware skin? How come he's so strong? "Let me go."

"How stupid can you be?" the man chided, the darkness making his voice more acidic than it originally was. "Your scent is all over the palace now! I don't know how I would explain this come morning."

Slowly, the walls of the royal palace began registering when Hesi's eyes got used to the dark. They passed columns taller than the ones in the trading courtyard. More statues of hissing and frowning Demon King lined the dim corridor, their gazes following Hesi and the man dragging her along the smoothed stone floor. Hesi stuck her tongue out at one.

"Where are you taking me?" she asked the man whose grip hadn't loosened since the beginning.

The man turned a corner and didn't bother telling Hesi, causing her to bump her shoulder against the stone. Darpeh, that hurt. Her bare feet skittered against the floor but the man, even half-hurrying, was walking so quietly he could have been walking on a pool of feathers. How come he wasn't afraid of being sniffed out by the guards? And well...how did he know where to go even in the darkness?

Who was this man?

"You should know better than to wander in the dark, alone and without anything to mask your scent!" the man ranted.

Hesi clicked her tongue. "There's no deshet branches here, genius."

"Deshet!" the man spat the word like a curse word when it's really not. "You think that could help your case? Are you serious?"

She knitted her eyebrows. What was his deal? "It's the only way I knew and the only one that worked for a considerably long time," she frowned at the implied scorn in the man's tone. "What are you so fired up about?"

The man paused and turned to her so suddenly she thought he changed his mind and would now be delivering her to the demons. "My problem," he got into her face, his eyes burning like the torches lining the exterior walls of the royal palace. "Is that as soon as the demons wake up, all they're going to be sensing is a trace which should have been in the bridal palace as long as the Prince isn't calling. Do you see that now?"

Hesi pursed her lips. Well, now that he told her, it did sound like a big headache for whoever this man was. "Well, I have a lot of stuff to do in this place and I don't have time to worry about scents or demons."

"Well, you should," the man resumed their walk-slash-dragging-forward. Hesi's wrist was beginning to hurt and by the looks of it, it's going to bruise tomorrow. "The demons' eyes are weak at night but their sense of smell is stronger than ever. They would have seen you coming from a mile away. Qer's trousers, even the Prince will know you were here."

Hesi's ears perked up. "The prince?"

The man clicked his tongue. "This is not a place for sightseeing. I hope you are aware of that when you fell in line in Berheqt's gates."

She stared at the back of the man's head, willing lightning to burn his hair. "How do you know that?"

"I know everything that happens in this palace," was what he said before he cranked a handle down and swung a door open. He shoved Hesi inside and shut the door behind him. She nursed her throbbing hand and the man pushed past her, going straight through a tall shelf full of clay pots and vases.

Hesi eyed the tables pushed against the corners of the room bearing pieces of parchment, sticks of graphite for writing, and scattered pieces of wilting and fresh leaves. Flowers with petals of different hues and shapes grew from large palthes—huge pots used to transport water popular in Ser-Methon.

The man was muttering under his breath, scouring for something in his royal shelves. "Zowere. Dulls senses and appetite. Useless," he moved to the next jar and sniffed its contents. He recoiled, clapping the lid back so hard he almost cracked the container. "Sufret. I'm not even sure what this is doing here except maybe for tea. Useless."

He yammered about more names foreign in Hesi's ears. What was he going on about? Before she could ask, though, he strode past her again and dropped an assortment of tools and ingredients. Then, he got to work, his hands flying here and there, operating cranks, knives, and scissors like he had been doing them most of his life. A small pot of water boiled over a lamp whose flame was fed with burning coal but was focused directly below the pot, not even an ember flying out into the air.

Hesi drew closer, albeit not losing the caution in her tense limbs should the man decide to grip her wrist again. "What are you doing?" she asked.

He ignored her and moved to drop the chopped leaves into the boiling pot of water. Tea. He's making tea. How pompous. Who in their right mind would make tea after dragging a girl in a hidden room in the royal palace after telling her the whole palace knew she was somewhere she shouldn't have been?

"What's going to happen if the Prince knows I've been here without his permission?" Hesi attempted to get the man to look at her again but he moved back to the shelf to get more ingredients from hell's anus, no doubt.

He rolled his shoulders in a casual shrug when he got back to the table. "You'll be dead by dawn, probably," he said. "Skinned alive with your insides flavoring the demons' banquet stew and maybe your eyeballs enhancing their Cani wine."

Hesi fought against the fear finding its way up her throat. She watched him mix the water with a wooden stick like he was stirring a soup made from human entrails. Where did he even get those instruments? The trading courtyard? Who was he to be able to walk around freely inside the palace and not get eaten?

"Who are you?" she demanded, crossing her arms over her chest. "You can't just tell me what to do like you own the place."

A snort rang from the man who was now transferring the contents of the pot into a separate cup made from hollowed out gourd shells. The sweet and salty scent of the brew wafted around the room, making Hesi's head light and her gut still. "I'm what you call a steward," he said, passing her the smoking cup. She wanted to slap it out of his hands but his gaze told her he'd flay her alive personally if she did. "I'm the official servant of the royal Mayaware and all of Iren-Washep's nobles."

"Is that why you're in the bathing chambers that day?" she forced herself to look at his eyes, staring at her like she's merely a human being and not a woman. "Was that why you could walk around these halls and remain unscathed?"

The man heaved a sigh. "Yeah," he massaged his temples and strode to yet another table and began scrawling on the parchment with a graphite stick.

"What is this?" Hesi pointed to the cup filled with warm tea in her hands. "I don't drink tea."

He faced her again, his frame never leaving his work table. "That should change your scent for at least twelve hours before the Mayaware realizes it was you who went here," he explained, shoving his wavy locks away from his eyes. "I could make up an excuse that one of the camels broke free and that's why there has been a human-like scent wafting in the palace as I tried to look for it with its owner, who may be a human trader."

Hesi raised an eyebrow. "Humans can trade here?"

"If you listened to Yobekh's lecture, you would have known," the man answered, going back to whatever he was writing.

"You even know about that? Are you a god?" She took a sip of the tea and almost spilled it when she recoiled after the hot liquid touched her tongue. "Darpeh, this does not taste the same way it smells. What is this?"

The man raised his head and turned to her again. "Maatsek leaves and fesel broth," he said as if that would explain everything." And no, I'm not a god. Just good at listening through walls."

"Are you a spy?"

He shrugged. "You could say that."

Silence coated the air between them until Hesi drained the cup of the last drop out of respect for the man and his effort even though the tea left a burning bitter taste at the back of her throat. Finally, she cleared her throat and braced the table's rim with her hands behind her. "Why do you know these things?" she asked.

"What things?"

She kissed her teeth and waved a hand in the air. "You know, these things," she said. "Like what kind of tea would be sure to change my scent to the Mayaware or that deshet is not a good substitute to mask my trace."

The man set his graphite stick down, pausing his writing in the middle of a paragraph—or at least, it looked like a paragraph. A haunted cloud passed across his face. "Unlike you," he said. "I've been here for far longer."

"Why?"

Hesi's question rang in the air in an electric wave, hanging there before dying into the emptiness between her and the man. He gaped at her, not even blinking once, but she held his stare, daring him silently to answer her question.

"Why are you here?" She drove the question home. "You could have escaped to Ser-Ib or in the neighboring continents when the upheaval happened. Why are you still here?"

He shot up from his rickety stool and faced her. Hesi tilted her head and made sure to match his stance. "What about you?" he jerked his chin at her. "Why are you here?"

Hesi smirked. "You first."

A flicker of annoyance flashed across his eyes but he threw his arms up and ran his twined fingers down his hair. "Fine," he said. "I'm here to kill the demons. That's why."

Her saliva went down her throat the wrong way, making her double over and cough her lungs out. He was going to do what? "You could have done that a long time ago," she cleared her throat of the last of her strangled coughs. "Why didn't you?"

"I don't intend to fight them with blades or whips," the man strode back to his stool and dropped into it. His shoulders slumped but he hadn't lost the ember burning in his eyes.

Hesi snorted. "Well, what do you intend to do?"

The man raised a glass vial into the meager light shining through the slits of what's supposed to be his window barricaded by planks wood nailed against the stone. For the first time, he smiled at her. "Poison."

Both of them paused for a minute but the silence was shattered when a laugh broke out of Hesi's lips. Soon, she was giggling, hugging her stomach and slapping the table's surface, making the pots clink against each other and the tools bounce from their perch. "Oh, that's so stupid," she wiped a knuckle at the sides of her eyes to dry off the tears forming in them. Dear gods, she hasn't had a good one in so long. "You could have just gone over while they're sleeping and kill them in their sleep."

The man wasn't amused. "With what?" he said. "Mayaware can only be killed by huurshe ores found in the mountains of Ser-Tehra and they went out of their way to get rid of those."

"Was that why took over Ser-Tehra and built Berheqt over it?"

He stuck his bottom lip out. "Wanna bet on it?"

"How's your poison thing going on?" she jerked her chin to the sheets of parchment scattered in front of the man from the table at the opposite side of the room. She set the cup down and strode over to him to peer at his writings but his arm swept over them before she could. "Was that what took you so long?"

The man sighed and hung his head. "Yeah," he said. "Painfully so."

Hesi stepped back, the gears in her head already turning. This man...whoever he was, he has a leg up the Mayaware's door. She didn't care if he lost that limb but what's important was that he could get her inside that door before it closes on her forever. This was almost perfect, if she pondered about it. Too perfect, in fact.

Still, it's not like she's going to let a chance slip by her so she propped a hand on her hips and leaned her weight on one leg. "Tell you what," she said. "That's why I'm here as well."

"What, poisoning the Mayaware?" The man knitted his eyebrows. "I'm pretty sure that plan was originally mine."

Hesi pouted. "Well, say goodbye to your plan because with only a few tweaks, it's going to be our plan."

The man's lips parted. "What are you implying?"

"Let me in on whatever it is you're doing and I could get you something you wanted most."

He arched his eyebrows. He's intrigued. "And that is?"

Hesi didn't fight the grin creeping out of her lips. "The Demon Prince's head."

A look of understanding passed between them and in the darkness and stillness of the night, it couldn't have been more insane. Dangerous, maybe, as trusting a person one just met wasn't the best plan to go around. But it's completely insane.

The man gave an amused laugh, slapping his knee lightly. "You drive a hard bargain," he stared up at her. "Miss...?"

"Call me Hesi," she thrust her open hand in his direction. "If we're going to work together, might as well as tell me your name."

He smiled, a direct opposite of the scowl he was giving her earlier. Then, he took her hand and shook it the way humans would back then to seal deals and declare each other as having officially met. "Kharta," he said. "My name is Kharta."

Hesi returned his expression, ignoring the embers rising from the point of contact of their skin. It was brighter and hotter now compared to when Kharta first caught her sneaking. So much could change in one night and perhaps, in the same time as well, the reign of demons would end at the hands of two humans meeting once by accident and in secret for the nights that would follow.

She tightened her hold on his hand as if to give him a taste of his own medicine. "Nice to meet you," she said, raising her eyes to his, only to realize he had one of the rarer shades of brown she didn't see much in Ser-Djare. "Let's get to work."