2

…

“Where is she?” someone snapped her out of her memories.

Startled, she turned away from the counter with the knife so abruptly that it almost ended up in the body of the man who had appeared behind her. He watched the blade with icy calm.

“You almost ruined my suit,” he stated dryly.

“I almost skewered you! Don’t do that to me, you walk like a ghost,” Mishi exhaled in relief. She set the knife down, pulled the jacket off his narrow shoulders, and began loosening his tie.

“Like a ghost?! You can’t even unlock this place without the racket of those hundred-year-old keys that probably fit the gate of Hanoska Castle’s cemetery,” he grumbled, and disliking such partner-like care, he yanked the loosened tie from Mishi’s hand so he could remove it himself with swift efficiency. “What were you thinking about, for heaven’s sake?! I told you I’d come at two. Why do I even announce it like an idiot,” he wondered.

At once he looked around impatiently and repeated, “Where is she?”

“On the veranda. She’s asleep. Don’t wake her now,” Mishi replied and noticed he still expected the rest of the answer.

Even though he would have preferred to be at the outdoor door, he waited. He was meticulous about this. He would stand here until evening if she hesitated to answer.

“I was remembering… the old days,” Mishi said heavily and hung his jacket in the hallway, “back when I wasn’t a housebound hen.”

She looked toward him in the kitchen and raised her eyebrows. He immediately recognized what Mishi was implying and headed outside—almost as if fleeing another possible conversation. That did not surprise Mishi. He disliked remembering how they met; it had not exactly been torn from the pages of a romance novel.

…

Mishi had known his name even before he became a member of the government council and earned the title of teefu. Tay Taris had once been an assistant to the head of the department where Mishi and Rohn started working after school. But one month before their arrival, Taris had been promoted to an intelligence officer of the governmental office, so they practically missed each other within the department. However, Taris’s reputation lived on in the economics division.

No one in the palace liked him. To everyone, Tay Taris was a silent, antisocial know-it-all without a kind word. And when he did speak, like a cold machine, it was never calmly. An unreadable bundle of nerves whose outbursts caused his subordinates depression.

Mishi had personally seen him only a few times. Like a thin, strange spider, he walked the palace halls without raising his gaze to anyone. He looked as if he were constantly pondering something immensely important. Even Mishi, at the time, was full of prejudice toward him, but in truth, she only knew the jokes. To her, he was a closed-off, mysterious man with fine, not particularly masculine features.

The only thing she found sympathetic about Taris was his Derit heritage. Not many Derits lived in this region of Areneán. That did not bother Mishi; she did not long to get closer to men of her own kind. She did not find them attractive or entertaining, which was probably not far from the truth. Derit men tend to be austere in demeanor and physically smaller—most likely because of the distant icy north they originate from.

However, after her breakup with Rohn and months of doing nothing, during which Mishi suffered under the weight of her illness, she received a cheerfully worded message from a friend at the palace: ‘The “beloved” Tay Taris has become the ruler’s deputy and has been looking for a personal intelligence officer for weeks. No one has the courage to apply.’