behind the bar, pouring, slapping bread and sausage onto wooden plates. She was
not attractive and furthermore was specifically unattractive, this new helper in
Sly’s. Her big chaincoated employer called her Cleya. Remarks were not made to
her. No one bothered to approach the counter to get a look at her, in her long
and nigh-shapeless gray dress. Ouleh announced that she liked this Cleya. The
reason was simple, and it was Frax who put it best: “Whew. Got a face her mother
couldn’t love and I’ve saw better figures on brooms.”
The woman now publicly called Cleya did not mind. To be with Ahdio at last, she
accepted the price, even this. All her life her beauty had after all been more a
curse than a blessing. One man, among all men, had treated her as other than an
object, a bauble, and he was the only man she had ever loved. Her father and the
powerful noble of wealth, Ezucar, had arranged and forced her marriage to the
latter, who wanted an object and a bright and beautiful bauble to wear in public
and at his parties. Meanwhile the man she loved had left Suma. Now, years later,
she had followed and they were together. The two rooms above the tavern were
eminently superior to the servant-staffed mansion of Ezucar. She was sorry that
because of her Ahdio had felt that he must take up his Practice again. Yet it
was only this once; it was enough and more than enough that at night in their
apartment above Sly’s Place in the Maze, his spell was off her so that the veil
of ugliness was lifted, and she was again his beautiful Jodeera.