Alaemnah spent time walking through the garden slowly this morning sipping the ginger tea she had gotten this morning to settle her stomach. It had been a good suggestion made by one who had stopped at the Kurii a few nights before, and was proving to be quite beneficial to her.

For the moment, as she set the cup beside her on the walkway where she knelt to work loose a few of the weeds that were trying to take root there, she let her thoughts slip to the previous nights conversation. That one had been concerning Gun and Nadine.

"...ill do anythin, anythin ta be wit ya."

She had listened the night that Nadine had cried into Brutin?s shoulder, and then listened as Nadine had spoken of her fears while picking at the carpet in Brutin?s office. When Nadine had said that she didn?t matter simply because she was a slave, it had stirred something deep inside Alae. She had wondered how one could come to believe such a thing.

"Will you be patient?"

Alae knew that this was not going to be easy. Her concerns on this matter had begun taking shape in her dreams and she now saw two paths to be followed.

On one she saw a time when Gun and Nadine were not standing as adversaries against each other. A child stood between them. A child whom they had each had a part in creating within her.

The other path she saw lead to a grave.

"i shud act a slave round him tho"

"And how does a slave act?"

"act proper so he dun get pissed off."

And so Nadine had shown a path she had thought she could tread. It was the easiest one to walk, and the hardest. It was the thing that she would do to be with Alae, and the thing that would remove a piece of Nadine?s heart from her.

"If he's going to see you, then he needs to see you, not a fake you."

Two paths to walk, and Alae knew in that moment that if the grave was going to be avoided, then their journey couldn?t begin with a lie.

"im scared"

If the full truth had been told in that moment, so was Alae.