An Offer... And a Deal.

The portress does not wait. She enters and puts a wooden box on the blanket as if it might bite her and she is already backing out when Brin tips the lid. Inside is a bottle the color of cheap glass, stoppered in wax, and a contract written in a hand that has never had to raise its voice. The first line is the name the palace you had in the palace. The second line is Charlie, smaller, like a correction. The third is a sentence you hate on sight: that whoever owns the bottle recognizes what you do with worn cloth as an opportunity, and is prepared to spend it.

You do not like that word. You do not like that this person knows.

Brin reads faster than you do and then she puts the page down as if wreaked of sewrage.

"That is Hallin," she says. "The king’s eyes. A dangerous man you best be wary of." She then finds the longer sentence because the short one is not enough of a warning. "He is a sexual deviant who does not treat women kindly, and he will off you his hand while he is thinking about how to twist it. If you sign that, you will work when he needs a body and dangerous possibility. I would pour this in the drain."

The contract is short under the flourish. Drink, and the shape you woke with on Green Road comes back. Sign, and you owe Hallin work at a time of his choosing. There is no wage. There is no date. There is a space for a mark.

You take the offer anyway, because Sera’s body is still sore from the man handling and you've had enough. Plus it seems this current body is not worth the hassle its fame brings.

"I heard you," you say, quiet and full. "I am still going to drink it."

Brin does not bless it. She holds the basin ready as if she expects you to be sick. You mark the page with the wax-stick in the box, Charlie, not Sera, and you break the bottle’s seal with your thumb. The liquid tastes like metal and flowers and something sweet that does not belong in an abbey. You get it down in three large swallows that almost spill from your mouth.

It hits the belly first as heat, then the hips, then a pulse. You fold forward on the blanket and Sera’s breasts hang heavy and wrong over your knees while the heat crawls lower and keeps crawling. Brin says your name and you cannot answer her because the first thing that comes back is not the beard and not the height.

It is a your cock... Growing out of you while the rest of you is still the queen.

It fills and lifts in a rush that is almost painful, the old weight and the old angle arriving through a body that still has hips and a chest to catch what happens next, and the potion does not let that arrival be private. It stacks like the Kings ring used to stack, except it is inside the change, it feels like an aphrodisiac that has no off, and so you take yourself in your still feminine hands that are still small and you do not last. The orgasm is violent enough that you shout into the blanket. You come across your breasts and stomach and the cracked pink skin where the wax was, thick ropes that keep going until your wrist shakes, and the spend sits on that skin as a sunscreen bottle had exploded across your body.

Then it glows.

White, magic, a flat light in the mess itself, and the glow spreads from the wet into the chest and the hips and the long blonde hair. The breasts go. The waist goes. The face hurts when the beard comes back in a flush of heat, patchy blonde and brown, the moustache turning up the way it always has. Your knees move farther from the floor. The brown hair that reaches your chest is yours again, straighter at the crown, more curl in the ends, and when you look at your hands they are long and masculine. You are tall and slim again, shaking on an abbey blanket, blue eyes, the ridge in your nose, covered in your own spend which is still pulsing faint white as if the bottle has not quite finished with it.

Charlie. Male. The collar hangs absurd on a throat it was not cut for.

Brin leans from the stool. Her mouth is open in worry.

"I will wipe you down," she says, basin already in her hand.

She starts at your shoulder with the wet cloth, and the first pass is clean. The second pass hits the glowing mess on your chest and her breath changes. She does not take her hand away in time. The cloth smears and her fingers go through it onto your skin, and the same heat that forced you out of Sera goes into her by the contact, sudden and rude. Her cheeks flush. The next wipe is slower than it should be. She swallows and tries to make it a wash again, and the cloth slips, and her palm is flat on your stomach in the spend, and she makes a small sound she did not plan to offer in the abbey.

"Damn that man and his potions," she says, angry at herself for allowing this. "That is the bottle still working. I should stop."

She does not stop at once. Her hand is still on you, shaking, the sheet forgotten, and the pulse in the mess is small and stubborn while you sit there male and dripping and contracted to a man she has already found himself a tool for his deviant schemes.