You ask, Tammlin, how unusual the tastes of our clients can be, and I find I have no answer.

Working as we do gives one a different perspective, I think, to that of any clerk of the courts, no matter your personal interests or upbringing. Sex and violence, punishment and pleasure - almost anything that these words conjure in your mind I am sure we have been paid handsomely for at one time or another. That or we have turned it down. Some people may have a birthright that will protect them from the consequences of the occasional unexplained death amongst their serving girls, but that does not make such a thing conscionable to any of us six. Some of these southern Knights seem perhaps to feel that the law is far away from their concerns.

I think at first what surprises about our clients is how often their desires are simple. You would think, surely, that to go to the expense of hiring a group such as ourselves, a client must have some want, some need, that cannot be met elsewhere, something exotic and extreme. Sometimes it is as simple as a man who does not treat all women as either virgins or whores, but who takes actual pleasure in their meeting, or a woman who will answer them back in a conversation. Sometimes they do not even want to touch, nor even watch, just to talk.

Sometimes we are more tutor than entertainers : do I sound proud to say that we make a fine coming of age gift? In Casz our services for a fortnight were a somewhat barbed gift from a lady to her husband on the occasion of their first anniversary. Oh but he was far from happy when his lady made her presentation in front of a select company of perhaps twenty guests, and only three or four of them innocent enough not to take the implication. It was the work of only two days to tempt him from his sulk, though, and it was he who recommended us to Kes' father, I believe.

Thinking on it, the jobs that stick in my mind as unusual are mostly those where we were purchased not to give - be it punishment, or pleasure, company or experience - but when we have been hired as spectres for another's attention. It is not common, and for the most part it makes me uncomfortable. Almost always, in those cases, we were hired for the services of one of our group, and that one, I can only imagine, is transformed in the mind of our client into their long lost, or their true love, or an abstract vessel to be loved and lavished and ... No, brother. Those jobs are mostly ones I argue against our taking. I will not be take that again for myself unless we really have fallen upon desperate times. It is not that anything happens that is distasteful or unpleasant to me. It is odd sometimes - like the girl in Pascha who fed Kes a whole hastknet cake, as though he were a living Spirit, her fingers sticky on his lips and wanting nothing more than that. It is that the minds of those clients are tricky, painful places. That same girl, hearing her broken sobbing, her unanswered prayers after she sent Kes away. More so even than my Kes vomiting all through that night, that disturbed me.

We sell fantasy. We sell sex and pleasure and beautifully wrought pain, but at root, we sell fantasies, and that can only be healthy for those who can still tell where the world ends and the created begins.

But I think that this may not answer your question? Perhaps if you ask again I will find a better response. We will be in this province a while longer, I believe. Our current patron is generous, and we meet tomorrow with another of his family. Worry not, our plan is not changed, but while there is work of this quality available and well funded, you know that we would be fools not to take the opportunity.

T
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