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you’re listening to the wrong storyteller, and the wrong story. I had already experienced my own identity crisis when I became a princess and had to kill of a wizard while he was wearing my body. Everything pales after watching your own body die.
    Besides, while I had been a bit surprised at the particulars, Nâtlac’s charm had worked as advertised. And now that my head had cleared a bit, I was back to being angry at Lucille—and I found it amusing to think she had to deal with some
other
guy in her discarded body. Maybe it would make her appreciate me when I came back.
    I can be shallow like that.
    Somehow, even after the shock of finding myself as someone else in a strange town, it was easy for my thoughts to return to Lucille, and my own anger. Enough so that, when I found an inn and used someone else’s gold to pay for a room and a woman, I was thinking less about my own long chastity than I was about how lying down with an
actual
whore was a perfect revenge for Lucille calling Evelyn one. It wasn’t rational thinking, but if I had been thinking rationally I wouldn’t have been there in the first place.
    Any sane individual could tell you that such a tryst would turn out to be disappointing, and they would be correct.
    I spent the balance of the evening with a young woman who knew her profession, but throughout the act, all I could think about was how angry Lucille had made me, and how stupidly I had reacted to it. My partner was willing, my borrowed body was functional and well equipped, and we successfully accomplished things that, for the last three months, had been little more than distant memory . . .
    But I really wasn’t there.
    I began in anger, and somehow, as things progressed, the anger turned into guilt. My body ran on hormones, instinct, and muscle memory, while my brain kept thinking back to Lucille, my fading anger at her, and how, whatever I’d been feeling at the time, I’d really been kind of an ass.
    I might be shallow, but I wasn’t nearly shallow enough.
    If my partner noticed the point where my actions became joyless and mechanical, she didn’t show any sign. I suspect it was not uncommon in her line of work. Once her task was complete, she wordlessly gathered her clothes, dressed, and left me alone, lying naked on the bed.
    Once sexual frustration was no longer at the fore of my mind, it began to occur to me that I had no idea how long the “temporary” effects of Nâtlac’s artifact were going to last. I assumed that it would last until the former owner of this body removed the necklace from the princess’s neck. But what if it didn’t work like that?
    I’ve been through this before,
I told myself.
Just work it out logically and I’ll sort it out . . .
    Because that had worked out so well last time.
    â€œI’m ready for it to wear off now,” I whispered up to the timbers above me.
    I stared at the ceiling and wondered what was wrong with me. I had received in one night everything that I had felt was missing from my life over the past three months, and it just felt empty.
    I could feel the Dark Lord Nâtlac and the whole pitiless universe laughing at me. Even when events conspire to give me exactly what I want—
especially
when events conspire to give me what I want—it never goes wrong the way I expect it to.
    It may have been my growing familiarity with living in the princess’s body, but I no longer felt comfortable in my own skin.
    Someone else’s skin.
    I rubbed my chin and my hand recoiled at the feeling of stubble. I didn’t even know what this guy looked like. I closed my eyes, made a fist, and pushed the knuckles against my forehead.
    â€œI know it was a bad idea. I know.”
    Eventually I fell asleep.

CHAPTER 5

    I had gone to sleep hanging on to two small optimistic thoughts.
    The first, at least this time my foray into a new body was much less threatening to