She didn’t plan to eat it.
The kitchens were underground, and the series of long, windowless rooms was lit with candles. No sense wasting expensive lamp fluid on a room that already had fires in it. Sweat trickled down her sides. She hadn’t felt warm since coming Nightward, and suddenly she was trapped in this stifling room with twenty people all furiously slicing and roasting food.
Beside her, Ev was faring better, kneading bread dough with practiced ease. Ev had grown up with a family, on a farm, doing chores. She knew so much more about living a normal life. Alizhan was good for reading minds, picking locks, and scaling walls. She didn’t know how to cook a goddamn thing.
Alizhan hadn’t realized all the steps that went into making food until she caught Ev thinking about washing the greens, and taking the stems off, and so on. Without surreptitiously scanning Ev’s thoughts for guidance about what to do next, Alizhan would’ve been lost. She certainly couldn’t understand any of what the other workers were saying—or thinking.
“I wish you believed me,” Alizhan said. Ev thought she was being ridiculous. Obsessed. Irrational. Alizhan wasn’t. This place gave her the creeps. She’d never been anywhere so silent. And there was a rule against her existence. And if nobody else here was using magic, then how were they all hiding from her?
“I do believe you,” Ev said. “I just don’t know what you want me to do about it.”
“You believe me, but you think I’m overreacting,” Alizhan clarified. “You think I’m being paranoid.” She emphasized the word, which had been in Ev’s thoughts only an instant before. “But it’s not being paranoid, it’s being sensible. Something is weird here. We can’t trust these people. What if they’re keeping secrets? What if they’re in league with Ir—I mean, spying on us?”
“Alizhan,” Ev said softly. “Consider, for a moment, how I felt when you told me to trust the stranger we met in a prison cell.”
“You weren’t sure about him.”
“Yes. Because I couldn’t see into him like you could.”
“Right! And here, I can’t see into anybody, so we can’t be sure about a single person!”
“Yes,” Ev said. She spoke so calmly, and she kept kneading the bread dough beneath her fists. “Before I started spending all my time with you, that was how I lived. That is, in fact, how almost everyone lives.”
“You think I’m whining?” Alizhan said.
“That’s not what I said,” Ev replied, but Alizhan could still read Ev, even if she was quieter this shift than usual. Ev would never tell Alizhan that she was whining, but she wasn’t exactly overflowing with sympathy.
Alizhan took a deep breath. It wasn’t Ev’s fault if she didn’t understand Alizhan’s feelings. Ev couldn’t read her. That meant Alizhan had to explain it. “Ev. Please. I can’t even tell people apart if I can’t read them. You know that. You understand how disorienting that is for me, right? And we’re in a place full of strangers and I can’t speak their language or understand their facial expressions.”
Ev was nodding, and Alizhan could feel the flow of sympathy begin.
“Next time, start with ‘Ev, I feel powerless and scared’ instead of ‘Ev, the people who have taken us in from the cold must be plotting against us.’”
Alizhan hadn’t wanted to admit that first part. “They could both be true.”
“I suppose,” Ev said. “But one thing at a time. Normally, you tell me if you think strangers are trustworthy. Here, I’ll tell you.”
“But how will you know?” Alizhan’s major experience with trusting someone unreadable—Iriyat—had gone catastrophically wrong. They wouldn’t be trapped in this cauldron of a kitchen otherwise.
“I won’t,” Ev said. “But I’ll listen to people, and watch their faces, and I’ll be cautious.”
“People keep secrets,” Alizhan reminded her. “They lie constantly.”
“I know,” Ev said, with just a hint of fatigue. “But I’ll keep an eye out. That’s all we can really do for now.”
Someone walked into the kitchen. Alizhan turned and saw a woman—probably a woman, based on the height and the long blond braid—dressed in brown suede and grey fur, far too warmly for the kitchen. From Ev’s thoughts, Alizhan recognized Pirkko.
“Hello,” she said in Laalvuri.
Alizhan stiffened. Was Pirkko going to touch her again? It hadn’t been painful the first time. But Alizhan had an entrenched, lifelong association between human contact and pain, and she didn’t want strangers to touch her.
“Hello,” Ev said.
“I go work,” Pirkko said. “But first I come here. See you. Work good? You happy?”
“Yes,” Ev said, which was an exaggeration in Alizhan’s case, but Pirkko didn’t need to know that.
Pirkko didn’t need to know anything about them. Why was she here? What was the purpose of this surveillance? It made Alizhan’s skin prickle, not knowing.
“Good,” Pirkko said. “Later we eat, yes?”
“Together?” Ev said, with some surprise, and Pirkko nodded enthusiastically, which made Ev warm up with happiness and amusement. Alizhan scrutinized their faces. They were both smiling. What reason could they have for that? Ev’s thoughts lingered on Pirkko’s face, and an ugly suspicion uncurled in Alizhan’s gut. She tried to ignore it. Jealousy was a foolish waste of time.
“Hello,” Pirkko said again, bowed her head, and left.
“That’s cute,” Ev said. “They must use the same word for ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye.’ We’ll have to ask Thiyo what it is.”
Cute. So much for Ev being cautious. “You think she’s trustworthy,” Alizhan said.
“She hasn’t done anything alarming yet,” Ev said. “She’s just being friendly. I’ll be friendly in return, until I have a good reason not to.”
“Or we could be unfriendly, until they give us a good reason to stop.”
“We’d never have met if I’d treated you like that,” Ev said, and Alizhan didn’t have a response.
The press and bookbindery were in a different building from the main hall and the dormitory where Thiyo had slept, and it was a long, winding walk through half-lit tunnels to get there. The room he emerged into did have windows, which was a welcome relief from the closed-in tightness of Estva’s other buildings, but of course, there was no light.
The blue-black expanse of the sky, brushed with a glittering sweep of stars, drew him. Thiyo couldn’t stop himself from walking across the room to stare out the window. The glass was cold underneath his fingertips. The dim white landscape of the ground below was an afterthought. Night was another ocean. A vaster, deeper one.
All islanders grew up with a healthy fear of the ocean, and the thought of something even grander and more powerful made Thiyo shiver. But he kept looking.
There was a low chuckle from across the room. “I was the same, when I first arrived.”
Thiyo turned. The speaker was a man with the same warm bronze skin and shiny black hair as Alizhan, but his hair was cut short and there were silver strands around his temples and faint lines around his eyes. Dressed in a grey robe, he was standing in front of a plate of movable type, looking down at his work through a pair of spectacles.
“Sardas,” he offered, without glancing at Thiyo.
“My name is Thiyo.”
“Can you read?”
The question didn’t make him bristle this time. “Yes.”
Sardas turned around to look at him at last, and if he was surprised to see an islander in his workshop, it didn’t show on his face. “Estvan?” he specified.
“Yes,” Thiyo said. They were speaking Estvan, after all. “And Nalitzvan.” The languages shared a writing system. Then, in Laalvuri, he added, “And Laalvuri, too.”
Sardas laughed again. It was a nice sound. “We don’t get enough people here who can say that,” he said in Laalvuri, pleased. “It feels good to hear it. You could be a great help to us. We print books—calendars and star charts and scholarly treatises, mo
stly—in all of those languages. I don’t suppose you read Adpri, too?”
“I do.”
Sardas grinned. He was a little unkempt, with two triads’ worth of stubble on his cheeks and cowlicks in his hair. It was rare to see anyone at the Nalitzvan court with even such minor lapses in attention to grooming. It was even rarer to see someone who would smile so warmly and openly. Thiyo was a long way from the palace.
“I hope Night agrees with you, Thiyo. We can do good work together if you stay.”
Thiyo nodded, and Sardas gestured for him to come closer. He showed Thiyo the sets of movable type and demonstrated how to work the press. His long, ink-smudged fingers moved the tiny letters deftly, and Thiyo found himself watching and listening with interest. He hadn’t expected to like the work he had to do, or anyone he had to work with, so Sardas and his workshop were a pleasant surprise. The press was in the middle of the room, but the walls were covered in cabinets and open shelves, every one full to the brim with books and unbound stacks of paper. The light in the room came from green lamp fluid, which wasn’t flammable, and every white sheet seemed to glow with it.
“I came Nightward about fifteen years ago,” Sardas said. “I wasn’t terribly young then—not as young as you—but I was still searching for my purpose. I was already a priest, but I felt lost. I told them I’d do any work when I got here. They had me working in the laundry at first, in a windowless cave. By the time I finally got up here and saw those windows, I thought God was welcoming me to paradise. I fell in love with the stars, and then with the work, and when the time came to return home to Laalvur permanently, I just couldn’t do it. But I don’t think I realized how much I missed the sound of home until you spoke just now. Estva, for all its wonders, can be a lonely place. But we should return to speaking Estvan, so I can introduce you to the others.”
Sardas picked up a wooden cane that was leaning against one of the cabinets. “I took a bad fall on the ice a few years ago and never quite recovered,” he said, holding up the cane. “Be careful out there, or you’ll end up as old and stooped as me.”
Sardas was only a little bit shorter than Thiyo, so he could hardly be called stooped, and his hair was still mostly black. He was perhaps fifty. Thiyo just nodded.
Sardas strolled across the room with his cane and led Thiyo through a door on the opposite side. The next room was the bookbindery, and it smelled of glue and paper. There was a pale young woman with a shaved head sewing stacks of pages together. She was sitting in a chair with wheels. A thick line of black makeup barred her face from temple to temple, and when she closed her eyes, Thiyo could see her eyelids were also painted black. Where the collar of her brown coat lay open, a black robe was visible. Thiyo glanced at the end of her coat sleeve and saw black feathers poking out.
“You’re a priest of Doubt,” he said. He’d never met anyone from the Laalvuri sect but he’d heard enough to recognize their distinctive style.
She flicked a glance up at him, the whites of her eyes like snow against the Night sky.
Her irises were blue, her skin was the same faint melon color as Ilyr’s, and her shaved head had blond stubble. And Sardas said he hadn’t heard anyone speak Laalvuri in a long time. “And you’re Nalitzvan.” Thiyo was aware of Sardas watching him, as well as the other two men in the room. He’d made them uncomfortable. His curiosity had gotten the better of him.
“Doubt knows no nation,” said the woman. Her focus had returned to her needle and stack of pages, and she continued sewing.
Doubt apparently didn’t have any manners, either.
“This is Ayat,” Sardas said, gesturing at the woman with a note of apology. “We accept all sorts in Estva. Most of us are priests of some kind. We need literate workers to make books, and there are lots of priests who come here to study. Next to Ayat is Fama, and standing by the desk over there is Rin.”
Fama, a dark-skinned young man whose tight black braids fell to his shoulders, was seated next to Ayat, gluing stiff boards to the fronts and backs of uncovered books. He offered Thiyo a cautiously friendly nod, as did Rin, a Nalitzvan man of middle height, his short hair fully grey, who was sorting through pages.
Sardas clearly wanted to ask Thiyo if he was a disciple of some religion—and which one, and which island, and which other languages—but questions like that skirted the bounds of Estvan propriety. Thiyo was grateful for it. He wasn’t sure how he would explain his presence here, if asked.
Besides, Thiyo had questions of his own to answer. As soon as Sardas left him alone, he slipped the folded pages where he’d transcribed the mystery language out of his pocket. He shuffled them into the stack of manuscript pages that Sardas had given him to print. Whenever he had a few unobserved moments, he returned to them, tracing the unfamiliar characters with his gaze until he imagined he could feel their curves and angles under his fingers like cast metal pieces of movable type.
At dinner, Thiyo was quiet and distracted and Alizhan was practically mute, picking miserably at the food she and Ev had cooked. Henny and Ket eventually gave up on trying to engage either of them and talked to each other in Nalitzvan, leaving Ev stranded. Ev didn’t mind the food, although it wasn’t impressive. There was satisfaction in having worked hard. But dinner was always better with company.
The dining hall was loud, and she had ample time to look around and examine her fellow Estvans. The tables seemed to be divided between laborers, people who had come to mine gold or ice, and scholars, people who had come to study the stars. There was a third group, much warier than the first two, of people who hadn’t come to Estva for any reason other than coming from somewhere else. Ev supposed she and her friends were part of this group, although that didn’t make her any more eager to get to know the others.
She might have guessed that the laborers would be more raucous than the scholars, but it was the opposite. Having worked hard all shift, they were content to eat in companionable silence. The scholars, on the other hand, argued fiercely and at great volume. The arguments were in Estvan, so Ev had no chance of understanding them, but she understood their gestures and expressions well enough. She was watching a pair of men argue, their hands slashing and jabbing through the air like birds of prey, when one man stood up and yanked the other closer by the collar of his robe.
He ground out a few words directly into his struggling, squirming victim’s face, and then spit.
His victim shoved at him, breaking his grip, and then came back swinging his arm toward the robe-grabber. His clenched fist connected with the man’s nose, and then the man grabbed a plate of food off the table and tried to smash it into his opponent’s face.
No one had intervened. The other scholars were watching in awe, and the rest of the dining hall was studiously ignoring the whole scene. The food had slopped onto both men and the floor, and the men were grappling with each other, one still holding the plate in his hand. The plate was still intact for the moment, but if it shattered, one of them could easily use a shard to kill the other.
Ev was up and striding across the room before she could even consider her decision. She was taller than both of them, and probably better at fighting, besides. It was just a matter of stepping in and pushing them apart.
She yanked the plate out of the man’s hand before he’d realized what she was doing, and then she set it on the table. She pulled their arms apart and forced herself between them. They were still snarling at each other over her shoulder, and a fleck of spit hit her cheek. She shook her head to get rid of it—an impulse, not a calculated move—and lost her grip on one of the men. He immediately stepped around her to continue haranguing his opponent.
Ev’s best hope now was simply to drag the man still in her grip away from the fight. She tried to position herself between the two men, but they scrabbled to get at each other, paying no attention her.
Then suddenly, someone grabbed the free man from behind and pulled him away. When he’d been carted unwillingly backward a few steps, Ev saw a short, thick b
lond woman behind him. Pirkko.
The hall went silent.
The man in Ev’s grip stilled, and so did the man in Pirkko’s. Pirkko let go, then stepped into the space where they’d been fighting. She said something to both of them in a loud, lecturing tone. Then she used a tone that Ev recognized from childhood, despite the language barrier, as I’m not mad, just disappointed. The men couldn’t look at her, or each other, and for a long moment, they cast dejected glances at the floor. Then both of them stood straighter and marched for the exit, one at a time. They kept a safe distance between them.
“What happened?” Ev asked Pirkko.
“They break rules,” Pirkko said shortly. “They leave now.”
“Now?” Ev said. “They can’t even go get their things?”
“Rules are simple,” Pirkko said.
“What were they fighting about?”
Pirkko shrugged, uninterested. “Priest nonsense. What stars. Which God.”
“Oh.” Ev’s father suspected that religion was a scheme to control people and keep them apart. Her mother said it probably didn’t hurt to pray anyway. Owing to their intercultural marriage, her parents were considerably more relaxed about the question of religion than anyone else in her village. Fighting over which gods were real, and what the stars meant, struck Ev as unnecessary. And Pirkko apparently felt the same.
Still. “It’s not right to just kick them out in the cold like that,” Ev said. “They’ll die out there, even if they don’t kill each other.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. But rules are rules,” Pirkko said. “They make choice.”
Ev wanted to protest this vicious, draconian policy, but Pirkko seemed to have some kind of authority as an enforcer of the rules—both men had stopped struggling as soon as she’d shown up—and Ev didn’t want to be on the wrong side of it.
Around them, the clinking of forks and knives against ceramic slowly resumed, and conversation along with it. Ev wanted to go back to the table—or to leave the room entirely—but Pirkko was still standing in front of her, and she didn’t have the impression she’d been dismissed.
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