Ev must not have angered Pirkko with her questions, since Pirkko beamed at her and said, “You, next shift, with me.”
23
Lacemakers
“WHAT WAS THAT?” THIYO AND Alizhan hissed simultaneously from either side of Ev as they left the dining hall. Henny and Ket were close behind, eager to hear the answer.
“I thought you were going to get thrown out with them,” Alizhan said. She sounded terrified. Not being able to read anyone’s mind, she’d assumed the worst. “I thought Pirkko was coming to kick you out for fighting.”
“No,” Ev said. “She wants me to work with her.”
“What?”
“She asked me to work with her,” Ev repeated. “Our next working shift.”
“So you won’t be in the kitchens with me.”
Ev had promised to stay with Alizhan and help her navigate while she was temporarily powerless. Guilt twisted her gut. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t think I can really say no to Pirkko, though. I get the impression she gives the orders.”
“She’s young to be giving the orders,” Thiyo observed.
“I don’t claim to understand it,” Ev said. “But you saw what happened when she walked over toward the fight.”
“Yes,” Thiyo said. “Which raises the question of why she didn’t do it far sooner.”
There was a pause. “Don’t look at me,” Alizhan said, although nobody was looking at her. “I can’t answer any questions about anybody’s secret motivations here. Except if they’re about Ev. And Ev doesn’t like that.”
Was that a statement of fact from Alizhan or some kind of resentful little dig at Ev? Or was it a remarkable display of restraint, since Alizhan could have chosen to air all of Ev’s dirty laundry in public if she’d wanted to? Whatever it was, Ev decided to ignore it. Alizhan had a right to feel hurt. Ev had made a promise she couldn’t keep.
“Pirkko was watching you,” Ket said to Ev, inserting himself into the conversation from behind the three of them. “I think she wanted to know what you were going to do.”
“Well, she knows now,” Henny said, joining in. “I suppose you can find about more about her when you go to work together.”
Ket stopped walking. “This is us,” he said to Thiyo. “We turn here to go back to the men’s dormitory.”
“I know,” Thiyo said. “I have something I need to talk about with Alizhan. I’ll be back in a little while.”
Had he figured out part of the text? No, he’d be acting cockier if he had. Ket nodded at Thiyo, then waved goodbye and went off to his own dormitory.
“More questions,” Alizhan complained. She’d come to the same conclusions as Ev. “We came all the way across the ocean to find a genius, and instead we got you.”
“Rude,” Thiyo said, as though he were passing down a judgment. He didn’t sound terribly broken up about it. “Take the book to someone else, then. See what they can do.”
Alizhan laughed. So they were only teasing and bickering—batting their paws at each other’s noses, not about to have a real fight. Ev let the two of them walk a step ahead as they made their way to the dormitory, so they could talk in low voices. Henny stepped forward to keep pace with Ev.
“Ket was right about Pirkko watching you,” she said in a low voice. “But I wouldn’t make it sound so sinister.”
“What do you mean?”
Henny shrugged one shoulder. “I work in a whorehouse. I know that look.”
Ev blinked.
“She cozied up to Thiyo, too, when we arrived,” Henny said. “I’d wager she’s lonely.”
“I guess it’s a small place,” Ev said. She didn’t know what to do with this unexpected thread of conversation. Was Alizhan listening? Would she find this topic upsetting? Would she find it extra upsetting if she knew—as she certainly would—that Ev’s face was hot? From pleasure or embarrassment or both. Pirkko had given her quite a smile at the end.
Ev had no idea what any of it meant. What were she and Alizhan to each other? They’d never named the thing between them. Was there a name for it? For two people who loved each other but could barely touch? The only word Ev knew for that was suffering.
And Ev only knew her own experience. Unlike Alizhan, she couldn’t say what anyone else was feeling. And Alizhan rarely voiced her thoughts. They’d promised to try. But there’d been little time for practice, since life lurched from one crisis to another. And Ev had promised to wait. But did waiting mean never even thinking about anyone else? It wasn’t a crime to enjoy a beautiful smile.
Was it a betrayal for Ev to feel flattered that Pirkko might be interested in her? That Pirkko might want to offer her what Alizhan could not?
Ev realized she’d been staring down the hall in silence for a long time. “Sorry,” she said to Henny. “Got distracted.”
“Just thought you should know,” Henny said lightly, as they entered their dormitory room. “I’ll let you three get up to whatever it is you’re doing. Talking about that book, most likely. Speaking of books, I guess you haven’t finished reading The Sunrise Chronicles yet.”
Ev shook her head. That had been such a nice little interlude. She wished they could go back to it. “We haven’t had time. Does Ket want it back?”
“Oh, keep it,” Henny said. “I’ll buy him another one. And it’s given you so much happiness.”
The bare room around them had only a few other people in it, all of them women getting ready to go to bed. The far end of the room was dark because some of them had already put out their candles. The sight of Thiyo caused them to murmur among themselves. When he sat down on Alizhan’s bed and pulled out a sheaf of papers, one of the women protested.
Thiyo said something back to her in Estvan. He sounded a lot more polite than he ever had with Ev.
“What are they saying?” Ev asked Henny, who had a better chance of guessing.
“She says it’s quiet hours in this room. She doesn’t want him in here making noise. He says he’ll be very quiet,” Henny said. “It’s a reasonable complaint.”
“We may have to find another space,” Thiyo said. “The print shop is nice, but I assume there’s another shift of workers in there right now. I haven’t had time to find anywhere else. There’s light in here, at least.”
“You just want to talk, right?” Alizhan said. “We’ll talk quietly and if anyone gets upset, we’ll move.”
Thiyo nodded. Alizhan sat down on her bed with him—very close to him, Ev couldn’t help noticing, and the sight wrenched her foolish heart out of shape—and they bent their heads over the pages until they were almost touching.
Henny went to her bed, on the other side of Ev’s, and started unbraiding her hair to comb it as if nothing else was happening. Ev sat down and watched Thiyo and Alizhan. “After our last conversation,” Thiyo was saying, “I thought about what you told me about Iriyat and her ability. If that’s one of her big secrets, it makes sense that it would be mentioned here—if she’s the author of this encoded text.”
That last addition had obviously been meant to placate Alizhan, who’d flattened her mouth into a stubborn line. It hadn’t worked.
“Based on her name, I’m assuming that Iriyat Varenx is Nalitzvan?”
Alizhan nodded. “We call her Ha-Varensi now that she’s the head of Varenx House. But yes, Varenx House was founded by Nalitzvans. Iriyat speaks the language.”
“And she’s educated,” Thiyo said. “Speaks two languages, at least. Owns the whole series of A Natural History of the World in her library.”
Alizhan nodded again. Her shoulders were tight and she was still frowning.
“This portrait of Iriyat is where I started. She’s wealthy, educated, powerful, beautiful. And she really wanted to share this secret with someone—otherwise why write it down? So I thought she might be a little bit of a showoff. She’d write in a refined way. And maybe she’d throw in unusual words. It wasn’t until I started thinking of Old Nalitzvan words that I found something,” Thiyo s
aid. “I told you our word uheko, for people like you and Henny and Iriyat and Ket. People whose gifts flow through their touch.”
At the sound of her name, Henny gave a lazy wave from where she was lying on her side in bed with a book, and then went back to ignoring their murmured Laalvuri conversation. She wasn’t as riveted as Ev. She had no reason to be, since she barely knew who Iriyat was or what she’d done.
“Our words for different types of uheko aren’t creative,” Thiyo continued. In his excitement, he struggled to keep his voice quiet. “We just called people like Iriyat and Ket ‘memory changers.’ But because there’s such a longstanding hatred and fear of magic in Nalitzva, there are many more words for people with gifts. Most of them are slurs—not words that people would use to talk about themselves. But in Old Nalitzvan, there was another name for memory changers—smaroi. It means ‘lacemakers.’”
“You found it,” Alizhan said. There was no triumph in her voice.
“Yes,” Thiyo said, still delighted, but that one word was like the last breath of passion rushing out of him. Alizhan’s early, numb reaction left him deflated. His shoulders slumped. He’d wanted them to be excited, too. He continued, far more soberly, “Iriyat’s invented script contains all the characters necessary to write Laalvuri words, but the diphthong oi doesn’t occur in Laalvuri, so this word contained a combination of characters that stuck out. I started thinking about it and—well, anyway, I found many instances of words that are likely to be forms of ‘Lacemaking’ or ‘Lacemaker,’ and we have no reason to believe the text is about the creation of actual lace. I haven’t made my way through the whole thing yet. But this is the key.”
“Good,” Alizhan said, and it couldn’t have sounded further from the truth. “This doesn’t mean anything for certain, though. Someone else could still have written the text.”
Thiyo stared at her, unsure what to make of that. The book belonged to Iriyat. His discovery had been predicated on knowledge of Iriyat’s personality. The simplest answer was that Iriyat had written the encoded text. But Ev understood, although she didn’t want to. Every time she thought about Alizhan’s long history with Iriyat, her stomach threatened to turn over. It was hard to grasp just how poisonous it was. Iriyat had isolated Alizhan from the world and exploited her. Worse, Iriyat had centered herself in Alizhan’s world as the only source of love and comfort, so that even now, after everything they’d learned, Alizhan still occasionally defended her.
Ev regretted killing the guard who had attacked Thiyo in Nalitzva. She didn’t think she’d regret killing Iriyat, if she ever got the chance.
If Alizhan overheard that thought, it didn’t show.
“Maybe we should tell Thiyo the rest of the story,” Ev said. She didn’t think he really needed it, now that he had a pathway into the text, but it might help him understand Alizhan. “Just in case it makes his job easier.”
“Please,” Thiyo said. “We only got as far as you discovering that Iriyat is a Lacemaker. What is she after? Altering memories alone isn’t enough to make you run. You didn’t run from Ket.”
“We’re not sure,” Alizhan said. And then she told the whole story, starting with Kasrik’s theft of the book from Iriyat’s study. It took some time to retell all the events, and Ev was amused, though not surprised, to find herself portrayed in Alizhan’s account as some kind of idealized, righteous figure of legend—a little bit like Vesper in The Sunrise Chronicles. Ev hadn’t felt, at the time, like she was making heroic choices. More often than not, she’d felt lost and overwhelmed. She just hadn’t wanted Alizhan to get killed. And then once she’d found out that Iriyat was hurting and killing other people, she’d wanted that to stop, too. What other choices were there?
Alizhan, in her own version of events, veered between clever and hapless. She broke into Mar ha-Solora’s mansion with ease, but couldn’t figure out how to stop upsetting Ev in conversation. That last bit didn’t really belong in the story, and Ev looked to Thiyo, expecting to see his false patience wearing thin. But instead, he was wide-eyed. And he was stuck on one particular detail of their story.
“People just… leave their children?”
“In orphanages, yes,” Alizhan said.
“Orphan means a child with dead parents,” Thiyo said. “That’s not what you’re describing.”
“Well, no.”
“You’re describing people voluntarily abandoning their children. And your religion encourages it.”
“Only certain kinds of children.” Alizhan shifted her weight on the bed. She never seemed to mind mentioning this topic in her rapid, light way—oh by the way, either my parents are dead or they abandoned me—as if the horror of it would be diminished by speaking as briefly as possible. Thiyo’s reaction, honest and unwilling to brush aside the ugliness of it, disturbed her. “And if you’re worried about me, don’t. Ev and I figured out who my father was, we think, and he died in the wave when I was a baby. And for all we know, maybe my mother died in the wave, too. I probably am an orphan. Nobody willingly abandoned me. So it’s the others you should be sad for, and not me.”
“I don’t see how any of that makes anything better.”
In the twenty-two triads they’d spent together, Ev had rarely seen Thiyo get emotional about anything that didn’t directly affect him. The wider world didn’t concern him. He had time only for his own happiness, his own hurt. But now, with his good hand, he reached for Alizhan’s, stroking his thumb over the back of her hand. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I wish things had been different for you.”
Alizhan turned her face so neither of them could see it, but she didn’t pull her hand away. “Don’t,” she said, her voice thick. “Don’t be nice to me. I don’t know what to do when you’re nice. Just go back to being funny and arrogant and mean.”
“How dare you,” Thiyo said, pretending offense. “Maybe you’re the arrogant, mean one, did you ever consider that?”
And they were play-fighting like cats again. But for a moment, the curtain had been pulled back, and something else had been exposed. None of the three of them seemed to know what.
But before they could say anything else, one of the women across the room hissed a warning at them. Thiyo apologized to her in Estvan, then began to gather the pages. “I’ll let you know what I find,” he said. He touched Alizhan on the hand again, and left.
Working with Pirkko wasn’t what Ev expected. The first thing they did was pass half a shift walking the length of the ramparts together. The ramparts weren’t all ice, as Ev had thought when she first arrived. They were stone in most places, and it was easy to walk along the broad path at the top of the walls.
Pirkko stopped to show Ev each guard station, introducing her to the people who were working there. A few of them were able to speak to her in Laalvuri, but most weren’t, and Ev was embarrassed. She was so useless. She could hardly do good work here, unable to speak to anyone.
Maybe Thiyo could teach her. No, that was foolish. He had his own work, and the book to decipher.
“Can you teach me Estvan?” Ev said to Pirkko, as they continued their walk. They might not stay long, but she wanted to do good while she was here.
Pirkko replied with a word Ev didn’t understand, and when Ev looked confused, she burst out laughing. “Ol,” she said again. “Ol is mean yes.”
“Ol,” Ev repeated, but apparently not to Pirkko’s satisfaction.
“Ol-luh,” Pirkko said, dragging out the last consonant.
Ev tried again, and although she felt ridiculous, Pirkko beamed. They went back and forth with a few more words and phrases—hello and goodbye, which were the same, and no, and my name is—and Ev stumbled over all the new sounds. Pirkko laughed a few times, but never maliciously. Mostly she smiled. She was so much less serious out here. It was hard to reconcile this young woman, her laughter lighting up the darkness, with the enforcer who’d exiled two men into the cold last triad. Maybe learning the language would give Ev some insight.
When they
’d finished walking around the city, they stopped at the main gate where Ev had first entered. In addition to the guard post, where there were always at least two people, there was a stock room full of spears, bows, staves, swords, and other weaponry that Ev had never used.
“What you know?” Pirkko said, gesturing around the room.
Ev picked up a staff, and Pirkko smiled, nodded, and picked up a second one, then pointed out the door. She went into the courtyard, and Ev followed. They faced off without another word. Pirkko came at Ev, spinning her staff, with a wild grin on her face. Despite the smile, her first attack was no joke, and Ev had to move fast to block it. She began to swing her staff to gain momentum for an attack of her own, but worry distracted her. She thought of Pirkko forcing those men into exile. How serious was this sparring? A few bruises meant nothing to Ev, but would Pirkko feel the same? Should Ev let her win to avoid any trouble?
Pirkko’s staff slammed into her side. Smoke. No more distractions. Ev sucked in a breath and retaliated hard. Pirkko stepped to the side, just out of range, but Ev almost caught her. Ev’s reach was longer—an advantage. She began to force Pirkko back, gaining ground one swipe at a time, keeping Pirkko on the defensive. In an instant between warding off Ev’s attacks, Pirkko raised her staff to swing it at Ev, and Ev brought her own weapon lower. She hit Pirkko’s legs, knocking her to her knees. Pirkko dropped her staff and raised her hands in surrender, laughing.
“You good with stick,” she said. “Good with sword too?”
Relief swept through Ev. Pirkko wasn’t angry. She smiled shyly and shrugged one shoulder. “Want to find out?”
Even knowing that they were sparring, play-fighting, not actually trying to hurt each other, Ev was happy to see Pirkko pull out two wooden practice swords. Pirkko proved to be better with a sword, and she disarmed Ev in a matter of minutes. Ev insisted they try again, and the second match lasted longer. But just when Ev had found her footing, Pirkko sent her sword flying out of her hand, dropped her own sword, and barreled into Ev. Ev fell backwards with Pirkko on top of her, and they rolled twice on the hard-packed snow. Ev ended up with Pirkko pinning her to the ground, and Pirkko locked eyes with her and leaned down so their noses almost touched. Ev didn’t breathe. What was she doing?
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