Nightvine

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Nightvine Page 32

by Felicia Davin


  “I was going to provide you with the cipher,” Iriyat continued. “When you were ready.”

  “When I was ready.” Alizhan couldn’t muster the energy to do more than repeat what Iriyat had said in a dead tone. When could a person be ready to find out her mother had been lying to her and exploiting her all her life?

  “There was so much I wanted to tell you, and I thought I could do it more clearly in writing, but instead I’ve caused you a great deal of suffering. So I want to apologize and make things right. And I think that starts with this.”

  With a single, elegant movement of her arm, Iriyat dropped both books into the fire. Alizhan jumped up, meaning to plunge her hands into the blaze. Flames were already licking at the pages, which were curling, crackling, and crumbling into the fire pit. She hesitated. Then Iriyat was upon her, moving faster than Alizhan had guessed, pulling her arms behind her.

  “Don’t, darling. I hate to see you hurt yourself.”

  Those two books together represented months of struggle. She and Ev had sailed across the ocean to find someone who could read the encoded text. Thiyo had labored for weeks on that translation. Ev and Thiyo had died.

  With that thought, all the fight went out of Alizhan. Iriyat had a tight grip on her wrists, but it wasn’t necessary. There was nothing worth fighting for.

  Alizhan didn’t resist when Iriyat spun her around. She didn’t even startle when Iriyat pulled her into a hug.

  “I was very sorry to hear of your loss,” Iriyat said.

  “Don’t.”

  “If you ever want to talk about it, I’ll be here. You know now that I also lost someone I loved, so I understand.”

  Not even the allusion to her father made Alizhan soften. There was nothing left in her but ashes. She turned her head to watch the smoke rise from the fire. At last, Iriyat drew back. “Will you sit?”

  What choice was there? Would her legs even hold her up? Every time she thought about Ev and Thiyo, she wanted to crumple. The chair was the only thing that kept her from puddling on the terrace.

  “Please eat. I went all the way out of the city to get these, you know. One of those dusty little villages on the outskirts. Orzatvur, I think? It was the funniest little farm. A big, hulking, surly Adpri exile sold me these. From the way he treated me, you’d have thought I was holding his family hostage.”

  Orzatvur. Iriyat had found Ev’s family somehow. Panic spiked. “Or threatening him,” Alizhan muttered.

  Iriyat’s laugh was as delicate and manicured as her fingertips. She picked another fruit out of the bowl and squeezed it till it split. A drop of red juice plopped onto the tabletop, ruining the geometric pattern of the tiles. “Indeed. I can’t imagine why.”

  Were Obin and Neiran—and even Ajee, God help him—in danger? Ev wasn’t here to protect them. They don’t even know she’s dead. Alizhan’s voice went so low it cracked when she said, “You’d never hurt them, of course.”

  “Of course,” Iriyat said smoothly. “But I wanted to meet them, since they raised the young woman who stole you away from me.”

  At least they were giving up on the pretense that the Umarsad family were random strangers. “That’s not what happened.”

  “Ah well,” Iriyat said, contemplative and nostalgic. “I suppose all parents feel that way about the people their children fall in love with.”

  Alizhan went still for a moment. She’d become accustomed to her grandmother’s bigotry and disgust. Merat had loathed Ev and Thiyo. Alizhan had conflated her hatred of them with her ruthlessness, and she’d expected Iriyat to be just like Merat. But she wasn’t. What Iriyat had said about Ev stealing Alizhan away was a casual figure of speech. It was jarring to realize Iriyat didn’t hate Ev. She’d even said she was sorry.

  Alizhan still didn’t want to hear it.

  “My parents felt significantly less charitable toward Arav,” Iriyat said. “My mother was a monster, as you know. It’s grisly, but I am grateful to you for killing her. Sardas told me.”

  It was hard to think through the fog of grief and panic. But there was something important: Iriyat had slid almost imperceptibly from my parents to my mother.

  Because her father was still alive. Alizhan had been the little ghost in Varenx House, and he’d been the other ghost. The one in the room upstairs who never came out. Alizhan’s pulse picked up just thinking about it. But what good would it do her?

  “But let’s put that aside. I wrote it down because it was the only way I knew to share it with you, but I want things to be different between us now.”

  “I don’t want anything from you.” Alizhan didn’t even want justice anymore. She just wanted to be done.

  “I know this is a difficult moment for us, but I believe we’ll get through. We just need some time to talk. I have to leave for Adappyr in a triad, but I was hoping you’d come with me. I won’t force you, of course. It’s your choice. Although I worry about leaving you alone in this state, so if you want to stay here, I’ll have to have someone—Sardas, perhaps—watch over you.”

  “A choice,” Alizhan said flatly. “Go to Adappyr with you or stay here under Sardas’s constant surveillance.”

  “I just want you to be safe.”

  “Fuck off,” Alizhan said, standing up. “I’m going back to bed.”

  Alizhan didn’t even have the energy to pull the curtains closed. She collapsed onto her bed and lay there, staring at the ceiling. She preferred to sleep in total darkness, when she had preferences at all. But her room was never bright, since there were no Dayward windows, only a perforated stone wall on the Nightward side meant to let cool air pass through. As it had always been, the room was full of potted plants bursting with blooms of all colors and leaves reaching in all directions. Iriyat’s hybridized creations.

  Something scratched at the stone screen. Alizhan ignored it, but it continued for many long minutes, developing a steady rhythm. Not an animal, then.

  Her bedroom was on the second story. There were no trees or vines on the Nightward side. Anyone who’d climbed up the stone screen had gone to a great deal of effort to contact her. Alizhan didn’t get up. There was a short list of people who might have taken the trouble, and she didn’t want to see any of them. She didn’t want to see anyone who wasn’t Ev or Thiyo.

  The scratching stopped. “Fuck you,” came as a low hiss through the screen. “I know you’re in there. Get up and come talk to me.”

  The voice was that of an angry teenage boy. Kasrik. Alizhan pushed herself upright and went to crouch next to the screen. The holes were too small to get a good visual, but from the sound of his voice, she could tell where Kasrik was. “What?”

  “What do you mean, what? I came to give you the news. Fair warning, all of it’s bad. We’ll work on getting you out of there, too.”

  “Ev and Thiyo are dead,” Alizhan said. There was no way to soften the blow—or maybe there was, and she didn’t want to.

  “Who the hell is Thiyo?” Kasrik said. “Never mind. I’m sorry about Ev. I liked her better than you.”

  Alizhan said nothing.

  “Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. Shit, Alizhan, I don’t know what to say. I’m really, really sorry. But let’s talk about the rest of it. Did you get that book translated?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Of course it fucking matters! Do you even know what’s going on here? God. I’m sorry about Ev, I am, but while you were gone, Iriyat got her hands around this city’s throat and if we don’t stop her, no one will.” There was a pause, and then a tightly rolled tube of paper was pushed through one of the holes in the stone. It dropped to the floor and uncurled. Another one followed. “These are some pamphlets. I don’t have time to stay here and tell you everything. Me and Eliyan have work to do. But try to be in here during Rosefinch shift, and I’ll come back. I worked it out with Vatik so he’s the one patrolling the grounds while I’m here. You can still trust him.”

  Alizhan had let most of his words pass over her, an
d she hadn’t bothered to pick up the pamphlets, but that gave her pause. He shouldn’t know about Vatik. Kasrik had lost his powers when he’d been tortured. “How do you know?”

  “I’m getting better,” he said, a touch of pride in his voice. “Ev told me to pay attention to faces, and that was all I could do for a while. But once I started to learn that, little by little, the other stuff—thoughts, feelings, you know, all that came back. Sometimes I see Mala when Vines is in port, and she thinks it’s getting better because I’m young and still growing. I’m not the same as I was, but maybe I could be, eventually.”

  “Good,” she said softly. That was one less burden to bear. “I’m glad.”

  “Does that mean you’ll stop sulking? Ev wouldn’t want you to sulk.”

  Alizhan huffed. Presumptuous little shit. It helped that he was right. “Fuck off.”

  “Alizhan.” He said her name like a warning. “She got Mar.”

  “What do you mean, got Mar?” There was no point in asking who she was.

  “Read the pamphlet,” Kasrik said. She heard the sound of his shoes scraping the stone as he climbed down.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you, as always, to my live-in science consultant, who never gets to read these novels without spoilers, but who is nevertheless willing to entertain discussions about hypothetical ecosystems, cryptography, and the motivations of fictional characters. The live-in science consultant also keeps me alive, in both a figurative emotional sense and a literal one, since without him I would subsist on peanut butter eaten out of the jar, our house would fall down around me, and I’d be too miserable to do anything about either problem. That counts as helping to write the book, I think.

  I am also grateful to Lis and Kristin, fellow writers and trusted beta readers, for all their encouragements and commiseration, and to my brother, who once described to me a course that he took on how to save people from drowning, and who probably doesn’t realize how instrumental he was to this book.

  And thank you to you, for making it this far. Book 3 is finished, I promise.

  About the Author

  Felicia Davin is the author of Thornfruit, Nightvine, Shadebloom and Edge of Nowhere. Her short fiction has been featured in Lightspeed, Nature, and Heiresses of Russ 2016: The Year’s Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction.

  She lives in Massachusetts with her partner and their cat. When not writing and reading fiction, she teaches and translates French. She loves linguistics, singing, and baking. She is bisexual, but not ambidextrous.

  * * *

  You can find her at feliciadavin.com or on Twitter @FeliciaDavin.

 

 

 


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