I just stood there, frozen. And then I started to talk.
"I sat with his body for hours before I cleaned it up," I said. "Part of me expected . . . I don't know. For him to wake up, maybe. Or for me to wake up from the nightmare." I let out a little sound. Something small and pained. "Then I had to deal with it. Wrap up his body. Find a bucket and fill it with warm water. Get a bunch of old rags. Imagine standing there at the linen closet trying to figure out how many rags you need to clean up your father's blood."
I choked, but not from my currentgift this time--on tears. I hadn't cried around another person since my currentgift developed. I had thought it was just out of the question for me now, like asking people rude questions or laughing when someone took a spill on an icy road.
Isae began to mouth a prayer. Only it wasn't one of comfort or even the one a person said when someone died. It was a blessing, for a sacred place.
Isae thought the place where my father died was sacred.
I knelt next to her, wanting to hear her voice as it shaped the words. Her hand wrapped around mine, and it was more than strange, touching someone who I didn't even know, didn't even like. But she squeezed tight, so I wouldn't let go, and finished up the prayer quietly.
I still didn't let go.
"I've never been able to tell someone that before," I said. "It makes people too uncomfortable."
"Takes more than that to make me uncomfortable," she said.
Her cool fingers sweep over my cheekbone, catching tears. She tucks a curl behind my ear.
"Your definition of a good memory needs work," she says, softly, the very gentlest of jokes.
"I hadn't cried in seasons, unless I was alone," I say. "No one was ever there to comfort me, not even my mother. All the tragedies of my life, they're too hard for most people to handle. But you could handle it. You could handle whatever I told you."
Her hand is still behind my ear.
Then it's in my hair, twisting the curls around her fingers.
And I kiss her. Once: soft, brief.
Again, harder, with her kissing me back.
Again, like we can't stand to be apart.
My rough hands find the back of her neck, and we're pressed together, fitted together, tangled together.
We bury ourselves as deep in this little pocket of happiness as we can get.
CHAPTER 13: AKOS
THE EXILES FIT THEM into temporary housing all stacked on top of each other, the beds dug right into the wall in metal-lined slots. It wasn't a permanent arrangement, but it would do for a few days--that's what the exile who showed them their beds had said, anyway.
Cyra took the topmost bed--they weren't wide enough to fit two people, so there was no chance of sharing--because she was a good climber, and Teka, equally nimble, took the second highest. Sifa and Eijeh took the lower two beds in the stack, so Akos found himself right in the middle. Between two Thuvhesits and two Shotet. It was like fate had given up on subtlety and had decided to just start poking at him.
Even though there was a sheet of metal separating him from Teka's bed, he still heard the slide of sheets as she tossed and turned all night. He woke to the woman who slept in the next column over dropping to a half crouch below him. There was something about the way she moved, the way her legs bent, that he recognized.
"Must be losing my touch if I can rouse you," the woman said, roughly, as she pulled on a pair of pants. She glanced up at him.
"I know you from somewhere," he said, swinging his legs over the edge of his bed and dropping to the floor. He curled his toes against the cold of the ground.
"I was there when you earned your armor," she said. "One of your observers. You're Kereseth."
Earning armor required three witnesses. It had taken him a long time to get Vakrez Noavek, the general, to agree to summon them for him. Vakrez had sneered at the idea that someone who wasn't Shotet-born could kill an Armored One. It had been Malan, his husband, who talked him into it. If he fails, so what? he had said, nodding to Akos. You prove a Thuvhesit isn't fit to wear our armor. And if he succeeds, it reflects well on your training. Either way, the gain is yours.
He had winked at Akos then. Akos had the feeling Malan got his way with Vakrez more often than not.
"Good to see you've found your footing," the woman said. "That business with the Armored One was a bit unorthodox."
She nodded to his wrist, where he'd marked the loss of the animal as surely as he would have marked any other life. A strange thing, to the huddle of Shotet who had granted him armor. He had put a hash through the mark like Cyra told him to, though.
He didn't cover up the marks when the woman looked them over, like he might have around his family. But he did run the tip of his finger across the line that belonged to Vas Kuzar. He hadn't decided yet whether he thought of it as a triumph or a crime.
"Enough chatter!" Teka growled from the above bunk. She threw her pillow, hitting the woman in the head with it.
Akos had gotten spare clothes from an exile about his size the night before, so he got dressed and splashed water on his face to wake himself up. Cool water ran down the back of his neck and followed his spine. He didn't bother to dry it. Ograns kept their buildings warm.
When he stepped outside to go to the mess, though, he realized that for the first time in a long time, nobody was telling him where he could and couldn't go, or chasing him so he had to hide. He decided to keep walking. He went past the mess hall, an old warehouse the Shotet had repurposed, and toward the Shotet-Ogran village of Galo.
The Shotet had done such a good job of adapting that he couldn't tell them apart from Ograns most of the time, even though Teka had said this village was full of exiles. He caught a few Shotet words passing by one of the market stalls, an old Shotet man bickering over the cost of an Ogran fruit that looked like a brain and glowed, faintly, with some kind of dust. And the fabric one of the women was shaking out of her window was stitched with a map of Voa.
The permanent structures were bent into each other, some walls warped from age. Some of the doors opened into each other, warring for dominance in front of the shops. Alleys only as wide as his shoulders led to still more shops buried behind the first row.
There were hardly any signs--you had to figure things out by poking your head inside. Half the objects they were selling weren't familiar to him anyway, but he got the sense Ograns liked their things small and intricate, if at all.
He felt jumpy, like someone was going to catch him walking around and punish him for it. You're not a prisoner anymore, he kept telling himself. You can go wherever you want. But it was hard to really believe it.
Then he caught a scent on the air that reminded him so much of jealousy dust he couldn't help himself. He ducked into one of the alleys, turning sideways so he wouldn't scrape his shirt on the damp stone, and inched closer. Vapor huffed from a window up ahead, and when he peeked between the bars, he saw an older woman bent over a stove, stirring something in an iron pot. Hanging all above her were bundles of plants, tied off with string, and from floor to ceiling, wherever there was room for a shelf, were jars marked in Shotet characters. The cluttered space held knives and measuring cups and spoons and gloves and pots full to bursting.
The woman turned, and Akos tried to slip out of sight, but he wasn't quick enough. Her eyes trapped his, and they were as bright blue as Teka's. She had a beak of a nose, and her skin was almost as fair as his own. She whistled at him between her teeth.
"Well, come in then, you may as well help stir," she said.
He bent under the doorframe. He felt too big for her narrow shop--was it a shop?--and too big for his own body. She came up to his chest, and she was slim, her arms muscled despite her age. There was no place for the feeble here, he thought. He would have asked Cyra what became of the feeble-bodied who dared to defy the Noaveks, but he didn't want the answer.
He took the spoon from her.
"Clockwise. Scrape the bottom. Not too fast," she said, and he
did his best. He didn't like the sound the metal spoon made against the bottom of the pot, but there was nothing for it. There wasn't a wooden spoon in sight. Trees probably tried to kill you if you cut them down, here.
"What's your name?" she said gruffly. She had moved on to a countertop only as wide as her hips, and was chopping leaves he didn't recognize. But dangling right in front of his nose was a bundle of sendes leaves. Where had she gotten them? Could they grow on Ogra? Surely not.
"Akos," he said. "How did you get sendes leaves here?"
"Imports," she said. "What, you think it's cold enough to grow an iceflower here?"
"I don't think the warmth is really the greatest obstacle," he said. "No sun, now that's a problem."
She grunted in what sounded like agreement.
"They don't risk flying in new shipments often," she said. "You're not interested in my name?"
"No, I--"
She laughed. "I'm Zenka. Don't get so twitchy about it, I'm not about to scold a person for caring more about the plants than they do about me. That would be downright hypocritical. Slow down, you'll beat the poor things half to death at the rate you're going."
Akos looked at his hand. He'd picked up the pace of stirring faster than he meant to.
He slowed his hand. Clearly he was out of practice.
"You ever get hushflowers here?" he said.
"Not much good they do me," she said. "Don't know how to handle them, and they're not to be trifled with."
He laughed. "Yeah. I know. My town had a fence around them to keep people from hurting themselves."
"Your town," she said. "Where's that, then?"
He realized, too late, that he might not want to run his mouth about being Thuvhesit in unfamiliar company. But it had been so long since he'd met a person who didn't already know who he was.
"Hessa," he answered, since he couldn't see a way around it. "Not my town anymore, I guess."
"If it ever was," she said. "Your name's Akos, after all. That's a Shotet name."
"I've heard," he said.
"So you know about iceflowers, then," she said.
"My dad was a farmer. My mom taught me a few things, too," he said. "I don't know anything about what grows on Ogra, though."
"Ogran plants are ferocious. They live on other plants, or meat, or current, or all three," she said. "So if you aren't careful, they'll bite your arm clean off, or shrivel you from the inside out. Harvesting here is more like hunting, with the added benefit of nearly poisoning yourself every time you take a step into the forest." She was smiling a little. "But they can be useful, if you can get them. They need to be cooked, usually. Takes away some of their potency."
"What do you make with them?"
"Been working on a medicine that will suppress the current, for those whose currentgifts are too strong for them here," she said. "A lot of Shotet find it unlivable. I could use the help, if you're interested in chopping and peeling and grating."
He smiled a little. "Maybe. Not sure what else I'll have to be doing while I'm here."
"You don't intend to stay long."
She meant that he didn't intend to stay on Ogra long, but Akos heard it, first, as bigger than that. How long would he live, before he met his fate? A day, a season, ten seasons? He felt like a deep-sea creature on a hook, being drawn toward the surface. He couldn't help but go where the line pulled him, and death waited above the water. But there was nothing he could do about it.
"My intentions," he said, "don't really matter anymore."
The mess hall was too quiet when Akos got to it, his fingertips stained green from some Ogran stem he had cracked open for Zenka. Too quiet, and too busy, everyone rushing around but not really going anywhere. He was scanning the room for Cyra when Jorek came up to him, his skinny arms bared by his shirt--which, judging by the frayed edges near his shoulders, he had cut the sleeves off of himself. Maybe with his teeth.
"There you are," Jorek said. "Where'd you go? Everyone's losing their minds."
Right away, Akos felt so tired he might collapse right there on the mess hall floor, on top of a discarded bread crust. "What's going on?"
"The Ogran satellite brought down a bundle of news a few minutes ago. They're beaming it to the screens here as soon as they can. But apparently it's a doozy," Jorek said. "They wouldn't say much, but they hunted down Cyra, and I don't think it's just because Isae Benesit thinks she's our sovereign."
Akos spotted Cyra across the room, from the shine of silverskin on her head, which was bent toward Aza, one of the exile leaders. She was scowling, which he knew didn't mean she was mad, even though that's how it looked. When she was mad, she was a statue. When she was laughing, she was scared out of her mind. And when she was scowling . . . well, he didn't quite know.
He was making his way over to her when the screens--there were four in the room, suspended from the middle in a cluster, like a chandelier--lit up and started playing footage. At first it was just the standard news feed, and then it switched over to a shot of a man's face. He was fair-skinned, with a deeply lined face and a stern brow. He was thin, and narrow through the shoulder, but he didn't look fragile--the opposite, really. He looked like he was using every bit of himself for muscle and energy, with nothing to spare. Most peculiar, though, was the dusting of freckles across his nose, too youthful to belong to such a stern and aged face.
Everyone in the mess hall went still.
"I am Lazmet Noavek," he said, "and I am the rightful sovereign of Shotet."
CHAPTER 14: CYRA
MY FATHER'S FACE IS a spark.
And all my memories are kindling.
A thousand moments of his eyes skimming right over me as he scanned a room. And his taut, wiry arm with its rows and rows of kill marks. And the vein that pulsed in the center of his forehead when someone displeased him. Those were the images I had of him, sealed away in my mind, but the worst ones were not those.
I never saw him in his worst moments, because I was never invited into the room--a favor, I now knew, though at the time it had felt like exclusion. Ryzek had been invited, though. When he was young, he had attended executions, and interrogations, and brutal training that treated soldiers of Shotet as disposable. And when he was older, he was forced to participate, to learn the art of pain the way others learned music or language, and to build a reputation for himself every bit as terrifying as my father's.
So my worst memories of Lazmet were actually memories of Ryzek, or my mother, finally dismissed from his presence. My mother's hands trembling slightly as she removed her necklace, or undid the buttons of her gown. Ryzek clamping both hands over his mouth so no one would hear him sob--though of course I knew what to listen for--or screaming at Vas for no reason, screaming himself hoarse.
Now Lazmet Noavek himself stared at me from the screen above my head, and I forced myself to straighten. He was looking at a sight, of course, not at me, but it felt like the first time he had ever made eye contact with me, and I wanted to bear up under his scrutiny. He was the worst of Ryzek bound in sinew and bone, but I still wanted his approval, my father's approval.
Maybe not your father, a voice in my head said.
"I am Lazmet Noavek, and I am the rightful sovereign of Shotet," he said. He looked thinner than he had the last time I saw him, and more lined, but he was otherwise unchanged. He had begun shaving his head when his hair thinned, and his skull was smooth except for the bones that protruded on either side at sharp angles. The defined muscle that wrapped around his bones, and the armor that he wore even now, could not quite disguise how narrow he was through the shoulders. He was tanned and weather-beaten--not brown like I was; he had the look of someone fair who has been scorched by a harsh sun for many seasons. His face was rough with the start of a beard.
Only Ryzek and Vas had been there when he supposedly died, out on a sojourn. They had been on a separate mission, and a secret one: finding and capturing an oracle. Ever since my father learned my brother's fate--the first chil
d of the family Noavek will fall to the family Benesit--they had both been searching for a way out of it. Every sojourn was a new chance to hunt down an oracle. On this particular sojourn, they had been attacked by local armed forces and, outnumbered, Lazmet had fallen, forcing Ryzek and Vas to flee. There had been no body, but no reason to suspect Ryzek hadn't told the truth. Until now.
I wondered if they had even been attacked at all. Where had Lazmet been all these seasons? He couldn't have been in hiding. He would never have surrendered his power willingly. He must have been imprisoned somewhere. But how had he gotten out? And why had he returned now?
Lazmet cleared his throat, and it sounded like rocks tumbling down the face of a cliff. "Whatever you have previously heard from the woman-child who murdered both my wife and my son should be disregarded, as she is not the leader of Shotet based on our laws of succession."
Eyes shifted to me from all angles, then flicked away again. I told myself I didn't care. But I remembered my shadow-streaked hand clamping on my mother's arm, to push her away, and shuddered. I had not killed Ryzek, but I couldn't claim to be innocent of my mother's death.
I could never claim to be innocent again.
"I speak for the people of Shotet, a people who have for hundreds of seasons been scorned, insulted, and disparaged by the nation-planets of the Assembly. A people who have, despite that constant scorn, become strong. We have met every possible criteria for inclusion in the Assembly. We settled on a planet, and still we were disregarded. We formed a mighty army, and still we were disregarded. We were given a fated family, spoken into being by all the oracles in the solar system, and still we were disregarded. We will be disregarded no longer."
Despite my fear of him, I felt something surge within me. Pride in my people, my culture, my language, and yes, my nation, which I had never stopped believing in, though I had disagreed with the methods my family had used to establish it. I was buoyed by his words even as I was afraid of what they meant, and when I looked around, I felt certain I was not the only one. These people were exiles, enemies of the Noaveks, but they were still Shotet.
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