Ajee was never very religious, but apparently he’d gone to enough sermons to take all the warnings about “touched” people to heart. Superstitious garbage was Ev’s first reaction. Except now she knew it was all true. Alizhan possessed an ability beyond normal human senses—the simplest word for it was magic. If magic was real, then the Temple of the Balance was no longer preaching superstitious garbage, but prejudice.
“You have to get rid of her,” Ajee said, as if Alizhan was a thing that could be thrown on a refuse heap.
What would Alizhan sense, if she were standing here? Could she sense them both through the wall? Was Ajee really so concerned for Ev? Why was he raising his voice?
“You grow thornfruit and muck stalls, too,” Ev pointed out, unaccountably hurt by this description, as accurate as it was.
“Yes, and I know my place!”
Ev opened her mouth but had no idea what to say to that. She’d offered to stay on the farm with him and get married, and he hadn’t wanted that, either. Eventually she said, as neutrally as possible, “You think I should have left her in the market.”
“Yes,” Ajee burst out. “She’s a thief! Let the Houses sort it out between themselves.”
“If Alizhan’s suspicions are correct, people will die for what’s in that book,” Ev said. “People might already have died.”
“And soon you’ll be one of them!”
“She needs help, Ajee.”
“So she’s another one of your little rescues?” Ajee said. “She’s not a kitten, Ev. She’s a person. A person you don’t know.”
Ev had nothing to say to that. She didn’t know everything about Alizhan, but she knew enough. More than she could explain to Ajee.
He shook his head and made a sound of disgust. “I can’t believe it. All this time, I thought you were sensible.”
All this time, I thought I was in love with you, Ev thought and didn’t say. It had only been four triads since she’d brought up marriage, but it felt like years. Ajee was still wearing the red-and-black wedding clothes he’d greeted them in. Mama must have been taking his measurements. Ev could see now that some of the embroidery was unfinished, black threads dangling from his wrists. His trousers were unhemmed. Still, it was fast work on Mama’s part. Unless she’d already known that Ajee was planning to propose.
Had Ev been the last to know?
She huffed. The sound wasn’t quite a laugh, but more importantly, it wasn’t a sob. Had Neiran been protecting her by keeping this secret? It didn’t feel much like protection.
Maybe it was for the best that Ajee had rejected her. Even if Ev had been Ajee’s wife, she still would have helped Alizhan. And in that case, she’d have brought Alizhan home and Ajee would’ve thrown her out.
Ev didn’t want to be sensible. She wanted to do the right thing.
The thought was like a deep breath. It made her feel grounded, settled. She didn’t need to say it out loud to Ajee, to hear him scoff at her, because she didn’t care what he had to say anymore.
When Ev said nothing, Ajee stalked out through the courtyard. Ev stayed still for an instant. Winning an argument ought to come with a sense of triumph. Instead, a question hovered in the back of her mind: had they ever been friends? Ev didn’t want to answer that, so she went back to the kitchen to help her mother, and then she heard her father call her name.
He was no longer in the kitchen, but the Nightward wall of the kitchen was set with wood and paper screens to let the cool air flow through, so Ev could hear him. She went outside and found her father sitting in the shade of the house. In contrast to his usual stillness and self-possession, one sandaled foot was scuffing at the scrubby ground.
“Are you angry with me, too?” Ev asked.
A pause. “No,” he said. “I just want you to be careful.”
“That’s why you called me out here?”
“She’s very pretty,” her father said. He wasn’t looking at Ev, but at the shadow cast by their house. Only a few hardy shade-growing flowers dotted the rocky ground. “Alizhan.”
Ev hadn’t been expecting the subject. It made her seize up with fear. Before he could delve any deeper, she shot back, “What does that have to do with anything?”
He regarded her in silence for an uncomfortably long time. “Maybe nothing,” he said, as if it were a concession. “Just be careful.”
“You said that already.”
“It means don’t trust her, Ev,” Obin said. “Her, or anyone else, but be extra careful with her. I remember that girl from your first time working in the market, and that means she’s been working for Varenx House for a long time. Keep that in mind. And I see the way you look at her.”
“I look at her the same way I look at everyone else! With my eyes!”
He held up a hand, and Ev quieted. “I know you’re trying to do the right thing. I won’t tell you what to do. I wouldn’t know what to say. But I want you to have this.”
He pulled a coinpurse out of the pocket of his trousers, slid a ring off his finger, and handed both to her. The purse was heavy. Ev had seen the grey ring before because he always wore it, but had never examined it in detail. It was angular, two pentagon-shaped bands connected by a zigzagging line of metal. She slipped it over her index finger experimentally, but it was too big.
“You can put it on a chain if you want,” he said. “I don’t know if you’ll need it. But if you need to get out of the city, you can go down to the harbor and find a ship called And There Still the Curling Vines Do Grow—just ask around for Vines. Show that ring to anybody on the crew and tell them you’re my daughter. Don’t let them scare you off. They might not be friendly, but they’ll help you. But keep that to yourself if you’re ever in Adappyr.”
This was as close as her father had ever come to saying anything about his past. Ev’s brows drew together. “Why would I be in Adappyr?”
He shrugged. “Just in case.”
“That makes no sense. Whatever this is, it’s contained in Laalvur. We just have to find someone who can decode the book, and then go from there. We’ll have to be careful. There might be a trial. But I can’t imagine needing—” Ev looked inside the purse. No white palaad coins, just a pile of brown kalap tinged with green, but it was more money than she’d ever held in her hand. Where had all this come from? Had her father hidden it in the space under the pantry floor? Did he have other secrets? The ring implied that he did.
“Just take it, Ev,” he said. “Set an old man at ease.”
“I don’t see any old men around here,” Ev said with a smile.
Her father flapped his hand in dismissal of her joke, but said nothing. After a moment, she nodded and pocketed the treasure.
“We’ll understand if you have to leave and not come back for a while,” Obin said. “Well. Your mother won’t be happy about it, but she’ll understand.”
Leave? Ev had never even been to the villages on the other side of Laalvur. Was it fear or excitement at the idea of leaving that set her heart beating faster? “Are you talking about going into exile?” she asked. “Like when you left Adappyr?”
“No.”
That sentence shuttered the conversation, and Ev was disappointed, but not surprised. She should never have asked. But he’d been the one to bring up the past. Sometimes talking to her father was like navigating a maze with a dead end around every corner. Ev kept her face expressionless and said, “I should go check on Alizhan.”
She turned to go.
“Ev.”
Her father stood up and wrapped her in a hug. Enveloped in darkness and enclosed in the circle of his arms, for a moment, Ev felt as if nothing could hurt her.
7
Lyrebird shift, 12th Triad of Hirsha, 761
MY STAY IN NALITZVA AT the home of Rossin Tyrenx was a dull misery. I have lived through deadlier horrors, now, than the fetid breath and coarse beard of a man four times my age trying to kiss me, and yet it still makes me shudder to think on it. Had I not been myself, I might have w
orse things to remember.
But I am my parents’ daughter. I had ways of slipping out of his grasp and redirecting his attentions. So I returned to the decks of In the Shade I Saw My Love Go Walking disgusted and exhausted but mostly unharmed.
I was not sad to see the white stone of Nalitzva fade from view, although the motion of the ship made me sick again. We sailed home, rather than rowing, since the winds blow from Night to Day. It is much faster to get from Nalitzva to Laalvur than the other way around. As much as I wanted to escape Tyrenx’s clutches, I was in no rush to return to my parents’.
I lay wretched in my bunk for a triad, and when my seasickness receded, I walked unsteadily to the deck for some fresh air. There, I had time to reflect on what my parents would say when I arrived. They would not care that I hated Rossin Tyrenx, who spoke to me like a child and tried to grope me with his knobby fingers.
It was not long before Arav found me. “Crying girl,” he said. “We talked about this.”
I had not realized that I was crying, and the sight of his smile—the soft, sad way one smiles at a weeping person, tempering cheer with sympathy—made me cry harder.
Heedless of the danger, I threw my arms around Arav’s neck and sobbed into his shoulder. He took it with grace. I could not breathe enough to explain myself to him, but he did not ask me to. He stroked a hand down my back.
This is what I knew: my parents would force me to marry Tyrenx. He would force himself on me.
Never. I would force my hand against his face until he forgot his own name.
They kill our kind in Nalitzva. That is why my family fled so long ago. Our people had grown careless and shed their secrecy, and they paid for their mistake in slaughter. After that, we kept our secrets, even in warm and welcoming Laalvur. As soon as our family arrived, we set about erasing ourselves from history.
In our modern era in Laalvur, it is considered backward and uncivilized—the height of absurdity—to believe in magic. That is no accident. That is the work of my ancestors. They did it so that we might live. They destroyed evidence and laid hands on witnesses. They soothed the terror of the truth into a rumor. In dining halls and parlors and temples and harbors, everywhere, they made a great show of laughing and saying: how could there be people in the world who could make memories disappear with a touch? Has anyone ever seen such a person? Is there any proof?
Years and years my ancestors worked at this, their masterpiece, their own disappearance. They succeeded. They saved themselves from being hunted to extinction. It is the greatest erasure of memory in history—except it is nowhere in history.
After all, what good is a power like ours, if people know?
There are other kinds of magic, but ours is the most hated. The oldest tales portray our kind as untrustworthy, deceitful, manipulative, cheaters and betrayers by nature. Or they did, until they were forgotten.
Nalitzvans are right to fear us. Laalvuri are fools to dismiss their fears as old wives’ tales. There used to be many names for us in all the languages of the world, but my favorite is the Old Nalitzvan: smaroi. Lacemakers. Lace is a delicate art, an arrangement of absences all strung together with fine thread. As Lacemakers, we construct nothing from something. We make holes.
My ancestors must have thought it a great joke to go into the textile trade.
Like true lacemakers, our craft depends on our hands. I have heard that in the islands, they call our ability touch-magic, uheko, from their word for hand. There is no dexterity involved. Simple contact is enough, bare skin to bare skin. The fine control is mental rather than manual.
As an adolescent, I resisted the tedium of training. For years, I frustrated my parents by only being able to perform the simplest of erasures, wiping away the last few moments of someone’s memory. But I discovered in Nalitzva that with untrained raw force, it was possible to knock a man unconscious with a touch.
This experiment of mine had two trials, both borne of panic. In the first, I deliberately tore off my glove and swatted Tyrenx’s hand away. In the second—unintentional—he approached me from behind, slid his clammy hand under my braid to touch the bare back of my neck, and then dropped like a stone. Until that moment, I had thought only my hands could have that effect, but terror and revulsion amplified my powers. Had I paid attention to my training, I would have known this to be true of all intense emotions. In any case, both times, Tyrenx woke up confused, but not permanently damaged. He attributed his collapses to too much wine.
Gifted Lacemakers can reach back into someone’s memory and steal any moment they like. Those of us with the most perfect technique are not limited to moments. We can vanish people, places, words and ideas from the mind, although it is time-consuming and tiring to do so.
The highest degree of control, though, is to touch someone’s skin without touching their memory.
Startled out of my sobbing, I looked up at Arav. His stare was foggy and unfocused. I dropped my arms and leapt away from him, putting my hands behind my back.
“Arav?”
He blinked. Then smiled. “Yes, crying girl?”
“I told you not to call me that.”
“But how else can I get you to make that face, with your eyebrows all scrunched together?”
I rolled my eyes.
“No, not like that, like this,” he said, and imitated my scowl with exaggerated ferocity.
I laughed despite myself, momentarily reassured that I had not damaged him, and Arav broke into a grin. I knew then, with rare clarity, that the right thing to do was to turn away. Every moment Arav spent in my company, he was in danger.
And yet I stayed.
For him, I thought, I would learn the control I had always lacked. Until then, we would both have to wait. I did not touch him again on the ship, not even with my gloves on, and he did not try to touch me. That stretched my willpower to its furthest limit. I could not stay away. I learned which shift he slept, and which he worked, and I adjusted my schedule so we could spend every waking minute together. We knew without speaking of it that our time together was precious, that we both wanted an impossible thing, and we were similarly determined to reap what we could from such a paltry harvest. Even in each other’s company, we were always left wanting more. I lived in hope of getting what we wanted, which is the sweetest torment.
We did not stop when the voyage ended. I was able to use my parents’ distaste for the dirty work of gardening against them. I claimed to be spending all my time there, and as I had to sneak back into the house through a path I had worn into some bushes, I usually had the dirt and scratches on my clothes to prove it. Parneet knew I was up to something, since she and her staff had to do the work that I was leaving unattended, but she did not like to involve herself in matters outside the garden. She claimed to be indifferent to my affairs, but none of her staff mentioned my absences to my parents, for which I was very grateful.
It was then that I learned to cultivate loyalty. Had the gardeners not kept silent at Parneet’s orders, I could have manipulated their memories, but I found it more pleasant to manipulate the household finances to their benefit instead. When I made a public fuss about how we did not pay our gardeners enough, my parents simply acquiesced without examining my motives more closely. I had always manifested such a distaste for politics, after all, and I had been perfectly compliant with their wishes of late—why should they not grant me this one small service? Sometimes it is easier to operate in light than in shade.
Arav and I carried on this way, meeting in secret whenever his ship was docked in Laalvur, for months. When I was not with him, I worked fervently on my control. I shook hands with our guards, with priests in the temple, with vegetable sellers in the market. I stumbled into strangers in the street by practiced accident, brushing my bare hands against them. If they made indignant exclamations, if they looked at me with clarity afterward, I knew that they remembered our exchange and that I had succeeded.
It took half a year before I would put my bare hand in his
. Other young men would have pressured me for more, or lost interest. Arav possessed surprising stores of patience.
“Don’t be scared,” he told me, intertwining his fingers with mine.
“I’m not,” I said, but I was. I had still never explained it to him. My parents had drilled into me that our survival depended on secrecy. But my silence was motivated by something other than the protection of my fellow Lacemakers. It was selfishness. I worried that Arav would not love me if I told him the truth.
“You’re so worried all the time. It’s just hands, Ya-ya.” No one else called me that, but Arav had always liked to give me nicknames. Doubling a sound in a child’s name is a common endearment. My parents had never done this. They were not much for endearments.
Ya-ya brought to mind shouting or laughing or singing. It was an absurd, childish nickname that did not suit me at all. I loved it.
Arav held our hands up between us for a moment. “No harm will come of this. But I’ll stop if you want to.”
“I don’t want to stop,” I said. I wanted more. I wanted to tell him everything. But the words would not come, so I closed my mouth.
“I would never hurt you.”
“I know,” I said. Arav was always so strikingly honest, so overwhelmingly sincere. I believed him in a way that I could never believe anyone else. Have I ever known anyone so pure? Even now, thinking of the way he gripped my hand and looked into my eyes still makes my heart full to bursting. “That’s not what I’m afraid of.”
“Then what are you afraid of, Ya-ya?”
That I will hurt you, I thought. I said, “Volcanoes. Waves. Medusas.”
“Sensible,” he said. “And here I thought you were afraid of getting caught walking the streets of the Marsh hand in hand with a poor boy.”
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