“An excellent question. Also rather rude.”
Alizhan wasn’t deterred. Good manners were not among her skills. She stopped trembling and focused all her attention on the prisoner. “If you’re an islander in prison in Nalitzva, then how and why do you speak Laalvuri?”
“There isn’t a good Laalvuri word for it,” he said, which wasn’t the answer Ev expected, although it was hard to say what she’d expected. Was he some kind of international criminal? Or was he like them, unjustly imprisoned?
“You know, we’re not all the same. I don’t go around calling you mainlanders. I know you’re Laalvuri.”
“Well, which island are you from, then?” Alizhan said, as if she were being very patient. “Tell me and I’ll call you that instead.”
“I’m from Hoi,” the prisoner said. There was a note of amusement in his voice, which was usually a good sign in people’s dealings with Alizhan, but Ev didn’t want to think well of him just yet. “And I’d very much like to get the watery hell out of Nalitzva and go back there, but first I want to know what you think I smell like.”
“It’s not always a smell,” Alizhan said, unfazed by the Hoi’s priorities. She waved a hand in the air, drawing a series of vague circles, in a gesture Ev guessed was supposed to be helpful and explanatory. “Sometimes it’s a feeling. Or a color. A sound. An image. Words, maybe, if someone’s really loud. Anyway, I can’t tell much about you, which might be because you’re in so much pain, or—”
Ev wanted to hear the end of that sentence, but the prisoner interrupted. “Well, prison is terribly hard on my complexion, you understand. I shudder to appear before you in this state, but I suppose it is a lesson in what life is like for those who haven’t been graced with dazzling good looks.”
Ev didn’t have time for this. For him. She supposed under all the filth and bruises he might have been handsome, but she couldn’t imagine a less important subject. She crossed her arms over her chest and tried not to tap her fingers with impatience.
“So I haven’t been able to attend to my toilette as usual. And the beds in this place! Let’s not even mention the food. Or lack thereof. A little ennui is to be expected. Anyway, clearly you’re a mind-reader. I’d say ‘why didn’t you just say so,’ but I suppose the answer is obvious, given where we find ourselves.”
Alizhan nodded.
In a different tone, rougher around the edges, the prisoner said, “You’re lucky these barbarians just threw you in prison instead of killing you on the spot.”
“Lucky,” Ev repeated. He knew about magic, this man. He wasn’t suspicious or even surprised. He thought magic-hating Nalitzvans were barbarians. Maybe he could help them after all, even if he was glib and snide. Was he really in pain, like Alizhan said? Ev squinted at his hand.
“Yes, lucky,” he said seriously. “In the same way I’m lucky that it was only one hand, and the wrong one, at that.” With his left hand, he gestured at the hand in his lap. Now that Ev was invited to examine it more closely, she could see it was swollen. Bruises darkened his skin. Some of his fingers were bent at unnatural angles. “We’re all marvelously lucky, aren’t we?”
“They broke your hand,” Ev said, outraged. She felt guilty for all her uncharitable thoughts toward him. She didn’t like him, but he didn’t deserve to be maimed. And what could he possibly have done to incur such an inhumane punishment? What would the guards do to Alizhan and Ev if they couldn’t escape? A frisson of fear ran down her spine.
“Beauty and brains,” the prisoner drawled.
He was really testing the limits of her sympathy, this stranger.
“Why?” Alizhan said. “What did you do?”
“What did you do?” he shot back. Alizhan probably couldn’t tell that he was glaring at her when he said it, since she rarely looked at anyone’s face, but Ev could.
“Nothing,” Alizhan said, unmoved by his tone.
There was a long silence, and finally the prisoner relented.
“Well, I wrote something,” he said. “The guards are possessed of strong literary opinions and they took it upon themselves to end my career.”
“What did you write? Was it libel? Did you criticize the royal family?” Ev said.
“Neither. It was both glorifying and truthful.” A joyless smile. “But really, why talk about how we ended up here—a dull, trivial subject—when instead, we could talk about how to get out?”
“It’s not right,” Ev said. “We didn’t do anything wrong. We don’t deserve to be here, and whatever you wrote, you didn’t deserve that. It’s not like you killed someone.”
“Yes, yes,” he said. “I’m so glad to know your sense of justice is offended. Now, about that escape plan. I hear you need to get to llyr. To get to him, you need someone who can speak Nalitzvan and someone who knows the palace. Coincidentally, this shift Mother Mah Yee and all your gods have rained blessings down upon you,” here he paused, and with his good hand, the prisoner made a graceful, sweeping gesture, indicating himself, “granting you the good fortune of meeting me. Get me out and I will get you in.”
“More of a trickle than a rain,” Alizhan said, laughing.
“More of a drought,” Ev muttered. Then she mentally pushed aside all the nonsense he’d said, and responded to the important part. “You know the palace?”
“And you speak Nalitzvan as well as Laalvuri?” Alizhan said.
“Naturally.”
His words gave Ev pause. She hated his little reminder that he’d eavesdropped on her private conversation with Alizhan earlier. But it was more than that. What could he possibly mean by “naturally”? His Laalvuri was perfect. Nothing about him made sense. Islanders rarely left their home. Ev had never met one in Laalvur, but she knew there was a trader who sold medusa venom and products made from it. She’d assumed Nalitzva would be similar. What was someone from Hoi doing in prison here?
“Also, the window will never work. Alizhan, can you tell me about the guards?”
Alizhan shook her head. “They’re too far. There’s too many people.” And then she added, “How do you know my name?”
“Ev and I had a chat,” he said. “If the guards come closer, could you read them?”
“Probably.” Alizhan shrugged. Then she said, caught between curiosity and suspicion, “Ev doesn’t like to talk.”
“She does,” he replied. Ev didn’t appreciate being spoken about as if she weren’t there, but the prisoner was already continuing. “We have to distract the guards somehow. Get them to open the door. There are almost always two of them, and we’ll only have a second. Ev can take one and you and I will take the other.”
“Ev could take both if she had her stick,” Alizhan said. As always, she had far more confidence in Ev than Ev did.
“Could she,” the prisoner said, and for the first time, he really smiled. It flashed across his face and was gone. Alizhan smiled in return, a quick mirror. Ev felt very far away. How had they already come to like each other?
“That’s good to know,” the prisoner continued. “But as Ev does not have her stick, I won’t assign her the task of taking out two very large men by herself. Once we get out of here, I’ll direct you to Ilyr. You can probably even get your book back, whatever you want it for.”
“Why are you helping us?” Ev asked.
“I should think it obvious. I want to get out of prison.”
“Why are you helping us with Ilyr,” Ev said flatly. The prisoner always slipped out of the way of questions. He hadn’t said his name yet, he’d barely explained what landed him in prison in the first place, and he hadn’t explained how he could possibly know his way around the palace. Alizhan’s instinct wasn’t enough for Ev to trust him.
“Oh, that,” he said. “It’s a long story.”
“We’re very busy, as you can see,” Alizhan said, gesturing at the cell.
“I do like a captive audience.”
Alizhan laughed. Ev stared at the prisoner until he began to talk.
; Acknowledgments
A whole community of marvelous, talented, brilliant, kind-hearted, good-looking people helped this book come into the world.
First among them is my live-in science consultant, who has answered questions about the physics of tidally locked planets, the chemistry of invisible ink, and the nervous systems of sea monsters that I invented—that we invented. With endlessly renewable patience, my science consultant listened to hours of soliloquy about this book, much of it overwrought in both senses of the word. (If you were faking the patience, thanks for that, too.) The science consultant also repeatedly predicted that I was, in fact, capable of writing a novel. His hypothesis has been confirmed.
I am grateful to my friends and fellow writers Lis, Kristin, and Ryan for beta reading and making suggestions, and most of all for every exclamation-point-filled or all-caps text, DM, or email live-blogging this book to me. Have you ever been so overcome with delight that you had to stand up and walk out of a room so you could clutch your face and remember how to breathe in private? I have. I hope to repay all of you in kind.
Thank you also to my parents and my brother, who are always, always willing to talk about books, even books they hadn’t read and weren’t allowed to see until after publication, like this one.
And to every fandom I’ve been in, where I learned as much about stories as I did in grad school, and to all the internet strangers and friends who crossed my path before this, thank you for teaching me that I could.
About the Author
Felicia Davin’s 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.
Thornfruit Page 31