“I don’t want to give you false hope. No matter what happens, it will take time,” Biha said. “And even if he learns to speak again, it may never be the same.”
“Still,” Ev said. That was better than what she’d thought.
“I’d like to meet him.”
“You’ve seen him,” Ev said. Biha had already made a point of mentioning it. Since the whole crew slept in the same place, everyone had seen both of them. Ev preferred not to dwell on it. “He won’t say much right now—and that’s assuming I can get him out of that hammock and up here. He might refuse.”
“He might not,” Biha said.
Ev went back down to check. Thiyo was awake, his stare fixed on nothing. He looked at Ev when she spoke to him, but nothing in his face indicated comprehension. His expression drooped.
“I know,” Ev said. She sat in the hammock, reached for his hand, and squeezed it. “Or I don’t know, but I’m imagining it, and it’s awful. I’m so sorry, Thiyo. So sorry.”
Ev stopped talking. After a moment, she realized she’d been waiting for a response, and none was forthcoming. Thiyo’s sad expression hadn’t changed.
“Biha wants you to come up so she can meet you. And you can meet the rest of them. I haven’t really met them, either, because she’s the only one I can talk to. Her husband is named Ngua. He’s very tall and handsome—you should come up just to look. I know you’ll enjoy that.”
Not even a smile. Ev should have expected that. Hard to laugh at a joke made in a language you don’t understand.
“Please get up,” she said, tugging gently at his hand. He didn’t move. She gestured for him to sit up. He narrowed his eyes at her, making it clear he didn’t endorse her plan, but eventually he complied. “Good. Now we’ll go up.”
Ev stood and waited for Thiyo to join her. After another extremely skeptical look and a length of time that communicated his reluctance, he swung one leg over the edge of the hammock, and then the other. When he stood, Ev remembered he was naked and turned her head.
Foolish. She’d known he was naked. They’d both been naked together, lying in that hammock one shift ago. He’d touched her leg. But that… that had felt a little bit like a dream, something she’d imagined in her exhaustion, so she’d been able to let it wash over her. With both of them standing, Ev more or less clothed and Thiyo completely unclothed, Ev couldn’t bring herself to look. He was already so vulnerable, and he couldn’t talk to her, and everything was so complicated.
“I think you need clothes,” she said, her head still turned. No sound came after that. “I know no one up there will care, and you don’t care, but I care, so please—at least a pair of trousers?”
They’d been dressed for the Estvan climate while thrown overboard, in furs and leather and wool. Their clothes had been in a salt-encrusted pile under the hammock, and Ev had already dressed. She could kneel down and sort through what remained without getting too much of an eyeful.
When she moved to step around him, Thiyo reached for her arm. At his touch, she stopped. They were side by side now, with Ev facing the hammock and Thiyo facing away from it. His fingertips brushed the underside of her jaw. She turned her head back toward him without consciously intending to. When she met his gaze, he glanced down at his naked body, then back up again.
Then the corner of his mouth lifted in the barest trace of a smirk. He raised his eyebrows.
Ev could have kissed him. It was the closest he’d come to a smile since he’d realized he’d lost his gift. It was the first sign she’d seen that he was still Thiyo. Instead, she slapped him lightly on the shoulder, then knelt down, dug his trousers out of the pile of clothes, and handed them up to him.
He sighed dramatically and accepted the ragged piece of clothing by pinching it between his thumb and his forefinger.
When he’d dressed—such as it was—Ev stood back up and put both hands on his shoulders. She looked him in the eye. “You’re one of the ones who gets back up again. If you could understand what I just said, you’d make a dirty joke about it, but you can’t talk and I’m not going to do it for you. So you’ll just have to re-learn to do it yourself.”
The crew introduced themselves to Thiyo in an incomprehensible, alien babble of sounds and hand gestures. It might have been eight different languages or it might have been one. He had no way of knowing.
He had no way of asking for clarification, either.
All those hundreds of thousands of words and sounds and gestures he’d archived in his mind, gone. His life’s work, gone. With every new sentence that passed over his head, he wanted to die a little more. As a child, he’d watched his mother speak and interpret at the All-Island Council, directing the flow of words with such grace. He’d spent the event trying to catch sounds and meanings as they rushed by. He’d imagined standing in the shallows with his feet sinking into the sand, clear water lapping at his legs while shimmering schools of fish darted around him. Even as an untrained child, he’d been able to snag a few. Now the water was still and murky, and no matter how many times he put his hands in, he came up empty.
Thiyo had uncurled himself from that hammock and come up here to make Ev stop blinking those big brown eyes at him like she was going to burst into tears at any moment, like he was the saddest thing she’d ever seen. Now he didn’t know why he’d bothered.
These were his people, or close enough. Their language wasn’t so different from the one his mother had sung lullabies in. He had no idea what they were saying.
Next to him, Ev found his hand and squeezed it. She didn’t know what any of them were saying, either. That was cold comfort.
Ev could talk to one of them, at least. A woman on the short side of average, with abundant black curls and a taste for white shell jewelry. That woman had stood next to another sailor and clasped his hand when she’d spoken. Their matching necklaces signaled an exclusive agreement. He was tall and good-looking, with a wide nose and a big smile and hair almost as long as his wife’s.
There were six others. He guessed that the woman with short white hair who’d spoken with her hands was the tracker. She was as athletic as the rest of them, but something in her was softer—she didn’t have the air of someone who regularly harpooned sea monsters or hauled their corpses into a net. The others, varied as they were in size and shape, all did. Thiyo would still bet on Ev in a fight against most of them, if it were one-on-one. But that wasn’t likely to be the case.
Ev didn’t seem to be considering that question. She didn’t feel worried about these people. What had they said to her to make her trust them? Shouldn’t she, as the lone mainlander among islanders, be on guard? Instead, she stood next to Thiyo smiling and nodding at the crew, who were arranged in a loose circle on the deck. They’d been a successful hunting party many times, judging from their tattoos.
Some of them regarded Thiyo with friendly smiles. A smile was one of his few ways of communicating, which meant he didn’t want to waste it. He kept his expression neutral. He’d smile if they deserved it.
Ev was chatting with the interpreter again, and then the interpreter was speaking to the whole group. They nodded. Then Ev pulled at Thiyo’s hand, looked right at him, touched her chest and said “Ev.”
That, at least, he understood. She must have asked the interpreter to do this for him. A second round of introductions, simplified into syllables he had half a hope of catching.
The interpreter, next in line, touched her chest and said… something. Biha? Maybe that was it. That was as close as he came to comprehending anything. He lost track of the other crew members’ names as soon as they were spoken.
And then it was Thiyo’s turn. All nine of them were looking at him, and his heart leapt into his throat. What if he couldn’t do it? What if he couldn’t even say his own name? He thought he knew how to make those sounds, but he’d thought he was speaking something comprehensible to Ev when they’d awoken, and he hadn’t been. What an abject humiliation it would be, to say his own name wro
ng in front of all these people. Panicked, he looked at Ev and clamped her hand in his.
She tried not to let anything show, but there was a hint of disappointment—a fraction of an instant where her mouth turned down. Then she squeezed his hand back. She gestured at him, saying, “Thiyo.”
Kae rose from the water, a mountainous mass blanketed in velvety green and dotted with brilliant blooms. The shadows were a little shorter than in Laalvur, the light a little brighter, but after so long on the Nightward continent, Ev welcomed any color of light. The crew blindfolded her as they approached. Thiyo was exempt from this treatment, presumably because he was an islander and already knew how they were planning to strip the medusa of its prized venom. Ev submitted to the blindfold without protest. As soon as they set foot on the white beach and walked away from the ocean, it smelled like flowers.
She and Thiyo were given a room to share. There were two beds. The walls were only paper screens and the roof was a thatch of dried leaves of some kind. Ev had seen stone structures higher up in the mountains as they’d sailed in. She wanted to ask Thiyo about it. She wanted to ask Thiyo about a lot of things.
He’d been sullen since she’d said his name for him in front of the crew. Had she done the right thing by speaking for him? Or should she have waited for him to try it himself? But he’d squeezed her hand and looked so pitiful—she’d had to do something.
They communicated mostly through facial expressions, body language, and touch. It was strange to touch someone so frequently after so much time in Alizhan’s company, and it was especially strange to touch Thiyo, who’d begun their relationship—whatever it was—by teasing her about being a prude and then biting her on the neck when they’d infiltrated Ilyr’s wedding. But Ev was scared and lonely, Thiyo must be more so, and touch was all they had.
If Alizhan were here, this wouldn’t be a problem. She’d know exactly what Thiyo was thinking. Maybe she could touch him and make him remember somehow. They’d work things out. But Alizhan was Merat’s prisoner—or maybe Iriyat’s prisoner by now, if the ship had arrived in Laalvur and Iriyat had overcome her mother. It was painful to think about how far away she was. How much danger she was in.
“We’re not supposed to leave this room,” Ev said, although she didn’t know why she bothered. “My presence here will disturb people. It’s funny, you know, I’m used to being singled out for my skin or my height, but the sailors were all colors and shapes and sizes. Biha said it’s the fact that I’m a stranger, that I can’t speak the language—” Ev paused, suddenly guilty that she’d brought this up, as though Thiyo could understand what she was saying. “Well, you probably know all this anyway. She said everybody knows everybody here. If anyone saw me, they wouldn’t recognize me, and then they’d ask why I was here and who my family was, and if I couldn’t name anybody they knew, they might kill me. It sounds outrageous and I wish you’d tell me it’s not true.”
He didn’t. Couldn’t. There was nothing to do but keep talking.
“Biha said she’d bring us food and water and as soon as she finds a ship that’s willing to take us, we’ll leave. I tried to impress on her that we have to go to Laalvur to find Alizhan, but she wouldn’t promise that we could get there. So I don’t know where we’re going next. But we survived that fiery fucking medusa and I don’t plan to get executed for leaving this room, so we’ll stay here.”
Thiyo had been pacing the room while she spoke, but he looked up at the end of her speech. Every time he looked at her, Ev hoped for a sign of comprehension. There was nothing.
“You do want to come with me, right? To Laalvur? To save Alizhan? Because if not, we’re close to Hoi. You could go home.”
Thiyo glanced at her, then went to the door of their cabin. He slid the paper screen open just wide enough to peek out.
“We’re not supposed to go out there. You’re in just as much danger as me!”
Thiyo looked at her, motioned out the door with a tilt of his head, then left the cabin.
“Thiyo!”
He strolled down the packed earth road as if nothing were wrong. There were only a few structures around, all wood, paper, and thatch like their cabin. Ev rushed after him, checking to make sure they weren’t seen. She caught up to him and put a hand on his shoulder to try to stop him, but he placed a hand over hers and continued to walk forward. It wasn’t a strong grip. She could have gotten away from him and run back to the safety of their room if she’d wanted.
She followed Thiyo out of the encampment and all the way down to the beach.
He scanned the horizon when they arrived, then began to poke through the foliage that was growing on the inland side of the dunes.
“Not that it’s not beautiful out here but we really shouldn’t—” Ev didn’t finish her sentence. It was a halfhearted attempt to stop him and she knew it. Words weren’t going to do the trick. She’d have to drag him back if she meant to follow the rules. But discovering what Thiyo wanted was more important. That he’d shown a desire to do anything other than lie in bed was remarkable.
Thiyo found a stick, snapped all the twigs off until it was only a single long branch, and then went toward the sand. He put the end of the stick into the soft white sand and began to move it.
Could he still write? Why hadn’t Ev thought to try that?
But he wasn’t writing, or if he was, Ev didn’t recognize any of the characters. She gave him a few more minutes to finish, nervously checking the path back to the camp. When she turned around again, Thiyo stood in the middle of a series of drawings. Ev recognized the largest as a map of the world—the ocean bisecting Night and Day. Thiyo had marked Laalvur with an X, as well as one other place.
“Is that Adappyr?” Ev asked. By its location on the Day continent, it was the only thing that made sense. Thiyo had also helpfully drawn a volcano not far from the site of the city.
He didn’t answer, but he swung his stick to point her toward another drawing. A book. When he saw Ev studying it, he touched his chest.
“A book. And you. Is this Iriyat’s journal? You’re trying to tell me something you found in Iriyat’s journal?” Ev’s heart sped up—because they were communicating, and because he was almost certainly trying to give her some bad news. She just had to figure it out.
Thiyo pointed toward another drawing. A wave. He pointed back toward the journal.
“Iriyat survived the last wave in Laalvur, but she lost Alizhan’s father,” Ev said. Thiyo wasn’t listening to her. How would she know if she’d interpreted the drawings right? “She became obsessed with waves.”
Thiyo swept his stick toward the caricature of the volcano next to Adappyr. He dragged the point of the stick in a series of zigzags radiating out from the city. A few short, violent lines came out of the top of the volcano.
“A quake and an eruption,” Ev said. “In Adappyr?”
The point of the stick landed on the journal again.
“Iriyat wrote about it,” Ev guessed. “But has it already happened? Or is it in the future? I don’t understand.”
There were a few more small drawings to Ev’s right. Thiyo walked toward them, first pointing at the islands on the map. Then he pointed at two stick figures.
“Us,” Ev said. “Ev and Thiyo.”
Thiyo looked up at those sounds, and for a moment, Ev thought he was going to nod his acknowledgement. He could recognize their names, couldn’t he? But he returned his attention to the drawings. His stick landed on them in a sequence. Two stick figures. The islands. A sailboat. The Dayward coast. Far inland, Adappyr. The volcano.
“You want us to go to Adappyr,” Ev said. The quake and eruption he was worried about must be in the future. What had he read in Iriyat’s journal? It must have been bad. When they’d met in the prison, he hadn’t even wanted to take a few minutes to free the other prisoners, and now he wanted to undertake a dangerous, weeks-long trip out of their way? “Thiyo, we can’t do that. Alizhan is alone in Laalvur. She needs us.”
No
response. Ev walked up to him and put her hand on the stick. Reluctantly, he let go. Ev pointed to the figures. “Ev and Thiyo,” she said, then pointed to the islands and the sailboat. “Need to sail to…” She stretched her arm to the left until the point of the stick touched one of the X marks. “Laalvur.”
Thiyo frowned at her.
Maybe he needed an illustration of her point. Ev wasn’t a great artist, but above the map, she drew three stick figures. Two tall and one short. She added a long braid to the short one. “Ev and Thiyo,” she said, pointing at the tall ones. It ought to be obvious who the short figure was meant to represent, but Ev still pointed and said, “Alizhan.” Then she indicated the city again. “Laalvur.”
Thiyo exhaled through his nose. He bent down and pointed forcefully at the lines he’d drawn around Adappyr. The volcano. Farther away, his drawing of a wave. Then Laalvur.
“You want to go to Adappyr first, then Laalvur,” Ev said. “We can’t leave Alizhan alone like that, Thiyo. She needs us. And we need her! She can fix you, Thiyo.” Maybe it wasn’t true, but God, Ev wanted to believe it. And whether or not Alizhan could heal Thiyo, they needed to find her. As quickly as she could, Ev drew a face in profile with lines radiating from the open mouth. She pointed to stick-figure Alizhan and then to the speaking figure. “Alizhan. Thiyo. See?”
Thiyo stood up, walked so close to Ev their noses almost touched, then reached for the stick. Instead of taking it from her hand, he put his hand over hers and made them point the stick together. He only pointed to two of the images, over and over.
Wave. Laalvur. Wave. Laalvur.
“Shit,” Ev said.
With the ocean at his back, Thiyo saw them coming before Ev did. Four unfamiliar men were hurrying down the path to the beach, and the leader was holding a musket. When they got within firing range, he aimed it at Ev.
Thiyo stepped in front of her. The man addressed him, speaking Kae.
Shadebloom Page 4