Maybe it didn’t matter that neither of them understood. He couldn’t possibly have said anything friendly, aiming his weapon like that.
Guns were unreliable enough that mainlanders almost never used them. Islanders did, although there was a one-in-two chance that it wouldn’t fire. If it fired, the shot might go astray. Still, Thiyo didn’t relish the sight of it. He tried to look like he was considering a response, not like he was a foreigner engaged in suspicious activity who couldn’t even put two words together in Kae.
Shouting drew his attention behind the group of men. The crew that had rescued them was making their way down the path. The translator was yelling.
When Thiyo caught her eye, she looked aggrieved. There had only been one rule, and still they’d broken it within two hours of landing. She’d probably spoken on their behalf with the elders in Kae, and now Thiyo and Ev were making a fool of her.
But Thiyo had needed to warn Ev, and coming here was the only way he could think of.
He shifted closer to Ev while the translator engaged the man with the gun in an argument. The lines of Thiyo’s drawings smeared under his bare feet. It made no sense to stand between Ev and that gun as though he could protect her. What she needed was someone who could speak for her, and Thiyo couldn’t even speak for himself. Unwilling to stand behind him, Ev came around to his side, but remained close enough that their shoulders were almost touching.
They watched as the man with the gun spoke curtly to the translator, and she responded in anger. The gun didn’t waver. Some of the sailors were reaching for weapons of their own.
The man looked down the barrel of his weapon. They were dead for sure.
And then—a sound. He didn’t recognize it as a sound at first, this experience that took hold of his body and overturned his mind. He couldn’t breathe or think while it was happening. His heart seemed to have seized up, but he wasn’t dead. His knees hit the sand, and dimly, he noted that Ev and the others had come down with him. An age passed before he could associate the unearthly sound with the open mouth of one of the sailors. The translator’s husband. How could such a thing emerge from a human throat? It was like no voice he’d ever heard, somehow high and clear and low and rich all at once, all-encompassing and overpowering.
A shape emerged from the sound, an undulating, intricate form that sculpted the air. Once he’d dragged that thought from the murk of his mind, something shifted. He no longer wanted it to end. What had been threatening and monstrous now glimmered with beauty. He felt no pain. He couldn’t move, but what did that matter? He was privileged to be here, alive in this moment, listening. Tears slid down his cheeks.
The man with the gun loosened his grip and his weapon dropped harmlessly to the sand. The translator’s husband stepped forward to collect it, and once it was in his hand, he closed his mouth. The singing ceased.
The loss of the sound knocked the wind out of Thiyo. His ears rang. A long time passed before he felt steady enough to stand, and even then, he did it with a hand up from Ev. She looked a little dizzy herself. The sailors had remained standing, but now Thiyo saw them removing wax from their ears. They’d come prepared. Once he could think again, Thiyo recalled his teacher telling him stories of such people. As he had been called a speaker, they were inadequately named singers. It was a rare gift, one he’d never given much thought to, but he wouldn’t forget it.
Would the experience have been different if he’d still possessed his own gift? Did the song have words? Thiyo dismissed the bitter thought soon after it occurred to him. He didn’t need to know any words to identify the song as wordless. Words would have been a useless ornament on top of such a thing. It pained him to admit that there were powers beyond language.
The translator was lecturing the man who’d held the gun, and he was talking back, but their argument ended quickly. Then she turned and spoke to Ev, firm but disappointed. Thiyo searched for landmarks in the sea of sounds—names, places, anything he recognized. But all he could tell was that the translator was delivering a message, and she wasn’t happy about it.
Ev said something very brief. It didn’t sound rebellious or angry. Maybe she was acknowledging what the translator had said.
Were they prisoners here? Surely not. But they weren’t guests, either. Thiyo guessed the translator had just agreed to ferry them off the island to solve the problem of everyone else on Kae wanting to murder them on sight. The people of Kae wouldn’t want a foreigner like Ev in their midst. If they recognized him, they’d regard him as little better than a foreigner, at best. True isolationists would consider him a traitor.
The translator was talking again. Ev was listening carefully. The translator’s crew were arrayed behind her, varying from discombobulated to disgruntled, with the exception of the singer. He looked sad. The man who’d held the gun was leading his three comrades back toward the camp.
No, Ev and Thiyo weren’t wanted. Their rescuers had come here to deposit their kill and collect their profits, and Ev and Thiyo were refuse that had clung to their prize. Had Ev negotiated a share for the two of them? He doubted it. She wouldn’t have known how likely they were to respect that kind of effort. She’d probably thought their miraculous rescue was payment enough. So now the two of them had done all the brutal, terrifying labor of killing that monster and all they had to show for it were a few scars and Thiyo’s broken head.
If he had to be speechless for the rest of his life for killing that medusa, Mah Yee ought to have made him rich, too. But the gods were funny like that.
Thiyo wasn’t laughing.
Ev spoke. She didn’t raise her voice, but she sounded very serious. She gestured to herself, and then to Thiyo, and then to their sand drawings.
There was murmuring behind the translator and among the camp members, and then a discussion began. Ev didn’t say much, but Thiyo could tell she was defending their position on the beach. She’d understood his warning and she was trying to impress its importance on the others.
It had only been minutes, but it felt like hours. All this talking tormented him. None of it made sense, no matter how hard he listened. But finally, Ev turned to him and took both his hands. “Thiyo.” Yes, that he understood. How tragic that recognizing the sound of his own name represented progress to him now. Ev squeezed his hands and said something incomprehensible. From the way she held his gaze, it was important to her.
And then she said a word he wished he couldn’t understand.
“Hoi.”
That must be the decision the people of Kae had come to. Thiyo and Ev weren’t their problem, so they’d pass the foreigner and the traitor along to someone else to deal with. After a year in Nalitzva and long months of wandering, Thiyo was going home.
6
Ten Ways to Make a Man Yours
Iriyat’s insistence that she’d respect Alizhan’s choices meant there was no lock on the bedroom door. No guard outside. Alizhan was free to wander the halls of Varenx House. A lifetime of practice avoiding the other servants—servants, she corrected, since she was no longer among their number, if she ever had been—made it easy to slip into the ghost’s room. Unlike hers, his door was locked, but that didn’t trouble her for long.
Like all the bedrooms, the ghost’s room had no windows, just a stone screen on the shade side of the house. It was shadowy and cool inside, but not quiet. The same low hiss of anger that always emanated from the room only got louder as Alizhan crept inside. There was a man in the bed, propped up against some pillows, his eyes and mouth half-open in unfocused stupor.
Orosk Varenx. Her grandfather.
He might once have been imposing, but nearly two decades in bed had left him thin. Still, he wasn’t as ancient as expected. It was difficult to see the white in his blond hair, and his face was slack, but only lightly lined. If Alizhan didn’t know better, she’d think he could get up at any moment. But Iriyat’s attack had left him breathing and little else.
He was clean-shaven and his hair wasn’t overgrow
n. She’d been doing more than just feeding him. But why go to the trouble? Some last vestige of sentiment?
No. Iriyat must have thought he could be useful to her somehow. Maybe she’d wanted to lure Merat back here. To torment her. It was too late for that, and whatever Iriyat’s reasons had been, the ghost was Alizhan’s advantage now.
If she could help him remember.
Orosk Varenx was a former Council member, wealthy and influential, and the current Council would believe him if he returned to tell the story of how Iriyat had wronged him. Twenty years was not so long. Some of them would remember him. His own body would serve as evidence.
Alizhan sat on the edge of his bed and took his hand. When she’d restored Thiyo’s memories, holding his head had been most effective, but she felt a strange reluctance to do that. She’d never met this man. Besides, if Iriyat’s journal had any grain of truth in it, he’d tried to prevent Alizhan’s birth. If she restored him, they were unlikely to get along.
Still, she had to try.
She took his hand. Orosk groaned. “I’m sorry,” Alizhan murmured. No matter what he’d done, he was vulnerable to her now, and she was hurting him. “I don’t know how to do this without causing pain.”
Orosk’s mind was in bad shape. He reminded her of some of Merat’s victims, ripped open and left empty. There was none of Iriyat’s usual care here. That made sense, given what Alizhan knew of their fight. Iriyat hadn’t had the time or the focus to achieve her seamless, undetectable alterations. That hadn’t been her goal. She’d wanted to kill him and she’d nearly succeeded.
Alizhan wished she didn’t understand what Iriyat had been feeling in that moment, but she did.
But perhaps understanding Iriyat could help her repair this. Lacemakers, Iriyat had written in her journal, enough times that the word had become Thiyo’s cipher. According to Iriyat, Lacemakers made holes. With her eyes closed, Alizhan visualized Orosk’s damaged mind as a dark expanse. At the edges, the frayed white threads of what had once been his consciousness trailed into the void. Could she connect them back together? Was there enough left to mend?
With Thiyo, it had helped if both of them focused on what needed to be remembered. They’d had to communicate. Alizhan couldn’t speak to Orosk. Not even when she was touching him and searching through his mind. But he must be in there, locked away, and she knew he was angry. That seemed a sensible place to start. Thiyo had only needed one word to begin deciphering Iriyat’s journal, and Alizhan knew far more than one word. She’d read Iriyat’s account of what had happened to this man. She called all the details she could into her mind’s eye and concentrated on them: the cell in the basement, Merat with a steaming mug of tea, Orosk with a long metal implement in hand, Iriyat naked and enraged. She pictured Iriyat’s hands on Orosk’s face, and thought of the pain she’d felt when Merat had tried to alter her memory. A piercing, stabbing jolt through the mind.
He groaned again. Alizhan opened her eyes. She bit her lip, ready to apologize.
“Who,” he rasped. His voice creaked, unused for years. He didn’t finish the question.
He’d spoken! Alizhan dove back in, eager to continue. Spending time so close to another person normally exhausted her, but the idea that she might mend whatever Iriyat had torn apart steadied her. It was painstaking work to seek out each delicate thread—a thought, a memory, a feeling—and connect it to the next. Alizhan wasn’t a Lacemaker, but even if she succeeded, the fabric of Orosk’s mind would always be a kind of lace. There wasn’t enough thread to make cloth. Still, she would repair what she could. Meticulous and methodical, the work calmed her. Unlike her first attempt with Thiyo, this brought her no pain. She felt at home in her body. Orosk hadn’t groaned again, either, so she wasn’t hurting him.
As time passed, her neck began to ache. She opened her eyes to stretch. They were still touching hands, and when she tried to remove hers, Orosk clenched it. His eyes—an unsettling shade of bright blue—were on her.
“Who,” he said again.
Holding his hand, she didn’t have to guess the end of the sentence. Orosk might once have been a powerful Lacemaker, unreadable to her, but there were no shields between them now. He wanted to know who she was. “It doesn’t matter,” she said.
She rolled her shoulders and went back to work. The quiet came over her again. There was just the darkness before her, and stitch by stitch, she was illuminating it. She kept a part of her mind focused on what she knew of her grandfather. He’d appeared in Iriyat’s journal as a distant authority figure, motivated by wealth and power and status. Iriyat had feared him. It was impossible to say if they’d loved each other.
Eventually, Alizhan couldn’t ignore the demands of her body. Her stomach was growling. At some point, she’d broken into a sweat. When she opened her eyes, the world wavered in her darkening vision, overlaid with the image of the white lace of Orosk’s mind. She blinked.
Orosk regarded her carefully. She’d brought that expression back to him.
“You asked me who I was,” she said. “The real question is who are you.”
“Orosk. Orosk Varenx.”
He’d understood her and responded accordingly. Hope flared inside her. That was progress. But was it enough? How long before he’d be capable of accusing his daughter before the Council? She had to restore him fast.
But first she had to eat before she collapsed. She couldn’t be found unconscious on the floor here. She had to be watchful until she could finish her work. She forced herself to her feet, unsteady, and staggered from the room.
Orosk had spoken to her. He’d remembered his name. And she hadn’t lost consciousness or been nauseated. It had been strenuous, but satisfying. Was this how using her gift was supposed to feel?
Alizhan’s hands and feet tingled with returning sensation as she hurried to the kitchen. Maybe there were still thornfruit left. Something she could eat right away. There was a stack of flatbread on the counter and she seized it. It was only then that she sensed Yiran.
It had been months since she’d last been in the kitchen with Yiran. Longer since Yiran had made her failed gesture of friendship. The air buzzed with hostility and curiosity.
“Never thought I’d see you again,” Yiran said.
Alizhan nodded, her mouth full. A logical assumption. She hadn’t been sure she’d come back alive.
“Can’t say I’m happy about it,” Yiran continued. “Still don’t know why she keeps you around.”
Alizhan swallowed the bread she was chewing. She’d never been allowed to talk about these things before, and besides, she’d never known the real answer. But if Iriyat wanted things to change between them, she was going to have to deal with the consequences. Alizhan wasn’t going to keep her secrets any longer. “I’m her daughter.”
Yiran burst out laughing. “You?”
Alizhan shrugged and shoved more bread into her mouth.
“You’re crazier than I thought—it almost makes me feel bad for you,” Yiran said. “Her daughter.” She laughed again. “She’s never been married—and God knows she’d never get pregnant without being married, as virtuous as she is.”
Everyone was always going on about how important faces were, and how certain people looked alike, but nobody seemed to think Alizhan resembled Iriyat in any way. Alizhan preferred it that way, even if a resemblance to Iriyat would have made it easier to convince the Council she was telling the truth.
Yiran was still laughing to herself and shaking her head. “You poor, addled thing.” She ducked down and pulled out a basket of thornfruit from a low shelf. “Here, you always liked these.”
Alizhan accepted the basket. She was happy to be thought of as witless if it would get Yiran to feed her. She hadn’t felt so hungry since before Ev and Thiyo—there was a path she didn’t want to go down, a dark and dangerous corner of her mind. It didn’t bear thinking about, her life before. There was work to do and it could only get done if she focused. She pushed herself up on the counter, sat do
wn, and dug in. She’d only turned down thornfruit earlier because Iriyat had been the one offering.
She’d thought her conversation with Yiran was over—usually the other woman was eager to get away from her. But Yiran didn’t even scold her for sitting on the counter. She just kept talking. Apparently Alizhan had, at last, made herself entertaining in a way that outweighed whatever unsettling effect other people felt in her presence.
“You sound like you’ve been reading those pamphlets,” Yiran said. “Have you? Is that where you got the idea that you’re Iriyat’s secret baby?”
“What pamphlets,” Alizhan said around a mouthful of thornfruit.
“Oh, you know, there’ve always been ones with wild stories,” Yiran said. “But lately they’re beyond. This one guy writes all the best ones. He goes by… Vesper, or something. Some made-up name. Cook saves them sometimes, even though they’ve got drawings and Iriyat says they’re a sin against God’s Balance. Let me see if I can find her stash.”
Vesper. The hero of The Sunrise Chronicles. The writer must be a fellow fan. Alizhan would have to tell Ev—and there it was again, a part of her mind she’d blocked off and barricaded. Do not pass.
Yiran went to her knees to search through the bottom drawer in a stack, her braid falling over her shoulder, the black end curling in her lap. She pulled out pots and pans and piled them on the floor. Then, at last, she let out a triumphant “ha!” and withdraw a crumpled few pages from the back corner of the drawer. Alizhan raised her eyebrows. Lately, people were always giving her pamphlets to read.
She sorted through half of them, scanning the headlines and the images, uninterested. Secret Cabal of Adpri Exiles Controls Laalvur. STARS NOT REAL? Night Sky a hoax! Ten Ways to Make a Man Yours. Nalitzvan Empire Invented Plague. The Sunrise Chronicles Continue: Chapter 42. Sideran ha-Katavi and Iriyat ha-Varensi Secret Lesbian Tryst WITH PICTURES! Except for that last one, which Alizhan knew was a lie, they weren’t even about Iriyat. Why was Yiran showing them to her? “One of these is fiction. The rest are garbage.”
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