“You were seen in the village,” Halelitha said. “Did you encounter anyone outside the village?”
From the way Halelitha pitched her voice so only Ev could hear, Ev assumed this question meant did anyone try to kill you on the way here? and she hurriedly said, “No.”
It had been a long hike. And why would the trail have been maintained if no one else used it? Thiyo’s interest in plants and animals far from the path had been strategic—and a little bit fanciful. If it was his goal for them to stay hidden, he could have accomplished that by dragging them into the foliage. Ev was glad he hadn’t. She added, “We didn’t see anyone but those women down there, and they seemed to recognize Thiyo.”
Halelitha snorted. “Thiyo knows a lot of people here.”
Ev wasn’t good at interpreting poetry, but she could guess what that meant.
“Follow me. Not you, you stay there, we start when I return. Life is short and our work unfinished.” Halelitha conveyed to Thiyo that he should remain seated and led Ev inside. She brought them into a room that might once have been a bedroom, but there was no bed in it. The walls were lined with bookshelves and the center of the room was divided by three more shelves, all packed tightly with books. The floor was piled high with books that didn’t fit on any shelf. The room was a maze.
“Wow.”
“I have no use for books—after I read, what’s the point of keeping them?—but my wives treasure the past in objects, and so do our children and grandchildren. They don’t understand me. Seven children, fifteen grandchildren, two great-grandchildren, and not an ohokutho among them. Not for lack of trying on my part!” She laughed, then shook her head. Her tone sobered. “And now you’ve brought my best student back speechless. Eighty years old and what trace will remain after I go? A dusty heap of books.”
“And a family,” Ev pointed out. “And many other students.”
Halelitha flapped her hand dismissively, but then she smiled. “I suppose you have a point. You know in some ways, Thiyo’s as much my grandchild as any of them. I taught him and his mother.”
“He must be glad to see you again,” Ev said.
Halelitha let out a bark of laughter. “I doubt it! I worked that boy hard. And he was nothing but a nuisance. Lazy and rude.”
“Hm,” Ev said, since both agreeing and disagreeing felt dangerous.
“It’s a shame Tayihe lost Korowi so young. Thiyo should have had brothers and sisters. I know Tayihe was disappointed Thiyo didn’t inherit his father’s gift for tracking, but he still had an extraordinary talent. When I think of the other children Tayihe and Korowi could have had, the potential…” She sighed. “But Thiyo has both of their blood, and even if you’re an ungifted foreigner, I’m pleased to see him with you. You could give him healthy children. Gifted children, maybe.”
Ev opened her mouth, then closed it.
“I know he could have fathered children with someone else while he was with Ilyr, but you mainlanders get so ridiculous about these things. Ilyr would probably have been enraged by that. Can you imagine?”
Ev could. Children hadn’t been the issue for Ilyr, but Halelitha had landed eerily close to the truth of their break-up. Ev didn’t enlighten her about the details.
“And it’s old-fashioned of me, to think people have a duty to share their gifts with future generations, but then again, I’m old. I come by my old-fashioned ways honestly.”
Eager to change the subject, Ev asked, “Do they live in the village? Your family?”
“Some of them live in this house. You saw one of them earlier. A grandchild. Teha. She didn’t get my gift, and she won’t ever be what Thiyo was, but she’s shown some talent. Her mother, my sixth child, lives with me, as do my seventh child and one of my wives. They’re out fishing. Don’t worry. They won’t kill you when they come back.”
Ev had questions, but she worried they’d sound suspicious, ungrateful, or intrusive if she spoke them aloud.
“Stay in here until I settle things with the village. That back left corner stack has twenty Laalvuri books in it—twelve books down from the top. Don’t let them fall on your head. I will speak with my neighbors. When the emperor spoke, men bowed their heads in respect.”
Ev wanted to ask if Halelitha was the emperor in that comparison, but she’d already left.
Ev picked her way through the stacks, careful not to knock anything over, and found the books in Laalvuri exactly where Halelitha had said she would. It took a bit of maneuvering to free them from the stack. The library tended toward the ancient and the philosophical, and Ev was disappointed, but she had nothing better to do than read old books, so she settled in for a few hours.
Thiyo and Halelitha both returned from the lesson in a foul mood. Halelitha dragged him into the kitchen and barked out instructions that he undoubtedly didn’t understand, but she must have demonstrated what she wanted, because half an hour later, they had produced a few dishes together and Ev was invited to eat with them. As she sat down on the floor in the central room of the house, she recognized the same grain that Tayihe had served, as well as some of the vegetables. There was also a small bowl filled with red paste on the table. Thiyo pointed at it and let his head drop toward one shoulder, his eyes half-closed.
“Is that the same fruit you were trying to show me in the forest?” Ev asked. “Is it poison?”
“Not poison,” Halelitha said. “Not when it’s cooked. It brings a pleasant languor. But more importantly, it loosens the tongue.”
Ev shot the bowl a wary glance.
“It’s not for you,” Halelitha said. “It’s for him.”
Thiyo didn’t look eager to eat any.
“I thought you said he needed to listen,” Ev said.
“For the most part. But right now, I can’t get him to say ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ Not in answer to a question—he won’t even repeat them after me.”
“I think he’s embarrassed,” Ev said. “He did talk for a little while after the medusa, but it didn’t make any sense.” She could barely remember those last moments of consciousness after he’d stabbed the thing. She’d had pain like knives everywhere its tentacles had touched her, and Thiyo had been calling to her in gibberish. At the time, she’d thought it was her perception. But then they’d woken up on the ship together and he’d still been babbling. Had it been a language she didn’t recognize? Ev didn’t think so. It had been so repetitive. So limited. As soon as Thiyo had become aware that they couldn’t understand each other, he’d gone silent.
“Hmph. I didn’t have time for Thiyo’s delicate feelings twenty years ago, and I don’t have time for them now. He knows what he needs to do.”
“And if he doesn’t want to?”
“Ev,” Halelitha warned. “You’re defending him, but you don’t need to be. I’m not going to hurt him.”
“Drugging him against his will sounds a lot like hurting him to me.”
“Who’s drugging him against his will?” Halelitha asked. “I put a bowl of akilithana on the table so he’d see what I want from him. I can’t exactly tell him in words.”
“Oh,” Ev said. She scooped up a little of the brown grain with her fingers and ate it, feeling foolish. Halelitha chatted with her for the rest of the meal, but she gave short answers, not wanting to get herself in any more trouble. At least the subject of pregnancy—and sex with Thiyo—didn’t come up again. She sighed with relief when the meal ended.
But then it was her turn to teach Thiyo.
As Halelitha had predicted, Thiyo was a frustrating and inattentive student. Ev lasted an hour. Talking without an interlocutor was a struggle, and Thiyo wore an obstinate frown and refused to meet her eyes. Halelitha’s signal that he should relax and speak more freely hadn’t worked. Eventually, Ev sighed and waved him away. She went back to the house’s funny library and paced among the stacks.
“I told you he was a bad student.” Halelitha didn’t come into the room, just stood with one hand resting on the open door.
&nbs
p; “And you still like him,” Ev said. “For some reason.”
“Sometimes he’s sweet,” Halelitha said, shrugging.
Ev couldn’t disagree. She didn’t feel much like agreeing, either.
“He never seemed like he was paying attention as a child, but then he’d come back the next triad and demand that I recite the beginning of an epic all over again so he could understand it. You take a break—I’ll work with him now. Hoi might come back more easily, since it was his mother tongue.”
Ev dreamed of drowning in poison. Every time she closed her eyes to sleep, fire raced down every scar veining her skin. She’d always been quick to rise, but the nightmares chased her from bed even earlier than her habit. Thiyo protested this behavior with wordless, sleepy noises. Ev regretted that her troubles disturbed his rest, but then again, he never seemed to have trouble falling back asleep.
To calm herself, she went outside—behind the house, where no one was likely to see her—and ran through the routines her father had taught her. She couldn’t fight her nightmares. She couldn’t fight her other dreams, either. It should have been a relief to escape the drowning, but her mind conjured up shifting images of kisses, and Ev didn’t like that, either. Sometimes it was Alizhan, who she missed fiercely, her dreams tracing the outline of a painful absence.
Sometimes her dreams were more concerned with presences than absences.
It didn’t make sense to mix them up, Ev chastised herself as she delivered a roundhouse kick to an imaginary opponent. They were completely different shapes, Thiyo a match in height for Ev and Alizhan small enough that people frequently mistook her for much younger than she was. More than that, Alizhan moved like she didn’t want to get caught. Thiyo moved like he knew everyone was watching and he wanted to give them a show. She shouldn’t know that. She wished she could quiet the inside of her head. All she could do was jump out of bed and work her body until her mind was clear.
She paused, panting. When she turned toward the house to go drag Thiyo out of bed, she discovered him lounging on the bench behind her. How long had he been there? She wiped a hand across her forehead to catch a trickle of sweat. He couldn’t possibly know what had driven her from bed—just one of the many ways he wasn’t Alizhan—but that didn’t stop the guilt that flooded her. To cover her reaction, she said, “Since when do you get out of bed without prompting? Come on, let’s go inside.”
Life in the village might have been nice, if Thiyo weren’t so steadfastly miserable. Whatever Halelitha had said to her family and neighbors, they seemed to like Ev. They had nothing but encouraging smiles for her when she came to watch them singing and dancing, which they often did when their work was done. Thiyo refused to accompany her. Ev stopped pushing when she remembered that he knew these people from his childhood. He was afraid to face them.
When it came to lessons, he didn’t have much interest in facing Ev or Halelitha, either. Halelitha’s optimism waned. “Fifteen triads won’t be enough,” she muttered darkly. She was gutting a fish in the kitchen, one that her wife and grandchild had brought back from an expedition, with more force than necessary.
Ev tried not to look at the bloody knife and the fish. Halelitha’s family members hugged her and danced with her and talked cheerfully at her, the way she did with Thiyo. They didn’t seem to care if she didn’t want to sample every dish at their table, but that didn’t make her feel less rude. She and Thiyo were an imposition. She had to be a perfect guest, since Thiyo couldn’t be cajoled into behaving.
She’d forced him to leave the darkened bedroom and join them, so he was stirring a pot of soup. Halelitha had already started to talk about him like he wasn’t there, which Ev hated.
“He said something to Tayihe when they first saw each other,” Ev said, trying to improve the mood. She offered Thiyo a smile, even though he was staring down into the pot. “Didn’t you, Thiyo?”
Halelitha huffed when Thiyo didn’t respond to Ev. “You won’t even look up when you hear your own name, Thiyo?”
“He usually does. Maybe he’s lost in thought.”
“That’s a fancy way to say sulking.”
“Well,” Ev said. Halelitha wasn’t wrong. She shot Thiyo an apologetic look, wishing he could participate in this conversation. “It seems natural that he’d be upset, doesn’t it?”
“We are offering him our time and effort. A gift should be repaid in kind.”
“You said yourself that he never seemed like he was paying attention as a child—”
“But even then, I saw signs of progress,” Halelitha said, cutting Ev off. “I’ve seen nothing yet. Not a twitch. Not a sound. I told you to talk all the time, but he should talk, too. It’s the only way he’ll learn.”
“Like I said, he’s embarrassed,” Ev said. Maybe Ev and Halelitha were the problem. Should they go back to Sunslope? Would he be willing to talk to Tayihe? “He doesn’t want to do it if he can’t do it perfectly. It makes it hard that he used to be so good.”
“Yes. And unhappiness spreads like sickness.”
Ev reconfirmed in her next lesson that Thiyo would respond to his own name, although only by nodding. She couldn’t get him to speak either of their names. He was an expert at draining every last drop of patience from her and cutting their lessons short. She sighed and dropped her head into her hands, and when she looked up, Thiyo had ambled off and Halelitha had appeared.
“Come around back to the garden.” They walked in silence for a few steps. Halelitha and her family had planted neat rows of leafy greens behind their house. Ev thought perhaps Halelitha meant to collect some, but instead she sat on a bench positioned in the shade of the house. “You asked me about changing memories.”
Ev nodded, suddenly alert. What would she give for some other solution?
“Much easier to remove memories than to restore them,” she continued. “You might consider that. He’s not making progress.”
Ev had been about to sit down next to Halelitha, but she stopped so abruptly that she had to take a step backward to regain her balance. She didn’t respond because she could hardly believe what she’d heard. What was Halelitha suggesting?
“It’s simple enough. The memory-changers take nightmares and traumas from people all the time. Lots of people choose it for themselves,” Halelitha continued. “He was the most brilliant student of my lifetime, as difficult as he was. Even better than his mother. His gift meant everything to him. And now he might not get better. And if he doesn’t, I can’t see how he’ll ever learn to live without it. In that case, I’d suggest a visit to a memory-changer.”
Thiyo had written pages and pages of essays while he’d been in Nalitzva. He’d composed poems. Ev had seen him navigate conversations in three languages—and he could easily have done more. He’d broken Iriyat’s code and learned her invented script. Those things were all distant memories, now, but they belonged to Thiyo. And Halelitha would take that from him. Ev couldn’t keep the horror from her expression.
Halelitha shrugged. “He wouldn’t be so miserable if he had no memory of how life used to be. It would be a kindness.”
Ev’s heart thudded in her chest. She took a measured breath. It was so early to suggest something so drastic, and besides, it would always be too early for a suggestion like that. “I would never do that to him.”
“Suit yourself.”
“Promise me you won’t do that to him,” Ev insisted. “It’s not possible for us to ask him, so he couldn’t give his consent.”
Halelitha nodded. “It would hurt me, too. I would only consider it if I thought it would lessen his pain.”
“He’s going to get better.”
“Of course,” Halelitha said, and Ev knew when she was being placated.
11
Power
Alizhan left Orosk’s room with her mind racing. There’d be no time to find something like Ayat’s chair with wheels. Maybe there was a cart somewhere on the property, or a wheelbarrow in the garden. But how would she get it in
to the house without being seen?
If Ev were here, she would already have carried Orosk to safety.
Ev wasn’t here and wouldn’t ever be—the thought still pierced her—but maybe someone else could carry Orosk. Vatik, the captain of Iriyat’s guard, might be willing to help. He knew Iriyat was at fault for the horrors they’d seen in the house in Gold Street, but he’d stayed in her service to spy on her. Kasrik thought he was still trustworthy. He’d been patrolling the grounds at the beginning of Rosefinch shift six hours ago, so Alizhan went into the gardens to look for him.
Varenx House, situated at the tip of Dar, was ringed by gardens. Three sides of the house had only a strip of foliage before the ground sheared off into a cliff, but the side that faced inland had extensive plantings. Visitors approached the house down a wide, straight alley through this main garden, but there were many more winding paths through the wild, flowering growth. There were always guards at the front door, but at any given moment, two or three would be out of sight on these paths. Alizhan hoped to find Vatik there. It would give them a moment of privacy.
An hour of wandering, her senses alert to other minds around her, brought her no closer to Vatik. She’d passed three other guards, which meant he wasn’t here. Too much time had elapsed—she couldn’t afford to leave Orosk in the house any longer. She’d have to drag him out herself. Never mind that it would be slow and arduous and leave them exposed. Never mind that she had only a vague notion of where she might take him, now that Mar was no longer a trustworthy ally. Eliyan’s orphanage? Some anonymous inn in Arishdenan? Ev’s family farm all the way out in Orzatvur?
Alizhan hurried back into the house, regretting that she hadn’t asked Kasrik to sneak in and help. The thought hadn’t occurred to her until it was too late. Alizhan wanted to believe that was because she’d worked alone until a few months ago, but deep down, she knew it was because she’d grown accustomed to relying on Ev and Thiyo.
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