Shadebloom

by Felicia Davin

  Ev thought Thiyo’s reaction was perfectly natural, given that he couldn’t know what Ilyr was saying. He was as wide-eyed and rigid as a tiny prey animal, hoping stillness might save him from his predator, his rapid pulse almost visible under his skin.

  Ilyr had said something about poetry. We wrote so many. Ev imagined Thiyo would contest that, so she did it for him. “What do you mean ‘we’ wrote so many?”

  “He, I suppose. But that was me in those poems, and everyone knows it. I’m the one who has to live with it, so I feel some credit belongs to me. And now Lan is dead and I’m married, which is worse. And he’s here with you.”

  From Ilyr’s tone, Thiyo being with Ev was an unfathomable betrayal. His eyes weren’t just red from drinking and staying awake, then. He’d been crying.

  “I’m sorry things ended so badly between you two,” Ev said gently. “I know Thiyo didn’t intend to hurt you, and I don’t think you intended to hurt him, either.”

  “What good does that do us?”

  “Not much. But we’re here about something else.” Ilyr knew Iriyat. She’d planted the idea of coming to the islands in his head in the first place. She could easily be responsible for his second visit. “You know Iriyat ha-Varensi.”

  “You’re trying to put me off the scent,” Ilyr complained. Even drunk, he was dogged. “Why won’t Thiyo talk? It takes more than a raspy throat to keep him quiet. He knows all sorts of signed languages. And why does he look like that? Thiyo, what’s wrong?”

  There would be no talking with Ilyr until they explained it. Ev sighed. She turned to Thiyo, pressed her lips together in silent apology, and circled her fingers around his wrist. She held up his scarred forearm, marked with black whorls just like her own.

  “Come closer,” Ilyr demanded.

  Ilyr was unarmed. He was bigger than Ev, but he was drunk. And Thiyo would intervene, if it came down to it. She had no reason to fear him. The water, though… Ev forced herself not to think of her nightmares.

  Still holding onto Thiyo, she waded into the cool shallows and approached him. The water got warmer and warmer as she did. Ilyr was on the other side of a pool, which must be a hot spring. Thiyo must have wanted to return here to go swimming—a strange thought. As different as this river was from the ocean where they’d been stranded, Ev wasn’t eager to go swimming again.

  She pulled herself up on the bank next to Ilyr. This close, he reeked of alcohol, among other things. Thiyo followed her. Ev displayed both their arms for Ilyr.

  “Medusa scars? When did that happen?”

  “Not long ago,” Ev said. “We made it out alive, but Thiyo was badly wounded.”

  Ilyr looked him up and down. “He doesn’t look—” he said. “Oh. That’s why he can’t speak.”

  “I don’t think he understands much, either,” Ev admitted. She’d wanted to protect Thiyo from this moment, but she didn’t see how she could. At least whatever biting remarks Ilyr made, they wouldn’t reach Thiyo.

  Although if Ilyr did say something cruel… Ev tightened her hand into a fist. She’d handle it.

  “I’m sorry,” Ilyr said, meeting Thiyo’s eyes. There was a surprising amount of feeling in the words. But Ev shouldn’t be surprised—whatever they were to each other now, they’d been lovers. There’d been something between them worth risking their lives for. Ilyr leaned over and Ev backed out of his way. She didn’t want to come between them now, and besides, he smelled. With Ev gone, Ilyr crawled a few paces on his knees and laid a hand on Thiyo’s. Thiyo’s mouth was a flat line. He didn’t want to be an object of pity, not for Ilyr. But he let Ilyr touch his hand.

  “Has anyone said if it will come back?”

  “Halelitha—his teacher—was optimistic at first, but she’s changed her mind.” Ev didn’t share Halelitha’s other solution. The idea horrified her and she didn’t want to plant it in Ilyr’s head, in case he wasn’t as sympathetic to Thiyo’s plight as he seemed. “Tayihe didn’t know.”

  “They’re cagey about these things. Thiyo believed in sharing—” he removed his hand from Thiyo’s and glared instead “—he believed a little too much in sharing, if you ask me, but most of them don’t like to talk about what they know.”

  Ev didn’t want to talk about the islanders as if they were all the same. That hadn’t been her experience. “We were rescued by a crew of sailors from Kae. The translator was happy to talk to me about magic. She thought there was a chance. And Tayihe and Halelitha have been honest with me about their uncertainties.”

  “I’m so glad they like you,” Ilyr said sarcastically, and Ev began to see how he and Thiyo had come together. “How nice to be the second foreigner instead of the first.”

  “A man tried to shoot me in Kae.”

  “He must have missed.”

  “Such compassion,” Ev said, wishing Thiyo could be the one to talk instead. She didn’t want to think of having the gun pointed at her. Her life had been threatened before, so that was nothing new. The rescue troubled her.

  Ngua’s otherwordly singing had saved her life. But the more Ev thought about that sound, the more she wanted to sail back to Kae and find him—to hear it again at any cost. She shuddered. “It was magic that saved us, actually. What else do you know about it?” After a moment’s reflection on what Alizhan or Thiyo might say, Ev added, “You lived here for a year, and you knew Thiyo for longer. I feel so out of my depth. Surely you know more than me. Do you think Thiyo can heal?”

  The flattery worked, and Ilyr gave serious thought to her questions. His expression softened when he looked at Thiyo. “He always said magic was a human phenomenon, part of the body. If he’d lost his eyes, we wouldn’t expect him to be able to see again. If he’d lost his legs, we wouldn’t expect him to walk.”

  “But—”

  Ilyr held up a hand to stop her. Even in this state, he was imperious. “I knew a man once who lost feeling in his face. He’d just had a tooth pulled. Nasty business. We thought he’d be numb for the rest of his life—even the dentist thought so—but after a few months, the feeling came back. And we’ve probably both known elderly people who’ve suffered attacks. Some recover.”

  None of that was useful. “We don’t have months. Thiyo says a quake is going to hit Adappyr, and he’s worried a wave will hit Laalvur following that.”

  Ilyr stared at her. “Thiyo doesn’t say much of anything. How do you know that?”

  Ev hesitated.

  “You mentioned Iriyat ha-Varensi,” Ilyr said. “Did she tell you? Are you working for her?”

  “No,” Ev said sharply, horrified. “And you shouldn’t be, either. But in a manner of speaking, I suppose she was the one who told us. Thiyo decoded a journal of hers. That’s how he knows. He told me through a series of drawings.”

  Drawings! Ev looked pointedly at Thiyo and then at Ilyr’s bag. There was a book in there. If nothing else, perhaps Thiyo could draw in its margins and make Ilyr understand. But a suspicion took hold of Ev that there was something important in that book. Thiyo nodded and trained his gaze on the bag.

  “Why shouldn’t I help her? She wants to stop these things. It’s a noble goal.”

  “She doesn’t. She wants to study them so she can predict and control them.” As Ev spoke, Thiyo sighed, bored with a conversation he couldn’t understand. He stood up, stripped naked, and sank down into the pool. Ev kept her eyes on Ilyr, who couldn’t keep his off Thiyo.

  Ilyr didn’t turn back toward her, and his response had an offhand quality to it. He was intent on Thiyo. “I fail to see the difference. Wouldn’t we all like to be able to predict and curtail these disasters?”

  “I didn’t say curtail,” Ev said. She raised her voice to call his attention back to her. Thiyo’s tactic had risked too much and now he’d never get to Ilyr’s bag without being seen. “I said control—and I meant cause. Iriyat has no qualms about using the power she already possesses to hurt and kill people. She can’t be trusted with more, especially not the kind of power that can des
troy cities.”

  “That’s a hell of an accusation. What proof do you have of this? It’s your word against hers, and I’ve known her far longer.” Ilyr sniffed disdainfully. “And she’s never tried to fuck my lover.”

  “Nobody’s trying to fuck anybody!” Ev burst out. And he’s not your lover anymore. But it was obviously a sore subject and she wasn’t cruel enough to say that aloud. Ilyr might be mixed up in something nasty, but he wasn’t a monster like Iriyat—at least, Ev hoped. “And we did have proof, but it was on the ship we were thrown off of, so it’s probably in Laalvur by now.”

  “So you have nothing,” Ilyr said.

  “No.”

  Both Ev and Ilyr turned to Thiyo, unaccustomed to hearing him speak. He was standing in the pool, his body facing the bank they were seated on, flipping through the book in Ilyr’s bag. He looked enraged. Ilyr had taken notes in a mixture of the spiral Hoi script and the more angular Nalitzvan, and the pages were covered in drawings and maps.

  Some of the drawings were medusas. Ev’s stomach churned.

  “What is that?” she asked.

  “You’re right,” Ilyr said. “Iriyat asked me to come here. She wanted information. She says the islanders know how to predict waves, and it’s not right to keep it from the rest of the world, not when they cause so much damage. Because she wants to fix the world. Because she’s a good person.”

  “She’s lying.”

  Ilyr made no attempt to take his notebook from Thiyo. “Don’t look so angry, Thiyo. I thought you’d agree, since we had all those conversations about sharing knowledge. I went to the archives in Summit and took notes.”

  “Iriyat may be right that it’s wrong of the islanders not to share this knowledge,” Ev said. “But she’s not a good person. She can’t be trusted.”

  “As we’ve already established, you have no proof and I have no reason to believe you.”

  Ev glanced at Thiyo, who still looked incensed, and then back at Ilyr, whose jaw was set. She supposed his position was reasonable, given what he knew. But he’d been duped. She sighed. “I don’t really care if you believe me, Ilyr. And I’m sorry, but I can’t let you send those papers to Iriyat.”

  Outrage reddened his features. He wasn’t accustomed to being pushed aside, even in the gentlest terms. “What the fuck—”

  He wasn’t used to being punched in the face, either. He folded after one solid hit, crumpling into the soft, muddy riverbank. Thiyo gave Ev a single approving nod. He picked up the bottle of wai and poured what remained into the mud. Then he dressed, stuffed the book into the leather bag, swung it over his shoulder, and set off into the woods.

  13

  In Need of Fixing

  It made Alizhan’s skin crawl to travel with Iriyat. All the normal things Alizhan had done over the past few triads—sitting in a carriage, staying at an inn, taking a meal—sickened her because she’d done them with Iriyat. No amount of probing questions on the politics of Adappyr and what Iriyat planned to do when they arrived made Alizhan feel any better about sharing space with her. Anything short of reaching across the table and throttling Iriyat felt like capitulating.

  Murder is not justice, she reminded herself, and in her head, it sounded like Ev’s voice.

  She pushed through the hours, awake or asleep, with her teeth clenched and every muscle aching. Sometimes she couldn’t breathe. She rarely wanted to eat. Her body never felt calm. After some time, she came to accept that this was a consequence of the rage and grief tied up inside her, cutting off her air and filling her up until she was stretched taut. If it had been another person, she would have known that in one effortless instant. But because it was her own turmoil, she had to experience the effects before understanding the cause. The knowledge brought her no relief.

  The one thing that lifted the tension in her body was that Vatik was traveling with them. He avoided her, as he always had, but every time Alizhan caught a glimpse of him riding near their carriage, or guarding their door at an inn, her fingers itched to heal him as she’d healed Orosk Varenx. But Iriyat’s suggestion that Orosk had died because of Alizhan’s intervention still lingered in her mind. It had to be false. Didn’t it? But Alizhan had killed Merat with her bare hands. If it was possible to do it on purpose, it was possible to do it by accident.

  Even if Alizhan felt confident in her abilities, there was the problem of how to get close enough to touch Vatik without arousing Iriyat’s suspicions. He’d never liked Alizhan. They couldn’t strike up a new friendship now.

  Still, she watched him closely as they made their way across the Day lands. The climate was already warmer than in Laalvur, and a fine red dust coated Alizhan’s sandals after a shift of traveling. At first, they stopped at villages that answered to Laalvur, but settlements grew sparser as they crossed the desert, and soon enough, they had to make camp under the blazing sky. Alizhan and Iriyat stayed in the stifling carriage as Vatik led the rest of the guard in setting up tents.

  “You’ll like Adappyr, I think,” Iriyat said idly. “It’s a troubled place, but still very beautiful. Rich in culture. And I think you’ll find it quieter than Laalvur.”

  Like Laalvur, Adappyr had a population in the tens of thousands. Iriyat wasn’t speaking of normal quiet.

  “If you knew Laalvur was such a difficult place for me, why not send me elsewhere?” Alizhan said. People in Adappyr learned to quiet their thoughts. People in Estva silenced theirs by eating nightvine. There were plenty of places that would have been easier than Laalvur.

  “Laalvur is our home,” Iriyat said, as though the question were incomprehensible to her. “I am working to make it better.”

  Alizhan wouldn’t let Iriyat weasel her way out so easily. She brought the conversation back to her own existence. “And yet I make it hard for you to achieve your political goals.”

  “My goals are not political,” Iriyat demurred. And then, in what Alizhan was coming to think of as her private voice—the tone she used when she wasn’t presenting herself to some imaginary public—she added, “‘Political’ is an absurd understatement.”

  “What word do you prefer?”

  If Iriyat could hear the acid in Alizhan’s voice, she ignored it. “Humanitarian,” she said. “Planetary.”

  Fucking hell. “Some people say they want to change the world, but you really want to change the world,” Alizhan said. The words just came out. She didn’t intend to say them to Iriyat. “And yet in the vast scope of your project, you’ve devoted special attention to me. And this ‘cure’ you want so much. That brings me back to my point: I’m difficult. I’m an obstacle. Why not remove me?”

  Iriyat made a little choked noise. Alizhan had rendered her speechless. After she collected herself, she said, “You’re my daughter. I’m not sure what you’re suggesting.”

  “You’ve removed plenty of other obstacles.”

  “Everything I’ve done, all of it, has been for you.”

  Familiar, unwanted words. “You want a different daughter,” Alizhan insisted. “A cured one.”

  “I don’t know what you mean. I want the daughter I have to live a full and happy life, something that’s impossible for you now.”

  Iriyat was right about one thing, at least. But if happiness was impossible, it was because Ev and Thiyo were dead. It had nothing to do with Alizhan’s peculiar abilities. “Why don’t you let me decide what a full and happy life is?”

  “You don’t know, Alizhan. You weren’t there—I had to watch, when you were so small, the way you screamed and wailed any time someone touched you. People who loved you! People who wanted to care for you! It broke what little was left of my poor, battered heart.”

  What could Iriyat possibly mean by you weren’t there? Of course Alizhan had been there. That was the point.

  “I couldn’t let you grow up in this world with only me to touch you,” Iriyat said.

  “And yet you did. You lied to me the whole time, too.” As a child, Alizhan had treasured every instant with
Iriyat, knowing she’d be gone soon. She always was.

  “I don’t understand what you want from me! I’m trying to explain to you how many years I’ve spent searching for a way to help you, to cure you…”

  “Why not just fix me yourself?”

  A silence.

  Fuck. She’d tried. All of Alizhan’s speculation about whether Iriyat had altered her memory was confirmed in that silence.

  Alizhan couldn’t sit there any longer. She slammed the carriage door behind her and stalked off into the heat of the sun, which paled in comparison to her rage.

  She wanted to wrap her hands around Iriyat’s neck and murder her on the spot, and at the moment, it seemed inconsequential that Alizhan was likely to die in the attempt. She took a breath. Another. The soles of her sandals scraped the rocky ground. There were no outcroppings large enough to provide shade. The mountains around Laalvur had receded into the distance as they’d traveled, but the desert ground was hard and uneven. No wonder it was taking Vatik and the men so long to put up the tents.

  Alizhan hadn’t even known she was walking in his direction until she’d arrived. “Vatik,” she called.

  She couldn’t kill Iriyat. Not until she knew more about her plans. She had to save as many people as she could.

  “What?” Vatik said.

  “Let me fix you,” Alizhan said. She kept her voice low. The next best thing to killing Iriyat was undoing all her work, and Iriyat had been altering her chief guard’s memory for years.

  “I’m not in need of fixing,” Vatik said, narrowing his mismatched eyes at her. Alizhan had convinced him that Iriyat was plotting something terrible and couldn’t be trusted, but she’d never convince him to like her.

  “You know she’s altered you,” Alizhan said, continuing to whisper. Iriyat had erased so many things from Vatik’s memory that she’d done permanent damage to his ability to retain new knowledge. But they both knew he’d killed for her.