“Exhausted.”
Ev smiled. “That one I guessed. I meant—how are you feeling now that you won? Now that Iriyat’s in prison?”
“The answer’s the same,” Alizhan said, and Ev wished she didn’t sound so sad and tired.
“I know you feel guilty about the risks you took, but Thiyo and I accepted them, and neither of us is angry with you. And I hope you can feel at least a little relief about the outcome of the trial,” Ev said. “It was a victory.”
“It doesn’t feel real,” Alizhan said. “And even if it is real—now what? What do I do with myself?”
“We could celebrate.” Ev reached for Alizhan’s hand and brought it to her face. Alizhan’s fingers rested on her cheekbone. “I missed you too, you know.”
“Oh,” Alizhan said, her pupils going wide and dark. “You let me in.”
The contact was as overwhelming as the first time they’d ever touched, except instead of pain, it brought a sweet and liquid rush of shared pleasure. And then they were kissing, trading the heat from their lips and tongues, and Ev had been waiting her whole life for this. Alizhan curved her hand around the back of Ev’s head to pull her closer, and Ev grabbed her waist, the warmth of her skin evident even through her clothes.
And then they stopped. Alizhan broke the kiss but didn’t move, not even to open her eyes. “Thiyo,” she said. “Just come in.”
“You don’t have to sound so testy about it. The door was open.”
“Ev left it open on purpose,” Alizhan said, relishing her knowledge of this thought. She did open her eyes then, but only to look at Ev and favor her with a smug grin. Ev’s face, already warm, got hotter, even though it was true. She’d hoped Thiyo would find them. For once, it was gratifying that Alizhan knew, with no need of words, everything she wanted. “You can shut it behind you.”
Ev heard the door latch but not Thiyo’s walk across the room or his clothes hitting the floor, but by the time he slid into bed behind her and kissed the back of her neck, he was already naked. It turned out he knew everything she wanted, too.
Thiyo swept onto the terrace in a dressing gown he must have selected from Mar’s wardrobe. Ev had been offered the same option, and had chosen the least expensive-looking clothes she could find, for fear of damaging them. Her tunic and trousers were cotton in plain dark red. They had still cost more than she wanted to contemplate, but at least it wasn’t the Varenx House guard uniform she’d been wearing.
Thiyo didn’t share Ev’s concern about borrowing Mar’s clothing, since the dressing gown he’d chosen was blue silk patterned with subtle, silvery waves. He was still tying it closed as he poured himself into one of the chairs. He’d taken his time joining them. Ev and Alizhan had been on the terrace for at least an hour, languid and happy and quiet in the sun. Or Ev thought it had been an hour. There were no clocks in sight. Sleeping through the shift bell earlier shouldn’t have unmoored her, not after she’d had her whole memory cut up and strung back together, but the change in her habit disoriented her.
She shouldn’t worry so much. The three of them were all together and whole for the first time in a long time. Thiyo had dragged his chair as close as possible to where Ev was sitting and now his head was on her shoulder. She had the feeling he would have crawled into her lap, had the furniture allowed it.
Their moment of peace was interrupted by the arrival of Henny and Ket. Ev would have been happy to see them if not for their grim expressions that promised bad news. Ev wondered what Mar thought of these visitors, but after Alizhan had restored his memory once more, he’d retreated to the solitude of his study. His withdrawal was a reminder that their victory didn’t repair all the damage done, as was the wary, sidelong look Thiyo shot at Ket.
“I’m not planning to do it again. And none of it was my idea,” Ket said, holding his hands up and addressing Thiyo and Ev. Seated on the cushioned wrought-iron bench next to Ev, Alizhan folded her knees up and hugged them. Their shoulders touched. Ev wrapped a hand around the bare skin of Alizhan’s bony brown ankle, because it was there and because she could.
“I know,” Thiyo said. “I don’t blame you. Or you, Alizhan. I did agree to it. I’ve just… been through rather a lot since we parted ways in Estva.”
“Alizhan told us some of what happened to you and Ev,” Henny said.
“Did she tell you how much of an asshole I was?”
Ket covered his smile with his hand. Henny laughed and said, “Not necessary.”
“Ah. Well.”
“You were severely wounded. That would take a toll on anyone,” Ev said. She put her free arm around Thiyo and laced her fingers into his hair.
“Has anyone heard from Obin?” Alizhan asked. “Has Orilan felt anything?”
Henny and Ket both nodded. “We came here to tell you that, but we wanted to give you time to recover from the trial. Kasrik and Eliyan are already down in The Marsh urging people to evacuate. Orilan felt something about four hours ago—she drew this.” Henny held up what looked like a child’s scribbling at first glance, but resolved into a map on further examination. Adappyr was marked with an X. Directly Nightward of the city, in the middle of the ocean, Orilan had tracked her charcoal across the paper so many times, and with such force, that she’d ripped it. “There was a quake under the sea, judging from what she drew. Obin came to the city as fast as he could. He wanted to see you, but he had to warn all the people he knows in Arishdenan Harbor.”
“We should go down there and help,” Ev said, and she could see in their faces they’d all had the same thought.
They were disentangling themselves and standing up when Mar appeared in the doorway, disheveled and with dark circles under his eyes. “Bad news.”
“We know about the quake in Adappyr,” Alizhan said.
“What? No, that’s not it.” Mar shook his head, repressing a question. “A runner came from Izhimem just now. A guard found this in Iriyat’s empty cell, along with the body of another guard in the corridor outside. No one can read it.” He held up a piece of paper.
“Fiery fucking scorched fucking ashes,” Ev said. Thiyo held out his hand for the paper without a word.
Thiyo had been so long without reading that to do it again with such ease felt unreal. The written word hadn’t come back to him with speech, and Alizhan hadn’t restored him fully until last triad. After the medusa, he’d had dream after dream of flipping through letters and scrolls and whole libraries of books. Thiyo could read in his dreams. It was when he woke that things ceased to be comprehensible.
Except the reading he did in these dreams never happened with his eyes. Wandering among endless library shelves, Thiyo would open a volume he’d never seen, and out would pour smoke or pressed lavender shadebloom. If there were letters printed on the page, they would slide off and flutter to the floor, where they transformed from print back into metal type and piled up around his feet until he couldn’t move. Other times the ink bled into his hands and became long black scars twining up his arms.
His dreams contained no script, but he still understood. He absorbed the books into himself through his hands, and on these occasions the dream would shift seamlessly from the library to scenes of a life he’d never lived in Laalvur. Every book in the labyrinthine library, no matter what its binding looked like, contained either Iriyat’s journal or the illicit Loves—the poetry he’d written for Ilyr that had escaped the intimacy of their bedroom and made its way into gossip and bonfires—the two texts that had interrupted and overtaken his life. Two private works, one he’d wanted to keep secret and one he’d wanted to expose.
He shared something with Iriyat after so many hours spent with her journal. Those dreams of absorbing her story into his body had nothing to do with his fears of never reading again and everything to do with the sympathy she’d somehow managed to instill through her story. She was a monster who’d pursued her goals without regard for human life. She’d abused Alizhan. She’d murdered people with her bare hands and orchestrated t
he deaths of thousands more. And yet he’d read about her sullen youth, her first inklings of desire, her conflict with her parents, her grief. He’d translated her confidence, her intelligence, her doubts and her regrets. When Alizhan and Ev had first given him Iriyat’s original journal, they’d warned him that the formerly invisible ink would give him a rash on his hands. Thiyo hadn’t touched it. Instead he was poisoned with the knowledge that Iriyat was a person, too. Somehow.
Thiyo wished he could excise that from his mind. Maybe Ket could do it. But he couldn’t ask for that, and the knowledge felt like a burden he should carry. Iriyat had wanted the world to be different, simpler, under her control. Instead, it was messy and chaotic, with undeserved suffering and death, where even the cruelest and most remorseless people occasionally seemed sympathetic. He would have to live with it. And he’d have to live with the other thing he shared with Iriyat, all those hours and hours of writing, which his dreams had conveyed in smoke and flowers in the absence of words. He knew her well, and beyond that, he knew the intimacy of writing for one person and one person only. But Thiyo had suffered for his writing, while Iriyat had used hers to inflict suffering.
Was still using it to inflict suffering, he corrected, finishing up his translation of the text. He’d worked fast. Iriyat’s invented script was still in his memory—something she must have figured out before she’d left this note. She’d known he would be able to decipher it. She’d known he could show it to Alizhan.
He sighed and put down his pen. “I’m not sure you should read it.”
Alizhan, Ev, and Mar were standing on the other side of Mar’s desk, all taken aback. Henny and Ket had departed to help evacuate The Marsh rather than wait for him to decode the note. Alizhan said, “Why not? It’s for me, isn’t it?”
“It is,” he allowed. “It’s also deeply fucked up.”
“As opposed to everything else Iriyat has done?”
Thiyo tried his best to catch Alizhan’s gaze, but she slipped away from him and stared down at some point to the left of her shoulder instead. He said, “She’s always wanted to explain herself to you. To make you love her, or failing that, to make you feel guilty. You don’t have to let her. You know what she’s done and you can decide for yourself how to feel about it.”
Alizhan graced him with a sad smile. “So it’s a threat, then.”
Thiyo wasn’t the only one who knew Iriyat well. He swallowed his next protest.
“It’s sweet that you want to protect me,” Alizhan said. “But this has always been complicated for me. That note is the only lead we have. Let me read it.”
36
Iriyat to Alizhan, 8 Rimersha 764
My dearest Alizhan,
I have resorted to this script again—the one I invented for us. For you. You never let me give you the cipher, instead seeking it elsewhere and letting others poison your heart against me. You have refused all of my gifts. I offered you my secrets and you exposed them to the world. I offered you a better world and you had me shamed and sentenced.
There are no more secrets except this one: You have broken my heart.
Perhaps you will reject that as you rejected my vision. Your rejection cannot make it less true. I loved you and kept you safe in the best way I knew, and now there will be no one to do either.
I once wrote to you that I needed no monuments, but I was wrong. If there are to be no more secrets, then I wish the world to know how we failed. As my last act, I will build one to loom over the future. A warning as hard and stark as our cliffs. Our monument will be a tomb.
Your loving mother,
Iriyat
37
Shell Collectors Make Bone Offerings
“What does it mean?” Ev asked, reading over Alizhan’s shoulder. “It sounds threatening, but what is she going to do?”
“She must think a wave is coming,” Alizhan said. “In Adappyr, she had advance knowledge of the quake and she planned to warn everyone and paint herself as the hero. But she can’t be the hero who warns everyone here. We ruined that for her with the trial.”
“She wants the wave to hit the city,” Thiyo said.
“She has no control over that,” Ev said. “I know she meddled with Adappyr until there were quakes, and those quakes might produce a wave, but if the wave is coming, it’s coming. She can’t stand on the shore and call it here herself. So where is she?”
“Building a tomb,” Alizhan murmured. She wasn’t looking at the page in her hands but her grip pulled the paper taut.
“She described the wave she saw in the journal over and over,” Thiyo said. “She was obsessed with it. Now it’s coming, and she’s not going to warn people.”
“That’s it,” Alizhan said. “If she can’t warn people, nobody can.”
“The shift bells didn’t ring,” Ev said, snapping her fingers with the realization. “That’s how they used to warn people of waves. She’s at one of the bell towers, or she’s sent someone.”
“There are four of them,” Alizhan said. “Let’s check the closest one.”
The first belltower they tried was at the peak of Breakneck Hill, not far from Hahim Point where Solor House was situated. Even high on the hill, every street was full of people carrying children and sacks of belongings, surging up from The Marsh and heading inland. Kasrik and Eliyan must be spreading the word fast, and people were listening. What should have been a short, simple walk required her to weave through the crowd, hoping that Alizhan, Thiyo, Mar and Zenav were up to following her. Ev had tried to convince Mar not to come, since he still looked wrecked from having his memory restored. In his case, Ev suspected it wasn’t so much the restoration as the memories themselves that troubled him. Ev didn’t know Mar well enough to ask delicate questions about what Iriyat had done to or with him, but his insistence on finding her was answer enough. He’d refused to be “coddled,” in his words, so Ev had settled for requesting that he bring a guard. Mar was angry at Iriyat, and if he wanted to find her and hurt her, Ev’s only reason to stop him was that she could do more damage faster.
The heavy wooden door at the bottom of the stairs was shut but not latched, and Ev pushed it open and advanced up the spiral staircase with dread humming in her ears. The others followed without a word, keeping their footfalls as muffled as possible.
Their quiet approach didn’t matter. There was no door at the top of the stairs. The stairwell simply opened into a room. Light poured in, the warm gold sky visible in the high windows above and from arched windows cut into the round walls of the tower. Four of these windows housed bells, each a fraction of the size of the great dark metal shape that dominated the room. It was as still and silent as the priest in grey robes lying dead on the floor.
Blood pooled beneath him. He’d been stabbed in the gut. Not the method Ev would have expected from Iriyat. Ev stepped over the body and circled the huge bell slowly, searching, but there was no sign of her presence.
“Do you think Iriyat did this?” Ev asked.
“It was her doing, whether or not she had help. We have to ring the bell,” Alizhan said, and Mar and Zenav began to pull on the thick rope connected to the largest one in the center of the room. It rocked back and forth in its cage. The sound filled the tower and reverberated through Ev’s body, urgent and without rhythm. No one bothered with the smaller bells. There was no mistaking this ringing for a shift-change call. None of the other towers answered. Had Iriyat gotten to all of them? Would she be waiting in one? They had to find her.
“We have to split up,” Ev said. “Mar and Zenav will stay here and keep ringing this bell, in case we can’t get to the other towers in time. Thiyo, go to the tower on Arish. It’s closest, so it should be easiest for you to find. I’ll take Denan. Alizhan—”
“Dar, I know,” Alizhan said, distracted and impatient. Unusually, her gaze was fixed on something obvious. The window that faced the sea. The water appeared no different than normal, its dark surface roughened by the Dayward wind, but Ev shuddered all th
e same.
The belltower in Denan was eerily like the one Ev had just seen in Hahim. Identical architecture was the least of it. The dim spiral staircase left her dizzy after she sprinted to the bright room at the top, where she found silent bells and a body on the floor.
Unlike the first priest, this one hadn’t been stabbed. There was no slick of blood congealing on the floor around him. No marks on his skin. His robes were undisturbed. His neck wasn’t snapped. Ev had to check for breath and pulse. If not for their absence, the priest might have simply fainted.
Could anyone faint with such a rigid, pained expression? This man had suffered in his last moments, even if he hadn’t been physically wounded.
Had Vatik looked like that after Iriyat had murdered him?
Ev cringed at the thought of another murder she hadn’t stopped, then crept around the giant bell to make sure she was alone in the room. Iriyat wasn’t waiting to slap her hands on Ev and ruin her mind again. It was only Ev and the dead priest.
Ev wasted no time. There was a rope hanging from the cage circling the giant bell, and she pulled it with all her strength.
Iriyat had to have killed this priest. She didn’t need to stab anyone, which meant the first body Ev had seen had been murdered by someone else. Iriyat had help. That meant Thiyo and Alizhan might not have found empty towers.
Smoke and fucking fire. She should have listened for the other bells before ringing this one. Now it was too loud to hear anything but the booming of the bell next to her. She left it ringing and ran back down to the street, straining her ears for some sign.
In Iriyat’s first, most lucid description of the wave, she’d written that she hadn’t fully understood until she’d seen it. The ocean taught me, she’d written. I hope to God it never teaches you.
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