by Tara Sim
She hummed in a way that said she obviously didn’t believe him. Then her eyes cut back to him. “If you’re going to keep staring at me, you might as well undress, too.”
“Wh—” God and her stars, why couldn’t he talk? “Undress?”
The countess pointed at his shirt. “It looks expensive.”
That was true enough; it was tailored by Ferdicand, one of Cayo’s favorite shops in the city for everyday wear. His fingers hesitated at his collar as she leaned back on her hands, observing him unabashedly.
“Go on,” she urged.
“Why do I feel like I’m putting on a show?”
“You could, if you wanted to. I’m a tough critic, though.”
That made him laugh and start unbuttoning his shirt. He’d been shirtless plenty of times around others, had enjoyed the attention he got as a result. But something about the way her eyes grazed his bare shoulders and slid down his chest was different. It didn’t feel sensual, exactly—but it wasn’t analytical, either. Something in between, as if she were trying to figure out what to make of him.
That calm appraisal made him shiver. There had been something about her at the teahouse as well—an intensity that rooted him to the spot, focused acutely on how her gaze trailed over his neck. Like she wanted to follow the path her eyes left with her fingers, or her lips. Or her teeth.
He was so used to blatant flirtation that the lack of it was startling, and somehow even more tantalizing. For the first time, he wondered if he actually wanted her to want him.
Cayo balled up the wet shirt and dropped it onto the rock next to him. “Better?”
“It’ll do.”
They fell into an uneasy silence. At least, for Cayo it was uneasy. He still couldn’t help but feel like a trespasser, the skin along his arms prickling with guilt and the lingering effects of her gaze. He tried to speak a few times, maybe to apologize again, maybe to say that he should get going and leave her be, but for some reason he stayed glued to his rock.
“I also wanted to come here,” she said at last, eyes on the water that lapped at the rocks, “so that I could clear my head. Get away from everything and just…think.”
“Oh.” Cayo rested his elbows on his knees, his feet still submerged in the water. The air smelled of salt and sunshine, much cleaner than what he had to breathe at the docks. “I know what that’s like.”
“Do you?” She turned to look at him again. It struck him then that for the first time, he was seeing her without flourishes or makeup, without the elaborate dresses and perfectly styled hair. Every time he had encountered her she had been so…put together. Picturesque. Almost as if she were donning a costume instead of an outfit.
But now she had been stripped—literally—and all he saw was a girl without a mask to hide behind, flawed and fierce and beautiful. Someone Cayo could actually relate to.
“Yes,” he admitted. “It’s funny, isn’t it, how you can only ever see the surface of a person? I feel like most of the time, beneath my surface, I’m drowning. And no one can see it.”
Her eyebrows gently furrowed together, thoughtful. “That’s it,” she agreed. “That’s it exactly.”
That initial admission had unlocked some door within him, and now it was beginning to creak open. “A lot’s been weighing on me lately,” he went on. “It helps to be alone with your thoughts. My mother…she used to sit on the balcony and stare at the ocean.” He gestured to the mouth of the inlet that led toward the bay. “That was her way of handling things, I suppose.”
Yamaa’s expression was cloudy, but her eyes were bright. Some of the tension left her shoulders, or perhaps he was only imagining it.
“My mother used to sew,” she said quietly.
Cayo thought back to their discussion at the teahouse about his interest in fashion. “What did she sew?”
“A bit of everything. Dresses, sheets, dolls.” Yamaa turned her face to the sun and closed her eyes, some of her wet hair slipping over her brown shoulder. “But that was a long time ago.”
Cayo wanted to ask more, but he was struck by the sudden vulnerability in her, the way the sunlight caught drops of water on her eyelashes. They spangled across her body like diamonds, as if she were worth more than any amount of gold.
He thought back to his halfhearted plan to charm money out of her. His father’s plan, really. Seeing Yamaa like this, more a girl he could have met in the Vice Sector than a noble in a gilded house, he realized that he could do it—he could get her to warm to him, sympathize with him, play a slow yet steady game of seduction.
But after only a moment of planning, he shook his head and looked away. It would be wrong to use her. Wrong to ignore this new and sudden fascination that drew his gaze back to her like the sun toward the horizon.
Eventually, he found his voice. “You mentioned needing to clear your mind. Has something been troubling you?”
“I…” She hesitated, startled by the question.
“I shared something about myself,” he said with a half-teasing grin. “Only fair you should, too.”
She scoffed, but it was more amused than annoyed. She smoothly slipped back into the water and crossed her arms on top of the rock. “I lost someone recently. Someone I thought I knew well, but now I’m realizing that maybe I didn’t know them at all.”
Cayo watched her legs slowly treading under the semiclear water. “I’m sorry to hear that. I know what loss is like, and it never gets any easier.” He thought of his mother on the balcony, humming her favorite songs. Thought of Soria coughing weakly into her pillow. “Especially when you have to watch someone you love waste away before your eyes.”
Yamaa looked at him as if for the first time, her guardedness dropping. “Yes,” she said. “Or you realize someone you love wasn’t who you thought they were. When someone who was supposed to protect you ends up betraying you instead.”
Cayo blinked at the cryptic words but decided not to press it. Yamaa rested her cheek on her arms, staring at the water, and the two of them were silent as they listened to the distant cries of gulls and the sound of the wind blowing past the cliffs. Cayo finally relaxed, his mission in the Vice Sector momentarily forgotten.
How long had it been since he had sat beside the ocean to merely exist and think? Probably not since his mother was alive. It was a sad thing, to realize that there was no one in his life he could completely be at ease with. Not his father, not his friends. There was Soria, to an extent, but even then he was always on watch.
But here, he could share this with Yamaa: this careful removal of their masks, the outward shell of polite young members of the gentry. Here in this inlet, they could be the messy, flawed, tired truths of themselves. And that was something to be thankful for.
As the light of afternoon began to wane, Cayo slipped back into the water with her. As if by some unspoken agreement, they swam lazily around the inlet, sometimes passing one another and sometimes swimming together.
She still had that thoughtful, mournful expression on her face. Suddenly, he was overcome with the desire to wipe it away.
“Hey.” He pointed to the far cliff wall. “I’ll race you. Last one there has to tell an embarrassing secret.”
She gave him an incredulous look, but before she could reply he was already speeding away. She yelled at his back and kicked off, slicing through the water like a blade. Within a few seconds she had outpaced him, water frothing at her heels. In another few seconds, she was slapping the cliff face victoriously.
Cayo slapped it a moment later, panting for breath. “You’re fast.”
“And you have to tell me an embarrassing secret.”
He groaned and floated on his back, lacing his fingers on his stomach. “Fine. Let’s see…Once, when I was eight, I got my fist stuck in a vase at a duchess’s manor during a dinner party. I was trying to tug it off when everyone came into the foyer and saw it go flying.” He re-created the spectacular arc it had made with his hand over the shimmering water. “And crashed at
the duchess’s feet.”
“It’s not a secret if people saw you do it.”
“No, the part that’s secret is that my father spanked me when we got home. I couldn’t sit down without crying for days.”
Although Cayo had lost the race, he was rewarded all the same by the sound of her short, clear laugh ringing over the water.
Unwilling as he was to leave the calm they’d created, the water was getting choppy. They climbed back onto the rocks, which created a makeshift shore. Cayo shielded his eyes and looked at the path of rocks they would have to climb to get back up to the cliff side.
When he turned to ask her if she needed any help, his breath caught in his throat. The fabric of her undergarments had clung to her with water, revealing the outline of a body threaded with corded muscle. The way she stood revealed the strength of her arms and thighs and stomach, a strength that was constantly hidden under silks and corsets. Water droplets rolled down her smooth skin, pooling in the crooks of her elbows and the hollow of her collarbone.
She met his heated gaze, and the two of them stood there, frozen, as if waiting for the other to move first.
Cayo swallowed. What would happen if he reached out to tuck back her hair? If his fingers skimmed the side of her exposed neck? There was a speck of water at the corner of her mouth. He could brush it away with his lips.
But before he could decide whether to take a step toward her, she shook herself and headed for the cliff face.
“It would be best if we forgot this happened, Lord Mercado,” she said as she began to climb, her limbs flexing as she moved.
It took him a moment to come to his senses, his blood warm and buzzing through his veins. “You can just call me Cayo,” he called up to her.
She paused, looking down at him. She seemed something born of the earth itself, power and beauty mixed with something almost feral.
“Thanks for your company,” she said at last. “Cayo.”
She climbed the rest of the way up, leaving him to shiver in the breeze as evening began to streak through the sky.
And wonder how in the hells he was going to climb up after her.
And so Punisher drove his sword point to Trickster’s chest, where welled a bright berry of blood. The drop fell to the earth and an orchard grew around them, the trees silent witnesses to the price Trickster paid for deceiving the gods and thwarting their whims.
—KHARIAN MYTH
Following Cayo Mercado’s example, Amaya took the long way home. The night was dark yet carried a balmy warmth, and her wet hair dried frizzy and soft about her shoulders. She still smelled of the sea, her skin coated by a patina of salt.
She went largely ignored as she wandered through the streets of Moray, her slippers dangling from her fingers. Her feet had long since dried, but she didn’t like the constricting fabric of her shoes, so used to going barefoot on the Brackish and on the islands where they had made their diving stops. She almost missed the feeling of a deck under her soles and the kiss of too-warm sand.
That was why she had gone to the inlet: to rekindle her connection with the water, to be alone for a blessed hour in order to parse out her thoughts. To mull over what the debt collector had said about her mother.
And then Cayo Mercado had barged in, refusing her a moment of privacy. Yet…Amaya wasn’t as mad as she would have expected at his unexpected company. It had helped, in an odd way, to see that she wasn’t the only one in some state of misery.
Amaya came across a street musician with a lap harp and stopped to listen a moment. He had collected a small audience, but no one looked twice at her; with her untamed hair and plain day dress, she wasn’t the remarkable Countess Yamaa, but just Amaya, a long-forgotten child of this city.
There was a pressure in her chest, a dreadful weight that pulled her shoulders down in such a way that would cause Liesl to order her to keep her posture straight. But Amaya’s mind was filled with conflicting thoughts. Her throat was tight with the fear of facing the consequences that rose before her.
Cayo Mercado. Everything Boon had said about him made him out to be a fop, a careless merchant’s son with no head for business. Perhaps those things were true, but the Cayo Mercado she had seen today was…different. Just as she hadn’t had the visage of the countess to hide behind, Cayo hadn’t had the visage of Lord Mercado. They had merely been a boy and a girl swimming in the sea.
When they had spoken of loss, she hadn’t missed the aura of hurt that surrounded him like a fine mist, the depth of loneliness—of helplessness—in his dark eyes. She had felt that mist coat her like a second skin, had taken it into her lungs. His pain tasted like hers.
They had both lost their mothers. Cayo was in the process of losing his sister.
And thanks to Boon’s plan, he was going to end up losing a lot more.
Yet she couldn’t help but feel a twinge of envy toward him. If Amaya was water, always moving, then Cayo was a tree, planted firmly into a patch of soil called home. Digging roots into the earth—grounded, connected.
Amaya staggered away from the lilting music and wandered deeper into the city, barely conscious of where she was going. She felt feverish, hot and numb all over.
Did Cayo really deserve to suffer for the sins of his father? Just as the children sold to the Brackish had been forced to pay for their parents’ debts, Cayo was merely the unwilling victim of his father’s crimes. They had all been ravaged by the generation that had come before them, told to feast on scraps and to be thankful for it.
Amaya stopped to lean her shoulder against the nearest building and passed a hand over her eyes with a shaking sigh. She couldn’t go through with this. Cayo Mercado did not deserve her revenge, no matter how spoiled and strange he was.
Dropping her hand, she looked around to get her bearings. She was in one of the traditional Rehanese districts, full of wide, short homes with green roofs like mountaintops and pointed eaves. Some homes bore statuettes of star saints, animal-like beings who carried out the work of the sky god. Lanterns had been lit along the street, dancing across the cobblestone in whirls of amber and orange.
It seemed vaguely familiar to her, like recalling a dream from a long time ago. Looking closer, she found the plaque bearing the street name. Guen Street.
She knew this place. It was the district where she had once lived with her mother.
Her lips dry and her heart beating faster, Amaya pushed off the side of the building and hurried down the street. She passed ghosts along the way—memories of holding hands with her mother as they went to the fish market, climbing onto roofs to keep a lookout for her father coming home for the day, the local neighborhood festivals held every season. Her mother had always loved those, for any excuse to dress herself and Amaya in Rehanese wrap dresses with their hair done up in the traditional styles. She had always splurged for freshly roasted nuts and balls of sticky rice coated with sesame seeds.
Amaya’s eyes were full of tears by the time she stopped before the door that had once led to her home.
If another family lived there now, she didn’t know, as the lanterns inside weren’t lit. But it still looked the same, from its red-painted door and the owl statuette on the corner of the roof. It was missing its beak from the time Amaya had thrown rocks at it. Her father had laughed, but her mother had been so furious, claiming that the star saint wouldn’t be able to protect their home if Amaya shattered it.
Grief surged up and seized her by the throat. She collapsed at the base of the outer wall and buried her face in her skirt, choking down the sobs that threatened to escape. Ghosts crowded her and touched her back, reminding her of when her father hauled her up onto his shoulders, or when her mother swept the dust out of the house while humming off-key.
The things she could no longer have. The comfort and love she had been denied by an unjust world.
Without her parents to be proud of her—without them to love her—who even was she? Did she mean anything to anyone? Would she ever have that uncondition
al support again, or was she destined to be alone, relying on no one but herself?
When the worst of her grief had passed, she was hollowed out and exhausted. She stared at the door and willed it to open. To walk the same floors her parents had walked. To somehow force time to run backward, to warn them of what was to come.
As she sat there, ensnared by memories, one in particular began to tug at her. She had been in the garden at the back of the house, an overgrown patch of herbs and morning glories. She had been playing with a doll her mother had made, but at the sound of a rustle, she had looked up and gasped.
A fat spider had been sitting in the bush beside her. A Rehanese Blueback, named for the triangular patch of bright blue on the back of its bulbous body. It had been crafting a web before her eyes, made up of shining strands of silk and gossamer.
But Amaya hadn’t been afraid. Her mother had always told her not to harm spiders. Look at how diligently they work, she would say, pointing them out in the garden or on their walks through the city. Most think of them as pests, but they create such lovely silk. That’s their gift to us.
So she had watched it work in awe, marveling at the level of skill it must have taken to make such a fine web. But her peaceful moment hadn’t lasted long. The front door to the house had slammed, making her start, and Amaya had abandoned her doll to see what was wrong.
Her mother had been pacing the front room, her eyes shining as she pressed a hand against her mouth. Amaya stared at that hand, realizing that something was different—her mother’s jade ring was gone, the one her father had given her when they’d been married. In its place was only a thin band of paler skin.
When she had spotted Amaya, her mother had dropped to her knees and grabbed her by the shoulders.
“Amaya,” she had whispered, her lips trembling and her eyes overflowing with tears. “It can’t…It can’t go on this way. I have to.” She had broken down then, hugging Amaya tight to her as she wept. “I have to!”