"My access was limited," I said. "Trust me, I would have wrapped my mother's blade in silk and crammed it in your eye socket if I had had unlimited resources."
He released me halfway, so my arm fell to my side, and my posture straightened. I regained the use of my eyes, so I could blink and look at Akos, who sat motionless at his place at the table.
He had only been here for two weeks, if the information we had gotten from Ara was correct, but he had changed. He had always been lean, but his face was now gaunt, and if he had stood, I was sure the slight paunch that had made his waist soft was now gone. The bones in his wrists stood out like little rocks under the skin. He was paler than pale, as green in this light as my father was, and unkempt, like he had not bothered to bathe in several days.
I ached with hunger, with sympathy, and yes, with longing, even still, as I looked at him. Knowing that he hadn't abandoned me just to return home and wait out the war had made it more difficult to be angry with him. Coming here had been stupid, but it had at least been for a greater purpose.
I stared at him, trying to get some kind of acknowledgment that I was standing right in front of him, and he stared back, but without recognition. He almost looked the way Eijeh had, after Ryzek had traded his first memory with him--like he didn't know who I was, or where he was. Like someone had broken him and put him back together incorrectly.
"There is a saying from a Shotet cleric that seems apt, given the situation," Lazmet said. He spun the knife on his palm, and caught it by the blade, offering it back to me, handle first. I gritted my teeth as the wriggling in my brain began again, and my hand extended, my fingers closing around the handle. "Only use a blade if you're prepared to die by it."
I shuddered, hard, as I realized what he was about to do. I fought the thing in my brain with every ounce of my strength as my hands both clasped the handle, turning the blade to face my own stomach. He had left my mouth free so that he could hear me scream, I was sure of it.
"Akos!" I yelled. "Touch him!"
"My son's currentgift is not active at the moment," Lazmet said. "But he is, of course, welcome to try."
Akos had not moved. I watched as he swallowed, hard, and fixed his gaze on me.
"No," he said quietly. "There's no point."
My hands pulled closer, and the tip of the blade touched my stomach--and somehow I had always known this was how death would find me, at the hands of my own family, and at the end of my own knife--
But though this felt familiar, and even expected, I refused to accept it.
It hadn't occurred to me until then that though Lazmet controlled my muscles, he didn't necessarily control my currentgift. And while I couldn't control it that well, either, I knew that it was hungry to be shared--as ever, it wanted to devour everything in its path, even if what was in its path was me. The doctor my mother had taken me to when I was young had told me my currentgift was an expression of what I thought I deserved, and what I thought other people deserved: pain. Perhaps there was truth in that. Perhaps I was now learning that I didn't deserve it as much as I had once thought. But regardless, I did know one thing: there was no other man in the galaxy who had earned pain more than the one who stood in front of me.
I didn't send out a hesitant tendril, wondering if it would work. I threw my currentgift at Lazmet Noavek with all the force of my will, and a black cloud engulfed him like a swarm of insects. He screamed, without control, without the luxury of pride. The knife stopped moving toward my gut, but I couldn't release it, either.
Then I heard a sharp pop as one of the jars on the shelves that lined the walls burst, like a balloon, its contents spurting over the floor. Another one shattered right after it, and another. Soon the air was pungent with the smell of long-preserved flesh and the light was changing from greenish to white. The floor was slick, and white lumps rolled this way and that. The wriggling in my brain subsided, and hands grabbed my shoulders from behind, dragging me backward.
I screamed, "No!" I had been so close, so close to killing him--
But the hands pulled me into the hidden hallway behind me, and once I was in the dark, I knew better than to try to run back. Instead I threw myself forward, spotting the bobbing of a knot of hair that told me it was Ettrek who had grabbed me. We ran, my father's shouting chasing us into the shadows. I jumped down half a flight of stairs I knew was coming, and turned a sharp corner, only to find Yma Zetsyvis standing at the exit in the kitchen, her blue eyes wild.
"Come quickly!" she said, and together we ran to the back gate, where Teka was waiting, motioning us out.
Running through the streets around Noavek manor reminded me of the Sojourn Festival. My hand wrapped around Akos's, my face itching from blue paint. Chasing him with water cupped in my hands, though it was raining down from above. And the quiet of afterward, when I stripped my blue-stained clothes in my bathroom and realized there was something calm and still inside me that hadn't been that way since before my mother died.
Since he had kissed me in the transport vessel galley, I had thought about what the exact moment was that I fell for him. Now, dragging air into struggling lungs as I ducked around corners and under low ceilings in the tunnels of Noavek manor, I wondered whether I had fallen for him while he was lying to me, making a show of being kind so that I would reveal how to get out of the manor. And if it had been during that time, did that mean I loved someone who didn't exist? A pretend Akos, like one of the Storyteller's smoke pictures?
A group of people running would have attracted more attention than anything, so when we were a few streets away from Noavek manor, I put my hood up and slowed to a walk. Yma, too, tucked her blond hair under a black scarf, though the pale color of her gown--lavender, today--still made her wealth too obvious. We would have to address that before we reached the fringes of the city.
Teka hooked her elbow around mine, making sure my skin was covered as well as hers. But it was instinct, to draw my currentshadows away from her, focusing them on the left side of my body instead of the right. Facing down my father had reminded me what the control felt like--not like controlling the shadows themselves, more like plating my body with armor so they couldn't touch me, and letting them flow elsewhere.
"This way we're just a pair of friends walking back from the market together," she said, tipping her head toward me. "No one expects Cyra Noavek to have a friend."
Sometimes she still said things that wounded me. And not because they were lies.
We walked that way, a dozen paces behind Ettrek and Zyt, and half a dozen paces in front of Yma.
"You'd be better off walking with her," I said, tipping my head back slightly. "You two could be mother and daughter."
Teka just shrugged.
When the streets turned from stone to broken stone to dirt, we stopped to address Yma's clothing. Teka loaned her a cloak with a hood, and she tied the dark scarf around her waist to cover most of her skirt. Only a little lavender peeked out from the bottom when she was in motion. Still, we made our way quickly to the safe house, with at least one of us peering over a shoulder every few steps, as if that wasn't suspicious on its own.
When we were tucked away inside the huge space, Ettrek turned to me.
"You know, it took a lot out of me, breaking all those jars," he said. "The least you could do is not look so angry at being rescued."
Now that we were safe, I let myself break. This time, I fell apart shouting.
"I had him! I was on the verge of killing him! And you decided to rescue me?"
Sifa emerged from a stairwell, her hands clasped in front of her. Had she known that we would fail? I didn't even want to consider the idea.
"Killing him!" Ettrek's hair was dusted with dirt, like sugar on top of a cake. "You were about to plunge a currentblade in your own stomach!"
"These currentshadows aren't only good for making me flinch a lot, you know." I charged toward him, crushing a patch of fragile flowers under the heel of my shoe. "I had him wrapped in them. I wo
uld have killed him."
"Maybe not before he killed you," Ettrek said quietly.
"And?" I demanded. He retreated, his back colliding with Zyt's chest, and I said, "When someone asks you to trade the chance of Lazmet Noavek's death for the life of Ryzek's Scourge . . ." and then shouted, ". . . you do it!"
The echo in the half-exploded space lasted a long time.
"You and the Kereseth boy both exasperate me," Yma said, undoing the clasp on the cloak she had borrowed and lowering the hood. "So eager to throw your lives away."
"It's not just his life he's willing to throw away," I snapped. "It's mine, too."
"Yes, that was quite a shock, him not saving you," Yma said. "I wasn't sure he had the fortitude. I was so concerned I thought about creating it, in him, but I was afraid of the damage I might do in the process."
"Creating it?" I said.
"Yes," she said. "The reason your family has kept me alive so long is that I twist hearts into the shapes of my choosing."
"That," I said, "explains a lot."
"Does it." Yma's tone was wry. "In any case, you are remarkably consistent, Miss Noavek. The boy has been starved, imprisoned, beaten, manipulated, threatened, and shown his friend's eyeballs in a jar at dinner, and still you think about what he allowed to happen to you."
"Yma," Teka said, looking sick.
"No, no. Let her get it out." I held my arms wide. "Which am I, then? Irritatingly self-sacrificial, or shockingly self-centered?"
"Do I have to choose?" She raised her eyebrows, which were so pale they almost blended into her skin. "You would die so that we all have to honor you. You are too bigheaded for the slow fade into obscurity, also known as a regular life. One thing I will say for your former paramour is that unlike you, he has no thirst for glory, at least."
I was about to respond when I noticed that Teka had covered her face. I heard a sharp sound, muffled by her palms. A sob.
"Jorek," she said.
It pulled the anger out of me, like sucking the poison from a bite. I had forgotten. Yma had forgotten, too, or she might not have chosen such specific words--shown his friend's eyeballs in a jar. Not only was Jorek gone, but he had suffered the same horror as Teka beforehand. It was not the way anyone should have to die.
Yma went to her in the way that only family could, wrapping her arms around her niece and clutching her close. I stood nearby, not willing to leave, but unsure how to stay. In more ways than one.
Sifa had walked over. Her hair was tucked into a bumpy braid, the same wavy-thick-smooth texture as my own.
"Did you know?" I said. I could have been asking about a dozen things, but I didn't bother to clarify.
"I suspected. I am still not sure exactly what's coming, or how to steer us. The situation has become . . . exponentially more complicated."
My chin wobbled when I spoke next: "If you don't know how to steer us . . . why did you come?"
"You won't like my answer."
As if that had ever mattered.
Sifa lifted a shoulder. "I came to be with you."
Sifa--the woman who had abandoned her husband and children to the horror of murder and kidnapping, the woman who had coaxed her son into killing Vas Kuzar and allowed Orieve Benesit to die in the name of fate--had come here, not to maneuver, but just . . . to be with me?
I wasn't sure whether to believe her or not, so I just nodded, sharply, and walked away.
The slant of light coming through the broken ceiling had taken on a burnt color, like still-cooling embers. That meant the day was done, with no plan, no path, no way back to Lazmet Noavek. Morning would come, and the time Isae Benesit had given us would run out.
CHAPTER 48: CISI
I WAKE WITH A sour taste in my mouth. I am not sure where I am. The last time I knew anything, I was in my bathroom with blood soaking my side, and Ast had just stabbed me. I thought I would die. But wherever I am, I don't seem to be dead.
My tongue feels like it's fuzzy. I cringe a little at the feeling. Someone sticks a straw between my lips, and I drink. Water fills my mouth, and I swish it around before swallowing.
And oh--swallowing hurts. Not my throat, but my stomach. It's like someone tore right through my abdomen.
I open my eyes. I'm not sure why I expect to see the big crack that's above my bed at home. When I was sick as a kid I used to think about what it was shaped like. A floater? A bird? I could never decide.
There's no crack in this ceiling, though. The ceiling here is a moving image, like the ones in the walls at Assembly Headquarters. It shows a blue sky with puffy clouds drifting across it.
I lift a hand. There's a patch of tech just under my knuckles. I can feel it, stinging a little as I wiggle my fingers. It's probably monitoring my vitals, heart rate and temperature and blood sugar. There's a little exit point on top of it, attached now to a tube with clear liquid running through it. Keeping me hydrated, I assume, though it's not doing anything for the taste in my mouth.
"Miss Kereseth?"
I blink away the film covering my eyes and see a woman dressed in a crisp white uniform--shirt and pants--with a dark blue apron over the top of it. Her hair is tied back and secured with pins. She wears rubber gloves.
I feel unmoored. In my mind, I list the things I know. I am not at home. Judging by the ceiling, I am in a rich place. Assembly Headquarters? No, Othyr--Othyr is where we were last. I'm hurt. My stomach. It's like someone tore right through my abdomen. . . .
I remember his face in the mirror, right next to mine. Someone did just that.
"Ast," I croak.
"What?" The nurse frowns. "He's not here right now--he came yesterday to check on you, though."
He came to check on me? No, he came to make sure I was still unconscious, or in the hope that I was dead. A shiver runs through me. He was here while I was unconscious--what if he did something else, what if he tried to finish what he started? I imagine a pillow pressed to my mouth, a vial of poison tipped down my throat, stitches pulled from the wound in my abdomen until my guts spill out--
"No," I say, and it comes out a growl. "No--Ast did it, Ast stabbed me--"
"Miss Kereseth, I think you're confused, you've been out for a couple days--"
"I am not--"
"The security footage of your room was missing," she says softly.
Of course it was, I think, but can't say. Ast found a way to delete the evidence--!
"But they found the weapon, wiped of fingerprints," she continues, "in the house of a man whose currentgift allows him to put on different faces. The Othyrian police suspect he was trying to kill the chancellor and got you instead."
I squeeze my eyes shut. Of course. Ast plays at being too simple for politics, he senses currentgifts, he grew up with real-world smarts and contacts with seedy reputations, no doubt . . . of course he knew how to cover his tracks. He deleted the footage, misled the police, found a likely suspect to frame for the crime, planted the weapon. . . .
But why? Why would he take this risk? Just to be right? To get his way? Why did he even care so much about what happened to Thuvhe in this war?
"It was him," I say with some difficulty.
Maybe, I think as I drift off again, it's not Thuvhe he cares about, but Shotet.
Isae told me the story, once, of how she got the scars. I never asked her, because that wasn't the sort of thing you just asked about. But she told me anyway.
We had been sitting on the old, grungy sofa in my school apartment. There were pots brewing on burners everywhere, so the corners of the room were full of vapor. We were in Shissa, so through the floor-to-ceiling windows on the far wall, all I could see were snowdrifts far below. My room was hardly even wide enough for me to stretch out my arms in both directions, but it had a good view.
She had an embroidered pillow in her lap, one I had bought from a little shop in Hessa where a friend from primary school worked. She was wearing socks I had loaned her because hers weren't warm enough. They were yellowish brown, or
brownish yellow, I could never decide which, and had a lumpy heel where I'd gone wrong with mending them.
She told me that she hadn't really grown up on a pirate ship. That was just what she told people to startle them. The transporter ship she was on as a kid did some shady business every now and then, she said, but nothing to get huffy about.
And trust me, she said, if there was something to get huffy about, my parents would be huffy.
They had landed on Essander to dump the goods from their most recent job, and it just happened to be the planet where the Shotet were doing their seasonal scavenge. Only, scavenges weren't supposed to include theft and murder, according to the ethical guidelines Shotet had agreed to when the Assembly was formed.
The Shotet boarded the transporter ship, much like pirates would have done. And they blew through the vessel room by room, rifling through everything to find valuables, and killing whoever they wanted. One of the scavengers threatened Isae's mother, and when her father defended her, they both wound up dead. So Isae went at the man with a meat mallet.
A . . . meat mallet? I asked her, so shocked I couldn't help but smile. It was all right. She smiled, too.
She cracked one of them hard in the head, she said, but meat mallets are worthless against a Shotet soldier. Actually, pretty much anything was, according to her. They were lethal. And the leader of the group, a woman, must have admired Isae's gumption, because instead of killing her, she pinned Isae down and carved into her face, saying, "Remember me."
She hadn't mentioned Ast at the time, except to say that some of her friends were hurt or killed, too. Now, though, I knew that he had been there, and that a Shotet soldier had killed his father, and half of his friends.
Yeah, there were plenty of reasons for Ast to care what happened to Shotet in this war.
"Cee?"
Isae's voice sounds strained. She looks worn, her hair lank around her face. She grabs my hand and squeezes it. I guess Ast must not have told her I tried to send a message to the Shotet exiles, then, or she would have me arrested instead of sitting at my bedside.
"Did you . . ." My voice sounds creaky as an old door. "Did you make the alliance with Othyr?"
"You don't need to worry about that right now," she says. "Just focus on healing, okay? We almost lost you. I almost lost you."