But I wasn’t confused. Perhaps if I had been normal, if I had grown up with any other name, I would have been.
Akos had been released of his fate, and of his obligation to me. And so he had left, gone home. Why would he feel the need to leave a message of farewell, or simply of explanation, to Ryzek’s Scourge? That would be too considerate. Too much for a person like me to possibly expect.
I sat, heavy, on the trunk that stood at the foot of Sifa’s bed. My currentshadows ran thick across my skin.
He was gone.
And I was alone again.
CHAPTER 31: CYRA
SWEAT RAN INTO THE corner of my mouth. I licked the salt taste away and burst into a run. It was a risk, but I thought I could surprise him with strength he wasn’t ready for.
My opponent was tall and lean. Ettrek, the one who had called me “Ryzek’s Scourge” in the storm sanctuary when I first arrived, and insisted on the name whenever he saw me. But right now, he was just an arrangement of limbs, a particular density of meat. I threw my body at his, driving my elbows low, toward his gut.
The school of the mind—elmetahak—would not approve of my risk taking. A risk should only be taken when there is no other option available, the teachings said. In this case, they were correct. I had miscalculated.
Ettrek’s arm slammed like a girder against my chest and shoulder, knocking me flat on my back. All around me the crowd roared their pleasure.
“Bleed, oruzo!” someone in the crowd jeered.
I heard, in their shouts, a memory. Of kneeling on a platform with a knife against my throat. My brother poised above me with rage and fear intermingled in his eyes. My people calling me “traitor,” my people crooning for my blood. The silverskin on my head prickled.
They still crooned for my blood, even here, on Ogra. To them, I was still a Noavek, still better dead than alive.
I looked up at the wall, at Ettrek, about to bend down to deliver the final blow. I knew him. He called me “ally,” he fought me for sport, but deep in the heart of him, he still wanted me to hurt.
So I slid a hand behind his head, as tenderly as a lover, and drew him closer. Hurt me more, the movement said. Go ahead. He jerked back like my touch was poison—and it was—and he fell back, off balance. I crawled on top of him, pinned him, made to elbow him in the face—but I stopped before striking him, my eyebrows raised.
“Yeah, yeah, I concede,” Ettrek said, and the crowd booed. They were tired of watching me win. Tired of watching Noaveks win.
That Lazmet’s blood didn’t run in my veins, that I might not technically even be Shotet, didn’t matter to them.
Did it matter to me?
Later, when the leaders of the Shotet exiles asked me to represent my people to the Ogran leadership—not knowing, of course, that I was not the true inheritor of my brother’s throne—I thought of how I had felt, with my back flat on the ground, with those people cheering for my pain and defeat.
They hated me. They did not accept me. They didn’t want me to represent them.
“The more traditional of the two Ogran leaders values law very highly, and you are the legal heir to the sovereignty,” the exile leader, Aza, said to me with a hint of desperation.
Teka added, “We need your help, Cyra.”
I looked at her—her pale hair limp from Ogran humidity, a dark circle beneath her remaining eye betraying her fatigue—and suddenly, Shotet was not the nameless crowd that had surrounded me more than once. Shotet was her. And Jorek. And even Yma. People who had been trampled by the powerful, just as I had. People who needed this small thing in order to fight back.
And I owed it to them. I had told people to evacuate. I had let slip that the exiles were on Ogra. I carried the Noavek legacy, even if I didn’t carry their blood. I owed this at the very least, for what I had done.
“Fine,” I said.
“I look ridiculous,” I said to my reflection. Or, really, I said it to Teka, who stood behind me with her arms folded, sucking a dimple into her cheek.
I wore a floor-length jacket with sharp shoulders, buttoned tight across my chest and falling straight to the floor. Every seam was stitched with glowing thread, though, which made me feel more like an Ogran spacecraft than a person. The collar—made entirely of luminous fabric—lit my face from beneath, making my currentshadows especially nightmarish when they flowed across my skin.
Which was constantly. What little control I had retained when we first landed on Ogra was gone, as if Akos had taken it with him when he left.
“Aza wanted to make sure you looked the part of a sovereign, even if you’re not really one. And now you do,” Teka said. “Besides, everyone here looks ridiculous, so you fit right in.”
She gestured to herself. She was dressed like me, except her jacket was gray—to complement her coloring, the Ogran seamstress had said—and fell to her knees instead of her ankles. She wore pants to match it, and her pale hair was pulled back into a sleek knot. My own was in a thick, bumpy braid over one shoulder, on the side opposite the silverskin.
We were about to attend a meeting with representatives of Ogra in Pokgo, Ogra’s capital city. They had invited us to discuss the “request”—more like a demand—issued by the government of Thuvhe that the Ograns no longer give shelter to Shotet exiles, in the wake of the attack on Shissa.
I felt ill. The only reason Thuvhe had known to make that demand of Ogra was because I had told Isae we were here. My currentshadows were dense and quick, and this restrictive clothing wasn’t helping. I couldn’t deny that it emphasized the length of my body in a nice way, though.
“You’re going bare-faced?” I said to Teka, turning away from the mirror. “You could at least smudge something on your eye, you know.”
“Every time I try I just end up looking stupid,” she said.
“I could give it a try,” I said. “My mother taught me when I was young.”
“Just don’t zing me with your currentgift,” Teka said, a little grouchy.
I had found a little black pencil to trace my lash line in one of the shops in Galo. I had tried to barter with the clever Ogran woman who ran it, but she had pretended not to understand my accent, so I eventually gave up on the game and bought it for its full price. I removed its cap and stood in front of Teka, bending so our faces were on the same level. I couldn’t brace myself against her, so I braced my hands against each other, to steady them.
“We could talk about it, you know,” Teka said. “Him leaving like that? Not so much as a good-bye? We could talk about it, if you . . . you know. Needed to.”
Not so much as a good-bye. He had decided I wasn’t worth that basic decency.
I clenched my jaw.
“No,” I said, “we can’t.”
If I talked about it, I would want to scream, and this coat was too tight around my ribs for that. It was the same reason I now avoided Eijeh and Sifa—always together, these days, and consulting with exiles about the future almost hourly. I couldn’t bear the feeling.
In light, short strokes, with pauses as my currentgift swelled and receded like a tide, I lined Teka’s eyelid with black, using the other end of the pencil to smudge it. When I first met her, she would have stabbed me rather than let me get this close to her, so though she would deny it if I asked, I knew she was softening toward me, as I had already softened toward her.
A soft heart was a gift, whether given easily or with great reluctance. I would never take it for granted again.
She opened her eye. Its blue looked even more brilliant with the black to frame it. She wore what she called her “fancy eye patch” on the other eye—it was clean and black, and held to her face with ribbon instead of a stretchy band.
“There,” I said. “Almost painless.”
She looked at herself in the mirror. “Almost,” she agreed. But she left the pencil in place, so I knew she liked it.