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 would 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.