Then he sat right there on the floor, holding his head. Riding out the pain. Blood ran down his arm and pooled in the crook of his elbow.
“The invaders might come to Hessa,” Isae said. “Looking for me. We should leave as soon as possible and find Ori.”
“‘We’?” he said. “I’m not taking the chancellor of Thuvhe to Ryzek Noavek, not with my fate as it is. That would really make me a traitor.”
She eyed his marked arm. “If you aren’t already.”
“Oh, shut up,” he snapped. She raised her eyebrows, but he went on. “You think you know exactly how I’ll meet my fate? You think you know what it means, better than I do?”
“You claim to be loyal to Thuvhe, but you tell its chancellor to ‘shut up’?” There was a note of humor in her voice.
“No, I told the woman in my kitchen asking for one hell of a favor to shut up,” he said. “I would never disrespect my chancellor that way. Your Highness.”
She leaned toward him. “Then take the woman in your kitchen to Shotet.” Leaned back. “I’m not an idiot; I know I’ll need your help to get me there.”
“You don’t trust me.”
“Again. Not an idiot,” she said. “You help me get my sister out, and I’ll help you get your brother out. No guarantees, of course.”
Akos almost swore. Why was it, he wondered, that everyone seemed to know exactly what to offer him to make him agree to things? Not that he was convinced she could help him, but he had been teetering on the edge of agreeing anyway.
“Akos,” Isae said, and the use of his name, without malice, startled him a little. “If someone told you that you couldn’t go save your brother, that your life was too important to risk for theirs, would you listen?”
Her face was washed out and dotted with sweat, her cheek red from where the soldier had hit her. She didn’t look much like a chancellor. The scars on her face said something different about her, too—that she, like Cyra, knew what she was risking when she risked her life.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll help you.”
There was a loud crack as Cisi brought her mug down hard on the table, splashing hot tea over her hand. She grimaced, wiping her hand on her shirt and thrusting it out for him to take. Isae looked confused, but Akos understood—Cisi had something to say, and much as he was afraid to hear it, he couldn’t very well say no.
He clasped her hand.
“I hope you both realize that I’m coming with you,” she said hotly.
“No,” he said. “You can’t be in that kind of danger, absolutely not.”
“You don’t want me to be in danger?” Her voice was rougher than it ever had been before; she was rigid as a crossbeam. “How do you think I feel about you going back there? This family has been through enough uncertainty, enough loss.” She was scowling. Isae looked like she had just been smacked, and no wonder—she had probably never seen Cisi like this, free to say whatever she wanted, free to cry and yell and make everyone uncomfortable. “If we all get killed in Shotet, we’ll get killed together, but—”
“Don’t talk about death that way, like it’s nothing!”
“I don’t think you get it.” A tremor went through her arm, her hand, her voice. Her eyes found his, and he focused on the spot on her iris, the place where the pupil broke open. “After you were taken, and Mom came back, she was . . . insensible. So I dragged Dad’s body out to the field to burn. I cleaned up the living room.”
He couldn’t imagine, couldn’t imagine the horror of scrubbing your own father’s blood out of the floor. Better to set the whole house on fire, better to leave and never come back.
“Don’t you dare tell me I don’t know what death is,” she said. “I know.”
Alarmed, he lifted a hand to her cheek, pressed her face into his shoulder. Her curly hair itched his chin.
“Fine” was all he said. It was agreement enough.
They agreed to sleep for a few hours before they left, and Akos went upstairs alone. Without thinking, he skipped the sixth step, some part of him remembering that it groaned louder than the others. The hallway upstairs was a little crooked; it listed to the right just after the bathroom, the curve wrong somehow. The room he’d shared with Eijeh was at the end. He opened the door with his fingertips.
The sheets on Eijeh’s bed were curled like they were around a still-sleeping body, and there was a pair of dirty socks in the corner, stained brown at the heels from his shoes. On Akos’s side of the room, the sheets were taut around the mattress, a pillow wedged between bed and wall. Akos had never been able to last long with a pillow.
Through the big round window he saw feathergrass rippling in the dark, and stars.
He held his pillow in his lap when he sat. The pair of shoes lined up with the bed frame were so much smaller than the pair he was wearing that he smiled. Smiled, and then cried, shoving his face in the pillow to stifle himself. It wasn’t happening. He wasn’t here. He wasn’t about to leave home when he’d only just found it again.