The vapor was thick enough. Akos grabbed the hook with the wooden handle that hung next to the stove, and attached it to the kettle. It caught, and locked in place as he poured water in each of the mugs. Isae came forward for one, standing on tiptoe so she could whisper in his ear.
“If it hasn’t already, it should be dawning on you right about now that your girl and your mother are very similar people,” she said. “I will pause as that irrefutable fact chills you to the core.”
Akos eyed her. “Was that humor, Chancellor?”
“On occasion, I have been known to make a humorous remark.” She sipped her tea, though it was still boiling hot. It didn’t seem to hurt her. She cradled the mug against her chest. “You knew my sister well, when you were children?”
“Not as well as Eijeh did,” Akos said. “I was a little harder to talk to.”
“She talked about him a lot,” Isae said. “It broke her heart when he was taken. She left Thuvhe for a while, to help me recover from the incident.” She waved her hand over her face, the scars. “Couldn’t have done it without her. Those fools at Assembly Headquarters didn’t know what to do with me.”
Assembly Headquarters was a place Akos had only heard about in passing. A giant ship in orbit around their sun, holding a bunch of drifting ambassadors and politicians.
“Seems like you’d fit in with them all right,” he said. Not exactly a compliment, and she didn’t seem to take it as one.
“I’m not all I seem,” she said with a shrug. She had worn shiny shoes at the hospital in Shissa, sure, he thought, but she also hadn’t complained this whole time about her own comfort. If she really had spent most of her life on a cruiser vessel coasting through space, she hadn’t lived like royalty, that much was clear. But it was hard to get a read on her. It was like she belonged to no one, and nowhere.
“Well, no matter how well you knew her,” she said, “I’m . . . grateful for your help. And Cyra’s. It’s not what I expected.” She glanced up at the hole in the ceiling. “None of this is.”
“I know the feeling.”
She made a little sound in her throat. “If you get Eijeh out, and don’t die in the process, will you come home with us?” she asked. “I could use your insights on Shotet culture. My experience with them has been somewhat one-sided, as you might imagine.”
“You think you can just have a fated traitor in your service without raising any eyebrows?” he said.
“You could go by another name.”
“I can’t hide who I am,” he said. “And I can’t run away from the fact that my fate lies across the Divide. Not anymore.”
She sipped her tea again. She looked almost . . . sad.
“You call it ‘the Divide,’” she said. “Like they do.”
He had done it without meaning to, without even thinking about it. Thuvhesits just called it feathergrass. Up until a little while ago, so had he.
She set her hand on the side of Akos’s head, lightly. It was odd for her to touch him—her skin was cold.
“Just remember,” she said. “These people don’t care about Thuvhesit lives. And whether you have the last vestiges of Shotet ancestry in your blood or not, you are Thuvhesit. You are one of my people, not theirs.”
He’d never expected anyone from Thuvhe to claim him. More the opposite, actually.
She let her hand fall, and carried her mug back to her seat next to Cisi. Jyo was playing Cisi a song, with that sleepy look in his eyes that was becoming familiar to Akos. Too bad for Jyo; anyone with a pair of eyes could see Cisi only wanted Isae. And he was pretty sure it went both ways.
Akos carried the painkiller to Cyra. She and his mother had moved on to another topic. His mom was mopping up the juice from some saltfruit with a chunk of bread made from ground-up seeds, harvested in the fields outside Voa. It wasn’t so different from what they’d eaten in Hessa—one of the few things Shotet and Thuvhe had in common.
“My mother took us there once,” Cyra was saying. “That’s where I learned to swim, in a special suit that protected against the cold. It might have come in handy on the last sojourn.”
“Yes, you went to Pitha, didn’t you?” Sifa said. “You were there, weren’t you, Akos?”
“Yes,” he said. “Spent most of my time there on an island of trash.”
“You’ve seen the galaxy,” she said with an odd smile. She slid her hand under his left sleeve, touching each kill mark. Her smile faded as she counted them.
“Who were they?” she asked softly.
“Two of the men who attacked our house,” he said in a low voice. “And the Armored One who gave me its skin.”
Her eyes flicked to Cyra’s. “Do they know him, here?”
“As I understand it, he is the subject of quite a few rumors, most of them untrue,” Cyra said. “They know he can touch me, that he can brew strong poisons, and that he is a Thuvhesit captive who somehow managed to earn armor.”