“Run?” I said, squeezing tighter.
In answer, he held my knees tight against his sides, and jogged down the pathway the soldiers had cleared, laughing. His bouncing steps jostled a giggle from me, and then the crowd—our people, my people—joined in, my eyeline full of smiles.
I saw a hand up ahead, stretching toward me, and I brushed it with my fingers, just like my mother would. My skin came away damp with sweat. I found that I didn’t mind it as much as I expected. My heart was full.
CHAPTER 4: CYRA
THERE WERE HIDDEN HALLWAYS in the walls of Noavek manor, built for the servants to travel through without disturbing us and our guests. I often walked them, learning the codes that the servants used to navigate, carved into the corners of the walls and the tops of entrances and exits. Otega sometimes scolded me for coming to her lessons covered in cobwebs and grime, but mostly, no one cared how I spent my free time as long as I didn’t disturb my father.
When I was newly seven seasons old, my wanderings took me to the walls behind my father’s office. I had followed a clattering sound there, but when I heard my father’s voice, raised in anger, I stopped and crouched.
For a moment, I toyed with the idea of turning back, running the same way I had come so that I could be safe in my own room. Nothing good came of my father’s raised voice, and it never had. The only one who could calm him was my mother, but even she couldn’t control him.
“Tell me,” my father said. I pushed my ear to the wall to better hear him. “Tell me exactly what you told him.”
“I—I thought . . .” Ryz’s voice wobbled like he was on the verge of tears. That wasn’t good, either. My father hated tears. “I thought, because he is training to be my steward, that he would be trustworthy—”
“Tell me what you told him!”
“I told him . . . I told him that my fate, as declared by the oracles, was—was to fall to the family Benesit. That they are one of the two Thuvhesit families. That’s all.”
I pulled away from the wall. A cobweb caught on my ear. I hadn’t heard Ryzek’s fate before. I knew my parents had shared it with him when most fated children found out their fates: when they developed a currentgift. I would find out my own in a handful of seasons. But to know Ryzek’s—to know that Ryzek’s was to fall to the family Benesit, which had kept itself hidden for so many seasons we didn’t even know their aliases or their planet of residence—was a rare gift. Or a burden.
“Imbecile. That’s ‘all’?” my father said, scornful. “You think that you can afford trust, with a coward fate like yours? You must keep it hidden! Or else perish under your own weakness!”
“I’m sorry.” Ryz cleared his throat. “I won’t forget. I will never do it again.”
“You are correct. You will not.” My father’s voice was deeper now, and flat. That was almost worse than yelling. “We will just have to work harder to find a way out of it, won’t we? Of the hundreds of futures that exist, we will find the one in which you are not a waste of time. And in the meantime, you will work hard to appear as strong as possible, even to your closest associates. Understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good.”
I stayed crouched there, listening to their muffled voices, until the dust in the tunnel made me want to sneeze. I wondered about my fate, if it would raise me up to power or cut me down. But now it felt more frightening than before. All my father wanted was to conquer Thuvhe, and Ryzek was destined to failure, fated to let my father down.
Dangerous, to anger my father with something you could not change.
I ached for Ryz, there in the tunnel, as I fumbled my way back to my bedroom. I ached, before I knew better.
CHAPTER 5: CYRA
A SEASON LATER, WHEN I was eight, my brother barged into my bedroom, breathless and soaked through with rain. I had just finished setting up the last of my figurines on the carpet in front of my bed. They were scavenged from the sojourn to Othyr the year before, where they had a fondness for small, useless objects. He knocked some of them over when he marched across the room. I cried out in protest—he had ruined the army formation.
“Cyra,” he said, crouching beside me. He was eighteen seasons old, his arms and legs too long, with spots on his forehead, but terror made him look younger. I put my hand on his shoulder.
“What is it?” I asked, squeezing.
“Has Father ever brought you somewhere just to . . . show you something?”
“No.” Lazmet Noavek never took me anywhere; he barely looked at me when we were in the same room together. It didn’t bother me. Even then, I knew that being the target of Father’s gaze was not a good thing. “Never.”
“That’s not exactly fair, is it?” Ryz said eagerly. “You and I are both his children, we ought to be treated the same. Don’t you think?”
“I . . . I suppose,” I said. “Ryz, what is—”