When he said the name of his home, comfortable with the slippery syllables that I would have stumbled over, it was easier to remember that though he spoke Shotet fluently, he was not one of us, not really. He had grown up encased in frost, his house lit by burnstones. He probably still dreamt in Thuvhesit.
“Thuvhe,” I repeated. I had never been to the frozen country in the north, but I had studied their language and culture. I had seen pictures and footage. “Iceflowers and buildings made of leaded glass.” They were people who loved intricate, geometric patterns, and bright colors that stood out in the snow. “Floating cities and endless white. Yes, there are things I love about Thuvhe.”
He looked suddenly stricken. I wondered if I had made him homesick.
He took the dagger that I had offered him and looked it over, testing the blade with his fingertip and wrapping his hand around the handle.
“You handed over this weapon so easily,” he said. “But I could use this against you, Cyra.”
“You could try to use it against me,” I corrected him quietly. “But I don’t think you will.”
“I think you might be lying to yourself about what I am.”
He was right. Sometimes it was too easy to forget that he was a prisoner in my house, and that when I was with him, I was serving as a kind of warden.
But if I let him escape right now, to try to get his brother home, as he wanted, I would be resigning myself to a lifetime of agony again. Even as I thought it, I couldn’t bear it. It was too many seasons, too many Uzul Zetsyvises, too many veiled threats from Ryzek and half-drunk evenings at his side.
I started down the aisle again. “Time to visit the Storyteller.”
While my father had been busy shaping Ryzek into a monster, my education had been in Otega’s hands. Every so often she had dressed me head to toe in heavy fabric, to disguise the shadows that burned me, and taken me to parts of the city my parents would never have allowed me to go.
This place was one of them. It was deep in one of the poorer areas of Voa, where half the buildings were caving in and the others looked like they were about to. There were markets here, too, but they were more temporary, just rows of things arranged on blankets, so they could be gathered and carried away at a moment’s notice.
Akos drew me in by my elbow as we walked past one of them, a purple blanket with white bottles on it. They had glue from peeled-off labels still on them, attracting purple fuzz.
“Is that medicine?” he asked me. “Those look like they’re from Othyr.”
I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.
“For what ailment?” he asked.
“Q900X,” I replied. “Known more colloquially as ‘chills and spills.’ You know, because it affects balance.”
He frowned at me. We paused there in the alley, the festival sounds far off. “That disease is preventable. You don’t inoculate against it?”
“You understand that we are a poor country, right?” I frowned back at him. “We have no real exports, and hardly enough natural resources to sustain ourselves independently. Some other planets send aid—Othyr, among them—but that aid falls into the wrong hands, and is distributed based on status rather than need.”
“I never . . .” He paused. “I’ve never thought about it before.”
“Why would you?” I said. “It’s not high on Thuvhe’s list of concerns.”
“I grew up wealthy in a poor place, too,” he said. “That’s something we have in common.”
He seemed surprised that we would have anything in common at all.
“There’s nothing you can do for these people?” he said, gesturing to the buildings around us. “You’re Ryzek’s sister, can’t you—”
“He doesn’t listen to me,” I said, defensive.
“You’ve tried?”
“You say that like it’s easy.” My face felt warm. “Just have a meeting with my brother and tell him to rearrange his whole system and he’ll do it.”
“I didn’t say it was easy—”
“High-status Shotet are my brother’s insulation against an uprising,” I said, even more heated now. “And in exchange for their loyalty, he gives them medicine, food, and the trappings of wealth that the others don’t get. Without them as his insulation, he will die. And with my Noavek blood, I die with him. So no . . . no, I have not embarked on some grand mission to save the sick and the poor of Shotet!”
I sounded angry, but inside I was shriveling from the shame of it. I had almost thrown up the first time Otega brought me here, from the smell of a starved body in one of the alleys. She had covered my eyes as we walked past it, so I couldn’t get a close look. That was me: Ryzek’s Scourge, combat virtuoso, driven to vomit by the sight of death alone.
“I shouldn’t have brought it up,” he said, his hand gentle on my arm. “Let’s go. Let’s go visit this . . . storyteller.”
I nodded, and we kept walking.