I thought he was going to refuse, but after a moment he nodded, sliding away from the wooden railing smooth as a shadow. We didn’t talk. The night was crammed enough with voices without us adding our own. The wooden walkway swayed and creaked beneath us. I wondered if I was making a mistake as I led the way out onto an empty rotting dock.
I could make out a man’s voice on a gill-netter across the way, singing the refrain to one of Dombang’s love songs, a simple, antique piece. The fisher didn’t seem to know the verses, only the refrain, and he worked through the same handful of notes again and again, rising above the tonic, falling below it, then returning to that base note over and over. The music reminded me, for some reason, of a bear cub I’d found years earlier in the Ancaz. His mother had been killed by rockfall, her hindquarters utterly crushed. The poor, baffled cub kept wandering a few feet away, then coming back to nuzzle at his mother’s fur, wandering away, then coming back, as though in the whole vast world he could think of nowhere else to go.
I pointed across the Pot to a line of dilapidated shacks canted precariously toward the water.
“That’s where I grew up.”
I didn’t look at Ruc. After a moment, I stopped looking at the shacks, too. I had not intended to come back.
“Why are you showing me this?” Ruc asked after a while.
I shook my head. “I don’t know.”
“Why did you leave?”
“I was finished.”
“Your parents?” Ruc asked.
“Dead.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.” I hesitated. “I was the one who killed them.”
Lanterns swayed, as they had swayed all evening, from the poles at the sterns of the boats. The current tugged at the vessels with slender, undeniable fingers, the same tonight as on every other night. You say a thing, sometimes, that you expect to change the world. When the world doesn’t change, it’s hard to know what to do next. Ruc didn’t respond, so I plunged ahead, my own story closing over me like the river, warm and welcoming and rotten.
“My father came here from the north, from Nish—I inherited some of the lightness of his skin, his eyes. He was rich when he arrived, a merchant. He met my mother, married, they had a child, lost him. I don’t know my brother’s name; they never spoke it. My father blamed himself, blamed my mother, blamed the entire world, started drinking quey. By the time I was born, he’d lost his fortune. Their house at the western end of the city was gone. The only home I knew was here.
“He’d come home at nights, hit me if he could find me. Hit my mother. He kept the knife for himself, though. After he’d bloodied my lip or blackened her eye, he’d go out on the dock and drag that knife over his skin again and again. I never knew if he was doing penance for hurting us, or for losing my brother, or for ruining his own life. Probably for all of it.”
I fell silent, gazed out over the harbor into the hot, cramped chambers of my past. When Ruc put a hand on my shoulder, I almost hit him. I felt like that child again: lost, terrified, brokenhearted.
“My mother tried to save him,” I went on, finally. “I came home one day from scavenging in the canals to find my father gone and a strange man in our shack.
“‘Who’s this?’ I remember asking.
“At first my mother didn’t meet my eyes. ‘He is a priest.’
“That word, priest, sent a thrill through me. Priests were secret and powerful. It was like learning we had a stash of gold hidden somewhere in the house. Only we didn’t have gold. The only thing we had was me.”
Ruc made a sound in his throat that might have been a growl. His fingers tightened on my shoulder.
“The priest smiled, gave me something to drink, told me I was going to save my family. When I woke up, I was alone in the delta, a sacrifice to the gods.”
“How did you survive?” Ruc asked.
“Luck,” I replied. It was partly true. I left out the golden eyes, the woman with the scale-black hair. For all I knew, she was no more than a nightmare.
“I realized something about life then: it’s not always good. People hold on to it because they don’t know anything else, like Chua refusing to leave the city even though she loathes it. She just needs a little help, a little nudge, something to show her another way. So did my mother and father. They were just worshipping the wrong gods.” I shook my head. “They didn’t need Kem Anh and her consorts. They needed Ananshael.”
Away over the water, the fisher was still singing the same handful of notes over and over, as though there were no other in the world.
“When I got back to the city, I killed them both. It was so easy. They were asleep. His arm was wrapped around her. They looked peaceful, in love. I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t done it years earlier.”
It was strange, I thought when I finally fell silent, that so many days—an entire childhood—could fit in so few words.
“And then what?” Ruc asked quietly.
“I found the Kettral,” I replied. After so much truth, the lie caught in my throat like a broken bone.
“Why are you telling me this?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. Then, after a moment, I shook my head. “No. I’m telling you because I want you to know.”
“Most people would try to hide a story like that.”
“I’ve been hiding it for a long time.”
I stepped closer to him, close enough that I could finally see the planes of his face beneath the shadow, the movement of his eyes. He didn’t pull back when I put a hand on his chest, didn’t even tense. His skin was warm in the warm night air. I could feel the strength waiting in the muscles beneath.
“I want you to kiss me,” I said, the words barely breaking into breath.
He didn’t move. Didn’t flinch or lean in. Across the canal, the fisherman followed the sad notes of his song out and back, out and back. Ela’s voice whispered in my ear: It matters how you hold your body. I shifted just slightly, following some instinct older than my own perseverating thoughts, moved marginally closer to Ruc, faced him more directly, and this time he moved with me, one hand slipping behind, sliding up my spine, closing firmly on the back of my neck, and drawing me slowly, inexorably forward.
I was shocked at how much I remembered, details I’d thought I’d forgotten flooding back: how he kissed the way he fought, patient and implacable both; the tiny chip in his tooth that my tongue always seemed to find; the vibration of his chest beneath my hands as he half growled, pulling me closer; the way his skin smelled of salt and smoke and something else I’d never quite been able to place; how he didn’t ever close his eyes. I could feel my own body responding, loosening and coiling at once, something that might have been hunger uncurling from my stomach up through my throat, through my tongue, and down into my legs.
When we finally broke apart, I felt like a marionette with half its strings cut.
“Does that mean you trust me after all?” I managed.