He did as she asked, then followed her to the open fire, where he watched as she cleaned the fish with a few deft flicks of a knife, dunked them in oil, dredged them in spices, and laid them on the grill. He could hardly imagine her being more dexterous if she’d had two hands instead of just the one.
She saw him looking. More to the point, she saw him look away when caught looking. She held up the smooth, tapered stump of her wrist and said, “I don’t mind. Have an ogle.”
He blushed, abashed. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m going to impose a fine on apologies,” she said. “I didn’t like to mention it last night, but today is your new beginning. Ten silver every time you say you’re sorry.”
Lazlo laughed, and had to bite his tongue before apologizing for apologizing. “It was trained into me,” he said. “I’m helpless.”
“I accept the challenge of retraining you. Henceforth you are only allowed to apologize if you tread on someone’s foot while dancing.”
“Only then? I don’t even dance.”
“What? Well, we’ll work on that, too.”
She flipped the fish on the grill. The smoke was fragrant with spice.
“I’ve spent all my life in the company of old men,” Lazlo told her. “If you’re hoping to make me fit for society, you’ll have your hands full—”
The words were out before he could consider them. His face flamed, and it was only her holding up a warning finger that prevented him from apologizing. “Don’t say it,” she said. Her affect was stern but her eyes danced. “You mustn’t worry about offending me, young man. I’m quite impervious. As for this…” She held up her wrist. “I almost think they did me a favor. Ten seems an excessive number of fingers to keep track of. And so many nails to pare!”
Her grin infected Lazlo, and he grinned, too. “I never thought of that. You know, there’s a goddess with six arms in Maialen myth. Think of her.”
“Poor dear. But then she probably has priestesses to groom her.”
“That’s true.”
Suheyla forked the cooked fish into a dish, which she handed to him, gesturing toward the table. He carried it over and found a spot for it. Her words were stuck in his head, though: “I almost think they did me a favor.” Who was they? “Forgive me, but—”
“Ten silver.”
“What?”
“You apologized again. I warned you.”
“I didn’t,” Lazlo argued, laughing. “‘Forgive me’ is a command. I command that you forgive me. It’s not an apology at all.”
“Fine,” allowed Suheyla. “But next time, no qualifiers. Just ask.”
“All right,” said Lazlo. “But… never mind. It’s none of my business.”
“Just ask.”
“You said they did you a favor. I was just wondering who you meant.”
“Ah. Well, that would be the gods.”
For all the floating citadel overhead, Lazlo had as yet no clear context for what life had been under the gods. “They… cut off your hand?”
“I assume so,” she said. “Of course I don’t remember. They may have made me do it myself. All I know is I had two hands before they took me, and one after.”
All of this was spoken like ordinary morning conversation. “Took you,” Lazlo repeated. “Up there?”
Suheyla’s brow furrowed, as though she were perplexed by his ignorance. “Hasn’t he told you anything?”
He gathered that she meant Eril-Fane. “Until we stood on the Cusp yesterday, we didn’t even know why we’d come.”
She chuffed with surprise. “Well, aren’t you the trusting things, to come all this way for a mystery.”
“Nothing could have kept me from coming,” Lazlo confessed. “I’ve been obsessed with the mystery of Weep all my life.”
“Really? I had no idea the world even remembered us.”
Lazlo’s mouth skewed to one side. “The world doesn’t really. Just me.”
“Well, that shows character,” said Suheyla. “And what do you think, now that you’re here?” All the while she’d been chopping fruit, and she made a broad gesture with her knife. “Are you satisfied with the resolution of your mystery?”
“Resolution?” he repeated with a helpless laugh, and looked up at the citadel. “I have a hundred times more questions than I did yesterday.”
Suheyla followed his glance, but no sooner did she lift her eyes than she lowered them again and shuddered. Like the Tizerkane on the Cusp, she couldn’t bear the sight of it. “That’s to be expected,” she said, “if my son hasn’t prepared you.” She laid down her knife and swept the chopped fruit into a bowl, which she passed to Lazlo. “He never could talk about it.” He’d started to turn away to carry the bowl to the table when she added, quietly, “They took him longer than anyone, you know.”
He turned back to her. No, he really did not know. He wasn’t sure how to form his thoughts into a question, and before he could, Suheyla, busying herself wiping up the cutting board, went on in the same quiet way.
“Mostly they took girls,” she said. “Raising a daughter in Weep—and, well, being a daughter in Weep—was… very hard in those years. Every time the ground shook, you knew it was Skathis, coming to your door.” Skathis. Ruza had said that name. “But sometimes they took our sons, too.” She scooped tea into a strainer.
“They took children?”
“One’s child is always one’s child, of course, but technically—or, physically, at least—he waited until they were… of age.”
Of age.
Those words. Lazlo swallowed a rising sensation of nausea. Those words were like… they were like seeing a bloody knife. You didn’t need to have witnessed the stabbing to understand what it meant.
“I worried for Azareen more than for Eril-Fane. For her, it was only a matter of time. They knew it, of course. That’s why they married so young. She… she said she wanted to be his before she was theirs. And she was. For five days. But it wasn’t her they took. It was him. Well. They got her later.”
This was… it was unspeakable, all of it. Azareen. Eril-Fane. The routine nature of atrocity. But… “They’re married?” was what Lazlo asked.
“Oh.” Suheyla looked rueful. “You didn’t know. Well, no secret’s safe with me, is it?”
“But why should it be a secret?”
“It’s not that it’s a secret,” she said carefully. “It’s more that it’s… not a marriage anymore. Not after…” She tipped her head up toward the citadel without looking at it.
Lazlo didn’t ask any more questions. Everything he’d wondered about Eril-Fane and Azareen had taken on a much darker cast than he could ever have imagined, and so had the mysteries of Weep.
“We were taken up to ‘serve,’” Suheyla went on, her pronoun shift reminding him that she had herself been one of these taken girls. “That’s what Skathis called it. He would come to the door, or the window.” Her hand trembled, and she clasped it tight over her stump. “They hadn’t brought any servants with them, so there was that. Serving at table, or in the kitchens. And there were chambermaids, gardeners, laundresses.”