shadows disappeared as his currentgift countered mine.
Yes, what was within arm’s reach was definitely enough for me.
“Would you … say something in Thuvhesit?” he asked.
I turned my head toward him. He was still looking up at the window, a faint smile curling his lips. Freckles dotted his nose, and one of his eyelids, right near the lash line. I hesitated with my hand just lifted off the blanket, wanting to touch him but also wanting to stay in the wanting for a moment. Then I followed the line of his eyebrow across his face with a fingertip.
“I’m not a pet bird,” I said. “I don’t chirp on command.”
“This is a request, not a command. A humble one,” he said. “Just say my full name, maybe?”
I laughed. “Most of your name is Shotet, remember?”
“Right.” He lunged at my hand with his mouth, snapping his teeth together. It startled a laugh from me. “What was hardest for you to say, when you were first learning?”
“Your city names, what a mouthful,” I said as he let go of one of my hands to catch the other, holding me by pinkie and thumb with all his fingertips. He pressed a kiss to the center of my palm, where the skin was callused from holding currentblades. Strange, that something so simple, given to a hardened part of me, could suffuse me so completely, bringing life to every nerve.
I sighed, acquiescing.
“Fine, I’ll say them. Hessa, Shissa, Osoc,” I said. “There was a chancellor who called Hessa the very heart of Thuvhe. Her surname was Kereseth.”
“The only Kereseth chancellor in Thuvhesit history,” Akos said, bringing my palm to his cheek. I propped myself up on one elbow to lean over him, my hair slipping forward to frame both our faces, long on one side though I was now silverskinned on the other. “I do know that much.”
“For a long time, there were only two fated families on Thuvhe,” I said, “and yet, aside from that one exception, the leadership has only ever been with the Benesits, when the fates have named a chancellor at all. Is that not strange to you?”
“Maybe we aren’t any good at leading.”
“Maybe fate favors you,” I said. “Maybe thrones are curses.”
“Fate doesn’t favor me,” he said gently, so gently I almost didn’t realize what he meant. His fate—the third child of the family Kereseth will die in service to the family Noavek—was to betray his home for my family, in serving us, and to die. How could anyone see that as anything but a hardship?
I shook my head. “I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking—”
“Cyra,” he said. Then he paused, frowning at me. “Did you just apologize?”
“I do know the words,” I replied, scowling back. “I’m not completely without manners.”
He laughed. “I know the Essanderae word for ‘garbage’; that doesn’t mean I sound right saying it.”
“Fine, I revoke my apology.” I flicked his nose, hard, and when he cringed away, still laughing, I said, “What’s the Essanderae word for ‘garbage’?”
He said it. It sounded like a word reflected in a mirror, said once forward and once backward.
“I’ve found your weakness,” he said. “I just have to taunt you with knowledge you don’t have, and you’re distracted immediately.”
I considered that. “I guess you’re allowed to know one of my weaknesses … considering you have so many to exploit.”
He raised his eyebrows in question, and I attacked him with my fingers, jabbing his left side just under his elbow, his right side just above his hip, the tendon behind his right leg. I had learned these soft places when we were training—places he didn’t protect well enough, or that made him cringe harder than usual when struck—but I teased him now with more gentleness than I had thought myself capable of, drawing from him laughs instead of cringes.
He pulled me on top of him, holding me by the hips. A few of his fingers slipped under the waistband of my pants, and it was a kind of agony I was unfamiliar with, a kind I didn’t mind at all. I braced myself on the blanket, on either side of his head, and lowered myself slowly to kiss him.
We hadn’t kissed more than a few times, and I had never kissed anyone but him, so each time was still a discovery. This time I found the edge of teeth, skimming, and the tip of a tongue; I found the slide of a knee between mine, and the weight of a hand at the back of my neck, urging me closer, further, faster. I didn’t breathe, didn’t want to take the time, and so I ended up gasping against the side of his neck before long, making him laugh.
“I’ll take that as a good sign,” he said.
“Don’t get cocky, Kereseth.”
I couldn’t keep myself from smiling. Lazmet—and whatever questions I had about my parentage—didn’t feel as close to me now. I was safe here, floating on a ship in the middle of nowhere, with Akos Kereseth.
And then: a scream, from somewhere deep in the ship. It sounded like Akos’s sister, Cisi.
I KNOW WHAT IT is to watch your family die. I am Cisi Kereseth, after all.
I watched Dad die on our living room floor. I watched Eijeh and Akos get dragged away by Shotet soldiers. I watched Mom fade like fabric in the sun. There’s not much I don’t understand about loss. I just can’t express it the way other people do. My currentgift keeps me all wrapped up tight.
So I’m a little bit jealous of how Isae Benesit, fated chancellor of Thuvhe and my friend, can let herself grieve. She wears herself out with emotion, and then we fall asleep, shoulder to shoulder, in the galley of the Shotet exile ship.
When I wake up, my back hurts from slumping against the wall for so long. I get up and lean to the left, to the right, while I take note of her.
Isae doesn’t look right, which I guess makes sense, since her twin sister, Ori, died only yesterday, in an arena of Shotet all chanting for her blood.
She doesn’t feel right, either, the texture around her all fuzzy like the way your teeth feel when you haven’t brushed them. Her eyes skip back and forth over the room, dancing across my face and body, and not in a way that would make a person blush. I try to calm her with my currentgift, sending out a smooth feeling, like unrolling a skein of silk thread. It doesn’t seem like it does much good.
My currentgift is an odd thing. I can’t know how she feels, not really, but I can feel it, like it’s a texture in the air. And I can’t control how she feels, either, but I can make suggestions. Sometimes it takes a couple of tries, or a new way of thinking about it. So instead of silk, which had no effect, I try water, heavy, undulating.
It’s a bust. She’s too keyed up. Sometimes, when a person’s feelings are too intense, it’s hard for me to make an impact.
“Cisi, can I trust you?”
It’s a funny word in Thuvhesit, can. It’s can and should and must all squished together, and you can only suss out the true meaning from context. It leads to misunderstandings, sometimes, which is probably why our language is described by off-worlders as “slippery.” That, and off-worlders are lazy.
So when Isae Benesit asks me in my mother tongue if she can trust me, I don’t really know what she means. But regardless, there’s only one answer.
“Of course.”
“I mean it, Cisi,”