just assume I want to kill him?”
“Don’t you?”
He paused. “I want to get my brother home.” He spoke each word with care. “And in order to do that, in order to survive here, I have to be able to fight.”
I didn’t know what it was to love a brother that much, not anymore. And from what I had seen of Eijeh—a flimsy wreck of a person—he didn’t seem worthy of the effort. But Akos, with his soldier’s posture and his still hands, seemed certain.
“You don’t know how to fight already?” I said. “Why did Ryzek send you to my cousin Vakrez for two seasons, if not to teach you competency?”
“I’m competent. I want to be good.”
I crossed my arms. “You haven’t gotten to the part of this deal that benefits me.”
“In exchange for your instruction, I could teach you to make that painkiller you just drank,” he said. “You wouldn’t have to rely on me. Or anyone else.”
It was like he knew me, knew the one thing he could say that would tempt me the most. It wasn’t relief from pain that I wanted above all, but self-reliance. And he was offering it to me in a glass vial, in a hushflower potion.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll do it.”
Soon after that I led him down the hall, to a small room at the end with a locked door. This wing of Noavek manor wasn’t updated; the locks still took keys instead of opening at a touch or the prick of a finger, like the gene locks that opened the rooms where Ryzek spent most of his time. I fished the key out of my pocket—I had put on real clothes, loose pants and a sweater.
The room held a long countertop with shelves above and below it, packed with vials, beakers, knives, spoons, and cutting boards, and a long line of white jars marked with the Shotet symbols for iceflowers—we kept a small store of them, even hushflower, though Thuvhe had not exported any goods to Shotet in over twenty seasons, so we had to import it illegally using a third party—as well as other ingredients scavenged from across the galaxy. Pots, all a shade of warm orange-red metal, hung from a rack above the burners on the right, the largest bigger than my head and the smallest, the size of my hand.
Akos took one of the larger pots down and set it on a burner.
“Why did you learn to fight, if you could hurt with a touch?” he said. He filled a beaker with water from the spout in the wall, and dumped it in the pot. Then he lit the burner beneath it and took out a cutting board and a knife.
“It’s part of every Shotet education. We begin as children.” I hesitated for a moment before adding, “But I continued because I enjoyed it.”
“You have hushflower here?” he said, scanning the jars with his finger.
“Top right,” I said.
“But the Shotet don’t use it.”
“‘The Shotet’ don’t,” I said stiffly. “We’re the exception. We have everything here. Gloves are under the burners.”
He snorted a little. “Well, Exceptional One, you should find a way to get more. We’ll be needing it.”
“All right.” I waited a beat before asking, “No one in army training taught you to read?”
I had assumed that my cousin Vakrez had taught him more than competent fighting skills. Written language, for example. The “revelatory tongue” referred only to spoken language, not written—we all had to learn Shotet characters.
“They didn’t care about things like that,” he said. “They said ‘go’ and I went. They said ‘stop’ and I did. That was all.”
“A soft Thuvhesit boy shouldn’t complain about being made into a hard Shotet man,” I said.
“I can’t change into a Shotet,” he said. “I am Thuvhesit, and will always be.”
“That you are speaking to me in Shotet right now suggests otherwise.”
“That I’m speaking Shotet right now is a quirk of genetics,” he snapped. “Nothing more.”
I didn’t bother to argue with him. I felt certain he would change his mind, in time.
Akos reached into the jar of hushflower and took one of the blossoms out with his bare fingers. He broke a piece off one of the petals and put it in his mouth. I was too stunned to move. That amount of iceflower at that level of potency should have knocked him out instantly. He swallowed, closed his eyes for a moment, then turned back to the cutting board.
“You’re immune to them, too,” I said. “Like my currentgift.”
“No,” he said. “But their effect is not as strong, for me.”
I wondered how he had discovered that.
He turned the hushflower blossom over and pressed the flat of the blade to the place where all the petals joined. The flower broke apart, separating petal by petal. He ran the tip of the knife down the center of each petal, and they uncurled, one by one, flattening. It was like magic.
I watched him as the potion bubbled, first red with hushflower, then orange when he added the honeyed saltfruit, and brown when the sendes stalks went in, stalks only, no leaves. A dusting of jealousy powder and the whole concoction turned red again, which was nonsense, impossible. He moved the mixture to the next burner to cool, and turned toward me.
“It’s a complex art,” he said, waving a hand to encompass the vials, beakers, iceflowers, pots, everything. “Particularly the painkiller, because it uses hushflower. Prepare one element incorrectly and you could poison yourself. I hope you know how to be precise as well as brutal.”
He felt the side of the pot with the tip of his finger, just a light touch. I could not help but admire his quick movement, jerking his hand back right when the heat became too much, muscles coiling. I could already tell what school of combat he had trained in: zivatahak, school of the heart.
“You assume I’m brutal because that’s what you’ve heard,” I said. “Well, what about what I’ve heard about you? Are you thin-skinned, a coward, a fool?”
“You’re a Noavek,” he said stubbornly, folding his arms. “Brutality is in your blood.”
“I didn’t choose the blood that runs in my veins,” I replied. “Any more than you chose your fate. You and I, we’ve become what we were made to become.”
I knocked the back of my wrist against the door frame, so armor hit wood, as I left.
The next morning I woke when the painkiller wore off, just after sunrise, when the light was pale. I got out of bed the way I usually did, in fits and starts, pausing to take deep breaths like an old woman. I dressed in my training clothes, which were made of synthetic fabric from Tepes, light but loose. No one knew how to keep the body cool like the Tepessar people, whose planet was so hot no person had ever walked its surface bare-skinned.
I leaned my forehead against a wall as I braided my hair, eyes shut, fingers feeling for every
