around in a pile of garbage.”
I stare at her. I’ve never heard her say something so hateful about the Shotet before. It’s not like her.
“Fleshworm” is what people call the Shotet when they’re reaching for the worst insult. Fleshworms are gray, wriggly things that feed on the living from the inside out. Parasites, all but eradicated by Othyrian medicine.
“Ah.” His smile grows wider, forcing a dimple into his cheek. There’s something about him that sparks in my memory. Maybe something he has in common with Cyra, though they don’t look at all alike, at a glance. “So this grudge you have against my people isn’t merely in your blood.”
“No.” She sinks into a crouch, resting her elbows on her knees. She makes it look graceful and controlled, but I’m worried about her. She’s long and willowy in build, not near as strong as Ryzek, who is big, though thin. One wrong move and he could lunge at her, and what would I do to stop it? Scream?
“You know about scars, I suppose,” she says, nodding to his arm. “Will you mark my sister’s life?”
The inside of his forearm, the softer, paler part, doesn’t have any scars—they start on the outside and work their way around, row by row. He has more than one row.
“Why, have you brought me a knife and some ink?”
Isae purses her lips. The sandpaper feeling she gave off a moment ago turns as jagged as a broken stone. By instinct, I press back against the door and find the handle behind my back.
“Do you always claim kills you didn’t actually carry out?” Isae says. “Because last time I checked, you weren’t the one on that platform with the knife.”
Ryzek’s eyes glint.
“I wonder if you’ve ever actually killed at all, or if all that work is done by others.” Her head tilts. “Others who, unlike you, actually have the stomach for it.”
It’s a Shotet insult. The kind a Thuvhesit wouldn’t even realize was insulting. Ryzek picks up on it, though, eyes boring into hers.
“Miss Kereseth,” he says, without looking at me. “You look so much like the elder of your two brothers.” He glances at me, then, appraising. “Are you not curious what’s become of him?”
I want to answer coolly, like Ryzek is nothing to me. I want to meet his eyes with strength. I want a thousand fantasies of revenge to come suddenly to life like hushflowers at the Blooming.
I open my mouth, but nothing comes out.
Fine, I think, and I let out a peal of my currentgift, like a clap of my hands. I’ve come to understand that not everybody can control their currentgifts the way I can. I just wish I could master the part that keeps me from saying what I want to.
I see how he relaxes when my gift hits him. It has no effect on Isae—none that I can see, anyway—but maybe it will loosen his tongue. And whatever Isae is planning, she seems to need him to talk first.
“My father, the great Lazmet Noavek, taught me that people can be like blades, if you learn to wield them, but your best weapon should still be yourself,” Ryzek says. “I have always taken that to heart. Some of the kills I have commanded have been carried out by others, Chancellor, but rest assured, those deaths are still mine.”
He slumps forward over his knees, clasping his hands between them. He and Isae are just breaths apart.
“I will mark your sister’s life on my arm,” he says. “It will be a fine trophy to add to my collection.”
Ori. I remember which tea she drank in the morning (harva bark, for energy and clarity) and how much she hated the chip in her front tooth. And I hear the chants of the Shotet in my ears: Die, die, die.
“That clarifies things,” Isae says.
She holds her hand out for him to take. He gives her an odd look, and no wonder—what kind of person wants to shake hands with the man who just admitted to ordering her sister’s death? And being proud of it?
“You really are an odd one,” he says. “You must not have loved your sister very much, to offer your hand to me now.”
I see the skin pull taut over the knuckles of her other hand, the one not held out to him. She opens her fist, and inches her fingers toward her boot.
Ryzek takes the hand she offered, then stiffens, eyes widening.
“On the contrary, I loved her more than anyone,” Isae says. She squeezes him, hard, digging in her fingernails. And all the while, her left hand moves toward her boot.
I’m too stunned to realize what’s happening until it’s too late. With her left hand she tugs a knife out of her boot, from where it’s strapped to her leg. With her right, she pulls him forward. Knife and man come together, and she presses, and the sound of his gurgling moan carries me to my living room, to my adolescence, to the blood that I scrubbed from the floorboards as I sobbed.
Ryzek slumps, and bleeds.
I slam my hand down on the door handle and stumble into the hallway. I am wailing, crying, pounding on the walls; no, I’m not, my currentgift won’t let me.
All it allows me to do, in the end, is let out a single, weak scream.
I RAN TOWARD CISI Kereseth’s scream, Akos on my heels, not even bothering with the rungs of the ladder that took me below deck—I just jumped down. I went straight toward Ryzek’s cell, knowing, of course, that he was likely the source of anything that caused screaming on this ship. I saw Cisi braced against the corridor wall, the storage room door across from her open. Behind her, Teka dropped down from the other end of the ship, beckoned here by the same noise. Isae Benesit stood inside Ryzek’s cell, and below her, in a jumble of legs and arms, was my brother.
There was a certain amount of poetry in it, I supposed, that just as Akos had watched his father spill his life on the floor, so I now watched my brother do the same.
It took far longer for him to die than I anticipated. That was intentional, I assumed; Isae Benesit stood over his body the entire time, bloody knife in her fist, eyes blank but watchful. She had wanted to take her time with this moment, her moment of triumph over the one who killed her sister.
Well, one of the ones who killed her sister, because Eijeh, who had held the actual blade, was still in the next room.
Ryzek’s eyes found mine, and almost as if he’d touched me, I was buoyed into a memory. Not one that he was taking from me, but one I had almost hidden from myself.
I was in the passage behind the Weapons Hall, with my eye pressed to the crack in the wall panel. I had gone there to spy on my father’s meeting with a prominent Shotet businessman-turned-slumlord, because I often spied on my father’s meetings when I was bored and curious about the happenings of this house. But this meeting had gone bad, which had never happened
