SWEAT RAN INTO THE corner of my mouth. I licked the salt taste away and burst into a run. It was a risk, but I thought I could surprise him with strength he wasn’t ready for.
My opponent was tall and lean. Ettrek, the one who had called me “Ryzek’s Scourge” in the storm sanctuary when I first arrived, and insisted on the name whenever he saw me. But right now, he was just an arrangement of limbs, a particular density of meat. I threw my body at his, driving my elbows low, toward his gut.
The school of the mind—elmetahak—would not approve of my risk taking. A risk should only be taken when there is no other option available, the teachings said. In this case, they were correct. I had miscalculated.
Ettrek’s arm slammed like a girder against my chest and shoulder, knocking me flat on my back. All around me the crowd roared their pleasure.
“Bleed, oruzo!” someone in the crowd jeered.
I heard, in their shouts, a memory. Of kneeling on a platform with a knife against my throat. My brother poised above me with rage and fear intermingled in his eyes. My people calling me “traitor,” my people crooning for my blood. The silverskin on my head prickled.
They still crooned for my blood, even here, on Ogra. To them, I was still a Noavek, still better dead than alive.
I looked up at the wall, at Ettrek, about to bend down to deliver the final blow. I knew him. He called me “ally,” he fought me for sport, but deep in the heart of him, he still wanted me to hurt.
So I slid a hand behind his head, as tenderly as a lover, and drew him closer. Hurt me more, the movement said. Go ahead. He jerked back like my touch was poison—and it was—and he fell back, off balance. I crawled on top of him, pinned him, made to elbow him in the face—but I stopped before striking him, my eyebrows raised.
“Yeah, yeah, I concede,” Ettrek said, and the crowd booed. They were tired of watching me win. Tired of watching Noaveks win.
That Lazmet’s blood didn’t run in my veins, that I might not technically even be Shotet, didn’t matter to them.
Did it matter to me?
Later, when the leaders of the Shotet exiles asked me to represent my people to the Ogran leadership—not knowing, of course, that I was not the true inheritor of my brother’s throne—I thought of how I had felt, with my back flat on the ground, with those people cheering for my pain and defeat.
They hated me. They did not accept me. They didn’t want me to represent them.
“The more traditional of the two Ogran leaders values law very highly, and you are the legal heir to the sovereignty,” the exile leader, Aza, said to me with a hint of desperation.
Teka added, “We need your help, Cyra.”
I looked at her—her pale hair limp from Ogran humidity, a dark circle beneath her remaining eye betraying her fatigue—and suddenly, Shotet was not the nameless crowd that had surrounded me more than once. Shotet was her. And Jorek. And even Yma. People who had been trampled by the powerful, just as I had. People who needed this small thing in order to fight back.
And I owed it to them. I had told people to evacuate. I had let slip that the exiles were on Ogra. I carried the Noavek legacy, even if I didn’t carry their blood. I owed this at the very least, for what I had done.
“Fine,” I said.
“I look ridiculous,” I said to my reflection. Or, really, I said it to Teka, who stood behind me with her arms folded, sucking a dimple into her cheek.
I wore a floor-length jacket with sharp shoulders, buttoned tight across my chest and falling straight to the floor. Every seam was stitched with glowing thread, though, which made me feel more like an Ogran spacecraft than a person. The collar—made entirely of luminous fabric—lit my face from beneath, making my currentshadows especially nightmarish when they flowed across my skin.
Which was constantly. What little control I had retained when we first landed on Ogra was gone, as if Akos had taken it with him when he left.
“Aza wanted to make sure you looked the part of a sovereign, even if you’re not really one. And now you do,” Teka said. “Besides, everyone here looks ridiculous, so you fit right in.”
She gestured to herself. She was dressed like me, except her jacket was gray—to complement her coloring, the Ogran seamstress had said—and fell to her knees instead of her ankles. She wore pants to match it, and her pale hair was pulled back into a sleek knot. My own was in a thick, bumpy braid over one shoulder, on the side opposite the silverskin.
We were about to attend a meeting with representatives of Ogra in Pokgo, Ogra’s capital city. They had invited us to discuss the “request”—more like a demand—issued by the government of Thuvhe that the Ograns no longer give shelter to Shotet exiles, in the wake of the attack on Shissa.
I felt ill. The only reason Thuvhe had known to make that demand of Ogra was because I had told Isae we were here. My currentshadows were dense and quick, and this restrictive clothing wasn’t helping. I couldn’t deny that it emphasized the length of my body in a nice way, though.
“You’re going bare-faced?” I said to Teka, turning away from the mirror. “You could at least smudge something on your eye, you know.”
“Every time I try I just end up looking stupid,” she said.
“I could give it a try,” I said. “My mother taught me when I was young.”
“Just don’t zing me with your currentgift,” Teka said, a little grouchy.
I had found a little black pencil to trace my lash line in one of the shops in Galo. I had tried to barter with the clever Ogran woman who ran it, but she had pretended not to understand my accent, so I eventually gave up on the game and bought it for its full price. I removed its cap and stood in front of Teka, bending so our faces were on the same level. I couldn’t brace myself against her, so I braced my hands against each other, to steady them.
“We could talk about it, you know,” Teka said. “Him leaving like that? Not so much as a good-bye? We could talk about it, if you . . . you know. Needed to.”
Not so much as a good-bye. He had decided I wasn’t worth that basic decency.
I clenched my jaw.
“No,” I said, “we can’t.”
If I talked about it, I would want to scream, and this coat was too tight around my ribs for that. It was the same reason I now avoided Eijeh and Sifa—always together, these days, and consulting with exiles about the future almost hourly. I couldn’t bear the feeling.
In light, short strokes, with pauses as my currentgift swelled and receded like a tide, I lined Teka’s eyelid with black, using the other end of the pencil to smudge it. When I first met her, she would have stabbed me rather than let me get this close to her, so though she would deny it if I asked, I knew she was softening toward me, as I had already softened toward her.
A soft heart was a gift, whether given easily or with great reluctance. I would never take it for granted again.
She opened her eye. Its blue looked even more brilliant with the black to frame it. She wore what she called her “fancy eye patch” on the other eye—it was clean and black, and held to her face with ribbon instead of a stretchy band.
“There,” I said. “Almost painless.”
She looked at herself in the mirror. “Almost,” she agreed. But she left the pencil in place, so I knew she liked it.
I tried not to think about Akos, or dream about him, or imagine conversations we might have had about what I was experiencing. I was already barely containing my rage at Thuvhe; I didn’t need something to stoke the flames further.
On the flight to Pokgo, however, I allowed myself just a moment of weakness before reprimanding myself.
As the ship glided between tall buildings—built higher than any of the ones in Voa, so tall they might have scraped the bottom of the Shissa ones that fell—I pictured the look of wonder his face would have worn if he had seen it.
And I would have said something like, Ograns allowed a certain percentage of trees to be preserved when they built Pokgo, which is why it still looks like a forest below us.
He would have smiled, amused as always by the knowledge I kept filed away.
But not amused enough by me to give me a damn explanation before—
Stop, I told myself, blinking tears from my eyes. There was pain in my knees, hips, elbows, and shoulders, pain in all the spaces between my bones. I couldn’t indulge this.
There was work to be done.
The ship docked at a building near the center of Pokgo, where all the buildings were so close together I could peer into strangers’ offices and living spaces and see how they decorated them. Ograns favored excess, so most of them were packed with objects of personal significance or fine craftsmanship. Everyone seemed to have the same decorative boxes, made of polished wood with little patterns carved into them.
When the hatch opened, I shuddered a little, because the wind that blew in was strong and it was clear we were higher up than I had realized, given the drop in temperature. Someone on the docking station guided a motorized walkway to the hatch. It had neither handrails nor some kind of visible fail-safe to keep a person on top of it. Our Ogran captain, a thick man with a substantial gut, walked right across it with the grace of a dancer. Yssa followed, and I was close behind her, forcing my eyes up and focused on the open doorway that was my destination.
If Akos had been here, I would have held his hand, my arm stretched out behind me like a banner.
But Akos was not here, so I made it across alone.
Ograns were ruled by a pair of people, one a woman and the other sema, the word in Shotet for neither woman nor man. There were two major political factions on Ogra, I knew, one amenable to change and the other not. Each one presented a viable candidate every ten seasons, and they ruled together, by compromise or by bargaining. It seemed impossible to me that such a thing could work, but apparently it wasn’t, because the system had lasted two hundred seasons so far.
The sema leader introduced themselves as “Rokha,” and had close-cut hair the color of Urek sand, a dusting of freckles on their skin, and delicate, pursed lips. The woman—“Lusha,” she had called herself, as she gripped my arm in greeting—was taller, thicker, and several shades darker-skinned than I was. The pencil smeared above her lashes had a faint shimmer to it, lighting her eyes from above, and it suited her.
“You are Cyra Noavek,” Rokha said to me, as we all stood in a group before the meeting was called to order. Lusha was talking to Yssa and Aza behind me—I could tell because her hearty laugh kept filling my head with a mirth I couldn’t feel.
“Allegedly,” I said, because I couldn’t help myself.
Rokha laughed.
“You’re taller than I thought,” they said. “I suppose anyone looks short beside Ryzek Noavek.”
“Looked,” I corrected them. To me it was just a grammatical error, a courtesy to someone who didn’t speak Shotet as a native. But their face tightened in recognition of the insensitivity.
“My apologies,” they said. “You lost him so recently.”
“I wouldn’t say I lost anything,” I said.
Rokha raised an eyebrow. The freckles on their eyelids made me think of Akos, and a web of currentshadows spread over my eye socket, making me wince.
“I can’t tell if you are joking or not,” Rokha said.
“That should please you. Ograns love mystery, don’t they?” I replied sourly, and Rokha squinted at me, as if puzzled, as Lusha called the meeting to order.
“Let us speak plainly,” Lusha said, and Rokha snorted.
Lusha wrinkled her nose at them, like a child might at a sibling. She was the more traditional of the two Ogran leaders, I knew, so she had a tendency to pontificate and stand on ceremony. I suppressed a laugh as Rokha winked at me across the low table. We sat on stools around it. The heavy fabric that covered me from throat to ankle pooled around me, glinting with the luminous thread that held it together.
“Okay,” Aza said. “Then—plainly speaking—we are surprised that Ogra would even consider expelling us when we have coexisted comfortably for so long on this planet.”
“We would not consider it if the pressure were merely coming from Thuvhe,” Lusha said with a sigh. “But Thuvhe is backed by the Assembly, and they are seeking powerful alliances. Our intelligence reports the chancellor is on her way to Othyr at this very moment.”
I glanced at Teka. She looked as troubled as I felt, her mouth drawn down toward her chin. If Thuvhe made an alliance with Othyr, this war was effectively over. No one would stand against Othyr, not without a cause greater than “keeping Shotet from being obliterated.”
As far as I knew, Othyr had always been the wealthiest and most powerful planet in the galaxy. It had been, at one time, rich with natural resources, but as our race advanced, they turned to more intellectual pursuits than mining or farming. Now they developed technology and conducted research. Nearly every advance that had been made in the field of medicine, space travel, food technology, or personal conveniences had come out of Othyr. If a planet were to cut itself off from Othyr, it would lose access to the things we had all—Shotet included—come to rely on. A leader would be mad to risk it.
“Why is the Assembly backing Thuvhe instead of maintaining neutrality, as they have in the past? Suddenly this is no longer a ‘civil dispute,’ as they’ve been insisting for over ten seasons?” Teka said.
“They sense that we are vulnerable,” Aza replied. “They undoubtedly see this as a cleanup effort. Get rid of Shotet trash. Blast it into space.”
I relished the anger in Aza’s voice, so similar to my own.
“That may be a slight exaggeration,” Lusha chastened. “The Assembly would surely not engage in a conflict unless they thought—”
“Then tell me why—” Aza’s voice shook as she interrupted Lusha. “Tell me why an attack against innocents fleeing to the sojourn ship in Voa was not considered a war crime, when an attack against innocents in Shissa was. Is that not because Thuvhesit children are considered innocent, and Shotet children are not? Is it not because Thuvhesit people are considered productive, and the Shotet are characterized as brutal scavengers?”
“I thought you didn’t support Lazmet Noavek’s actions against Thuvhe,” Rokha said, voice hard. “You issued a statement condemning the attack immediately upon hearing about it, after all.”
“And I stand by that statement. Lazmet Noavek has recruited himself an army composed of supporters of his late son. His actions against Shissa had nothing to do with us, and we certainly would not have done something so cruel,” Aza said. “But that doesn’t mean that Thuvhe doesn’t deserve some kind of retribution for what they did to us.”
I didn’t have to be an expert in these kinds of meetings to know this one wasn’t going well. The preferred communication style for an Ogran was like a hammer hitting a nail, and it was the same for Shotet. In fact, our cultures had more in common than not—we valued resilience, we occupied planets that defied us, we revered the oracles. . . .
If I could make them see how connected we were, maybe they would agree to help us.
“Why do they hate us?” I said, head tilted. I pitched my voice high, so it would sound like I was genuinely confused.
“What do you mean, why?” Aza scowled at me. “They have always hated us! Their hatred is without basis, without foundation—!”
“No hatred is mindless, not according to the mind of the one who hates,” Teka said, nodding at me. “They hate us because they think we are backward. We follow the currentstream, we honor the oracles.”
“And the oracles, by naming the Noavek family’s fates, have affirmed Shotet’s place in the galaxy,” I said. “But the Assembly didn’t listen. The Assembly didn’t grant us sovereignty. They want to limit the oracles’ power, not magnify it by honoring the fates. And so they hate us, for revering the very people from whom they want to wrest power.”
“That is a bold claim,” Lusha said. “Treasonous, some might say, to suggest that the Assembly wants to strip the oracles of their power.”
“The only treason I acknowledge,” I said, “is treason against the oracles. And I have never once committed that crime. The same cannot be said of our governing body.”
Aza said, “Two seasons ago, Ogra was on the verge of war because the Assembly wanted to release the fates of the fated families to the public, was it not? I read the transcript. You yourself, Lusha, seemed particularly angry about their choice.”
“I didn’t see a reason to break our traditions,” Lusha said stiffly.
“That act,” Teka said, “of needlessly declaring all the fates to the general public, resulted in the kidnapping of an oracle of our planet, and culminated in the very war that we’re in right now. The Assembly sowed the seeds for this war by defying the oracles. And now they want to crush us because of it?”
I didn’t know if she was making any headway. I wasn’t good at reading faces. Nevertheless, she persisted:
“The Assembly is threatened by any planet that is fate-faithful,” Teka said. “It started with us, but don’t think it will end with us. Tepes, Zold, Essander, Ogra—all the fate-faithful planets are at risk. If they can call us backward and orchestrate a war to get rid of us, they can do it to you. We all have to stand together if we want to keep their power limited, as it should be.”
I tried to read Rokha and Lusha’s body language—I was not so poor at that—but it was difficult without understanding Ogran culture better. Rokha’s hands were folded neatly on the table in front of them. Lusha’s arms were crossed. Surely not a good sign, in any culture.
I cleared my throat. “I have an idea, before we even get that far.”
Everyone turned toward me, Teka with her mouth puckered.
“I have met Isae Benesit, Chancellor of Thuvhe. She spent days with Shotet renegades when she was in Voa. She just sent someone to Ogra to talk about an alliance. She knows that we are not the same as Lazmet Noavek.” I lifted my shoulder. “It’s not Shotet that’s the problem for her; it’s the current regime. And we are in agreement on that point.”
“First you say it’s the Assembly waging this war, and then it’s just Isae Benesit?” Lusha demanded. “Which is it?”
“It’s both,” I said. “The Assembly is using Isae Benesit for a reason—they want to follow the law. They won’t attack without cause. So if Thuvhe won’t attack us, the Assembly has no intermediary through which to wage war. The conflict dissipates. Appease Isae, and we appease the Assembly. Unseating Lazmet would appease Isae.”
“Let me guess,” Teka said. “Your proposed solution is to kill him.”
I wasn’t sure how to answer, so I didn’t try.
“You Noaveks,” she said. “Always eager to draw blood.”
“I refuse to choose a complicated solution just because it leaves my hands clean,” I snapped. “I have been urging you all to take Lazmet Noavek seriously since his face first appeared on screens across the galaxy. He is powerful and he holds half of Shotet in his fist. If he is dead, we can reclaim our people and negotiate a peace. Until he is dead, peace will be impossible.”
I was sitting like my mother, I realized. Back straight, hands folded, legs crossed at the ankles. Perhaps she was not my mother by blood, but I carried more of her in me than I carried of the oracle who had traded me for the sake of fate. I had not ceased to be a Noavek. It was not often a comfort, but in this situation, where strength was required, I did not disparage it.
Rokha bobbed their head a few times.
“I think there is a solution here that suits all of us,” they said. “Miss Noavek, since this is your idea, we will arrange for you to propose your solution to Chancellor Benesit herself, on a secure feed. In the meantime, we will open discussions—Shotet and Ogra both—with Tepes, Zold, and Essander. Just to explore our options. Lusha?”
“Discussions, only,” Lusha said, jabbing the table in front of her with one finger. “Covert ones. We don’t want the Assembly to think we are planning some kind of rebellion.”
“We can send our envoys on delivery vessels as they exit the planet’s atmosphere,” Aza said. “The Assembly hardly pays attention to Ogra to begin with—they won’t be checking your flight ledgers.”
“Fair,” Lusha said. “We are agreed, then. Miss Noavek, we will arrange for you to speak to the Chancellor of Thuvhe within a week.”
I felt my pulse in my fingertips. I needed time, more time than I could ask for, more time than they could give me. And even with time, could I really plan to assassinate my own father—could I even do it successfully, given what had happened when I made the attempt on Ryzek’s life?
If you can’t do it, no one can, I reminded myself. If you can’t do it, we’re done for anyway, so you may as well try.
When I stood, it was on steady feet, and with steady hands. But I felt anything but steady.