AKOS WALKED THE RAISED path that kept the farmers clear of the hushflowers. Half the hushflower crop from that season had been burned by Shotet invaders, but the farmers were still out there, tending what was left with their thick gloves on. It was lucky, they said, that the Shotet had come after the blooms were harvested, since they only needed the roots to survive anyway. Hessa’s crops would bounce back just fine.
The temple, on the other hand . . .
Akos still couldn’t bear to look up at it. Where the red glass dome had once glinted in the moonlight was now a big empty space. The Shotet had smashed it to bits. They had killed most of the oblates in the temple. They had swarmed the streets and filled the alleys. Two weeks later and Hessans were still dealing with the bodies. The dead were mostly soldiers, thanks to a brave oblate who had sounded the alarm, but some civilians, too.
He didn’t dare go into town. They might recognize him, or his sleeve might pull back and show his marks. They might attack him, if they knew what he was. Kill him, even. He wouldn’t blame them. He had let the Shotet in.
Mostly, though, he just couldn’t stand to look at any of it. What flashes he saw on the news were plenty.
So when he walked, it was through the iceflower fields, wrapped up in his warmest clothes, even though it was Thuvhe’s warmest time. The fields were a safe place. White purity blossoms were still popping off their stems and floating through the air, even now. Yellow jealousy dust was thick on the ground. It was desolate, everything gone until the Deadening time came again, but that suited him fine.
He hopped down from the raised path, onto the road. This time of year, when some of the snow went soft, it froze at night, so there was ice everywhere, and he had to be careful. The hooks on the bottom of his boots didn’t always catch, and he was still off balance with his arm in the sling. His careful steps took him as far west as the feathergrass, where his family’s house was nestled, safe and lonely.
Cisi’s floater wasn’t parked on the front lawn. When she came to visit, she parked in town and walked to the house, so nobody would know she was there. Nobody knew he was there, either, or he was sure he would be arrested by now. He may have killed Lazmet Noavek, but he’d let Shotet soldiers into Hessa temple. His arm was marked. There was armor in his bedroom. He spoke the revelatory tongue. He was too Shotet for Thuvhesits, now.
Light glowed from under the kitchen door when he walked in, so he knew Cisi was there. His mother had tried to visit him in the hospital. She had made it into the room, and he had lost himself in shouting at her, getting so wound up the doctors told Sifa to leave. Cisi had promised not to let her into the house until he was ready. Which, Akos privately thought, would be never. He was done with her. With what she had done to Cyra. With how she had stood apart from his suffering. With how she had maneuvered him into killing Vas. With all of it.
He stomped to get the ice off his boots, then loosened them and toed them off by the door. His hands were already undoing the straps and buttons that kept his kutyah coat fastened tight, and stripping the hat and goggles from his face. He had forgotten how much time it took to get dressed and undressed here. He’d gotten used to the temperate climate in Voa.
Voa was now dark. Ogra-dark, the sky stained black in the center and fading to gray out by the old soldiers’ camp. The news didn’t have an explanation, and neither did Akos. No one knew much about what had happened there.
What was happening now, though, was covered on a constant loop. How the Shotet exiles were now recognized as Shotet’s official government, under a temporary council of advisers while they set up for elections. How Shotet had negotiated for its nationhood. How they had traded legitimacy for their land, and were now evacuating Voa. The Ograns had given them a piece of land, bigger than Voa, and far more hazardous, and were negotiating the terms of Ogran-Shotet coexistence.
And there were other things brewing in the Assembly, too. Talk of a schism. The fate-faithful planets separating from the secular ones, the oracles fleeing the latter for the former. Half a galaxy living without knowing the future, and half listening to whatever wisdom the oracles might offer. That schism existed in Akos himself, and the idea that the galaxy might divide distressed him, because it meant that he, too, would have to choose a side, and he didn’t want to.
But that was the way of things—sometimes, wounds were too deep to heal. Sometimes, people didn’t want to reconcile. Sometimes, even though a solution might create worse problems than there were to begin with, people chose it anyway.
“Cee?” he called out, once he was finished hanging up all his winter clothes. He walked the dark, narrow hallway to the kitchen, peering out into the courtyard to see if the burnstones were still lit.
“Hello there.” A voice spoke from his living room.
Yma Zetsyvis sat by the fireplace. She was an arm’s length away from the place where his father had died. Her white hair was loose around her face, and she was elegant as ever, even dressed in armor. It was the color of sand.
He startled, more at the sight of her than the sound, cringing into the wall. And then, embarrassed by his reaction, he pushed himself away from the wall and forced himself to face her. It had been like this since Lazmet’s death.
“I apologize. I couldn’t think of a better way to warn you,” Yma said.
“What—” He drank in a few shallow breaths. “What are you doing here?”
She smiled a little. “What, no ‘Oh, you’re alive, how nice’?”
“I—”
“Shh. I don’t actually care.” She stood. “You look better. You’ve been eating?”
“I—yes.”
Every time he faced a meal these days, he thought of what he had done to Jorek, and it was hard to take even a single bite, hungry as he was. He made himself do it, because he didn’t like to feel tired, and weak, and fragile. But it was difficult each time.
“I came to get you out of here,” she said.
“It’s my house,” he replied.
“No, it’s your parents’ house,” she said. “It’s the place where your father died, in the shadow of a town you can’t even go into anymore, thanks to certain facets of your identity being public knowledge. This isn’t a good place for you to be.”
Akos crossed his arms over his stomach, holding on tight. She had put into words what he already knew, what he had known since Cisi brought him here, after the attack. The bed that had belonged to him was right next to Eijeh’s, and Eijeh was gone, disappeared into the streets of Voa and never spotted again. The living room still reminded him of his father’s blood. And the destroyed temple—
Well.
“Where am I supposed to go?” he said in more of a whisper than anything.
Yma came to her feet and approached him, slowly, as if approaching an animal.
“You,” she said, “are a Shotet. It’s not the only thing you are, to be sure. You are still a Thuvhesit, and an oracle’s son, and a Kereseth, and all those things. But you can’t deny that a Shotet is part of what you are.” She set a hand on his shoulder, gently. “And we are the ones who want you with us.”
“We?” Akos snorted, ignoring the heat that had sparked behind his eyes. “What about Ara, and Cyra? They don’t want me with them.”
“I can’t believe I’m about to say this,” Yma said. “But I don’t think you are giving your girl enough credit. Or Ara, given time.”
“I don’t—”
“For heaven’s sake, boy, just go in the kitchen,” Yma snapped.
Sitting at his kitchen table—the kitchen table where he had spread his homework as a kid to work before dinner, where he had climbed up to dust the burnstones with red hushflower powder, where he had learned to chop and slice and crush ingredients for the painkiller—was Cyra.
Her thick, wavy hair piled on one side of her head, the other glinting silver.
Her arm wrapped in armor.
Her eyes dark as space.
“Hello,” she said to him in Thuvhesit.
“Hello,” he replied in Shotet.
“Cisi smuggled us into Thuvhe,” Cyra said. “Border control is very tight right now.”
“Oh,” he said. “Right.”
“Yma and I are flying to Ogra tonight, now that I’m well enough to travel.”
“You—” Akos swallowed hard. “What happened?”
“The dark over Voa? That was me. My currentshadows.” She smiled, a bit sheepishly. It wasn’t the easy smile she might have given him a few months ago, but it was more than he expected. She held up a hand, showing him the black shadows that still floated over her skin, dense and dark. “It took so much out of me, the currentshadows were gone for a week. I thought they might have disappeared forever. Was devastated when they came back, actually. But I’m—dealing with it. As always.”
Akos nodded.
“You’re thin,” she said. “Yma told me about—how it was. With Lazmet. With you.”
“Cyra,” he said.
“I know what he’s like, you know. I saw, I heard things.” She closed her eyes, shook her head. “I know.”
“Cyra,” he said again. “I’m so—there aren’t words—”
“There are a great number of words, actually.” She rose from her seat at the table, trailing her fingers along the wood as she walked around it. “In Shotet, the word just means ‘regret,’ but in Zoldan, there are three words. One for slights, one for regular apology, and one that means something along the lines of ‘What I did cut out a piece of me.’”
Akos nodded, unable to speak.
“I thought I couldn’t forgive you, that I lacked the capacity,” she said. “After all, I was about to die, and you were just sitting there.”
Akos winced.
“I couldn’t move,” he said. “I was—frozen. Numb.”
“I know,” she said, coming to stand in front of him, her brow furrowed. “Don’t you remember, Akos, what I hide beneath this armor?” She clasped the forearm guard in front of her body. “When I showed you these marks, did you think, even for a moment, that I had done something that couldn’t be forgiven?”
Akos’s heart was pounding, as hard as it did when he panicked, and he didn’t know why.
“No, you didn’t,” she said. “You showed me mercy. Teka showed me mercy. Even Yma, in her way.” She reached for him, for his cheek. He cringed away.
It was so much harder—so much harder to accept her forgiveness than her condemnation, because it meant that he had to change.
“This time, let me be the one to say to you—you were young, and hungry, and exhausted. In pain, and confused, and alone,” she said. “And if you think that I—Cyra Noavek, Ryzek’s Scourge, killer of my own mother—can’t understand what happened to you, then you don’t really understand who I was, and what I did.”
Akos watched her carefully as she spoke, as she pulled him closer and touched her forehead to his, so they could still look at each other, breathing the same air.
“What I did,” he said, “cut out a piece of me.”
“It’s all right,” she said. “I’m all hacked up and stitched back together, too.”
She pulled away.
“For now,” she said, “just be my friend again, okay? And we can talk about the whole ‘I’m still in love with you, what the hell do we do about it’ question later.”
Akos smiled.
“Show me your house,” she said. “Are there embarrassing pictures of you? On the journey, your sister told me you were very particular about your socks.”
And so Akos took her upstairs, his fingers laced with hers, and opened all his drawers, letting himself be thoroughly mocked.
Dear Cisi,
I’m sorry I didn’t wait for you. I wasn’t sure when you’d be back, and my ride was leaving.
I hope you understand why I can’t stay. There’s no place for me here anymore. But let’s make a deal. If you try to ease off your currentgift when you’re advising Isae, I’ll try to stop beating myself up about Eijeh. And Jorek. And Hessa.
Personally, I think your end is much easier, so you better take me up on it.
But I’m serious—you’re not a puppet master, Cee, even though I know sometimes you want to be. Maybe power suits you, but it’s got to be handled carefully, you know?
I’ll be farther away from you now, on Ogra, than I ever was in Shotet, but this time will be different. This time, I can come visit. This time, I can be what I want to be, go where I want to go.
I’ll miss you. Stay safe.
—Akos
P.S. Don’t worry, I’ll talk to Mom eventually.