MY FATHER’S FACE IS a spark.
And all my memories are kindling.
A thousand moments of his eyes skimming right over me as he scanned a room. And his taut, wiry arm with its rows and rows of kill marks. And the vein that pulsed in the center of his forehead when someone displeased him. Those were the images I had of him, sealed away in my mind, but the worst ones were not those.
I never saw him in his worst moments, because I was never invited into the room—a favor, I now knew, though at the time it had felt like exclusion. Ryzek had been invited, though. When he was young, he had attended executions, and interrogations, and brutal training that treated soldiers of Shotet as disposable. And when he was older, he was forced to participate, to learn the art of pain the way others learned music or language, and to build a reputation for himself every bit as terrifying as my father’s.
So my worst memories of Lazmet were actually memories of Ryzek, or my mother, finally dismissed from his presence. My mother’s hands trembling slightly as she removed her necklace, or undid the buttons of her gown. Ryzek clamping both hands over his mouth so no one would hear him sob—though of course I knew what to listen for—or screaming at Vas for no reason, screaming himself hoarse.
Now Lazmet Noavek himself stared at me from the screen above my head, and I forced myself to straighten. He was looking at a sight, of course, not at me, but it felt like the first time he had ever made eye contact with me, and I wanted to bear up under his scrutiny. He was the worst of Ryzek bound in sinew and bone, but I still wanted his approval, my father’s approval.
Maybe not your father, a voice in my head said.
“I am Lazmet Noavek, and I am the rightful sovereign of Shotet,” he said. He looked thinner than he had the last time I saw him, and more lined, but he was otherwise unchanged. He had begun shaving his head when his hair thinned, and his skull was smooth except for the bones that protruded on either side at sharp angles. The defined muscle that wrapped around his bones, and the armor that he wore even now, could not quite disguise how narrow he was through the shoulders. He was tanned and weather-beaten—not brown like I was; he had the look of someone fair who has been scorched by a harsh sun for many seasons. His face was rough with the start of a beard.
Only Ryzek and Vas had been there when he supposedly died, out on a sojourn. They had been on a separate mission, and a secret one: finding and capturing an oracle. Ever since my father learned my brother’s fate—the first child of the family Noavek will fall to the family Benesit—they had both been searching for a way out of it. Every sojourn was a new chance to hunt down an oracle. On this particular sojourn, they had been attacked by local armed forces and, outnumbered, Lazmet had fallen, forcing Ryzek and Vas to flee. There had been no body, but no reason to suspect Ryzek hadn’t told the truth. Until now.
I wondered if they had even been attacked at all. Where had Lazmet been all these seasons? He couldn’t have been in hiding. He would never have surrendered his power willingly. He must have been imprisoned somewhere. But how had he gotten out? And why had he returned now?
Lazmet cleared his throat, and it sounded like rocks tumbling down the face of a cliff. “Whatever you have previously heard from the woman-child who murdered both my wife and my son should be disregarded, as she is not the leader of Shotet based on our laws of succession.”
Eyes shifted to me from all angles, then flicked away again. I told myself I didn’t care. But I remembered my shadow-streaked hand clamping on my mother’s arm, to push her away, and shuddered. I had not killed Ryzek, but I couldn’t claim to be innocent of my mother’s death.
I could never claim to be innocent again.
“I speak for the people of Shotet, a people who have for hundreds of seasons been scorned, insulted, and disparaged by the nation-planets of the Assembly. A people who have, despite that constant scorn, become strong. We have met every possible criteria for inclusion in the Assembly. We settled on a planet, and still we were disregarded. We formed a mighty army, and still we were disregarded. We were given a fated family, spoken into being by all the oracles in the solar system, and still we were disregarded. We will be disregarded no longer.”
Despite my fear of him, I felt something surge within me. Pride in my people, my culture, my language, and yes, my nation, which I had never stopped believing in, though I had disagreed with the methods my family had used to establish it. I was buoyed by his words even as I was afraid of what they meant, and when I looked around, I felt certain I was not the only one. These people were exiles, enemies of the Noaveks, but they were still Shotet.
“We reject the terms of Chancellor Benesit’s peace,” he said. “There can be no peace between us while there is no respect. Therefore the most efficient course of action is to work against peace. I submit this message as a declaration of war against the nation of Thuvhe, led by Chancellor Isae Benesit. We will meet again in battle, Miss Benesit. Transmission complete.”
The screens all switched to another piece of footage, something from the high peaks of Trella, where fog swirled so high it turned into clouds.
All around me the mess hall was oddly quiet.
We were at war.
“Cyra.” Akos’s voice was a comfort. So familiar, its rumble. What were the first words he had said to me? Oh, yes—they had been explaining his gift. I interrupt the current, he had said. No matter what it does.
If my life was a different kind of current—and it was, in a certain sense, a flow of energy across space, brief and temporary—he had certainly interrupted it. And I was better for it. But now the question I had held in my mind ever since he first kissed me, about whether it was his fate tying him to me or not, felt more urgent than before.
“That was my father,” I said, with something between a hiccup and a giggle.
“Pleasant man,” he said. “A little too soft-spoken, though, don’t you think?”
The joke eased me back into the present. When before everything had been quiet, now it was roaring with conversation. Teka was having a heated argument with Ettrek, which I knew because her finger was in his face, almost jabbing him in the nose when she gestured. Aza was with a few other grave-looking people, her face half-covered with her hand.
“What happens now?” Akos said to me softly.
“You think I know?” I said, shaking my head. “I don’t even know if you and I count as exiles. Or if Lazmet counts exiles as Shotet.”
“Maybe we’re on our own, you and me.”
He said it with a glint of hope in his eyes. If I was not an exile, if I was not even Shotet, then staying with me was not a sign of his inevitable betrayal. The family Noavek had so long been synonymous with “Shotet” in his mind that the sudden paring down of everything I was appealed to him. But I could not be made smaller, and moreover, I didn’t want to be.
“I am always a Shotet,” I said.
He looked taken aback at first, tilting away from me. But his rejoinder came quickly, and it was sharp: “Then why do you doubt me when I tell you I am always a Thuvhesit?”
It wasn’t the same. How could I explain that it wasn’t the same? “Now is not the time for this debate!”
“Cyra,” he said again, and he touched my arm, his touch light as ever. “Now is the only time for this debate. How can we talk about where we’re going now, what we’re doing now, if we haven’t talked about who—and what—we are now?”
He had a point. Akos had a way of getting to the heart of things—he was, in that way, more of a knife than I was, though I was the sharper-tongued of the two of us. His soft gray eyes focused on mine like there were not over one hundred people crowded around us.
Unfortunately, we didn’t possess the gift of focus in equal measure. I couldn’t think in all the chatter. I jerked my head toward the door, and Akos nodded, following me out of the mess hall and into the quiet stone street beyond. Over his shoulder I saw the village, faint dots of light dancing all over it, in all different colors. It looked almost cozy, not something I had thought a place like Ogra could be.
“You asked who we are now,” I said, looking up at him. “I think we need to move even further back and ask, are we a ‘we’?”
“What do you mean?” he asked, with sudden intensity.
“What I mean is,” I said, “are we together, or am I just some kind of . . . warden again, only it’s fate keeping you prisoner this time, instead of my brother?”
“Don’t make it sound simple when it isn’t,” he said. “That’s not fair.”
“Fair?” I laughed. “What, in your entire life so far, has made you think anything will be ‘fair’?” I stepped wider, so I felt like I was rooted to the ground, the way I might have if we had been about to spar. “Just tell me—tell me if I’m something you’re choosing, or not. Just tell me.”
Just get it over with, I thought, because I already knew the answer. I was ready to hear it—even eager, because I had been bracing myself since our first kiss for this rejection. It was the inevitable by-product of what I was. Monstrous, and bound to destroy whoever was in my path, particularly if they were as kind as Akos.
“I,” he said, slowly, “am a Thuvhesit, Cyra. I would never oppose my country, my home, if I felt like I had a choice.”
I closed my eyes. It hurt worse—much worse—than I was expecting it to.
He went on, “But my mother used to say, ‘Suffer the fate, for all else is delusion.’ There’s no point in fighting something that is inevitable.”
I forced my eyes open. “I don’t want to be something you ‘suffer.’”
“That’s not what I meant,” he said, reaching for me. I backed up. For once, the pain that wrapped around every limb was not a curse to me—though not a gift, never a gift—but another set of armor.
“You’re the one thing that makes my life bearable,” he said, and the sudden tension in him, suffusing every muscle, reminded me of how he had braced himself every time Vas came around. It was the way he looked when he was guarding himself against pain. “You’re this bright spot of light. You’re—Cyra, before I knew you, I thought about . . .”
I raised my eyebrows.
He drew a sharp breath. His gray eyes looked glassy.
“Before I knew you,” he began again, “I didn’t intend to live past rescuing my brother. I didn’t want to serve the Noavek family. I didn’t want to give my life to them. But when it’s you . . . it seems like whatever the end is, it might be worthwhile.”
Maybe, to another person, this might have sounded kind. Or at least realistic. A person couldn’t avoid fate. That was the whole point. Fate was the place at which all possible life paths converged—and when the oracles said “all,” they meant all. So was it really so bad, being something good in the fate Akos dreaded?
Maybe not. To another person.
Unfortunately, I was not another person.
“What you’re telling me,” I said, “is that if you’re going to have your head chopped off anyway, it’s at least nice to have your head on a very soft chopping block.”
“That’s . . .” He made a frustrated noise. “That’s the worst possible way to interpret what I said!”
“Yeah? Well, it’s my way,” I snapped. “I don’t want to be the gift someone gets when they’ve already lost. I don’t want to be a happy inevitability. I want to be chosen. I want to be wanted.”
“You think I don’t want you? Haven’t I made that clear? I still chose you over my family, Cyra, and it wasn’t because of fate!” He was mad now, practically spitting at me. Good. I wanted to fight. Fighting was something I could do, something I had trained myself to do whenever things got difficult. It was what kept me safe—not avoidance, because when had I ever been able to avoid the things that hurt me? No, it wasn’t pretending I wouldn’t get knocked down that protected me, but the knowledge that I would get back up as many times as I had to.
“How do you know?” I demanded. “It’s not saying yes if you don’t feel like you have a choice!”
“This isn’t about me, this is about your own insecurity.” He spoke fiercely, hotly, against my face. We were too close together but neither of us moved back. “You don’t think anyone could possibly want you, so therefore, I must not be able to really want you. You’re taking something good away from yourself because you don’t think you deserve it.”
“It’s because no one has ever wanted me that I feel this way!” I was almost yelling. There were people milling around, and they stopped at my sudden increase in volume, but I didn’t care. He was knocking me down, again and again, every time that he didn’t say what I wanted him to say—that he chose me, that he wanted this, that he knew it, that fate was irrelevant.
All I wanted was for him to lie, and for me to believe it. But I didn’t have to be an oracle to see that of all the possible futures that existed, there wasn’t a single one where that outcome was possible. I would never believe a lie. And Akos would never tell me one.
“I am in love with you,” I said. “But for once in my life, I want someone to choose me. And you don’t. You can’t.”
I felt the mood change, as we stepped back, Akos looking suddenly bereft, like he had had his arms full and someone had come along and taken away everything he was carrying. I felt the same way. Empty-handed.
“I can’t change the way things are,” he said. “You can’t blame me for that.”
“I know.” He was right, and that was why there was no point in arguing anymore. I had begun the conversation with a demand for honesty, but honesty didn’t need to come from him—it needed to come from me. His fate was a reality, and as long as he had his fate, he couldn’t care about me the way I needed him to. And I only knew that I needed him to because he had encouraged me to try to value myself more highly. So we were tangled in a web together, cause and effect and choice and fate all intermingling.
“So you’re going to stay here, because your fate is with me,” I said hollowly. “And I’m going to stay here, to help them figure out how to handle my father. And you and I . . .”
“Will be what we are,” he said. So quiet.
“Right.” My eyes burned. “Well, I need to talk to them about Lazmet. Can you find Teka and make sure she’s all right?”
He nodded. I nodded. We both walked back into the mess hall, where everyone was still gathered around the screens, which now showed the wavy blur of heat above the sands of Tepes.