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  “I can put you to sleep for this, if you’d rather,” Henny said to Thiyo, ignoring the exchange at the foot of the bed. “I’ll do what I can for your hand. You might need to put that arm in a sling, just to keep yourself from banging it up more than you already have. Not much to be done about the bruises.”

  Henny’s touch was not just the absence of pain, but the presence of something wonderful. Better than coffee. Better than wine. Better than sex. With his eyes closed and his head lolling against the pillows, Thiyo hummed happily in response. “You can do anything you want to me, Henny.”

  Henny made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a sigh of disgust. In Nalitzvan, she said, “Whatever you’re talking, it ain’t Nalitzvan. Some time I’ll find a man who don’t go up in a cloud of steam every time I touch him.”

  “Ket,” Thiyo said, as a friendly suggestion.

  That elicited a trill of laughter from Henny and silence from the other side of the room. Henny kept talking after that, but Thiyo didn’t understand a word of what she said.

  Ev spent two triads in and out of consciousness, waking just long enough to receive bizarre and confusing updates on the world: the city was in mourning for Lan, Alizhan had accidentally knocked out Ket, and Thiyo hated being injured and stuck in bed almost as much as Ev did, but he hated reading A Natural History of the World even more.

  “So let’s read a different book,” Ev said. She was awake now, and not feverish, but Henny had ordered her to stay in bed. Henny couldn’t be with her all the time, so to ease Ev’s pain, Henny brought her a clear, golden tea to drink as a painkiller every shift. It left a half-sweet, half-sharp taste in her mouth, like cut grass, and it made the edges of everything go fuzzy before she drifted to sleep. Ev hated sleeping all the time, and she hated feeling drugged even more, but she still needed the tea. She still hadn’t grown accustomed to waking up in the little room, feeling as dim as the light that filtered through their purple drapes. She wanted a distraction.

  “Didn’t you two sail across the ocean specifically to get me to read this book?” Thiyo said.

  “Well, we didn’t know you were going to whine about it the whole time,” Alizhan said. She was curled in her chair in the corner, like a cat that had retreated to its hiding place to lick its wounds after a fight. Alizhan probably hadn’t enjoyed knocking out Ket any more than Ket had enjoyed being knocked out. It had been almost half a shift, and Alizhan hadn’t moved from that spot.

  “I was serious about the book,” Ev said, before Thiyo could snap at Alizhan. Lots of time in this very small room was getting to all of them. The injuries and the feeling of being hunted weren’t helping anyone calm down, either. She clenched her hands in the thick, red wool blanket that covered the bed. “I don’t care what Thiyo does, but I want something to read. I’m not good for anything else right now.”

  Alizhan stretched herself out, stalked from the room, and returned a few moments later with a book. “This is Ket’s,” she said, handing it to Ev. No mention of how he was recovering from their last interaction, but if he was lending books, he couldn’t be too sick—or too resentful. “He said he has others, if you’d rather read something else.”

  The text on the front of the little tan book had worn away, but Ev recognized the scrolling design around the edges. It was a volume of The Sunrise Chronicles. Ev had read them all dozens of times, but then, Alizhan knew that already. Ev smiled.

  Thiyo shot a disdainful look at the book’s spine and said, “Ugh, that garbage.”

  “You shut your mouth,” Alizhan said, sitting back down in the chair and pulling her knees under herself. “We love them. I’ve loved them since I was a kid.”

  “You have?” Ev knew Alizhan liked the books, but they’d only had one conversation about them.

  “Yeah,” Alizhan said. “You were always reading them or thinking about them, so I asked Iriyat to get them so I could read them, too. I knew all the endings by then, of course, because of you.”

  “Sorry.”

  Alizhan smiled at the floor. Ev wondered, then, if Alizhan had deliberately put distance between them before starting this conversation, before revealing something sweet and yearning and vulnerable about herself. If Alizhan was curled up like a cat in that chair, she was one of those cats who’d never directly approach you or jump into your lap, but would always arrange to be near you, as if by coincidence.

  Those cats usually ran away if you tried to touch them.

  And with that thought, Ev’s little metaphor lost its charm.

  “It never mattered about the endings,” Alizhan murmured. “I loved them anyway.” She looked up for a moment to glare at Thiyo. “Because they’re great. I couldn’t put them down. Why wouldn’t you like them? What’s wrong with you?”

  “They’re sickeningly sentimental,” he said. “And so lazy. All the writers ever do is put a man and a woman in the same place, have them look at each other, and we’re all supposed to assume immediately that it’s love.”

  “People do that, though,” Alizhan insisted. “It happens all the time. Not just with men and women. People look at each other and are overcome with—well, I guess it’s usually more like lust than love. But I do think it’s possible to fall in love instantly.”

  “But that’s not what happens in Sunrise,” Ev said. “Have you even read them?”

  “Why would I waste my time?” Thiyo said. “A big strong man rescues a dainty woman. The prose is stuffed full of unbearably overwrought descriptions. Members throb. They fall in love. The end.”

  He was so wrong that Ev laughed out loud. “That’s not it at all. How can you judge them without reading them?”

  “And what do you have against throbbing members?” Alizhan said.

  “I’d love to have something against a throbbing member, but this brothel is in shockingly short supply,” Thiyo replied.

  “Ket did tell me he had other books,” Alizhan said. “Maybe you’d like one of them better. In particular, he mentioned a scandalous book of poems that everyone’s been talking about. It had a funny little title. I think it was just called Loves.”

  Thiyo blanched.

  “Don’t be cruel, Alizhan,” Ev said. Thiyo was an elitist asshole, but he’d been beaten for writing those poems, and she wasn’t going to kick him while he was down.

  “It’s in Nalitzvan,” Thiyo said coolly. “You couldn’t read it anyway.”

  Ev turned the book in her hands to look at the spine and saw that the title was printed in Nalitzvan. “Oh.” She opened it to its first page, foolishly expecting the inside of the book to be easier to read. In theory, she knew how to read the foreign script, but she had to sound it out like a child. With such regular doses of Henny’s tea fogging up her head, the novel would be slow going, even if she had read it before. “I guess I could use the practice.”

  Thiyo sighed. He held out his left hand expectantly.

  Ev shut the book and brought it closer to herself as though she were protecting it. “What do you want with it, if you hate it so much?”

  “Nothing,” Thiyo said. “But you saved my life and almost got killed in the process. I suppose I can read you a chapter of this drivel.”

  “You just don’t want to read any more of A Natural History of the World because it makes you feel stupid that you can’t figure out what all that blue ink is,” Alizhan said.

  “I haven’t noticed you making any progress on that count,” Thiyo snapped. “And thank you, Alizhan, for rendering my very small gesture of gratitude hollow and self-serving.”

  “You did a pretty good job of that yourself,” Ev pointed out. Earlier, she’d thought of Alizhan as a cat, and the comparison was tempting in Thiyo’s case, too. Ev felt as though the two of them were circling her with their tails whipping. Ludicrous.

  “Are you refusing my offer?”

  Ev put the book in his hand, moving gingerly so as not to disturb her stitches. “Please,” she said, settling back against her pillows. “Go ahead.”

/>   “She has it almost memorized, so we’ll know if you do a bad job translating,” Alizhan said, a little too eagerly.

  “I never do,” Thiyo said, and opened the book.

  Despite his grudging offer to read a single chapter of “drivel” to Ev, Thiyo was a good reader. The words flowed smoothly. If Ev hadn’t known he was looking at a text in Nalitzvan and speaking it aloud in Laalvuri, she never would have guessed. Thiyo never paused to consider his translation, although once or twice he’d paused to groan or make a snide comment.

  Commentary aside, Thiyo’s reading was a pleasant distraction. Without it, Ev thought about how slowly she was healing, and how trapped they were in their little room at Zhenev’s, and how their best option—once she could travel—was to go farther from home, even though they’d left Kasrik and Mar and Eliyan and her parents and all those kids without any protection from Iriyat. Ev even felt afraid for Vatik, the head of the guards at Varenx House, who was risking his life by defying Iriyat’s orders in secret. All of Laalvur was in peril, and Ev and Alizhan had abandoned the city. It chilled Ev to think of what Iriyat might be doing in their absence. And Ev didn’t even know how she and Alizhan would get home from Estva, let alone stop Iriyat.

  That was what Ev thought about when she was awake and lucid, which admittedly wasn’t very often.

  “Thiyo was very disappointed when you fell asleep after chapter one,” Alizhan informed her. Ev had no way of knowing if Alizhan was reporting Thiyo’s real thoughts or teasing him. “He wanted to keep going.”

  “Even sentimental garbage is preferable to A Natural History of the World,” Ev said, smiling.

  Thiyo was sitting in bed next to her with a handful of loose pages spread over his lap. His right arm, with his hand now splinted and bandaged, was holding A Natural History open while he attempted to compare the strange blue markings with his own transcriptions. The book was desiccated from being stored in salt, its pages crackling and dry, and it rustled whenever Thiyo moved. Somehow the salt had caused the blue ink to become visible. “I will get this,” he assured them, chewing his lip and looking from one text to another. The loose pages on the bed were covered in text that was neither the angular, separate script of Nalitzva nor the looping, connected writing of Laalvur. “Do you see this string of characters? And this one? They’re the same. It must be a repeated word. There are other repetitions, too.”

  “It’s long,” Ev remarked.

  “This isn’t even all of it,” Thiyo said. “Pages and pages of text written on top of another text, in invisible ink and a language that no one can read. At that point, why even bother to write anything down?”

  “It has to be Iriyat’s, right?” Ev said. “She must really have wanted to preserve something. She must have wanted to communicate something with—someone. Whoever could read that language.”

  “No one,” Thiyo said. “No one can read this. It looks like no other script in the world.”

  “How do you know that?” Ev said, and when he looked at her, Thiyo’s smile was slow and sure and smug. “Really? You know all of them?”

  “Except the one we need him to know,” Alizhan said.

  “How do you know all of them?” Ev said, still stuck on this point. “And if you know all the others by magic, why can’t you read this one?”

  “It doesn’t work like that,” he said. “I was born with a gift, but I still had to be trained. Everyone needs to be trained.” His gaze flicked toward Alizhan, but then he continued quickly: “I spent my whole childhood with an old ohokutho—that’s a person who remembers everything—reciting the epics of different cultures at me, until I knew them all.”

  “Is that what you are? Ohokutho?”

  Thiyo shook his head. “I remember words, and sounds, and structures, but that’s it. Not experiences or images or conversations or what I ate for a particular meal a decade ago. I don’t have perfect recall of everything that’s ever happened to me. But the words stick with me. Although I don’t need to have encountered a word before to understand it. I can’t explain it. I need a little exposure to the language, but after that I just… develop a sense of what things mean.”

  “Like looking into water,” Alizhan said. Ev had no idea what she meant. No longer concerned with Thiyo’s failure to decode the book, Alizhan was smiling. “A current of sounds with their meanings shimmering underneath.”

  Thiyo stared at her. “You remembered that. I’ve never said that—not in those words—to anyone. But yes, that’s how it is.” He shook his head and composed himself. “And in a sense, all magic is like that. A sensing of what lies beneath. It’s what you do, too.”

  “Sense what lies beneath people’s outsides, you mean.”

  “Yes. Some people can transform what they sense. Mala and Henny sense pain and transform it into pleasure. Ket’s like you, in a way—he can read minds if he’s touching people. And he can transform what he finds.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  Thiyo arched an eyebrow. “You’ve done it to me and Ev. And every person you’ve ever knocked unconscious.”

  “That’s not what Ket does.”

  “I suspect you could do what Ket does if you practiced.”

  Alizhan shuddered.

  A good opportunity to redirect the conversation. “So how long will it take you to… sense this?” Ev asked.

  “I don’t know. But it will come,” he insisted. He rubbed at his eyes, smearing a trail of ink across his face. For an instant, Ev imagined herself licking the pad of her thumb and brushing it over his temples and the bridge of his nose, the way her mother had always tried to clear the smudges from her face when she was a child. But Thiyo wasn’t her family—he was hardly even her friend—and she couldn’t reach out and touch his face like that. It would be intrusive, and in her current state, extremely painful.

  The ink streak wasn’t a terrible addition to his face, besides. It would soften whatever arrogant thing he planned to say next.

  “I’m a genius, after all.”

  “Yes,” Ev agreed. If she looked at Alizhan, Ev would giggle, so she held Thiyo’s dark gaze as solemnly as she could. “But I bet even geniuses need to take breaks.”

  “Really,” Thiyo said flatly. “This whole time, you’ve just been angling for chapter two.”

  But he was reaching for The Sunrise Chronicles without another word of encouragement, so Ev lay back and listened. She didn’t intend to mention how much less reluctantly Thiyo had offered to read the second chapter, and she hoped Alizhan would leave him alone, too. There were so few pleasant things in her life at the moment.

  The next triad, it was Thiyo who brought up the possibility of reading chapter three, and when Ev eagerly accepted, he did the whole thing without any mockery. By chapter four, Thiyo had crafted different speaking styles to distinguish the characters. Vesper, the hero, had a steady, deep voice. Privately, Ev thought Thiyo was making him sound like Ilyr. And Aurora, the smart, prideful princess, bore more than a passing resemblance to Lan. Their banter ricocheted back and forth, making Ev forget where she was stuck, and why.

  But she did heal, and every time she woke up, her head was clearer and she was in less pain. She could sit up now, and get out of bed, and walk short distances. Ev wasn’t ready to fight anyone, but she would just have to hope their escape from Nalitzva wouldn’t require that of her. It was time to go.

  18

  Iriyat to Ilyr, Lyrebird shift, the 17th Triad of Yahad, 764

  LYREBIRD SHIFT, 17TH TRIAD OF Yahad, 764

  Ilyr,

  An urgent matter spurs my hand.

  More urgent and tragic even than the loss of your Lady Lan. I know she was dear to you, and I was grieved to hear of her death. I know she was a treasured friend and colleague, and that she helped you with your writings.

  How strange, that the deepest grief is so often hand in hand with the highest joy. I hope your new marriage is bringing you much of the latter. Your life is in tumult, my friend, and soon we shall write ea
ch other true letters to discuss it.

  But for now I have no time to dwell on that.

  I have received terrible news from Adappyr. Two different sections of the city have caved in over the last week. Whole neighborhoods are blocked off and impassable due to the collapses. People are starving behind the collapsed walls, or buried under the rubble. It guts me to learn of such random loss of life. I have hired the Lampgreen Company to trade their swords for shovels and commanded them to go to Adappyr to dig out anyone they can.

  I am sure you are wondering what this has to do with you.

  I am plagued by the notion that this tragedy might have been prevented, if only we knew more about the workings of our world. For it must have been a quake that caused the formerly solid walls and columns of Adappyr to crumble and cave in—what else could ruin these structures that have stood for centuries?

  Could these collapses herald an eruption? A wave? Are they a sign of more to come?

  I beg you, for the sake of our Adpri friends, and for our own sakes, to save us all. We are in danger. I am but a messenger. You will be the hero.

  I know you remember well our conversation about the islands three years ago. I know, from your tender letters of recent years, that you traveled there and found a fullness of the heart worth more than any treasure. I know you care for those lands and those people as you do your own, and as I do my own, and we must now extend that feeling to the people of Adappyr, and the people of all the world.

  I must ask you to travel to the islands again. Lives depend on it.

  It pains me to capitalize on the death of your dear friend Lady Lan, but her passing provides you with the perfect cover to return to the islands. Say you are bringing home her remains, and go at once. To have survived so long in their home amid the towering ferocity of the ocean, the islanders must possess knowledge of the events that shake our world—quakes, waves, eruptions—and you must bring it back to us.

  Further instruction is enclosed. Destroy this letter.