Shadebloom Read online

  Good luck with that. “What do you know about Thiyo?” Ev asked.

  “He’s the one who left.”

  Ev searched Biha’s expression. What did she think of that choice? Did she disapprove? Did her crew members? Alizhan would have known. Ev didn’t, and so she said nothing.

  “And based on our conversation, I think I recall hearing that he was a talker,” Biha said.

  That startled a little half-sad smile out of Ev. “I suppose he does like to hear himself talk.”

  Biha frowned. “I must have made a mistake. This pair of words always trips me up. Not a talker. A speaker. We were just discussing them—people who can learn dozens of languages.”

  “When you were arguing that it’s not magic, you mean?” Ev said.

  “I wanted to expand your understanding,” Biha said, eager to rekindle that conversation. “But yes. You asked me if I spoke every language—a strange question, unless you’d recently encountered an islander who could do just that.”

  “Ah,” Ev said. She bit her lip.

  When Ev went back down to check on Thiyo, he was awake. Waiting for her. He raised an eyebrow as she sat back down in the hammock. Curious. Suspicious. Why had Ev told him to go back to sleep if she was going to get up and wander?

  Ev touched his shoulder. “Thiyo.”

  His gaze slid to her hand. Then their eyes met. Ev tried to convey everything in that single instant of looking, as if that would be less painful. Perhaps he already knew. It was strange for him to be silent, even for this brief moment.

  Then he spoke.

  Of course they had to do this the hard way. There was no easy way.

  Thiyo continued speaking. It sounded casual, whatever it was. Chatty. Nonchalant. When Ev didn’t react, there was break in the flow of sound—she wasn’t sure it qualified as words—and then he picked it up again, more hesitantly. His tone changed once, and then again. Was he experimenting? He stopped and restarted.

  If that was a language, she’d never heard anything like it. A hodgepodge of repeated syllables, it sounded like the wordless babble of infants.

  “Thiyo,” she began. Smoke, this was hard. She started again. “Thiyo, I can’t understand you. You’re speaking—well, to be honest, I’m not sure. Whatever it is, I don’t understand. I need you to speak Laalvuri. Or Adpri. Even Nalitzvan, if that’s all you can manage. I could work with that.” What Ev really needed was for Thiyo to recover and be himself again so he could listen to their mysterious rescuers—or captors. Ev kept that to herself. She didn’t want to overwhelm him. “Nod if you understand anything I’m saying.”

  He didn’t.

  “Thiyo. Please. Nod if you understand.” Ev demonstrated, lifting and lowering her chin.

  Even with her rambling, she’d only spoken for a moment or two. In that time, Thiyo’s expression had crumpled from uncomprehending to stricken. Now his eyes were wide with panic. He opened his mouth to speak, then closed it and shook his head.

  Ev tried again. She spoke slowly. She attempted to say it in Adpri and Nalitzvan, and each time she spoke to him, his bewilderment gradually gave way to something far worse. Ev had never seen him look so lost or helpless—not in prison, not when he’d had a sword to his throat, not when he’d faced the man who’d broken his heart, not even when he’d been stranded in the ocean with a giant medusa. It crushed her.

  “Hey, hey,” she said, tightening her grip on his shoulder. She moved her hand down and grasped his arm, choosing a place that was free of those twining black scars. “We will figure this out.”

  She didn’t know that. She couldn’t. She could only think of Kasrik, who’d once been like Alizhan until Iriyat’s priests had tortured it out of him with preserved medusa tentacles. Unlike the scars swirling and tangling over Thiyo’s skin and her own, Kasrik’s scars striped his arms straight up and down. The work of a different kind of a monster—a human one. He’d lost his ability because of them. She’d pitied him, but she hadn’t taken his loss as seriously as she could have. He’d become like her. She’d never been able to read minds and she was living her life just fine.

  But having spent so much time traveling through foreign lands, the confusion and vulnerability of being unable to speak or understand were fresh in her mind. Thiyo had never suffered that experience, and now he was condemned to it. He’d had every language, and now he had none. Each time she spoke to him, he recoiled.

  There were few light sources down here, but when he turned away from her, Ev caught a glint of tears in his eyes.

  So instead of speaking comforting words, as she wanted to, Ev pulled him up into a hug and squeezed. He held onto her. That, at least, they could both understand.

  2

  Fair Warning

  Iriyat plucked a thornfruit from the bowl and pinched the brown rind between two manicured nails until it popped and split. She lifted the fruit, its newly revealed pulp as red as her lips, and ate it in one bite. She dropped the rind into an empty dish on the table between them, then gestured at the overflowing bowl next to it. “Don’t you want some? You used to love these.”

  Alizhan stared at her white hand hovering over the mound of fruit. When Sardas had commandeered Honesty and sailed back to Laalvur under Iriyat’s orders, she’d envisioned herself in a cell in the basement of Varenx House. Instead, she’d been directed back to her childhood bedroom to sleep and then invited to a meal on the terrace. Iriyat had even lit a fire in the terrace’s fire pit—a decorative touch, since Laalvur was never cold. The comforts were a small difference. Cell or no cell, Alizhan was a prisoner.

  And what did it matter? She’d had some foolish, grand plan to return home, to accuse Iriyat of her crimes and force her to stand trial. To bring the journal to light. To see justice for the people she’d already hurt and to protect the ones she might hurt in the future. To save the city. To change the world.

  But what was the point of the world? Ev and Thiyo were dead.

  “I’m not hungry,” Alizhan said. They’d force-fed her on the ship. She wasn’t sure how much time had passed between that terrible shift when she’d killed Merat and their arrival in Laalvur. Seven or eight triads, probably, since she’d woken up with a smear of blood between her thighs this shift. Enough time to die of starvation, if only someone would let her.

  “Are you sure?” Iriyat said, the picture of concern. “You look thin. Sardas told me you weren’t eating. You’ve always been skinny, but I don’t want you to waste away. And you love thornfruit!”

  “I’m not hungry,” Alizhan repeated.

  “I want to apologize,” Iriyat said. “I know you’ve had a difficult time. And I’m to blame for some of it.” Iriyat pulled two books out of her lap. One was a Nalitzvan copy of The Sunrise Chronicles into which Thiyo had sewn his own translation of Iriyat’s journal. The other was volume eleven of A Natural History of the World—Iriyat’s original, encoded journal. Sardas had taken both from Alizhan when he’d put her under guard. Those two texts represented Alizhan’s best chance at persuading the rest of the world that Iriyat was a criminal, so she ought to feel panic, seeing them in Iriyat’s hands. Instead, she felt hollow.

  “I was going to provide you with the cipher,” Iriyat continued. “When you were ready.”

  “When I was ready.” Alizhan couldn’t muster the energy to do more than repeat what Iriyat had said in a dead tone. When could a person be ready to find out her mother had been lying to her and exploiting her all her life?

  “There was so much I wanted to tell you, and I thought I could do it more clearly in writing, but instead I’ve caused you a great deal of suffering. So I want to apologize and make things right. And I think that starts with this.”

  With a single, elegant movement of her arm, Iriyat dropped both books into the fire. Alizhan jumped up, meaning to plunge her hands into the blaze. Flames were already licking at the pages, which were curling, crackling, and crumbling into the fire pit. She hesitated. Then Iriyat was upon her, moving faster than Alizhan had
guessed, pulling her arms behind her.

  “Don’t, darling. I hate to see you hurt yourself.”

  Those two books together represented months of struggle. She and Ev had sailed across the ocean to find someone who could read the encoded text. Thiyo had labored for weeks on that translation. Ev and Thiyo had died.

  With that thought, all the fight went out of Alizhan. Iriyat had a tight grip on her wrists, but it wasn’t necessary. There was nothing worth fighting for.

  Alizhan didn’t resist when Iriyat spun her around. She didn’t even startle when Iriyat pulled her into a hug.

  “I was very sorry to hear of your loss,” Iriyat said.

  “Don’t.”

  “If you ever want to talk about it, I’ll be here. You know now that I also lost someone I loved, so I understand.”

  Not even the allusion to her father made Alizhan soften. There was nothing left in her but ashes. She turned her head to watch the smoke rise from the fire. At last, Iriyat drew back. “Will you sit?”

  What choice was there? Would her legs even hold her up? Every time she thought about Ev and Thiyo, she wanted to crumple. The chair was the only thing that kept her from puddling on the terrace.

  “Please eat. I went all the way out of the city to get these, you know. One of those dusty little villages on the outskirts. Orzatvur, I think? It was the funniest little farm. A big, hulking, surly Adpri exile sold me these. From the way he treated me, you’d have thought I was holding his family hostage.”

  Orzatvur. Iriyat had found Ev’s family somehow. Panic spiked. “Or threatening him,” Alizhan muttered.

  Iriyat’s laugh was as delicate and manicured as her fingertips. She picked another fruit out of the bowl and squeezed it till it split. A drop of red juice plopped onto the tabletop, ruining the geometric pattern of the tiles. “Indeed. I can’t imagine why.”

  Were Obin and Neiran—and even Ajee, God help him—in danger? Ev wasn’t here to protect them. They don’t even know she’s dead. Alizhan’s voice went so low it cracked when she said, “You’d never hurt them, of course.”

  “Of course,” Iriyat said smoothly. “But I wanted to meet them, since they raised the young woman who stole you away from me.”

  At least they were giving up on the pretense that the Umarsad family were random strangers. “That’s not what happened.”

  “Ah well,” Iriyat said, contemplative and nostalgic. “I suppose all parents feel that way about the people their children fall in love with.”

  Alizhan went still for a moment. She’d become accustomed to her grandmother’s bigotry and disgust. Merat had loathed Ev and Thiyo. Alizhan had conflated her hatred of them with her ruthlessness, and she’d expected Iriyat to be just like Merat. But she wasn’t. What Iriyat had said about Ev stealing Alizhan away was a casual figure of speech. It was jarring to realize Iriyat didn’t hate Ev. She’d even said she was sorry.

  Alizhan still didn’t want to hear it.

  “My parents felt significantly less charitable toward Arav,” Iriyat said. “My mother was a monster, as you know. It’s grisly, but I am grateful to you for killing her. Sardas told me.”

  It was hard to think through the fog of grief and panic. But there was something important: Iriyat had slid almost imperceptibly from my parents to my mother.

  Because her father was still alive. Alizhan had been the little ghost in Varenx House, and he’d been the other ghost. The one in the room upstairs who never came out. Alizhan’s pulse picked up just thinking about it. But what good would it do her?

  “But let’s put that aside. I wrote it down because it was the only way I knew to share it with you, but I want things to be different between us now.”

  “I don’t want anything from you.” Alizhan didn’t even want justice anymore. She wanted to be done.

  “I know this is a difficult moment for us, but I believe we’ll get through. We just need some time to talk. I have to leave for Adappyr in a triad, but I was hoping you’d come with me. I won’t force you, of course. It’s your choice. Although I worry about leaving you alone in this state, so if you want to stay here, I’ll have to have someone—Sardas, perhaps—watch over you.”

  “A choice,” Alizhan said flatly. “Go to Adappyr with you or stay here under Sardas’s constant surveillance.”

  “I just want you to be safe.”

  “Fuck off,” Alizhan said, standing up. “I’m going back to bed.”

  Alizhan couldn’t muster the energy to pull the curtains closed. She collapsed onto her bed and lay there, staring at the ceiling. She preferred to sleep in total darkness, when she had preferences. But her room was never bright, since there were no Dayward windows, only a perforated stone wall on the Nightward side meant to let cool air pass through. As it had always been, the room was full of potted plants bursting with blooms of all colors and leaves reaching in all directions. Iriyat’s hybridized creations.

  Something scratched at the stone screen. Alizhan ignored it, but it continued for many long minutes, developing a steady rhythm. Not an animal, then.

  Her bedroom was on the second story. There were no trees or vines on the Nightward side. Anyone who’d climbed up the stone screen had gone to some effort to contact her. Alizhan didn’t get up. There was a short list of people who might have taken the trouble, and she didn’t want to see any of them. She didn’t want to see anyone who wasn’t Ev or Thiyo.

  The scratching stopped. “Fuck you,” came as a low hiss through the screen. “I know you’re in there. Get up and come talk to me.”

  The voice belonged to an angry teenage boy. Kasrik. Alizhan pushed herself upright and went to crouch next to the screen. The holes were too small to get a good visual, but from the sound of his voice, she could tell where Kasrik was. “What?”

  “What do you mean, what? I came to give you the news. Fair warning, all of it’s bad. We’ll work on getting you out of here, too. There are some friends in town you’ll want to see.”

  “Ev and Thiyo are dead,” Alizhan said. She didn’t have any other friends. There was no way to soften the blow—or maybe there was, and she didn’t want to.

  “Who the hell is Thiyo?” Kasrik said. “Never mind. I’m sorry about Ev. I liked her better than you.”

  Alizhan said nothing.

  “Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. Shit, Alizhan, I don’t know what to say. I’m really, really sorry. But let’s talk about the rest of it. Did you get that book translated?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Of course it fucking matters! Do you even know what’s going on here? God. I’m sorry about Ev, I am, but while you were gone, Iriyat got her hands around this city’s throat and if we don’t stop her, no one will.” There was a pause, and then a tightly rolled tube of paper was pushed through one of the holes in the stone. It dropped to the floor and uncurled. Another one followed. “These are some pamphlets. I don’t have time to stay here and tell you everything. Me and Eliyan have work to do. But try to be in here during Rosefinch shift, and I’ll come back. I worked it out with Vatik so he’s the one patrolling the grounds while I’m here. You can still trust him.”

  Alizhan had let most of his words pass over her, and she hadn’t bothered to pick up the pamphlets, but that gave her pause. He shouldn’t know about Vatik. Kasrik had lost his powers when he’d been tortured. “How do you know?”

  “I’m getting better,” he said, a touch of pride in his voice. “Ev told me to pay attention to faces, and that was all I could do for a while. But once I started to learn that, little by little, the other stuff—thoughts, feelings, you know, all that came back. Sometimes I see Mala when Vines is in port, and she thinks it’s getting better because I’m young and still growing. I’m not the same as I was, but maybe I could be, eventually.”

  “Good,” she said softly. That was one less burden to bear. “I’m glad.”

  “Does that mean you’ll stop sulking? Ev wouldn’t want you to sulk.”

  Alizhan huffed. Presumpt
uous little shit. It helped that he was right. “Fuck off.”

  “Alizhan.” He said her name like a warning. “She got Mar.”

  “What do you mean, got Mar?” There was no point in asking who she was.

  “Read the pamphlet,” Kasrik said. She heard the sound of his shoes scraping the stone as he climbed down.

  3

  A Romance for the Ages!

  1 Yahad 764

  MAR HA-SOLORA AND IRIYAT HA-VARENSI TO MARRY

  Laalvur holds its breath in anticipation of an unforgettable celebration

  Two of our city’s most beloved figures, Mar ha-Solora and Iriyat ha-Varensi, have announced their intent to marry. These two members of the Council of Nine need no introduction, both longtime leaders of Great Houses and familiar faces in all corners of the city. Such a wedding deserves feasting and dancing in the streets, and the happy bride- and groom-to-be have promised a joyful and abundant celebration on the fifteenth triad of the month of Rimersha, with the ceremony beginning at the call of the Lyrebird shift.

  Theirs is a romance to be remembered. The pair have been seen strolling Arishdenan harbor holding hands. When asked for comment, Mar, besotted, said, “If I’m being truthful, I’ve been in love with Iriyat for years.” And with tears sparkling in her eyes, his future bride said, “After I lost my parents in the last wave, I thought I could never love again, but Mar showed me how wrong I was. We want to share that feeling with all of Laalvur.”

  Have two more beautiful people ever fallen in love? Their wedding will be a historic event!

  4

  Cured

  Alizhan finished reading the pamphlet and shoved it under her mattress. She sat down heavily on the bed. Iriyat and Mar were getting married? Mar had always been a little infatuated with her—until he’d discovered her role in performing cruel experiments on the city’s gifted orphans, including Kasrik. When Alizhan had last been in Laalvur, Mar had made an enemy of Iriyat by demanding that the other members of the Council of Nine hold her accountable for the orphanage in Gold Street. But Iriyat had burned the orphanage and erased all evidence of her involvement there. Now the entire city seemed to have forgotten that Mar had moved against Iriyat—including Mar himself.