Nightvine Page 7

  Thiyo and Erinsk had wanted to put Alizhan’s long hair in some kind of complicated updo, but Alizhan had balked at being touched. She’d shown no interest at all in their instructions, complete with many gestures, until Erinsk had presented her with an array of small metal pins. Then she’d transformed into a model student. She’d listened attentively and stared into the mirror with great concentration, chewing her lip and stabbing pins into the thick twist of hair at the crown of her head. They were all invisible now, as black as her hair, but there must be forty of them at least.

  They’d done well with their disguises, given their limited preparation time. Thiyo must be paying Erinsk a lot.

  The three of them were ushered into the room and seated at long tables parallel to the walls. There were a few musicians in the center of the room, surrounded by empty space that would be filled with dancers after the feast. Thiyo was disgruntled about their placement, far from the dais where the wedding party would sit. Ilyr and his new wife hadn’t entered yet. More powerful and favored courtiers—Thiyo’s potential betrayers—sat at tables closer to the dais. Lady Lan’s social status had fallen, and their dinner companions were either minor nobility or extremely wealthy merchants, two classes that didn’t mix well. The atmosphere was both tense and tedious.

  Still, Thiyo cleared his expression and made introductions. Ev nodded politely at the men and women surrounding them, but retained none of their names or titles. If Thiyo didn’t want her to talk, then he was on his own for this part. Alizhan didn’t make much of an effort, either.

  He didn’t seem to mind being on his own. He chatted with everyone around them, at a pace far too rapid for Ev to follow. There were a lot of names, so Ev assumed he was asking after people’s health. At one point, he laughed sweetly and laid a hand over hers, then dropped a kiss on her cheek. Thiyo was on her right, so he was touching her with his injured hand. The gesture must be worth the pain to him. Ev tried to look like she enjoyed it.

  The musicians began to play something ceremonial, and the prince and his new bride entered. Ilyr was as beautiful as Thiyo had described him, broad-shouldered and golden-haired. Aniyat was also beautiful, but not in the way Ev had expected. Since finding out that Thiyo slept with men, Ev had assumed any woman who attracted his interest would be possessed of a slender, youthful androgyny—flat-chested and straight-hipped—but Aniyat was neither. The neckline of her silvery white gown was cut to draw attention to the plump roundness of her barely contained breasts, and her skirts flowed over the flare of her hips. She was almost as tall as Ilyr and their hair matched shades of gold, so they made a stunning pair. The two of them looked so radiant with happiness that for a moment, Ev forgot their mission and its charade entirely.

  Beside her, Thiyo sat rigid. His jaw tightened.

  Before the meal, they were served tiny glasses of translucent green liqueur. From Thiyo’s earlier descriptions, Ev recognized it as wai. She tried to push away thoughts of sea monsters and torture chambers and focus only on the delicate glassware. It was a small amount of liquid. How much could it hurt?

  All the guests lifted them into the air at the same time, looking at the prince and his new wife and wishing them long life, good health, and many children. Ev’s small vocabulary was good enough to understand that. After studying the other men at the table, she drank hers in a single gulp. The liquid was obviously alcohol, sweet to the first touch of the tongue and burning at the back of the throat. Ev was prepared for that sensation, but its sting had a curiously long-lasting effect. Luckily one mouthful wasn’t enough to get her drunk.

  The other guests said something to Thiyo about his glass, raised in a toast but otherwise untouched, and he politely demurred, gesturing delicately at his stomach. Then he turned to Alizhan and said in heavily accented Laalvuri, “Wai. Special drink of my people. From the, how you say? Sense fish? Light fish?” He wiggled the fingers of his good hand in imitation of tentacles.

  “Medusa,” Alizhan supplied.

  If the thought of drinking liquor laced with medusa venom horrified Alizhan as much as it did Ev, she didn’t let it show. It had only been twenty-two triads—not even a full month—since the catastrophe in Laalvur, where they’d rescued Kasrik from torture with raw venom. He’d once been a mind-reader like Alizhan, but the torture had destroyed his ability and left him with black scars lining his arms. The venom in wai was tempered, and there was only a small amount in the alcohol, but it was venom all the same.

  “Yes, medusa,” Thiyo said, pronouncing the new word atrociously. “Hoi gift to prince.”

  “You’re not drinking it?” Alizhan said.

  “Too sick,” he said. “But you. You will like.”

  This was part of the plan. Thiyo had claimed it would make the crowd more bearable for Alizhan. Still, she eyed her glass dubiously, and the other guests chuckled at her expression. A few of them encouraged her to try it. Thiyo stared pointedly at Alizhan, which she was unlikely to notice. After a moment she picked up her glass and downed it. There were cheers from the other guests.

  Then Thiyo turned to Ev, and said, in grammatically and phonetically perfect but extremely halting Adpri, “Lots of these people speak your language, but it’s rare to find anyone who speaks this one. You can say whatever you want.”

  So this was why he’d insisted she pretend to be Adpri.

  His long pauses were clearly for show, just like his fake accent in Laalvuri. Ev noticed he’d carefully avoided any recognizable words when speaking to her: Nalitzvans, Laalvuri, Adpri. How had he acquired such accentless Adpri? Adpri speakers had to be rarer on the island of Hoi than they were in Nalitzva, but she decided against mentioning that. Thiyo gestured demonstratively at her empty glass, as if they were still talking about the liquor.

  Of all of this shift’s little embarrassments, this one was the worst. Ev didn’t speak Adpri half as well as Thiyo. His plan was all for nothing. And now she had to make it sound like she could say whatever she wanted. “I can’t,” she said, hoping it sounded to the others like a gruff pronouncement on the drink.

  “He doesn’t like to talk,” Alizhan remarked in Laalvuri, from the other side of Thiyo. This earned a few titters from the guests who understood Laalvuri, and it saved Ev the trouble of saying anything more, for which she was grateful. Ev almost smiled at the remark. Would Djal Udborum smile? Thiyo had told Ev not to bother with pretending she didn’t understand Laalvuri. He had very low expectations of her acting skills.

  A Nalitzvan guest said something short enough and simple enough that Ev understood, at last. “Liquor will fix that.”

  She nodded, in keeping with her taciturn persona, and raised her empty glass in agreement.

  Their little multilingual exchange prompted some conversation in Nalitzvan, addressed to Thiyo, and the word Ilyr surfaced in the conversation, one clear landmark emerging from the fog, over and over again. Thiyo laughed softly at whatever was being said, but his smile was tight and cold.

  Dinner was served. It was a long, rectangular pastry in a pool of thick white sauce. When Ev cut into the pastry, she found an oblong shape of glistening white flesh. Ev poked at it with the metal utensil she’d been given and then said to Thiyo in Adpri, “What is this?”

  “Some kind of fish. Why does it matter? Stop poking it and just eat it.”

  “Fish,” Ev said with quiet horror. She glanced at Alizhan, seated on the other side of Thiyo, and saw that she was also hesitant to eat. Ev couldn’t remember the Adpri word for what she wanted to say, so instead she said, “We don’t eat.”

  “Now you do.”

  Ev forced herself to take a bite and almost gagged. She’d always hated the smell of fish at the market. The food was as slimy as it looked. A woman across the table noticed Ev’s reaction, then looked at Alizhan, who was regarding Ev with wide eyes, and said in Laalvuri, “I knew some Laalvuri were vegetarians, but I had no idea Adpri were.”

  A man with sandy brown hair, probably the woman’s husband, laughed and said
in Nalitzvan, “I thought Adpri ate everything.”

  It took Ev a moment to comprehend the words, but no time after that to grasp the mean-spirited joke. The underground city, just on the scorching edge of Day, had suffered several collapses in recent years, some of them in the food-growing sectors. Famines had ravaged Adappyr as a result, and reports had emerged that residents were eating sun-baked mud rather than starving to death.

  These pale people in their cold-air white stone palace would have no forks to eat with or swords to fight with, if not for Adpri miners and smiths.

  Ev could still taste the fish. She wished she had more liquor to burn it out of her mouth. Instead, she gulped some wine, which proved a passable substitute.

  “I live in Laalvur long time,” Ev said, sending a silent apology to her father. Obin had told her how hard life was as an exile with an accent. Adpri accents were the butt of jokes in Laalvuri novels and plays. It had taken Obin many years to erase his. It was a shame he’d felt the need to. When Ev had been aboard Vines, she’d thought the Adpri sailors all sounded rather musical when they spoke Laalvuri. How strange that people treated foreign accents as a mark of inferiority, when really they were a mark of someone else’s superior grasp of your language.

  The woman beamed as if Ev were a dog that had just performed a trick. Then she said, in loud, slow Nalitzvan, “So your new beau does talk, Lady Lan!”

  “Of course he talks,” Thiyo said lightly. For one, brief instant, Ev felt the relief of being defended. Then, with lowered lashes and a knowing tilt of the head, Thiyo added, “He speaks all the right tongues.”

  Time spent in these people’s company had improved her comprehension of their language, which Ev regretted. In Adpri, under her breath, she said, “I hate this. I hate you.”

  “I don’t care,” Thiyo said sweetly, speaking Adpri so that only Ev could understand. “Eat your fish.”

  Meanwhile, on Thiyo’s other side, Alizhan speared a piece of fish with her fork and put it in her mouth with grim determination. She grimaced, swallowed, and then grabbed for Thiyo’s untouched glass of liquor—Ev should have thought of that!—and threw back its contents. The other guests were silent for a moment.

  “You could have just asked,” Thiyo said mildly. This remark was in Nalitzvan for everyone’s enjoyment.

  Alizhan’s face lit up with a wild smile, and the other guests laughed. Their conversation in Nalitzvan resumed, and Ev could follow parts of it if she concentrated, but she decided to save her energy for later. Thiyo had told them that dinner would be long, and that they should wait until the crowd was as drunk as possible before acting. She let her gaze wander the room, wondering which of these glittering, smiling people had thrown Thiyo in prison. Her attention returned to the table not because of any movement, but instead because of the absence of motion.

  Thiyo’s food was untouched.

  Of course. He couldn’t hold a knife in his right hand.

  Ev regarded his plate with unveiled revulsion. He’d made her eat flesh, so it would be a fitting and utterly justified punishment to let him go hungry all shift. But she only considered that course of action for an instant. Then she picked up her own utensils, leaned over, and cut his pastry and fish into small pieces.

  “Oh, thank you,” Thiyo effused in Nalitzvan for the benefit of their audience. “How sweet.” In Adpri, he murmured something that Ev guessed meant, “You finally fucking noticed.”

  “How many dinners?” Ev replied. She wanted to say courses, not dinners, but Adpri probably didn’t even have a word for courses. If it did, her father would never have said it, out of protest. Ev almost smiled to herself. She could hear Obin saying rich people in a tone of disgust as clearly as if he were right there, looking around the room with her. She missed him. He’d have even less patience for this multi-course feast than she did. Ev looked directly at Thiyo and said, as she withdrew her knife and fork from his plate, “If you are mean, I stop helping.”

  To her surprise, he ducked his head and said, “Sorry.” After eating a bite of fish—thank the Balance he still had one good hand and Ev didn’t have to feed him herself—he swallowed and added, “I’m really hungry.”

  Because he’d been in prison for weeks. Tortured. Starved. Ev didn’t want to feel sorry for him, but she couldn’t help it. When servers came to take their dishes away and replace them with new ones, Ev cut up his next course without being asked. Thiyo ate with a relish she couldn’t hope to match. There was hardly a vegetable or a spice in sight. It was all meat and fish in sauces made of more meat and fish, and the thought of eating any of it turned Ev’s stomach. Even the bread with its golden-brown crust and airy white crumb, the only part of the meal Ev genuinely liked, lost its appeal after a couple of slices. Every course was longer and more excruciating than the last, and Ev grew tenser and tenser. They were all going to get exposed as frauds and dumped right back into a cell—or worse.

  Alizhan, on the other hand, was handling everything calmly. She’d even talked a little with their companions, smiling and nodding as if she were thrilled to be there. Alizhan didn’t need language skills to follow a conversation, and rehearsing their story beforehand meant Ev also knew what Thiyo had said about them. According to the story Thiyo had been telling everyone, Ev—that is to say, Djal Udborum—was an Adpri exile who’d made his career in Laalvur as a physician and an herbalist. Years ago, he’d met Lady Yiran Selevi, head of one of the minor houses in Laalvur, because she suffered from terrible headaches that only he could cure. Lady Selevi had longed to travel Nightward, but feared that her health might prevent her. Udborum, upon discovering her desire to travel, had offered to accompany her and they had arrived in the city two weeks ago.

  At this moment of Thiyo’s retelling, their interlocutors all made little “oh” sounds of realization. Two weeks! That was how long it had been since anyone had seen Lan. “Yes,” Thiyo would say, with a dreamy smile that confirmed all their suspicions. Ev knew this part not from the conversations Thiyo had held in front of her at the feast, but from his recitation hours earlier, when they’d put the finishing touches on the story in Erinsk’s shop. “I was out for a walk in the Upper City Gardens, and I saw two such people as I had never seen before…”

  Alizhan and Ev had argued against this line, since Laalvuri were common enough even across the ocean, but Thiyo had insisted. “I am an islander. They think I am provincial. No. Not provincial. Primitive. They will believe that I walked up to the first Laalvuri and Adpri I saw and asked to touch their face.”

  When Ev had made a skeptical grimace, Thiyo had continued blithely, “They will believe it because that is what they do to me. You should see the way they gape. And they never appreciate it when I stare back, the hypocrites.”

  Alizhan had scrunched up her face in disgust at that, but the lines had stayed in the final draft of the story. Thiyo had claimed the whole thing had just enough of a whiff of the taboo—foreigners and sex and suspect medicines—that everyone would be too titillated or scandalized to ask real questions. Even with limited language skills, Ev could see now that he’d been right.

  Ev sighed with relief when the meal concluded and the musicians began to play something louder and more lively, but then Thiyo nudged her. A nudge wasn’t one of their previously agreed-upon signals, so Ev did nothing. Then Thiyo said to their companions, “He may not be much for talking, but he’s an excellent dancer.”

  Ev blinked. They hadn’t discussed that at all. But if Thiyo was deliberately trying to embarrass her, he was out of luck. She was an excellent dancer, or at least a good one. And this way, if Thiyo did something inappropriate, she could stomp on his delicate slipper-clad toes. Dancing would definitely be better than dinner.

  9

  Dances and Dunces

  THE DANCE THAT ALL THE wedding guests, including the bride and groom, lined up to do was simple enough: people danced in pairs of one man and one woman, facing each other, and then gliding through a few steps together. Ev took the le
ad as they went for a turn around the room, gingerly holding Thiyo’s injured right hand in her left, and keeping her right hand on his back. Thiyo, of course, closed the space between their bodies until they were almost pressed together. Ev gave up on trying to keep her distance once she realized he was trying to talk privately. He wasn’t provoking her on purpose. He’d more or less behaved himself since that strange moment after the kiss.

  With his lips close to her ear, Thiyo said, “We’re going to pass some people that I need you to take note of. Then later, you can pass by them with Alizhan.”

  “We can’t ask her to dance.”

  “She’ll be fine.” He had such confidence and authority, even whispering in her ear. “Look left, that’s Kiryet Altvyezh. She hates me because I’m prettier than her, and Ilyr likes me better. Liked me better. She complains constantly about every aspect of life, large or small. Once while she was droning on, I politely inquired if ten gold tyek would make her feel better, and Ilyr laughed into his hand. He tried to pretend it was a cough, but she’s hated me ever since.”

  The brown-haired woman dancing near them did have a rather sour expression. Ev hardly had time to memorize the woman’s appearance—long, thin face, hair piled on her head in an enormously complicated architectural style, pink dress with frothy lace cuffs—before Thiyo was pointing out someone else.

  “That short blond woman over there, that’s Orlat Linsk. I flirted with her husband once and he was very responsive. I didn’t mean anything by it. Now he always finds some excuse to get close to me at social engagements. As if he has a chance! Anyway. She hates me. Either Kiryet or Orlat might have spied on me, I suppose, although I still can’t figure out how they would have discovered—oh look over there, that’s Torir Tyrenx, he was a little too persistent in his advances and I had to reject him rather publicly, I don’t think he likes me much.”