Carve the Mark

Akos was silent.

I sat back from the crack in the wall, closing my eyes against the line of light so I could think.

For my brother and my father, every sojourn since Ryzek was young had been a search for an oracle, and every search had turned up empty. Likely because it was nearly impossible to catch someone who knew you were coming. Or someone who might lay on a blade to avoid capture, as the elder oracle had in the same invasion that had brought the Kereseths here.

But finally, it seemed Ryzek had found a solution: he had gone after two oracles at once. One had avoided being taken by dying. And the other—this Eijeh Kereseth—didn’t know what he was. He was still soft and pliable enough to be shaped by Noavek cruelty.

I sat forward again to hear Eijeh speak, his curly head tipped forward.

“Akos, what is he saying?” Eijeh asked in slippery Thuvhesit, wiping his nose with the back of his hand.

“He’s saying they didn’t come to Thuvhe for me,” Akos said, without looking back. It was strange to hear someone speak two languages so perfectly, without an accent. I envied him the ability. “They came for you.”

“For me?” Eijeh’s eyes were pale green. An unusual color, like iridescent insect wings, or the currentstream after the Deadening time. Against his light brown skin, so like the milky earth of the planet Zold, they almost glowed. “Why?”

“Because you are the next oracle of this planet,” Ryzek said to Eijeh in the boy’s mother tongue, stepping down from the platform with the knife in hand. “You will see the future, in all its many, many varieties. And there is one variety in particular that I wish to know about.”

A shadow darted across the back of my hand like an insect, my currentgift making my knuckles ache like they were breaking. I stifled a groan. I knew what future Ryzek wanted: to rule Thuvhe, as well as Shotet, to conquer our enemies, to be recognized as a legitimate world leader by the Assembly. But his fate hung over him as heavily as Akos’s likely now hung over him, saying that Ryzek would fall to our enemies instead of reign over them. He needed an oracle if he wanted to avoid that failure. And now he had one.

I wanted Shotet to be recognized as a nation instead of a collection of rebellious upstarts just as much as my brother did. So why was the pain of my currentgift—ever-present—mounting by the second?

“I …” Eijeh was watching the knife in Ryzek’s hand. “I’m not an oracle, I’ve never had a vision, I can’t … I can’t possibly …”

I pressed against my stomach again.

Ryzek balanced the knife on his palm and flicked it to turn it. It wobbled, moving in a slow circle. No, no, no, I found myself thinking, unsure why.

Akos shifted into the path between Ryzek and Eijeh, as if he could stop my brother with the meat of his body alone.

Ryzek watched his knife turn as he moved toward Eijeh.

“Then you must learn to see the future quickly,” Ryzek said. “Because I want you to find me the version of the future I need, and tell me what it is I must do to get to it. Why don’t we start with a version of the future in which Shotet, not Thuvhe, controls this planet—hmm?”

He nodded to Vas, who forced Eijeh to his knees. Ryzek caught the blade by its handle and touched the edge of it to Eijeh’s head, right under his ear. Eijeh whimpered.

“I can’t—” Eijeh said. “I don’t know how to summon visions, I don’t—”

And then Akos barreled into my brother from the side. He wasn’t big enough to topple Ryzek, but he had caught him off guard, and Ryzek stumbled. Akos pulled his elbow back to punch—stupid, I thought to myself—but Ryzek was too fast. He kicked up from the ground, hitting Akos in the stomach, then stood. He grabbed Akos by the hair, wrenching his head up, and sliced along Akos’s jawline, ear to chin. Akos screamed.

It was one of Ryzek’s preferred places for cutting people. When he decided to give a person a scar, he wanted it to be visible. Unavoidable.

“Please,” Eijeh said. “Please, I don’t know how to do what you ask, please don’t hurt him, don’t hurt me, please—”

Ryzek stared down at Akos, who was clutching his face, his neck streaked with blood.

“I do not know this Thuvhesit word, ‘please,’” Ryzek said.

Later that night I heard a scream echoing in the quiet hallways of Noavek manor. I knew it didn’t belong to Akos—he had been sent to our cousin Vakrez, “to grow thicker skin,” as Ryzek put it. Instead I recognized the scream as Eijeh’s voice raised in acknowledgment of pain, as my brother tried to pry the future from his head.

I dreamt of it for a long time thereafter.

(#ulink_07b10b08-7290-5c14-9e25-99c6eb4cd529)

I WOKE WITH A groan. Someone was knocking.

My bedroom looked like a guest room, no personal touches, all the clothes and beloved objects hidden in drawers or behind cabinet doors. This drafty house, with its polished wood floors and grand candelabras, held bad memories like too much dinner. Last night one of those memories—of Akos Kereseth’s blood trailing down his throat, two seasons earlier—had come into my dreams.

I didn’t want to take root in this place.

I sat up and dragged the heels of my hands over my cheeks to smear the tears away. To call it crying would have been inaccurate; it was more an involuntary oozing, brought on by particularly strong surges of pain, often while I slept. I raked my fingers through my hair and stumbled to the door, greeting Vas with a grunt.

“What?” I said, pacing away. Sometimes it helped to pace the room—it was soothing, like being rocked.

“I see I’ve found you in a good mood,” Vas said. “Were you sleeping? You do realize it’s well into the afternoon?”

“I don’t expect you to understand,” I said. After all, Vas didn’t feel pain. That meant he was the only person I had encountered since I had developed my currentgift who could touch me with bare hands, and he liked to make sure I remembered that. When you get older, he sometimes said to me when Ryzek couldn’t hear him, you may see value in my touch, little Cyra. And I always told him I would rather die alone. It was true.

That he couldn’t feel pain also meant he didn’t know about the gray space just beneath consciousness that made it more bearable.

“Ah,” Vas said. “Well, your presence has been requested in the dining room this evening for a meal with Ryzek’s closest supporters. Dress nicely.”

“I’m not really feeling up for a social engagement right now,” I said, teeth gritted. “Send my regrets.”

“I said ‘requested,’ but maybe I should have chosen my words more carefully,” Vas said. “‘Required’ was the word your brother used.”

I closed my eyes, stalling in my pacing for a moment. Whenever Ryzek demanded my attendance, it was to intimidate, even when he was dining with his own friends. There was a Shotet saying—a good soldier does not even dine with friends unarmed. And I armed him.

“I came prepared.” Vas held out a small brown bottle, corked with wax. It wasn’t labeled, but I knew what it was anyway: the only painkiller strong enough to make me fit for polite company. Or fit enough, anyway.

“How am I supposed to eat dinner while I’m on that stuff? I’ll throw up on the guests.” It might improve some of them.

“Don’t eat.” Vas shrugged. “But you can’t really function without it, can you?”

I snatched the bottle from his hand, and nudged the door closed with my heel.

I spent a good part of the afternoon crouched in the bathroom, under a stream of warm water, willing the tension from my muscles. It didn’t help.

And so I uncorked the bottle and drank.

As revenge, I wore one of my mother’s dresses to the dining room that evening. It was light blue and fell straight to my feet, its bodice embroidered with a small geometric pattern that reminded me of feathers layered over each other. I knew it would hurt my brother to see me in it—to see me in anything she had ever worn—but he wouldn’t be able to say anything about it. I was, after all, dressed nicely. As instructed.

It had taken me ten minutes to fasten it closed, my fingertips were so numb from the painkiller. And as I walked the halls, I kept one hand on the wall to steady myself. Everything tipped and swayed and spun. I carried my shoes in my other hand—I would put them on right before I entered the room, so I wouldn’t slip on the polished wood floors.

The shadows spread down my bare arms from shoulder to wrist, then wrapped around my fingers, pooling beneath my fingernails. Pain seared me wherever they went, dulled by drugs but not eliminated. I shook my head at the guard outside the dining room doors to stop him from opening them, and stepped into my shoes.

“Okay, go ahead,” I said, and he pulled the handles apart.

The dining room was grand but warm, lit by lanterns that glowed on the long table and the fire along the back wall. Ryzek stood, bathed in light, with a drink in his hand and Yma Zetsyvis at his right. Yma was married to a close friend of my mother’s, Uzul Zetsyvis. Though she was relatively young—younger than Uzul, at least—her hair was bright white, her eyes a shocking blue. She was always smiling.