Carve the Mark

“In sleeping elixir,” Akos said, and he did as she said, standing on her left with cutting board and knife and dirt-dusted harva root. It was sickly white and covered in a fine layer of fuzz.

“And that recreational concoction,” she added. “I believe I told you it would be useful at parties someday. When you’re older.”

“You did,” Akos said. “You said ‘when you’re older’ then, too.”

Her mouth slanted into her cheek. Most of the time that was the best you could get out of his mom.

“The same ingredients an older version of you might use for recreation, you can also use for poison,” she said, looking grave. “As long as you double the hushflower and halve the harva root. Understand?”

“Why—” Akos started to ask her, but she was already changing the subject.

“So,” she said as she tipped a hushflower petal onto her own cutting board. It was still red, but shriveled, about the length of her thumb. “What is keeping your mind busy tonight?”

“Nothing,” Akos said. “People staring at us at the Blooming, maybe.”

“They are so fascinated by the fate-favored. I would love to tell you they will stop staring someday,” she said with a sigh, “but I’m afraid that you … you will always be stared at.”

He wanted to ask her about that pointed “you,” but he was careful around his mom during their lessons. Ask her the wrong question and she ended the lesson all of a sudden. Ask the right one, and he could find out things he wasn’t supposed to know.

“How about you?” he asked her. “What’s keeping your mind busy, I mean?”

“Ah.” His mom’s chopping was so smooth, the knife tap tap tapping on the board. His was getting better, though he still carved chunks where he didn’t mean to. “Tonight I am plagued by thoughts about the family Noavek.”

Her feet were bare, toes curled under from the cold. The feet of an oracle.

“They are the ruling family of Shotet,” she said. “The land of our enemies.”

The Shotet were a people, not a nation-planet, and they were known to be fierce, brutal. They stained lines into their arms for every life they had taken, and trained even their children in the art of war. And they lived on Thuvhe, the same planet as Akos and his family—though the Shotet didn’t call this planet “Thuvhe,” or themselves “Thuvhesits”—across a huge stretch of feathergrass. The same feathergrass that scratched at the windows of Akos’s family’s house.

His grandmother—his dad’s mom—had died in one of the Shotet invasions, armed only with a bread knife, or so his dad’s stories said. And the city of Hessa still wore the scars of Shotet violence, the names of the lost carved into low stone walls, broken windows patched up instead of replaced, so you could still see the cracks.

Just across the feathergrass. Sometimes they felt close enough to touch.

“The Noavek family is fate-favored, did you know that? Just like you and your siblings are,” Sifa went on. “The oracles didn’t always see fates in that family line, it happened only within my lifetime. And when it did, it gave the Noaveks leverage over the Shotet government, to seize control, which has been in their hands ever since.”

“I didn’t know that could happen. A new family suddenly getting fates, I mean.”

“Well, those of us who are gifted in seeing the future don’t control who gets a fate,” his mom said. “We see hundreds of futures, of possibilities. But a fate is something that happens to a particular person in every single version of the future we see, which is very rare. And those fates determine who the fate-favored families are—not the other way around.”

He’d never thought about it that way. People always talked about the oracles doling out fates like presents to special, important people, but to hear his mom tell it, that was all backward. Fates made certain families important.

“So you’ve seen their fates. The fates of the Noaveks.”

She nodded. “Just the son and the daughter. Ryzek and Cyra. He’s older; she’s your age.”

He’d heard their names before, along with some ridiculous rumors. Stories about them frothing at the mouth, or keeping enemies’ eyeballs in jars, or lines of kill marks from wrist to shoulder. Maybe that one didn’t sound so ridiculous.

“Sometimes it is easy to see why people become what they are,” his mom said softly. “Ryzek and Cyra, children of a tyrant. Their father, Lazmet, child of a woman who murdered her own brothers and sisters. The violence infects each generation.” She bobbed her head, and her body went with it, rocking back and forth. “And I see it. I see all of it.”

Akos grabbed her hand and held on.

“I’m sorry, Akos,” she said, and he wasn’t sure if she was saying sorry for saying too much, or for something else, but it didn’t really matter.

They both stood there for a while, listening to the mutter of the news feed, the darkest night somehow even darker than before.

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“HAPPENED IN THE MIDDLE of the night,” Osno said, puffing up his chest. “I had this scrape on my knee, and it started burning. By the time I threw the blankets back, it was gone.”

The classroom had one curved wall and two straight ones. A large furnace packed with burnstones stood in the center, and their teacher always paced around it as she taught, her boots squeaking on the floor. Sometimes Akos counted how many circles she made during one class. It was never a small number.

Around the furnace were metal chairs with glass screens fixed in front of them at an angle, like tabletops. They glowed, ready to show the day’s lesson. But their teacher wasn’t there yet.

“Show us, then,” another classmate, Riha, said. She always wore scarves stitched with maps of Thuvhe, a true patriot, and she never trusted anyone at their word. When someone made a claim, she scrunched up her freckled nose until they proved it.

Osno held a small pocket blade over his thumb and dug in. Blood bubbled from the wound, and even Akos could see, sitting across the room from everyone, that his skin was already starting to close up like a zipper.

Everybody got a currentgift when they got older, after their bodies changed—which meant, judging by how small Akos still was at fourteen seasons old, he wouldn’t be getting his for awhile yet. Sometimes gifts ran in families, and sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes they were useful, and sometimes they weren’t. Osno’s was useful.

“Amazing,” Riha said. “I can’t wait for mine to come. Did you have any idea what it would be?”

Osno was the tallest boy in their class, and he stood close to you when he talked to you so you knew it. The last time he’d talked to Akos had been a season ago, and Osno’s mother had said as she walked away, “For a fate-favored son, he’s not much, is he?”

Osno had said, “He’s nice enough.”

But Akos wasn’t “nice”; that was just what people said about quiet people.

Osno slung his arm over the back of his chair, and flicked his dark hair out of his eyes. “My dad says the better you know yourself, the less surprised you’ll be by your gift.”

Riha’s head bobbed in agreement, her braid sliding up and down her back. Akos made a bet with himself that Riha and Osno would be dating by season’s end.

And then the screen fixed next to the door flickered and switched off. All the lights in the room switched off, too, and the ones that glowed under the door, in the hallway. Whatever Riha had been about to say froze on her lips. Akos heard a loud voice coming from the hall. And the squeal of his own chair as he scooted back.

“Kereseth …!” Osno whispered in warning. But Akos wasn’t sure what was scary about peeking in the hallway. Not like something was going to jump out and bite him.

He opened the door wide enough to let his body through, and leaned into the narrow hallway just outside. The building was circular, like a lot of the buildings in Hessa, with teachers’ offices in the center, classrooms around the circumference, and a hallway separating the two. When the lights were off, it was so dark in the hall he could see only by the emergency lights burning orange at the top of every staircase.

“What’s happening?” He recognized that voice—it was Ori. She moved into the pool of orange light by the east stairwell. Standing in front of her was her aunt Badha, looking more disheveled than he’d ever seen her, pieces of hair hanging around her face, escaped from its knot, and her sweater buttons done up all wrong.

“You are in danger,” Badha said. “It is time for us to do as we have practiced.”

“Why?” Ori demanded. “You come in here, you drag me out of class, you want me to leave everything, everyone—”

“All the fate-favored are in danger, understand? You are exposed. You must go.”

“What about the Kereseths? Aren’t they in danger, too?”

“Not as much as you.” Badha grabbed Ori’s elbow and steered her toward the landing of the east stairwell. Ori’s face was shaded, so Akos couldn’t see her expression. But just before she went around a corner, she turned, hair falling across her face, sweater slipping off her shoulder so he could see her collarbone.