“I WANT YOU TO TASTE IT,” I said to Sid when we returned to her house after the party’s end, when Middlings filled the floor below us with velvet pillows. A dancer detached from the ceiling like a petal and sailed down, landing in the pillows with a whump. Eventually, we did, too, as did the blue-braided man, who had cried himself to sleep after our conversation and continued napping on the pillows below, one hand tucked beneath his cheek.
“No,” Sid said. She stalked up the stairs to her room and shut the door behind her.
I followed her, shoving the door open. “You have no right to be angry. Nothing was done to you. The Council took my blood. They have been stealing from the Ward. Hair for wigs, limbs for High-Kith surgeries, blood for magic. They have been taking children, and I don’t even know why. I get to be angry. Not you.”
“Fine,” she said. “I don’t get to be angry.” But she looked furious. “Now let me be. Go away. I am not tasting your blood.”
“Is it because he said the memory hurt?”
“No.” Her dark eyes were wide, her face paler than usual, the freckle beneath her eye stark against her skin.
“It’s not like you to be afraid.”
“You have no idea who I really am.”
Frustrated, I said, “I know only what you let me know.”
“Yes, I am afraid,” she said, “but that is not why I don’t want to do it. Maybe I don’t have the right to be angry, not like you do, but I am angry. I am angry because of what’s been done to you. I am angry because so much has been taken from you and you are asking me to take something else.”
“But I want you to. I need to know.”
“Ask someone else. Ask your sweetheart.”
“I want it to be you. I trust you.”
A defeated, worried look stole over her. She sat at the edge of her bed, which was plainer than mine, narrower, and impeccably made. She yanked the hem of her tunic out of her trousers, exposing the dagger, which she dragged from its sheath. She offered its hilt to me. “I keep the edge very sharp.”
When I sat next to her she let herself fall back against the mattress with a strangled, frustrated sigh. “I have gotten myself in over my head,” she said. “This trip was supposed to be fun. The whole idea behind running away is to escape responsibility.” She screwed her eyes shut. “Do it, then. Quickly. I don’t want to watch you hurt yourself.”
The dagger’s hilt was chased in gold. Now that I could see the weapon up close, I noticed that its intricate decoration included, at the pommel of the dagger, the same sign as on the card Sid had taken from her queen. “Did you steal this, too?”
She groaned. “Please just get this over with.”
I nicked my finger on the dagger’s edge. Blood instantly welled. She opened her eyes. “Gods,” she said.
“Just one.” I held out my hand.
She lifted herself onto her elbows, her head tipped back, her short hair bright in the rising sun. She gripped my wrist and lifted her face to my hand, licking my finger like a calf. I shivered. The cut stung, but I loved the feel of her tongue on me. I couldn’t look away from her dark eyes, her mouth on my hand. Then her eyes glazed over. Her fingers slackened around my wrist. She dropped back down, heavy as wood, rigid, and staring.
She lay like that for a long time, long enough that I grew concerned, trying to tell myself that the blue-haired man had tasted my blood and survived, and his brain had seemed addled well before.
Sid’s chest rose and fell with steady breaths. Her lower lip was pink with my blood.
I curled up next to her on the bed. I waited. I breathed in the scent of her smoky perfume. I closed my eyes.
Finally, I felt her stir beside me. She made a soft noise deep in her throat. Her hand reached out and found my thigh. She pulled me close, then turned onto her side to face me, her eyes wide, blinking rapidly. Then she burrowed into my arms and pressed her damp face against my neck.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
She nodded. I felt a tear slide down my neck.
“Did it hurt?”
“Yes,” she whispered.
“I’m so sorry. What can I do? Tell me what to do.”
She shook her head. “Nothing. It hurts inside. It’s because I remembered something I don’t have anymore.”
“But it was real?”
“Yes,” she said. “It was. It used to be real.”
“Can you tell me?”
“I don’t want you to see me like this.” She started to pull away.
“Stay.”
She relaxed a little but kept her face buried against me. “It was like that man said. It was not a normal memory. I was living in the past. I didn’t even know I had forgotten it.” She was speaking softly, her words little breaths against my skin. “I remembered my mother holding me. I could smell the cypress trees waving against the sky. We were on the grass outside my home. An irrielle bird sang. The wind made the grass shimmer. I was small, unsteady on my feet. I didn’t know, then, that I had nearly killed my mother with my birth. My father raged at the doctors. He practically lost his mind with fear. I didn’t know, when I was a baby, that I would be the only child my parents would have. I didn’t know that all their plans would rest on me. I didn’t know what plans were. I didn’t know that anything would ever be more or less than it was at that moment. I fell in the grass. My mother lifted me into her arms. Her hair is similar to mine, but much longer. I pushed it aside and said, Away, so I could press my cheek against the smooth skin of her chest, just above her heart, and I felt so sure that she loved me more than anyone or anything in the world.”
“But,” I said, “this is a good memory.”
“Yes.”
“Yet it hurts.”
“Yes.”
I was confused. I didn’t understand how a memory so loving could pain her. I had believed both of Sid’s parents to be alive. “Did she die?”
“No. But things are different between us now.”
“Why?”
“Maybe I was easier to love then.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“It’s hard to remember something you no longer have,” Sid said. “My mother caught me with a girl when I was seventeen. She cried.”
“Why? Is it against your country’s law to be with a woman?”
“No.”
“But she doesn’t like it.”
“It’s not that, exactly…” Sid paused, considering, and when she spoke I saw that it was only because she had been thinking about this for years that she was able to speak clearly. “She has friends like me. I don’t think she would care about me liking women if it didn’t interfere with her plans. She cried because she was going to force her plans on me anyway, and she was sad for what it would do to me, and guilty for herself.”
“What about your father?”
“I think he hopes the problem will solve itself.” She got quiet. “I don’t want to be a problem.”
I stroked her hair. “You’re not.”
“I don’t want to marry.”
“You won’t.”
“He’s as bad as she is. Just more passive.”
“I don’t understand why it’s so important to them that you marry.”
She shrugged. “It’s expected. They want grandchildren. They want me to marry their friends’ son. That family will be angry if I say no.”
“They would rather lose you than lose their friends?”
“Let’s just say they hope to get everything they want.”
“But they risk losing everything.”
“I guess they must be comfortable with that possibility.”
My anger, which had been steadily growing, came out in a rush. “I hate them.”
Sid looked up at me.
“They’re selfish,” I said.
“They want what they believe is best for me.”
“But it isn’t.”
“No,” she said softly, “it isn’t.”
I shook my head. “What about that girl?”
Sid sat up. She ran a hand through her hair, trying to get it to settle. She stood, walked to the window, and opened it. The salty harbor air drifted in. The rising sun burned through the dawn. The sky was a thin blue, with a sheen like hammered metal. “She grew up,” Sid said. “Last I heard, she was engaged to a man.”
“Does that bother you?”
She shrugged. “It’s not like it was true love written in the stars.”
“She probably wishes she still had you.”
“Well”—she smiled, but her heart wasn’t in it—“who wouldn’t?”
“I would.”
Slowly, she said, “Is that what you want?”
“What do you mean?”
“To think about me while you’re in that young man’s bed.”
I stared.
“People want all sorts of things,” she said. “It’s not the strangest desire to want to be with one person but imagine another.”
I left the bed and came to her. “I don’t want to be with him.”
“No?”
“No. I don’t love him. I just said I did. He expected it, and I worried what he might do if he didn’t get it.”
She leaned one shoulder against the wall, looking down at me, her brow furrowed, her hands stuffed in her pockets.
I said, “I want you.”
Her expression changed. It deepened with decision. Her mouth slipped into a slight smile that looked almost self-mocking. “Do you?”
“Yes.”
“Nirrim, I can’t be good to you.”
“Then be bad.”
Her hands still in her pockets, she leaned to brush her face against my neck. She kissed my throat. The heat of her mouth was everywhere except on my mouth, her body nudging me up against the wall. Her tongue found my quick pulse. “Touch me,” I whispered.
“Not yet.”
Her mouth seared through my thin silk dress, her tongue dampening it. I felt her gentle teeth.
“Kiss me,” I said.
“Not yet.”
I touched her cheek. She turned to glide her mouth over my fingers. “Please,” I said, and pulled her toward me, my mouth hungry for hers. I kissed her. Her lips opened beneath mine. She made a low sound in her throat, and then her hands were on me, finding the shape of my body, its delicate spots, its needy ones. She unbuttoned the top crystal button of my dress, and moved slowly to the next one. Impatient, I began to undo them myself. She stopped my hands. “Let me,” she said. Her tongue lightly touched my lower lip, and I knew I would let her do anything.
She undid all the buttons, her fingers dipping lightly beneath the silk to touch my skin, until the dress fell from my shoulders and slid to the floor.
“I’m not sure,” I said, and her hands stilled. She pulled slightly away, her eyes hesitant, and I saw that she misunderstood. I said, “I’m not sure how.”
She smiled. “I am.”
She knelt before me, her lips and tongue on my belly. “Please don’t stop,” I said.
Her mouth went lower.
My hands twisted in her hair.