There were tracks in the fine, white ash outside Chua’s shack—bare feet approaching the southern wall, then departing the way they had come. As promised, Kossal had been trailing me, watching. I scanned the ramshackle buildings ringing the crematorium, but he knew his work well enough to stay out of sight. I wondered if he’d been on the boat somehow, when we’d found the transport. It seemed unlikely, but he wouldn’t have made a very good priest if he’d restricted himself to the realm of the likely.
Ruc didn’t notice the tracks. He didn’t seem to notice me, either, as he stalked away from Chua’s hut, then through the alleys of the Weir, eyes fixed straight ahead as he threaded his way between drunks, fishers, and orphans. One grubby kid of maybe ten or eleven tried to lift the knife Ruc wore at his belt. Ruc caught his wrist and tossed him into the canal without breaking stride. He only stopped when we emerged from beneath the overhanging roofs into the open space of the Weir’s harbor.
The sun had sagged beneath the peaked roofs to the west. Cramped shacks stretched their shadows across the darkening water. Unlike New Harbor, which was deep enough for the proud-masted, oceangoing merchant vessels, the Pot—the local name for the harbor, really just a collection of docks around the fattened backwater of one of the canals—was a mess of canoes and hide coracles, half-sunk rafts, permanently tethered craft that no sane person would trust out in the delta. People had begun lighting their lanterns, hanging them from long poles. The red of the lanterns was the sunset’s red, as though someone had stolen that horizon-wide light and sealed it inside the carcasses of dead fish.
Ruc had his back to the nearest lanterns, and a shadow fell like a mask across his face. Red limned the hard line of his jaw, the muscles of his neck, but I could barely see his eyes.
“Five hundred suns?” he asked.
I shrugged. “Cheaper than seeing the whole city burn.”
People jostled us, but Ruc’s face kept away the beggars and thieves. Since the transport, something had changed inside him. He’d always been a fighter, a soldier, but there had been music in his violence, a sly wit in his voice, even when he wasn’t smiling. Another man, one with less curiosity and more anger, wouldn’t have spent the last few days bantering and sparring with me. I’d been counting on Ruc’s love of adventure when I decided to return to the city. The man I’d known from Sia liked taking chances; he thrived on it. I was starting to worry, however, that after what we’d seen on the transport, Ruc was done taking chances.
“You think she can find them?” he demanded.
“The Vuo Ton?” I cocked my head to the side, trying to get a better look at his face. “Or the gods?”
He turned to me. “There are no gods, Pyrre. Or if there are, they don’t give a shit about us.”
I fought down the urge to reach out, seize one of the anonymous bodies that kept passing, offer the person to the god, and show him Ananshael’s might. My Trial, however, didn’t allow killing for the sake of theological argument, and Kossal was still out there, watching. Besides, Ruc wasn’t talking about Ananshael.
“How do you know?” I asked, keeping my voice mild.
“Wrong question.”
“Seems to me the woman asking gets to decide what she asks.”
He shook his head. “Ask all you want. Still the wrong question. Might as well ask me how I knew you were gone.”
“I’m right here.”
He shook his head. “That morning back in Sia, all those days after.”
I took a slow breath, steadying myself. “Just because you don’t see a thing, doesn’t mean it’s not there.”
“Is that right?”
“I might have been.”
“Might have been what? Hiding just out of sight? Following me around?”
“Good Kettral practice.” I’d meant it as a joke, but the line landed like a dead eel on the deck.
“I could have thought you were coming back,” Ruc continued after a moment. “I could have believed you just stepped away unexpectedly for a day or two, forgot to leave a note, that you were going to climb back any night through my window and into my bed. I could have believed that just the same way that everyone in this ’Kent-kissing city thinks their gods are going to come back and save them.
“But that wouldn’t have been reasonable, would it? I wasn’t asking myself why I should believe you were gone—that would have been an insane question. The sane question was why I should believe you were coming back.
“I did ask myself that one. Asked it more than once. And do you know what I told myself?” He drove the last two words like nails into my silence. “She’s not.”
His hands hung slack at his side, but he was ready to fight, eager. I could feel my own pulse pressing at the vessels of my neck, the eagerness woven through my own flesh. Eagerness for what? I wondered. To feel him pressed against me, fucking or fighting, his elbow locked around my neck, my fingers binding his wrists. It had been like that in the ring and in his bed; hot and cold all at once, dizzying, euphoric.
But not love, I reminded myself, then wondered if I was right. Maybe love was just this: the fury, the delicious anticipation, the release. I wanted to scream, clenched my teeth hard around the sound tangled on my tongue, pouring up through my throat. When I finally spoke, it was only two words, two quiet syllables to set against his own.
“I did.”
“On a mission.”
“A mission I requested.”
His green eyes were black in the shadow. When he moved, they glinted red. “Why?”
The bold answer was obvious, laid out before me naked for the taking: Because I wanted to see you. Because I needed you. Because I love you.
I couldn’t say it.
The problem wasn’t the lie; I’d lied to Ruc about a dozen things since returning to the city. I couldn’t say the words because I was afraid of them, afraid that once I’d shaped them on my tongue, laid them on the air between us, that I wouldn’t be able to live up to them. As long as they remained unspoken, they could be denied, disowned, but saying a thing gives it strength. What if the story I told about myself proved more vibrant than the life I’d lived? What does it mean, when the lies one tells about oneself are brighter than the truth?
“I was curious,” I said finally, loathing the word—its vagueness, its smallness—even as I spoke.
“Curious?”
“About you. To see if you’d changed.”
He turned away, back toward the Pot. “Everyone changes.”
I shook my head, put a hand on his arm. It was a dangerous position, overextended. If he tried to break my elbow, it would be hard to stop him. I left it there anyway. “You seem the same.”
“The same as what?” He didn’t even glance at my hand. “You didn’t know me then, and you don’t now.”
The words hurt. I wondered if that was a good sign, if the pain and shame were handmaidens to something more. It seemed possible. Or maybe the pain was just pain.
“So tell me,” I said, “what I don’t know.”
“There’s a list.”
“Tell me what you want. What you believe.”
I hoped he would say something about me, but that door, open momentarily, had swung silently shut while I groped hopelessly for the right words. When he spoke, it was with his customary calm, that perfect reserve, the wry glance that was his best defense.
“What I want is justice.
“What I believe is that people killed those legionaries and priests. Not gods. Not monsters from the delta. People. I want to find them and I want to stop them before they do more and worse.”
The words left me hollow, cold. They were noble enough, sure, but I would have preferred his rage, would have preferred him to roar at me, to try to break my hand, which was still perched like a brainless bird on his arm, than that impossibly distant civic devotion. Of course, preferring a thing doesn’t make it so. I exhaled slowly, silently, feeling my excitement drain out with the air, turned my attention back to the dull business of massacres and lost gods.
“If you believe that,” I said finally, “if you believe the Vuo Ton are really behind the attack on the transport, then going to find them is like laying your arm in the croc’s mouth. If they’re the enemy, they’ll kill us the moment we arrive.”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe?” I shook my head. “You’re not a fucking idiot, Ruc. There’s something you’re not telling me.”
“And because I’m not an idiot, I’m going to continue not telling you.”
“You still don’t trust me,” I said wearily.
He shrugged. “You haven’t tried to kill me yet. And I’ve given you chances.”
I shook my head. “But it doesn’t matter. You don’t trust me.”
“Would you?”
It was a vexingly good question.
I was lying, of course, doing everything I could to see his city burn just for the excuse to be close to him. He was smart to distrust me, but surely love, whatever it was, transcended being smart. In all the songs and plays, lovers were forever ignoring the sensible, pragmatic course, spurning the advice of friends and family, ignoring a thousand signs and signals that whispered stop, go back. Most of the time it seemed that love was inextricable from bad judgment. Any love that left the rational mind intact seemed a weak, watery thing, not really love at all. And Ruc’s rational mind was still very much intact. Of course, so was my own, and I was the one who needed to feel the emotion.
I let him go, spread my hands, as though inviting an attack. “If I’m lying, if I’m not Kettral, then what do you think I’m doing here?”
“I don’t know,” he replied after a pause. From someone else, in another situation, the words might have been an admission, even a capitulation. From Ruc, standing on that dock beneath those lanterns, they were a wall, a fucking fortress.
Out in the harbor, hulls rocked on the small swells. A polyphony of discordant voices filled the night: a woman screaming over and over, demanding that someone—a lover, a child—just leave her alone; the rumble of old men grumbling into their clay cups; shrieks that might have been fear or delight; so many lives crammed so close together. Down below us, on a long, narrow barge, a group of children were playing a game involving dice and a knife, chanting the same refrain between rolls:
One for your heart,
Two for your eyes,
Three for the ones
Who will weep when you die.
Four for your limbs,
Five for your lies,
Six for the ones
Who will laugh when you die.
Dead Man’s Dice, we called it when I was a kid, or sometimes just Bloody Cuts. I remembered playing in the alleyway a few streets over from my shack, the quick, eager thudding of my heart as the dice flew, the scramble to grab the knife, the hot, warm wash of the blade slicing my fingers when I failed. I never really liked Dead Man’s Dice, but every night I could I snuck away to play.
Caught up in the chant, seized by some impulse I couldn’t quite explain, I turned to Ruc.
“Come with me.”
He didn’t move. “Where?”
“Not far. Just the other end of the Pot.”
I thought he was going to refuse, but after a moment he nodded, sliding away from the wooden railing smooth as a shadow. We didn’t talk. The night was crammed enough with voices without us adding our own. The wooden walkway swayed and creaked beneath us. I wondered if I was making a mistake as I led the way out onto an empty rotting dock.
I could make out a man’s voice on a gill-netter across the way, singing the refrain to one of Dombâng’s love songs, a simple, antique piece. The fisher didn’t seem to know the verses, only the refrain, and he worked through the same handful of notes again and again, rising above the tonic, falling below it, then returning to that base note over and over. The music reminded me, for some reason, of a bear cub I’d found years earlier in the Ancaz. His mother had been killed by rockfall, her hindquarters utterly crushed. The poor, baffled cub kept wandering a few feet away, then coming back to nuzzle at his mother’s fur, wandering away, then coming back, as though in the whole vast world he could think of nowhere else to go.
I pointed across the Pot to a line of dilapidated shacks canted precariously toward the water.
“That’s where I grew up.”
I didn’t look at Ruc. After a moment, I stopped looking at the shacks, too. I had not intended to come back.
“Why are you showing me this?” Ruc asked after a while.
I shook my head. “I don’t know.”
“Why did you leave?”
“I was finished.”
“Your parents?” Ruc asked.
“Dead.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.” I hesitated. “I was the one who killed them.”
Lanterns swayed, as they had swayed all evening, from the poles at the sterns of the boats. The current tugged at the vessels with slender, undeniable fingers, the same tonight as on every other night. You say a thing, sometimes, that you expect to change the world. When the world doesn’t change, it’s hard to know what to do next. Ruc didn’t respond, so I plunged ahead, my own story closing over me like the river, warm and welcoming and rotten.
“My father came here from the north, from Nish—I inherited some of the lightness of his skin, his eyes. He was rich when he arrived, a merchant. He met my mother, married, they had a child, lost him. I don’t know my brother’s name; they never spoke it. My father blamed himself, blamed my mother, blamed the entire world, started drinking quey. By the time I was born, he’d lost his fortune. Their house at the western end of the city was gone. The only home I knew was here.
“He’d come home at nights, hit me if he could find me. Hit my mother. He kept the knife for himself, though. After he’d bloodied my lip or blackened her eye, he’d go out on the dock and drag that knife over his skin again and again. I never knew if he was doing penance for hurting us, or for losing my brother, or for ruining his own life. Probably for all of it.”
I fell silent, gazed out over the harbor into the hot, cramped chambers of my past. When Ruc put a hand on my shoulder, I almost hit him. I felt like that child again: lost, terrified, brokenhearted.
“My mother tried to save him,” I went on, finally. “I came home one day from scavenging in the canals to find my father gone and a strange man in our shack.
“‘Who’s this?’ I remember asking.
“At first my mother didn’t meet my eyes. ‘He is a priest.’
“That word, priest, sent a thrill through me. Priests were secret and powerful. It was like learning we had a stash of gold hidden somewhere in the house. Only we didn’t have gold. The only thing we had was me.”
Ruc made a sound in his throat that might have been a growl. His fingers tightened on my shoulder.
“The priest smiled, gave me something to drink, told me I was going to save my family. When I woke up, I was alone in the delta, a sacrifice to the gods.”
“How did you survive?” Ruc asked.
“Luck,” I replied. It was partly true. I left out the golden eyes, the woman with the scale-black hair. For all I knew, she was no more than a nightmare.
“I realized something about life then: it’s not always good. People hold on to it because they don’t know anything else, like Chua refusing to leave the city even though she loathes it. She just needs a little help, a little nudge, something to show her another way. So did my mother and father. They were just worshipping the wrong gods.” I shook my head. “They didn’t need Kem Anh and her consorts. They needed Ananshael.”
Away over the water, the fisher was still singing the same handful of notes over and over, as though there were no other in the world.
“When I got back to the city, I killed them both. It was so easy. They were asleep. His arm was wrapped around her. They looked peaceful, in love. I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t done it years earlier.”
It was strange, I thought when I finally fell silent, that so many days—an entire childhood—could fit in so few words.
“And then what?” Ruc asked quietly.
“I found the Kettral,” I replied. After so much truth, the lie caught in my throat like a broken bone.
“Why are you telling me this?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. Then, after a moment, I shook my head. “No. I’m telling you because I want you to know.”
“Most people would try to hide a story like that.”
“I’ve been hiding it for a long time.”
I stepped closer to him, close enough that I could finally see the planes of his face beneath the shadow, the movement of his eyes. He didn’t pull back when I put a hand on his chest, didn’t even tense. His skin was warm in the warm night air. I could feel the strength waiting in the muscles beneath.
“I want you to kiss me,” I said, the words barely breaking into breath.
He didn’t move. Didn’t flinch or lean in. Across the canal, the fisherman followed the sad notes of his song out and back, out and back. Ela’s voice whispered in my ear: It matters how you hold your body. I shifted just slightly, following some instinct older than my own perseverating thoughts, moved marginally closer to Ruc, faced him more directly, and this time he moved with me, one hand slipping behind, sliding up my spine, closing firmly on the back of my neck, and drawing me slowly, inexorably forward.
I was shocked at how much I remembered, details I’d thought I’d forgotten flooding back: how he kissed the way he fought, patient and implacable both; the tiny chip in his tooth that my tongue always seemed to find; the vibration of his chest beneath my hands as he half growled, pulling me closer; the way his skin smelled of salt and smoke and something else I’d never quite been able to place; how he didn’t ever close his eyes. I could feel my own body responding, loosening and coiling at once, something that might have been hunger uncurling from my stomach up through my throat, through my tongue, and down into my legs.
When we finally broke apart, I felt like a marionette with half its strings cut.
“Does that mean you trust me after all?” I managed.
We’d shifted as we kissed, turned toward the lanterns, so I could see his eyes when he replied, green and alien as the delta we’d just survived. “No,” he said quietly. “It does not.”
Across the canal, the fisherman had finally fallen silent. Maybe his nets were furled and tucked away, or maybe he was still over there, working in the darkness, but had grown tired of the song.