774 PQ
“How is wanting to celebrate my birthday a mistake?”
Selah is infuriating. Not always, not often, but when she is it takes every ounce of Tair’s willpower to remember why she loves her. Selah lives fast and loud and bright, and has the luck of birth to be able to wear her heart on her sleeve. Usually this is endearing. This is the Selah who needled her father into letting Tair have free rein of the Archives. The Selah who argues passionately at dinner with ancient scholars and politicians too stuck in their ways to see that she actually makes a good point. The Selah who runs in the streets without shoes because she relishes the sunbaked grit of the earth beneath her bare feet. But this is also the Selah who is blissfully unaware that her experience of the world isn’t shared by everyone, and that’s the Selah who is currently standing in Tair’s room.
Her rickety wooden bedroom may not mirror the opulence and grandeur of the historic estate in which it sits at the top, but Tair loves it all the same. Wall-to-wall bookshelves. The small bed tucked into the alcove by the round window, a perfect reading nook. Tair is not a hoarder, thank you very much, but a keen and discerning collector, and a lifetime of trinkets and papers neatly cover the surfaces of the remaining desks and shelves. There’s an organization to it. Her own form of organization, maybe, but an organization all the same. This bedroom is home, and what’s more, it’s hers, private from the other dormitories and shared quarters here at the very top attic of Breakwater House. It’s cozy, generally, but the energy inside right now is anything but.
“It’s not a mistake,” she says, patience wearing thin. “But you should’ve gone with Arran, or one of your friends, not—”
“You are my best friend,” Selah interrupts, annoyingly. “You. And I can’t celebrate with you tomorrow, so Quiet forbid I wanted to tonight.”
“Well, I didn’t want to. One month until I can go and do whatever the frag I like. That’s all I asked you to wait for, and you couldn’t even do that. Just like you couldn’t—”
No. Not yet. She’ll have a lifetime to challenge Selah the way she’s always wanted, to call her out on all the things she doesn’t understand. But not for another month. Not until she turns eighteen. Not until she’s an adult, and a plebeian, and a citizen, and free.
“What?” Selah snaps.
“It’s nothing.”
“Like I couldn’t what?”
Tair shakes her head. Selah wouldn’t see her punished for speaking out of turn, she never has. It’s probably never even occurred to her that she could. But there are some things you just don’t say. Not when you’ve worked this hard and waited this long for something that’s almost within your grasp.
“Tell me.”
“Is that an order?” Tair spits, and Terra help her since she clearly can’t help herself. Selah, who gives her three orders a day without realizing it, at least has the grace to look horrified, the blood draining from her dark brown face. “Of course not.”
She does this. Gets under her skin. Most of the time Tair thinks it’s that thing, that unspoken thing she can never act on. It’s easy to forget how fragged up it really is, this thing that exists between them, but moments like this remind her all too clearly.
Then Selah, who’s never been able to help herself much either, keeps talking. “But I really wish you would tell me what’s got you so vexed off, because I don’t know how this somehow became my fault. We snuck out—successfully, I could add—and we had fun, and you’re letting a couple of bona fide savages ruin the whole night—”
“You couldn’t let it be,” Tair snaps, every instinct screaming at her to shut up just shut up. “You never can. I was handling it.”
And then Selah had barged in and taken over, power trip in one hand and savior complex in the other, as though she weren’t capable of handling herself. Stumbling blindly into the promise of violence growing beneath those boys’ gleeful smiles, blissfully unaware that there was a line Tair herself could never cross.
“That’s what you’re angry about?” asks Selah, and has the nerve to look as though she might laugh. “That I stepped on your moment?”
Tair could strangle her.
“No! I mean yes, but not like—Fuck,” she bites out, taking them both aback. She never slips like that in front of patricians. Never. “You just . . . you can’t see it.”
“Then help me to.”
A sudden knock on the door jolts them out of the bubble of argument they’ve woven around themselves. Then it swings open and of course, of course it’s Una.
“Morning,” the older woman says with a terrifying calm.
“Frag,” says Tair, with acute and sudden awareness of the time. “Did we wake you up?”
Una’s raised brow exudes the air of an empress rather than a thirty-something serva with tangled blond hair. “I think you’ve probably woken everyone,” she says, and Tair hopes to Terra she only means those on the attic floor. “But not everyone’s as friendly as me, so I thought I’d stop by and tell you to shut up.”
“Sorry, Una,” Selah cuts in, and Tair grits her teeth because there she goes again. Speaking over her as though she isn’t even there. As though she knows better.
If Una is surprised to see Selah there, nothing in her face gives it away. “Respectfully and all that, miss,” she says, with absolutely no respect at all, “you might get to sleep in tomorrow, but I’m up in two hours.”
“Right, really very sorry.”
And then she’s gone, taking the air out of the room with her.
Selah glances over. “Do you think all natives are as mean as our Una, or did we just get lucky?”
It’s a bad attempt to cut through the lingering tension. Tair flops on her bed, suddenly incredibly tired. The spark’s gone out and she just doesn’t want to argue anymore.
“She’s not that mean, Sel.”
Maybe because it’s two in the morning and she’s tired, maybe because Selah’s at least trying to make peace, but somehow she finds that she doesn’t actually mind so much when Selah sits down on the bed next to her. Or when Selah’s fingers begin to dance along her wrist, tentative and slow, tracing the faint rising lines of the veins just under her skin. So soft and light you’d barely know they were there. Despite herself, she finds herself releasing into the feeling, the vulnerability of it. And Selah smiles that little smile of hers, the one that says Forgive me? And Tair finds herself smiling back, finds it easy enough to forgive.
It’s not Selah’s fault. She’s been raised in privilege, and is both a remarkable and a remarkably kind person when she could so much more easily be neither. It’s no one’s fault. It just is what it is.
And then Selah strikes.
Fingers dig into the soft skin beneath Tair’s ribs, and the spasm of tickles jolt her up off the bed screaming, “NO!”
Selah only cackles, and doubles down on her attack.
“You monster!” she growls, managing to grab a pillow somehow and whack it across Selah’s head, knocking her to the side. She grabs for her and digs an indignant hand through those careful black braids, and Selah’s roar lands somewhere between a scream and a laugh as she launches herself at Tair once again.
Somewhere in the scuffle, breathless with laughter, she’s ended up on top of Selah because of course she has, their faces inches from each other. Second time tonight, she thinks hopelessly, and hates the way you’re supposed to know exactly what to do. Because Selah’s face is tilted up toward her and the moonlight is in her black hair and Tair wonders how she’s ever supposed to know what this means. Or if it ever meant anything at all. Because she’s not brave enough for this. Knowing is one thing but acting on it is something else completely.
There are things that are only allowed to exist in the abstract.
She lets it go.
Falling over next to her, breathing hard, Tair privately thinks that she just needs to get herself a nice pleb girlfriend and move on with her life. Like it would ever be as easy as that. Freedom for a verna is only ever halfway. She’s been apprenticed to Gil Delena for nearly a decade, and even after she becomes a citizen she’s going to be Selah’s secretary for the rest of her life. There’s no way out from her. She doesn’t want a way out from her. Not when most days she knows the familiar weight on the bed next to her better than she knows herself.
“Where do we go first?” she asks quietly, looking up. She had pinned the map of the world to the ceiling above her bed on the night of her eleventh birthday. A gift from Gil, along with the silver pushpins she and Selah have dotted liberally across it in the years since, marking all the places they’ll visit one day, once they’re old enough to not need anyone else’s permission.
It’s a familiar dream, an old game. We’ll go where we want, and eat what we want, and say what we want. And no one can stop us. Tair has never been allowed outside the city of Luxana, but Selah has her own constraints, the history and traditions of civilization itself resting on her shoulders. Both girls understand the importance of this, just as they both understand that a gilded cage is still a cage.
“Maghreb-Anatolia,” Selah says this time, pointing upward at a land that exists in Tair’s imagination as clear blue seas and spice towers and pilgrimages to Mecca.
“Why?”
“The food, the desert . . . the ruins of the Greco Empire’s outposts. I want to ride an elephant. I want to go somewhere entirely different from here.”
“Tin’buktu’s different. No Imperium.”
“And crawling with great-grandparents. No thank you.”
Feeling a sudden recklessness, a flash of cabin fever she knows has been stirring for months if not years, she takes Selah’s hand in hers so that their fingers are pointing together to the lower righthand corner of the map. The only quadrant with no pins at all.
“Pacifica?”
“Outside the empires completely,” Tair responds, a sudden thrill running through her when she finds that she’s unable to imagine anything at all. “As different as you can get.”
“No Roma . . . no Aksum,” says Selah, and Tair can hear sleep curling in at the edges. “No Imperium at all.”
“Total anarchy.”
Adrenaline pounds through her veins, heart beating fast at the thought, lips curling at the edges. Selah nuzzles her face into her neck and curls up to sleep, but Tair continues to stare up at the world above her, the dizzying array of so many sudden futures unfolding before her mind’s eye.
“I can’t wait.”