Carve the Mark, Page 4

  We were flanked by armored soldiers who carved a narrow path for us in the bodies. But really, I didn't think we needed them--the crowd parted for my father like he was a knife slicing through them. They may not have shouted his name, but they bent their heads to him, guided their eyes away from him. I saw, for the first time, how thin the line was between fear and love, between reverence and adoration. It was drawn between my parents.

  "Cyra," my father said, and I stiffened, almost going still as he turned toward me. He reached for my hand, and I gave it to him, though I didn't want to. My father was the sort of man a person just obeyed.

  Then he swung me into his arms, quick and strong, startling a laugh from me. He held me against his armored side with one arm, like I was weightless. His face was close to mine, smelling of herbs and burnt things, his cheek rough with a beard. My father, Lazmet Noavek, sovereign of Shotet. My mother called him "Laz" when she didn't think anyone could hear her, and spoke to him in Shotet poetry.

  "I thought you might want to see your people," my father said to me, bouncing me a little as he shifted my weight to the crook of his elbow. His other arm, returning to his side, was marked from shoulder to wrist with scars, stained dark to stand out. He had told me, once, that they were a record of lives, but I didn't know what that meant. My mother had a few, too, though not half as many as my father.

  "These people long for strength," my father said. "And your mother, brother, and I are going to give it to them. Someday, so shall you. Yes?"

  "Yes," I said quietly, though I had no idea how I would do that.

  "Good," he said. "Now wave."

  Trembling a little, I extended my hand, mimicking my father. I stared, stunned, as the crowd responded in kind.

  "Ryzek," my father said.

  "Come on, little Noavek," Ryzek said. He didn't need to be asked to take me from my father's arms; he saw it in the man's posture, as surely as I felt it in the restless shift of his weight. I put my arms around Ryzek's neck, and climbed onto his back, hitching my legs on the straps of his armor.

  I looked down at his pimple-spotted cheek, dimpled with a smile.

  "Ready to run?" he said to me, raising his voice so I could hear him over the crowd.

  "Run?" I said, squeezing tighter.

  In answer, he held my knees tight against his sides, and jogged down the pathway the soldiers had cleared, laughing. His bouncing steps jostled a giggle from me, and then the crowd--our people, my people--joined in, my eyeline full of smiles.

  I saw a hand up ahead, stretching toward me, and I brushed it with my fingers, just like my mother would. My skin came away damp with sweat. I found that I didn't mind it as much as I expected. My heart was full.

  CHAPTER 4: CYRA

  THERE WERE HIDDEN HALLWAYS in the walls of Noavek manor, built for the servants to travel through without disturbing us and our guests. I often walked them, learning the codes that the servants used to navigate, carved into the corners of the walls and the tops of entrances and exits. Otega sometimes scolded me for coming to her lessons covered in cobwebs and grime, but mostly, no one cared how I spent my free time as long as I didn't disturb my father.

  When I was newly seven seasons old, my wanderings took me to the walls behind my father's office. I had followed a clattering sound there, but when I heard my father's voice, raised in anger, I stopped and crouched.

  For a moment, I toyed with the idea of turning back, running the same way I had come so that I could be safe in my own room. Nothing good came of my father's raised voice, and it never had. The only one who could calm him was my mother, but even she couldn't control him.

  "Tell me," my father said. I pushed my ear to the wall to better hear him. "Tell me exactly what you told him."

  "I--I thought . . ." Ryz's voice wobbled like he was on the verge of tears. That wasn't good, either. My father hated tears. "I thought, because he is training to be my steward, that he would be trustworthy--"

  "Tell me what you told him!"

  "I told him . . . I told him that my fate, as declared by the oracles, was--was to fall to the family Benesit. That they are one of the two Thuvhesit families. That's all."

  I pulled away from the wall. A cobweb caught on my ear. I hadn't heard Ryzek's fate before. I knew my parents had shared it with him when most fated children found out their fates: when they developed a currentgift. I would find out my own in a handful of seasons. But to know Ryzek's--to know that Ryzek's was to fall to the family Benesit, which had kept itself hidden for so many seasons we didn't even know their aliases or their planet of residence--was a rare gift. Or a burden.

  "Imbecile. That's 'all'?" my father said, scornful. "You think that you can afford trust, with a coward fate like yours? You must keep it hidden! Or else perish under your own weakness!"

  "I'm sorry." Ryz cleared his throat. "I won't forget. I will never do it again."

  "You are correct. You will not." My father's voice was deeper now, and flat. That was almost worse than yelling. "We will just have to work harder to find a way out of it, won't we? Of the hundreds of futures that exist, we will find the one in which you are not a waste of time. And in the meantime, you will work hard to appear as strong as possible, even to your closest associates. Understand?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Good."

  I stayed crouched there, listening to their muffled voices, until the dust in the tunnel made me want to sneeze. I wondered about my fate, if it would raise me up to power or cut me down. But now it felt more frightening than before. All my father wanted was to conquer Thuvhe, and Ryzek was destined to failure, fated to let my father down.

  Dangerous, to anger my father with something you could not change.

  I ached for Ryz, there in the tunnel, as I fumbled my way back to my bedroom. I ached, before I knew better.

  CHAPTER 5: CYRA

  A SEASON LATER, WHEN I was eight, my brother barged into my bedroom, breathless and soaked through with rain. I had just finished setting up the last of my figurines on the carpet in front of my bed. They were scavenged from the sojourn to Othyr the year before, where they had a fondness for small, useless objects. He knocked some of them over when he marched across the room. I cried out in protest--he had ruined the army formation.

  "Cyra," he said, crouching beside me. He was eighteen seasons old, his arms and legs too long, with spots on his forehead, but terror made him look younger. I put my hand on his shoulder.

  "What is it?" I asked, squeezing.

  "Has Father ever brought you somewhere just to . . . show you something?"

  "No." Lazmet Noavek never took me anywhere; he barely looked at me when we were in the same room together. It didn't bother me. Even then, I knew that being the target of Father's gaze was not a good thing. "Never."

  "That's not exactly fair, is it?" Ryz said eagerly. "You and I are both his children, we ought to be treated the same. Don't you think?"

  "I . . . I suppose," I said. "Ryz, what is--"

  But Ryz just placed his palm on my cheek.

  My bedroom, with its rich blue curtains and dark wood paneling, disappeared.

  "Today, Ryzek," my father's voice said, "you will give the order."

  I was in a small dark room, with stone walls and a huge window in front of me. My father stood at my left shoulder, but he seemed smaller than he usually was--I only came up to his chest in reality, but in that room I stared right at his face. My hands were clenched in front of me. My fingers were long and thin.

  "You want . . ." My breaths came shallow and fast. "You want me to . . ."

  "Get yourself together," my father growled, grabbing the front of my armor and jerking me toward the window.

  Through it I saw an older man, creased and gray haired. He was gaunt and dead in the eyes, with his hands cuffed together. At Father's nod, the guards in the next room approached the prisoner. One of them held his shoulders to keep him still, and the other wrapped a cord around his throat, knotting it tightly at the back of his head.
The prisoner didn't put up any protest; his limbs seemed heavier than they were supposed to be, like he had lead for blood.

  I shuddered, and kept shuddering.

  "This man is a traitor," my father said. "He conspires against our family. He spreads lies about us stealing foreign aid from the hungry and the sick of Shotet. People who speak ill of our family can't simply be killed--they have to be killed slowly. And you have to be ready to order it. You must even be ready to do it yourself, though that lesson will come later."

  Dread coiled in my stomach like a worm.

  My father made a frustrated noise in the back of his throat, and shoved something into my hand. It was a vial sealed with wax.

  "If you can't calm yourself down, this will do it for you," he said. "But one way or another, you will do as I say."

  I fumbled for the edge of the wax, peeled it off, and poured the vial's contents into my mouth. The calming tonic burned my throat, but it took only moments for my heartbeat to slow and the edges of my panic to soften.

  I nodded to my father, who flipped the switch for the amplifiers in the next room. It took me a moment to find the words in the haze that had filled my mind.

  "Execute him," I said, in an unfamiliar voice.

  One of the guards stepped back and pulled on the end of the cord, which ran through a metal loop in the ceiling like a thread through the eye of a needle. He pulled until the prisoner's toes just barely brushed the floor. I watched as the man's face turned red, then purple. He thrashed. I wanted to look away, but I couldn't.

  "Not everything that is effective must be done in public," Father said casually as he flipped the switch to turn the amplifiers off again. "The guards will whisper of what you are willing to do to those who speak out against you, and the ones they whisper to will whisper also, and then your strength and power will be known all throughout Shotet."

  A scream was building inside me, and I held it in my throat like a piece of food that was too big to swallow.

  The small dark room faded.

  I stood on a bright street teeming with people. I was at my mother's hip, my arm wrapped around her leg. Dust rose into the air around us--in the capital city of the nation-planet Zold, the dully named Zoldia City, which we had visited on my first sojourn, everything was coated in a fine layer of gray dust at that time of year. It came not from rock or earth, as I had assumed, but from a vast field of flowers that grew east of here and disintegrated in the strong seasonal wind.

  I knew this place, this moment. It was one of my favorite memories of my mother and me.

  My mother bent her head to the man who had met her in the street, her hand skimming my hair.

  "Thank you, Your Grace, for hosting our scavenge so graciously," my mother said to him. "I will do my best to ensure that we take only what you no longer need."

  "I would appreciate that. There were reports during the last scavenge of Shotet soldiers looting. Hospitals, no less," the man responded gruffly. His skin was bright with the dust, and almost seemed to sparkle in the sunlight. I stared up at him with wonder. He wore a long gray robe, almost like he wanted to resemble a statue.

  "The conduct of those soldiers was appalling, and punished severely," my mother said firmly. She turned to me. "Cyra, my dear, this is the leader of the capital city of Zold. Your Grace, this is my daughter, Cyra."

  "I like your dust," I said. "Does it get in your eyes?"

  The man seemed to soften a little as he replied, "Constantly. When we are not hosting visitors, we wear goggles."

  He took a pair from his pocket and offered them to me. They were big, with pale green glass for lenses. I tried them on, and they dropped straight from my face to my neck, so I had to hold them up with one hand. My mother laughed--light, easy--and the man joined in.

  "We will do our best to honor your tradition," the man said to my mother. "Though I confess we do not understand it."

  "Well, we seek renewal above all else," she said. "And we find what is to be made new in what has been discarded. Nothing worthwhile should ever be wasted. Surely we can agree on that."

  And then her words were playing backward, and the goggles were lifting up to my eyes, then over my head, and into the man's hand again. It was my first scavenge, and it was unwinding, unraveling in my mind. After the memory played backward, it was gone.

  I was back in my bedroom, with the figurines surrounding me, and I knew that I had had a first sojourn, and that we had met the leader of Zoldia City, but I could no longer bring the images to mind. In their place was the prisoner with the cord around his throat, and Father's low tones in my ear.

  Ryz had traded one of his memories for one of mine.

  I had seen him do it before, once to Vas, his friend and steward, and once to my mother. Each time he had come back from a meeting with my father looking like he had been shredded to pieces. Then he had put a hand on his oldest friend, or on our mother, and a moment later, he had straightened, dry-eyed, looking stronger than before. And they had looked . . . emptier, somehow. Like they had lost something.

  "Cyra," Ryz said. Tears stained his cheeks. "It's only fair. It's only fair that we should share this burden."

  He reached for me again. Something deep inside me burned. As his hand found my cheek, dark, inky veins spread beneath my skin like many-legged insects, like webs of shadow. They moved, crawling up my arms, bringing heat to my face. And pain.

  I screamed, louder than I had ever screamed in my life, and Ryz's voice joined mine, almost in harmony. The dark veins had brought pain; the darkness was pain, and I was made of it, I was pain itself.

  He yanked his hand away, but the skin-shadows and the agony stayed, my currentgift beckoned forward too soon.

  My mother ran into the room, her shirt only half buttoned, her face dripping from washing without drying. She saw the black stains on my skin and ran to me, setting her hands on my arms for just a moment before yanking them back, flinching. She had felt the pain, too. I screamed again, and clawed at the black webs with my fingernails.

  My mother had to drug me to calm me down.

  Never one to bear pain well, Ryz didn't lay a hand on me again, not if he could help it. And neither did anyone else.

  CHAPTER 6: CYRA

  "WHERE ARE WE GOING?"

  I chased my mother through the polished hallways, the floors gleaming with my dark-streaked reflection. Ahead of me, she was holding her skirts, her spine straight. She always looked elegant, my mother. She wore dresses with plates from an Armored One built into the bodices, draped with fabric so they still looked light as air. She knew how to draw a perfect line on her eyelid that made it look like she had long eyelashes at each corner. I had tried to do that once, but I hadn't been able to keep my hand steady long enough to draw the line, and I had to stop every few seconds to gasp through pain. Now I favored simplicity over elegance, loose shifts and shoes without laces, pants that didn't require buttoning and sweaters that covered most of my skin. I was almost nine seasons old, and already stripped of frivolities.

  The pain was just part of life now. Simple tasks took twice as long because I had to pause for breath. People no longer touched me, so I had to do everything myself. I tried feeble medicines and potions from other planets in the vain hope they would suppress my gift, and they always made me sick.

  "Quiet," my mother said, touching her finger to her lips. She opened a door, and we walked onto the landing pad on the roof of Noavek manor. There was a transport vessel perched there like a bird resting midflight, its loading doors open for us. She looked around once, then grabbed my shoulder--covered with fabric, so I didn't hurt her--and pulled me toward the ship.

  Once we were inside, she sat me down in one of the flight seats and pulled the straps tight across my lap and chest.

  "We're going to see someone who might be able to help you," she said.

  The sign on the specialist's door said Dr. Dax Fadlan, but he told me to call him Dax. I called him Dr. Fadlan. My parents had raised me to show res
pect to people who had power over me.

  My mother was tall, with a long neck that tilted forward, like she was always bowing. Right now the tendons stood out from her throat, and I could see her pulse there, fluttering just at the surface of her skin.

  Dr. Fadlan's eyes kept drifting to my mother's arm. She had her kill marks exposed, and even they looked beautiful, not brutal, each line straight, all at even intervals. I didn't think Dr. Fadlan, an Othyrian, saw many Shotet in his offices.

  It was an odd place. When I arrived, they put me in a room with a bunch of unfamiliar toys, and I played with some of the small figurines the way Ryzek and I had at home, when we still played together: I lined them up like an army, and marched them into battle against the giant, squashy animal in the corner of the room. After about an hour Dr. Fadlan had told me to come out, that he had finished his assessment. Only I hadn't done anything yet.

  "Eight seasons is a little young, of course, but Cyra isn't the youngest child I've seen develop a gift," Dr. Fadlan said to my mother. The pain surged, and I tried to breathe through it as they told Shotet soldiers to when they had to get a wound stitched and there was no time for a numbing agent. I had seen recordings of it. "Usually it happens in extreme circumstances, as a protective measure. Do you have any idea what those circumstances might have been? They may give us an insight into why this particular gift developed."

  "I told you," my mother said. "I don't know."

  She was lying. I had told her what Ryzek did to me, but I knew better than to contradict her now. When my mother lied, it was always for a good reason.

  "Well, I'm sorry to tell you that Cyra is not simply growing into her gift," Dr. Fadlan said. "This appears to be its full manifestation. And the implications of that are somewhat disturbing."

  "What do you mean?" I didn't think my mother could sit up any straighter, and then she did.

  "The current flows through every one of us," Dr. Fadlan said gently. "And like liquid metal flowing into a mold, it takes a different shape in each of us, showing itself in a different way. As a person develops, those changes can alter the mold the current flows through, so the gift can also shift--but people don't generally change on such a fundamental level."