Carve the Mark (Carve the Mark #1)(115)

“I am a servant of fate,” she said. “I do not have the luxury of partiality.”

The thought brought a chill to my bones. I understood doing things for “the greater good” in theory, but in practice, I didn’t have any interest in it. I had always protected myself, and now I protected Akos, when I could. Beyond that, there weren’t many I wasn’t willing to cast out of my path. And maybe it meant I was evil, but it was true regardless.

“It is not easy to be a mother and an oracle, or a wife and an oracle,” she said, not sounding quite as steady now as she had before. “I have been . . . tempted many times. To protect my family at the expense of the greater good. But . . .” She shook her head. “I must stay the course. I must have faith.”

Or what? I wanted to ask. What was so bad about snatching up your loved ones and fleeing, refusing to shoulder a responsibility you never wanted?

“I have a question you might be able to answer,” I said. “Do you know the name Yma Zetsyvis?”

Sifa tilted her head so her thick hair spilled over one shoulder. “I do.”

“Do you know what her name was before she married Uzul Zetsyvis?” I said. “Was her fate favored?”

“No,” Sifa said. She took a breath of the cool night air. “Their marriage was a kind of aberration, unlikely enough to register in the oracles’ visions of Shotet. Uzul married far beneath himself, for love, apparently. A common woman, with a common name. Yma Surukta.”

Surukta. It was Teka’s name, and Zosita’s. Women of pale hair and bright eyes.

“That’s what I thought,” I said. “I would stay and talk, but I have something I need to do.”

Sifa shook her head. “It’s strange for me not to know what someone is deciding.”

“Embrace the uncertainty,” I said.

If Voa was a wheel, I was walking its circumference. The Zetsyvis family lived across the city, their house on a cliff overlooking Voa. I could see the light glittering inside their estate from far off, when the streets were still broken under my feet.

The currentstream, winding around the sky above me, was deep purple, transitioning to red. It almost looked like blood. Fitting, given our plans for tomorrow.

I felt comfortable in the poor, discarded district where the renegades had chosen their safe house. More often than not, the windows were dark, but sometimes I saw shadowed figures hunched over small lanterns. In one house I spotted a family of four crowded around playing cards scavenged from Zold. They were laughing. There had been a time when I would not have dared to walk these streets, as Ryzek’s sister, but now I was disgraced, and no friend of the regime. I was as safe as I could be, here.

I was less comfortable when I crossed into wealthier territory. Everyone in Voa professed loyalty to the Noavek regime—it wasn’t optional—but Ryzek kept the oldest and most trusted families in Shotet in a ring around him. I could tell I was in that ring by the buildings alone: they were newer, or patched over and repaired and repainted. The street had turned to stone beneath my feet. There were lights along the way. I saw inside most of the windows, where people in clean, crisp clothes read their screens at the kitchen table, or watched the news feed.

As soon as I could, I turned toward the cliffs, to one of the paths that would take me up the face. Long ago, the Shotet had carved steps into these cliff walls. They were steep and narrow and poorly maintained, so they weren’t for the faint of heart. But I had never once been accused of having that kind of heart.

Aching from both yesterday’s injuries and my currentgift, I kept one hand on the wall to my left, pressing close. I hadn’t realized when I left how sore and exhausted my body still was, how every step throbbed in my still-healing throat and scalp. I paused, and took out the packet of vials I had taken from Akos’s belongings before I left.

A line of vials in different colors confronted me. I knew most of them by sight—a sleeping potion, a painkiller, and at the far end, its cork sealed twice with melted wax, the pure red of hushflower extract. In this quantity, at this potency, it was enough to kill a man.

I swallowed half a vial of the painkiller, then tucked the packet away in my small satchel.

It took an hour of climbing to reach the top. I had to stop several times along the way to rest. The city was smaller every time, its lit windows just blinking lights up here. I could always find Noavek manor, glowing white near the city’s center, and the amphitheater, even now protected by a web of light. Somewhere beneath that amphitheater was Orieve Benesit, waiting to die.

When I reached the top, I backed away from the edge as quickly as I could. Just because I wasn’t faint of heart didn’t mean I enjoyed taunting death.

I followed the road to the Zetsyvis house, into the forests where they bred fenzu for export. The path I walked was guarded by metal grates, to keep people from stealing the valuable insects. Draped over the trees were nets to prevent the fenzu from escaping, more a precaution than anything. Fenzu built their nests around the delicate branches nearest to the sky. The trees themselves were tall and thin, their trunks so dark they looked black, adorned with wiry, dark green clusters instead of the floppy leaves I had seen on other planets.

Finally the Zetsyvis house came into view. There was a guard at the gate, but by the time I punched him in the jaw, it was already too late for him to defend himself. I used his limp hand to unlock the gate. I paused there, remembering how my hand hadn’t unlocked Ryzek’s room in Noavek manor. How my blood, my genes, hadn’t unlocked it. And I still didn’t know why.