Carve the Mark (Carve the Mark #1)(47)

I laughed. “Am I?”

“That is why it’s so important that you help me,” Ryzek went on, like he hadn’t heard me. “You can afford to. You don’t need to fight so hard against what the world expects from you.”

Ryzek had been weighing his life against mine since I was a child. That I was in constant pain, that I could not get close to anyone, that I had experienced deep loss just as he had, didn’t seem to register in his mind. All he saw was that our father had ignored me rather than subjecting me to horrors, and that my fate didn’t make the Shotet doubt my strength. To him, I was the lucky child, and there was no point in arguing about it.

“What happened, Ryzek?”

“You mean aside from all of Shotet being reminded of my ridiculous fate by Lety Zetsyvis?”

At the mention of her, I shuddered involuntarily, remembering how warm her skin had been as she died. I clasped my hands in front of me to keep them from trembling. Akos’s painkiller didn’t suppress the shadows completely; they moved, sluggish now, beneath my skin, bringing with them a sharp ache.

“But you were ready for that,” I said, fixing my eyes on his chin. “No one would dare repeat what she said now.”

“It’s not just that,” Ryzek said, and I heard in his voice a reminder of what he had sounded like when he was younger, before my father sank in his teeth. “I followed the trail from Uzul Zetsyvis’s confession to an actual source. There is a colony of exiles somewhere out there. Maybe more than one. And they have contacts among us.”

I felt a thrill in my chest. So the rumor of the exile colony had been confirmed. For the first time, the colony represented to me not a threat, but something like . . . hope.

“One display of strength is good, but we need more. We need there to be no doubt that I am in command, and that we will return from this sojourn even more powerful than before.” He let his hand hover over my shoulder. “I will need your help now more than ever, Cyra.”

I know what you want, I thought. He wanted to root out every doubt and every whisper against him and crush them. And I was supposed to be the tool he used to do that. Ryzek’s Scourge.

I closed my eyes briefly as memories of Lety came to me. I stifled them.

“Please, sit.” He gestured to one of the chairs set up near the screen. They were old, with stitched upholstery. I recognized them from my father’s old office. The rug beneath them was Shotet-made, of rough woven grasses. In fact, nothing in the room was scavenged—my father had hated the practice, said it made us weak and needed to be gradually abandoned, and Ryzek seemed to agree. I was the only one left with an affinity for other people’s garbage.

I sat on the edge of the chair, the fates of the favored lines glowing next to my head. Ryzek didn’t sit across from me. Instead, he stood behind the other chair, braced against its high back. He had rolled up the sleeve on his left arm, displaying the marks.

He tapped his crooked index finger against one of the fates on the screen, so the words grew larger.

The fates of the family Benesit are as follows:

The first child of the family Benesit will raise her double to power.

The second child of the family Benesit will reign over Thuvhe.

“I have heard mutterings that this second child”—he tapped the second fate, his knuckle brushing the word reign—“will soon declare herself, and that she is Thuvhesit-born,” Ryzek said. “I can’t ignore the fates any longer—whoever this Benesit child is, the fates say she will be the ruler of Thuvhe, and responsible for my undoing.” I hadn’t quite put the pieces together before. Ryzek’s fate was to fall to the family Benesit, and the family Benesit was fated to rule Thuvhe. Of course he was fixating on them, now that he had his oracle.

“My intention,” he added, “is to kill her before that happens, with the help of our new oracle.”

I stared at the fate written on the screen. All my life I had been taught that every fate would be fulfilled, no matter what anyone tried to do to stop it. But that was exactly what he was proposing: he wanted to thwart his own fate by killing the one who was supposed to bring it about. And he had Eijeh to tell him how.

“That’s . . . that’s impossible,” I said, before I could stop myself.

“Impossible?” He raised his eyebrows. “Why? Because no one has managed to do it?” His hands clenched around the chair back. “You think that I, of all the people in the galaxy, can’t be the first to defy his fate?”

“That’s not what I meant,” I said, trying to stay controlled in the face of his anger. “All I meant was that I’ve never heard of it happening, that’s all.”

“You soon will,” he snapped, his face twisting into a scowl. “And you’re going to help me.”

I thought, suddenly, of Akos thanking me for the way I arranged his room, when we got to the sojourn ship. His calm expression as he took in my marked arm. The way he laughed when we chased each other through the blue sojourn rain. Those were the first moments of relief I had experienced since my mother died. And I wanted more of them. And less of . . . this.

“No,” I said. “I won’t.”

His old threat—that if I didn’t do as he said, he would tell the Shotet what I had done to my beloved mother—no longer frightened me. This time, he had made a mistake: he had confessed to needing my help.