The Fates Divide (Carve the Mark #2)(110)

He didn’t dare go into town. They might recognize him, or his sleeve might pull back and show his marks. They might attack him, if they knew what he was. Kill him, even. He wouldn’t blame them. He had let the Shotet in.

Mostly, though, he just couldn’t stand to look at any of it. What flashes he saw on the news were plenty.

So when he walked, it was through the iceflower fields, wrapped up in his warmest clothes, even though it was Thuvhe’s warmest time. The fields were a safe place. White purity blossoms were still popping off their stems and floating through the air, even now. Yellow jealousy dust was thick on the ground. It was desolate, everything gone until the Deadening time came again, but that suited him fine.

He hopped down from the raised path, onto the road. This time of year, when some of the snow went soft, it froze at night, so there was ice everywhere, and he had to be careful. The hooks on the bottom of his boots didn’t always catch, and he was still off balance with his arm in the sling. His careful steps took him as far west as the feathergrass, where his family’s house was nestled, safe and lonely.

Cisi’s floater wasn’t parked on the front lawn. When she came to visit, she parked in town and walked to the house, so nobody would know she was there. Nobody knew he was there, either, or he was sure he would be arrested by now. He may have killed Lazmet Noavek, but he’d let Shotet soldiers into Hessa temple. His arm was marked. There was armor in his bedroom. He spoke the revelatory tongue. He was too Shotet for Thuvhesits, now.

Light glowed from under the kitchen door when he walked in, so he knew Cisi was there. His mother had tried to visit him in the hospital. She had made it into the room, and he had lost himself in shouting at her, getting so wound up the doctors told Sifa to leave. Cisi had promised not to let her into the house until he was ready. Which, Akos privately thought, would be never. He was done with her. With what she had done to Cyra. With how she had stood apart from his suffering. With how she had maneuvered him into killing Vas. With all of it.

He stomped to get the ice off his boots, then loosened them and toed them off by the door. His hands were already undoing the straps and buttons that kept his kutyah coat fastened tight, and stripping the hat and goggles from his face. He had forgotten how much time it took to get dressed and undressed here. He’d gotten used to the temperate climate in Voa.

Voa was now dark. Ogra-dark, the sky stained black in the center and fading to gray out by the old soldiers’ camp. The news didn’t have an explanation, and neither did Akos. No one knew much about what had happened there.

What was happening now, though, was covered on a constant loop. How the Shotet exiles were now recognized as Shotet’s official government, under a temporary council of advisers while they set up for elections. How Shotet had negotiated for its nationhood. How they had traded legitimacy for their land, and were now evacuating Voa. The Ograns had given them a piece of land, bigger than Voa, and far more hazardous, and were negotiating the terms of Ogran-Shotet coexistence.

And there were other things brewing in the Assembly, too. Talk of a schism. The fate-faithful planets separating from the secular ones, the oracles fleeing the latter for the former. Half a galaxy living without knowing the future, and half listening to whatever wisdom the oracles might offer. That schism existed in Akos himself, and the idea that the galaxy might divide distressed him, because it meant that he, too, would have to choose a side, and he didn’t want to.

But that was the way of things—sometimes, wounds were too deep to heal. Sometimes, people didn’t want to reconcile. Sometimes, even though a solution might create worse problems than there were to begin with, people chose it anyway.

“Cee?” he called out, once he was finished hanging up all his winter clothes. He walked the dark, narrow hallway to the kitchen, peering out into the courtyard to see if the burnstones were still lit.

“Hello there.” A voice spoke from his living room.

Yma Zetsyvis sat by the fireplace. She was an arm’s length away from the place where his father had died. Her white hair was loose around her face, and she was elegant as ever, even dressed in armor. It was the color of sand.

He startled, more at the sight of her than the sound, cringing into the wall. And then, embarrassed by his reaction, he pushed himself away from the wall and forced himself to face her. It had been like this since Lazmet’s death.

“I apologize. I couldn’t think of a better way to warn you,” Yma said.

“What—” He drank in a few shallow breaths. “What are you doing here?”

She smiled a little. “What, no ‘Oh, you’re alive, how nice’?”

“I—”

“Shh. I don’t actually care.” She stood. “You look better. You’ve been eating?”

“I—yes.”

Every time he faced a meal these days, he thought of what he had done to Jorek, and it was hard to take even a single bite, hungry as he was. He made himself do it, because he didn’t like to feel tired, and weak, and fragile. But it was difficult each time.

“I came to get you out of here,” she said.

“It’s my house,” he replied.

“No, it’s your parents’ house,” she said. “It’s the place where your father died, in the shadow of a town you can’t even go into anymore, thanks to certain facets of your identity being public knowledge. This isn’t a good place for you to be.”