The Fates Divide (Carve the Mark #2)(111)

Akos crossed his arms over his stomach, holding on tight. She had put into words what he already knew, what he had known since Cisi brought him here, after the attack. The bed that had belonged to him was right next to Eijeh’s, and Eijeh was gone, disappeared into the streets of Voa and never spotted again. The living room still reminded him of his father’s blood. And the destroyed temple—

Well.

“Where am I supposed to go?” he said in more of a whisper than anything.

Yma came to her feet and approached him, slowly, as if approaching an animal.

“You,” she said, “are a Shotet. It’s not the only thing you are, to be sure. You are still a Thuvhesit, and an oracle’s son, and a Kereseth, and all those things. But you can’t deny that a Shotet is part of what you are.” She set a hand on his shoulder, gently. “And we are the ones who want you with us.”

“We?” Akos snorted, ignoring the heat that had sparked behind his eyes. “What about Ara, and Cyra? They don’t want me with them.”

“I can’t believe I’m about to say this,” Yma said. “But I don’t think you are giving your girl enough credit. Or Ara, given time.”

“I don’t—”

“For heaven’s sake, boy, just go in the kitchen,” Yma snapped.

Sitting at his kitchen table—the kitchen table where he had spread his homework as a kid to work before dinner, where he had climbed up to dust the burnstones with red hushflower powder, where he had learned to chop and slice and crush ingredients for the painkiller—was Cyra.

Her thick, wavy hair piled on one side of her head, the other glinting silver.

Her arm wrapped in armor.

Her eyes dark as space.

“Hello,” she said to him in Thuvhesit.

“Hello,” he replied in Shotet.

“Cisi smuggled us into Thuvhe,” Cyra said. “Border control is very tight right now.”

“Oh,” he said. “Right.”

“Yma and I are flying to Ogra tonight, now that I’m well enough to travel.”

“You—” Akos swallowed hard. “What happened?”

“The dark over Voa? That was me. My currentshadows.” She smiled, a bit sheepishly. It wasn’t the easy smile she might have given him a few months ago, but it was more than he expected. She held up a hand, showing him the black shadows that still floated over her skin, dense and dark. “It took so much out of me, the currentshadows were gone for a week. I thought they might have disappeared forever. Was devastated when they came back, actually. But I’m—dealing with it. As always.”

Akos nodded.

“You’re thin,” she said. “Yma told me about—how it was. With Lazmet. With you.”

“Cyra,” he said.

“I know what he’s like, you know. I saw, I heard things.” She closed her eyes, shook her head. “I know.”

“Cyra,” he said again. “I’m so—there aren’t words—”

“There are a great number of words, actually.” She rose from her seat at the table, trailing her fingers along the wood as she walked around it. “In Shotet, the word just means ‘regret,’ but in Zoldan, there are three words. One for slights, one for regular apology, and one that means something along the lines of ‘What I did cut out a piece of me.’”

Akos nodded, unable to speak.

“I thought I couldn’t forgive you, that I lacked the capacity,” she said. “After all, I was about to die, and you were just sitting there.”

Akos winced.

“I couldn’t move,” he said. “I was—frozen. Numb.”

“I know,” she said, coming to stand in front of him, her brow furrowed. “Don’t you remember, Akos, what I hide beneath this armor?” She clasped the forearm guard in front of her body. “When I showed you these marks, did you think, even for a moment, that I had done something that couldn’t be forgiven?”

Akos’s heart was pounding, as hard as it did when he panicked, and he didn’t know why.

“No, you didn’t,” she said. “You showed me mercy. Teka showed me mercy. Even Yma, in her way.” She reached for him, for his cheek. He cringed away.

It was so much harder—so much harder to accept her forgiveness than her condemnation, because it meant that he had to change.

“This time, let me be the one to say to you—you were young, and hungry, and exhausted. In pain, and confused, and alone,” she said. “And if you think that I—Cyra Noavek, Ryzek’s Scourge, killer of my own mother—can’t understand what happened to you, then you don’t really understand who I was, and what I did.”

Akos watched her carefully as she spoke, as she pulled him closer and touched her forehead to his, so they could still look at each other, breathing the same air.

“What I did,” he said, “cut out a piece of me.”

“It’s all right,” she said. “I’m all hacked up and stitched back together, too.”

She pulled away.

“For now,” she said, “just be my friend again, okay? And we can talk about the whole ‘I’m still in love with you, what the hell do we do about it’ question later.”