The Fates Divide (Carve the Mark #2)(33)

“I was there when you earned your armor,” she said. “One of your observers. You’re Kereseth.”

Earning armor required three witnesses. It had taken him a long time to get Vakrez Noavek, the general, to agree to summon them for him. Vakrez had sneered at the idea that someone who wasn’t Shotet-born could kill an Armored One. It had been Malan, his husband, who talked him into it. If he fails, so what? he had said, nodding to Akos. You prove a Thuvhesit isn’t fit to wear our armor. And if he succeeds, it reflects well on your training. Either way, the gain is yours.

He had winked at Akos then. Akos had the feeling Malan got his way with Vakrez more often than not.

“Good to see you’ve found your footing,” the woman said. “That business with the Armored One was a bit unorthodox.”

She nodded to his wrist, where he’d marked the loss of the animal as surely as he would have marked any other life. A strange thing, to the huddle of Shotet who had granted him armor. He had put a hash through the mark like Cyra told him to, though.

He didn’t cover up the marks when the woman looked them over, like he might have around his family. But he did run the tip of his finger across the line that belonged to Vas Kuzar. He hadn’t decided yet whether he thought of it as a triumph or a crime.

“Enough chatter!” Teka growled from the above bunk. She threw her pillow, hitting the woman in the head with it.

Akos had gotten spare clothes from an exile about his size the night before, so he got dressed and splashed water on his face to wake himself up. Cool water ran down the back of his neck and followed his spine. He didn’t bother to dry it. Ograns kept their buildings warm.

When he stepped outside to go to the mess, though, he realized that for the first time in a long time, nobody was telling him where he could and couldn’t go, or chasing him so he had to hide. He decided to keep walking. He went past the mess hall, an old warehouse the Shotet had repurposed, and toward the Shotet-Ogran village of Galo.

The Shotet had done such a good job of adapting that he couldn’t tell them apart from Ograns most of the time, even though Teka had said this village was full of exiles. He caught a few Shotet words passing by one of the market stalls, an old Shotet man bickering over the cost of an Ogran fruit that looked like a brain and glowed, faintly, with some kind of dust. And the fabric one of the women was shaking out of her window was stitched with a map of Voa.

The permanent structures were bent into each other, some walls warped from age. Some of the doors opened into each other, warring for dominance in front of the shops. Alleys only as wide as his shoulders led to still more shops buried behind the first row.

There were hardly any signs—you had to figure things out by poking your head inside. Half the objects they were selling weren’t familiar to him anyway, but he got the sense Ograns liked their things small and intricate, if at all.

He felt jumpy, like someone was going to catch him walking around and punish him for it. You’re not a prisoner anymore, he kept telling himself. You can go wherever you want. But it was hard to really believe it.

Then he caught a scent on the air that reminded him so much of jealousy dust he couldn’t help himself. He ducked into one of the alleys, turning sideways so he wouldn’t scrape his shirt on the damp stone, and inched closer. Vapor huffed from a window up ahead, and when he peeked between the bars, he saw an older woman bent over a stove, stirring something in an iron pot. Hanging all above her were bundles of plants, tied off with string, and from floor to ceiling, wherever there was room for a shelf, were jars marked in Shotet characters. The cluttered space held knives and measuring cups and spoons and gloves and pots full to bursting.

The woman turned, and Akos tried to slip out of sight, but he wasn’t quick enough. Her eyes trapped his, and they were as bright blue as Teka’s. She had a beak of a nose, and her skin was almost as fair as his own. She whistled at him between her teeth.

“Well, come in then, you may as well help stir,” she said.

He bent under the doorframe. He felt too big for her narrow shop—was it a shop?—and too big for his own body. She came up to his chest, and she was slim, her arms muscled despite her age. There was no place for the feeble here, he thought. He would have asked Cyra what became of the feeble-bodied who dared to defy the Noaveks, but he didn’t want the answer.

He took the spoon from her.

“Clockwise. Scrape the bottom. Not too fast,” she said, and he did his best. He didn’t like the sound the metal spoon made against the bottom of the pot, but there was nothing for it. There wasn’t a wooden spoon in sight. Trees probably tried to kill you if you cut them down, here.

“What’s your name?” she said gruffly. She had moved on to a countertop only as wide as her hips, and was chopping leaves he didn’t recognize. But dangling right in front of his nose was a bundle of sendes leaves. Where had she gotten them? Could they grow on Ogra? Surely not.

“Akos,” he said. “How did you get sendes leaves here?”

“Imports,” she said. “What, you think it’s cold enough to grow an iceflower here?”

“I don’t think the warmth is really the greatest obstacle,” he said. “No sun, now that’s a problem.”

She grunted in what sounded like agreement.

“They don’t risk flying in new shipments often,” she said. “You’re not interested in my name?”