The Fates Divide (Carve the Mark #2)(35)

I never saw him in his worst moments, because I was never invited into the room—a favor, I now knew, though at the time it had felt like exclusion. Ryzek had been invited, though. When he was young, he had attended executions, and interrogations, and brutal training that treated soldiers of Shotet as disposable. And when he was older, he was forced to participate, to learn the art of pain the way others learned music or language, and to build a reputation for himself every bit as terrifying as my father’s.

So my worst memories of Lazmet were actually memories of Ryzek, or my mother, finally dismissed from his presence. My mother’s hands trembling slightly as she removed her necklace, or undid the buttons of her gown. Ryzek clamping both hands over his mouth so no one would hear him sob—though of course I knew what to listen for—or screaming at Vas for no reason, screaming himself hoarse.

Now Lazmet Noavek himself stared at me from the screen above my head, and I forced myself to straighten. He was looking at a sight, of course, not at me, but it felt like the first time he had ever made eye contact with me, and I wanted to bear up under his scrutiny. He was the worst of Ryzek bound in sinew and bone, but I still wanted his approval, my father’s approval.

Maybe not your father, a voice in my head said.

“I am Lazmet Noavek, and I am the rightful sovereign of Shotet,” he said. He looked thinner than he had the last time I saw him, and more lined, but he was otherwise unchanged. He had begun shaving his head when his hair thinned, and his skull was smooth except for the bones that protruded on either side at sharp angles. The defined muscle that wrapped around his bones, and the armor that he wore even now, could not quite disguise how narrow he was through the shoulders. He was tanned and weather-beaten—not brown like I was; he had the look of someone fair who has been scorched by a harsh sun for many seasons. His face was rough with the start of a beard.

Only Ryzek and Vas had been there when he supposedly died, out on a sojourn. They had been on a separate mission, and a secret one: finding and capturing an oracle. Ever since my father learned my brother’s fate—the first child of the family Noavek will fall to the family Benesit—they had both been searching for a way out of it. Every sojourn was a new chance to hunt down an oracle. On this particular sojourn, they had been attacked by local armed forces and, outnumbered, Lazmet had fallen, forcing Ryzek and Vas to flee. There had been no body, but no reason to suspect Ryzek hadn’t told the truth. Until now.

I wondered if they had even been attacked at all. Where had Lazmet been all these seasons? He couldn’t have been in hiding. He would never have surrendered his power willingly. He must have been imprisoned somewhere. But how had he gotten out? And why had he returned now?

Lazmet cleared his throat, and it sounded like rocks tumbling down the face of a cliff. “Whatever you have previously heard from the woman-child who murdered both my wife and my son should be disregarded, as she is not the leader of Shotet based on our laws of succession.”

Eyes shifted to me from all angles, then flicked away again. I told myself I didn’t care. But I remembered my shadow-streaked hand clamping on my mother’s arm, to push her away, and shuddered. I had not killed Ryzek, but I couldn’t claim to be innocent of my mother’s death.

I could never claim to be innocent again.

“I speak for the people of Shotet, a people who have for hundreds of seasons been scorned, insulted, and disparaged by the nation-planets of the Assembly. A people who have, despite that constant scorn, become strong. We have met every possible criteria for inclusion in the Assembly. We settled on a planet, and still we were disregarded. We formed a mighty army, and still we were disregarded. We were given a fated family, spoken into being by all the oracles in the solar system, and still we were disregarded. We will be disregarded no longer.”

Despite my fear of him, I felt something surge within me. Pride in my people, my culture, my language, and yes, my nation, which I had never stopped believing in, though I had disagreed with the methods my family had used to establish it. I was buoyed by his words even as I was afraid of what they meant, and when I looked around, I felt certain I was not the only one. These people were exiles, enemies of the Noaveks, but they were still Shotet.

“We reject the terms of Chancellor Benesit’s peace,” he said. “There can be no peace between us while there is no respect. Therefore the most efficient course of action is to work against peace. I submit this message as a declaration of war against the nation of Thuvhe, led by Chancellor Isae Benesit. We will meet again in battle, Miss Benesit. Transmission complete.”

The screens all switched to another piece of footage, something from the high peaks of Trella, where fog swirled so high it turned into clouds.

All around me the mess hall was oddly quiet.

We were at war.

“Cyra.” Akos’s voice was a comfort. So familiar, its rumble. What were the first words he had said to me? Oh, yes—they had been explaining his gift. I interrupt the current, he had said. No matter what it does.

If my life was a different kind of current—and it was, in a certain sense, a flow of energy across space, brief and temporary—he had certainly interrupted it. And I was better for it. But now the question I had held in my mind ever since he first kissed me, about whether it was his fate tying him to me or not, felt more urgent than before.

“That was my father,” I said, with something between a hiccup and a giggle.