The Fates Divide (Carve the Mark #2)(52)

“No,” he said, his face flushing with warmth. “Thank you.”

“Do you have a name?” Cyra asked, blunt as ever. “Or should we just call you ‘Oracle’?”

“Ah, forgive my rudeness. My name is Vara,” she said. “I sometimes forget that the people I know do not know me, in turn. Is there anything I can do to make you less hostile, my dear?” She nodded to Cyra. “Or are you content to remain this way?”

A faint crease appeared in Cyra’s cheek, the way it did when she was suppressing a smile.

“Fine, I’ll sit,” she conceded. “But don’t read too much into it.”

“I wouldn’t dare,” Vara said as Cyra perched on the edge of the bench next to Akos. Even sitting down, the two of them were taller than Vara, who was short and thick through the middle. There was something familiar about her.

“Are you related to Yssa in some way?” he asked.

“Well spotted, darling, yes. She is my daughter. A rather . . . late-in-life entanglement it was,” she said. “She gets her father’s frame. Tall and long-limbed. The rest was mine.” She broke a piece off the dough and popped it in her mouth.

“Now,” she said as she swallowed, “I’m sure you are wondering why I didn’t put on my traditional Ogran robes and meet you in the Hall of Prophecy like a proper oracle.”

“It crossed my mind,” Akos said.

“I would expect no less from the son of an oracle,” Vara said, still with that kind smile. “Well, really, let’s keep this between us, but I hate that hall. It makes me feel short. So do the robes! They were made for the last oracle, and he was much bigger than me. Besides—I thought, given the nature of what I have to discuss with you both, you might appreciate the more comfortable surroundings.”

Akos felt like he’d been dunked in cold water, suddenly. Given the nature of what I have to discuss with you.

“So it’s not good news,” Cyra said, wry. Leaning on sarcasm almost always meant she was scared out of her mind. The tightening of her hands around the edge of the bench suggested the same thing.

Vara sighed. “Oh, the truth rarely is, dear girl. What I have for you today is something we call ‘kyerta’—do either of you know the word?”

Cyra and Akos both shook their heads.

“Of course not. Who speaks Ogran but Ograns?” Vara’s laugh was like a thin trickle of water. “You see, we think of oracles as delivering the future only, and that’s most of what we do, yes.” She grabbed a fat metal cylinder from a shelf behind her, and used it to roll the dough flat. “But it’s the past that brings about the future—often it stays hidden, shaping our lives in ways we do not understand. But sometimes it must force its way into the present in order to change what’s coming.”

She broke the dough into three large pieces, and rolled them between her hands until they were long and thin, like tails. Then she began to braid them.

“Kyerta,” she said, “is a revelation that causes your world to shift on its axis. It is a profound truth that, once you know it, inevitably alters your future, though it has already occurred and should, therefore, change nothing.”

She finished the braided dough, and set it aside with a sigh. Dusting off her hands, she sat down across from them and leaned into her arms.

“In your case, this kyerta comes in the form of your names,” she said. “You have lived your lives as Akos Kereseth and Cyra Noavek, when in fact, you are Akos Noavek and Cyra Kereseth.”

She sat back from the table.

Akos struggled to breathe.

Cyra let out a peal of laughter.





CHAPTER 27: CYRA


I CLAPPED MY HAND over my mouth to stop the sound, a horrible, forced laugh without any mirth in it.

Cyra Kereseth.

It wasn’t the first time I’d ever thought the name. I had daydreamed about it once or twice, leaving the name Noavek behind and taking on Akos’s name, someday in an ideal future where we got married. It was customary for the lower-status person in a marriage to change their name, in Shotet, but we could make an exception, to rid me of the label I hated. The name Cyra Kereseth had become, to me, a symbol of freedom, as well as a sugar-sweet unreality.

But Vara didn’t mean that my name was Cyra Kereseth through some hypothetical, far-off marriage. She meant that my name was Cyra Kereseth now.

The hard part was not believing I wasn’t Cyra Noavek. I had suspected it since my brother told me I didn’t share his blood, maybe even since my blood didn’t work in the gene lock that he had used to keep his rooms secure. But believing I belonged to the same family that had raised Akos to a soft heart and a knowledge of iceflowers—that was another thing entirely.

I didn’t dare look at Akos. I wasn’t sure what I would see when I did.

I took my hand away from my face.

“What?” I said, stifling another giggle. “What?”

“Sifa would tell the story better,” Vara said. “But unfortunately that task now falls to me, because it is Ogra’s future that hangs in the balance. When you were born, Akos, to Ylira and Lazmet Noavek, Sifa saw only dark paths ahead of you. And likewise, Cyra, born to Sifa herself, and Aoseh Kereseth, only dark paths ahead of you. She despaired for both of you.