The Fates Divide (Carve the Mark #2)(58)
We were about to attend a meeting with representatives of Ogra in Pokgo, Ogra’s capital city. They had invited us to discuss the “request”—more like a demand—issued by the government of Thuvhe that the Ograns no longer give shelter to Shotet exiles, in the wake of the attack on Shissa.
I felt ill. The only reason Thuvhe had known to make that demand of Ogra was because I had told Isae we were here. My currentshadows were dense and quick, and this restrictive clothing wasn’t helping. I couldn’t deny that it emphasized the length of my body in a nice way, though.
“You’re going bare-faced?” I said to Teka, turning away from the mirror. “You could at least smudge something on your eye, you know.”
“Every time I try I just end up looking stupid,” she said.
“I could give it a try,” I said. “My mother taught me when I was young.”
“Just don’t zing me with your currentgift,” Teka said, a little grouchy.
I had found a little black pencil to trace my lash line in one of the shops in Galo. I had tried to barter with the clever Ogran woman who ran it, but she had pretended not to understand my accent, so I eventually gave up on the game and bought it for its full price. I removed its cap and stood in front of Teka, bending so our faces were on the same level. I couldn’t brace myself against her, so I braced my hands against each other, to steady them.
“We could talk about it, you know,” Teka said. “Him leaving like that? Not so much as a good-bye? We could talk about it, if you . . . you know. Needed to.”
Not so much as a good-bye. He had decided I wasn’t worth that basic decency.
I clenched my jaw.
“No,” I said, “we can’t.”
If I talked about it, I would want to scream, and this coat was too tight around my ribs for that. It was the same reason I now avoided Eijeh and Sifa—always together, these days, and consulting with exiles about the future almost hourly. I couldn’t bear the feeling.
In light, short strokes, with pauses as my currentgift swelled and receded like a tide, I lined Teka’s eyelid with black, using the other end of the pencil to smudge it. When I first met her, she would have stabbed me rather than let me get this close to her, so though she would deny it if I asked, I knew she was softening toward me, as I had already softened toward her.
A soft heart was a gift, whether given easily or with great reluctance. I would never take it for granted again.
She opened her eye. Its blue looked even more brilliant with the black to frame it. She wore what she called her “fancy eye patch” on the other eye—it was clean and black, and held to her face with ribbon instead of a stretchy band.
“There,” I said. “Almost painless.”
She looked at herself in the mirror. “Almost,” she agreed. But she left the pencil in place, so I knew she liked it.
I tried not to think about Akos, or dream about him, or imagine conversations we might have had about what I was experiencing. I was already barely containing my rage at Thuvhe; I didn’t need something to stoke the flames further.
On the flight to Pokgo, however, I allowed myself just a moment of weakness before reprimanding myself.
As the ship glided between tall buildings—built higher than any of the ones in Voa, so tall they might have scraped the bottom of the Shissa ones that fell—I pictured the look of wonder his face would have worn if he had seen it.
And I would have said something like, Ograns allowed a certain percentage of trees to be preserved when they built Pokgo, which is why it still looks like a forest below us.
He would have smiled, amused as always by the knowledge I kept filed away.
But not amused enough by me to give me a damn explanation before—
Stop, I told myself, blinking tears from my eyes. There was pain in my knees, hips, elbows, and shoulders, pain in all the spaces between my bones. I couldn’t indulge this.
There was work to be done.
The ship docked at a building near the center of Pokgo, where all the buildings were so close together I could peer into strangers’ offices and living spaces and see how they decorated them. Ograns favored excess, so most of them were packed with objects of personal significance or fine craftsmanship. Everyone seemed to have the same decorative boxes, made of polished wood with little patterns carved into them.
When the hatch opened, I shuddered a little, because the wind that blew in was strong and it was clear we were higher up than I had realized, given the drop in temperature. Someone on the docking station guided a motorized walkway to the hatch. It had neither handrails nor some kind of visible fail-safe to keep a person on top of it. Our Ogran captain, a thick man with a substantial gut, walked right across it with the grace of a dancer. Yssa followed, and I was close behind her, forcing my eyes up and focused on the open doorway that was my destination.
If Akos had been here, I would have held his hand, my arm stretched out behind me like a banner.
But Akos was not here, so I made it across alone.
Ograns were ruled by a pair of people, one a woman and the other sema, the word in Shotet for neither woman nor man. There were two major political factions on Ogra, I knew, one amenable to change and the other not. Each one presented a viable candidate every ten seasons, and they ruled together, by compromise or by bargaining. It seemed impossible to me that such a thing could work, but apparently it wasn’t, because the system had lasted two hundred seasons so far.