The Fates Divide (Carve the Mark #2)(79)

“Are you Ryzek?” I said to Eijeh.

Eijeh and Sifa both stared at me, blank.

“When you first woke, you said ‘we.’ ‘We’ got lost in the future,” I said.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

“Oh?” I stepped toward him. “So that wasn’t my delusional, egocentric brother referring to himself in the royal ‘we’?”

Eijeh started to shake his head.

“It’s not my brother who’s biting your nails, picking at your food, spinning your blade, remembering our mother?” I said.

I knew my voice was loud, maybe loud enough to hear through the walls, but I didn’t care. I had seen my brother’s body. I had shoved it into space. I had scrubbed his blood from the floor. I had buried my anger, my grief, my pity.

My currentshadows were now flowing down my arms, winding around my fingers, and slipping between the seams of my shirt.

“Ryzek?” I said.

“Not exactly,” he replied.

“What, then?”

“We are a we,” he said. “Some of us is Eijeh, and some of us is Ryzek.”

“You’ve been . . .” I struggled to find the way to phrase it. “. . . partly Ryzek this entire time, and you said nothing?”

“After getting murdered?” he retorted. “Keep your currentgift away from me.” The shadows were beneath my skin and on top of it, both, stretching toward him, itching to be shared. “And you wonder why people don’t like you?”

“I have never once wondered that,” I said. “And you—” I turned to Sifa. “You don’t look surprised, as usual. You’ve known this whole time that a spy might be among us—”

“He has no interest in spying,” Sifa said. “He just wants to be left alone.”

“Not a cycle ago, he murdered Orieve Benesit to keep Ryzek in power,” I said in a low voice. “And now you tell me he wants to be left alone?”

“As long as Ryzek’s body existed, we were trapped where we were,” Eijeh—Ryzek—whatever—replied, leaning close. “Without it we are free. Or we would be, if not for these damn visions.”

“Those damn visions.” I laughed. “You—Ryzek—tortured Eijeh by trading memories with him in order to get those visions, if I recall correctly. And now you hate them?” I laughed again. “That seems fitting.”

“The visions are a curse,” he said, looking uncomfortable. “They keep throwing us into other people’s lives, other people’s pain—”

My mind felt like an overstuffed toy, all the contents bursting the seams. It had never occurred to me that Ryzek—in whatever form he now found himself—might not want the power he held. But when I thought of the Ryzek I had known, the one who covered my ears in dark hallways, and carried me on his back through Shotet crowds on the way to the sojourn ship, it didn’t seem so strange.

But that wasn’t right. Neither Ryzek Noavek nor Eijeh Kereseth deserved to be free from the consequences of what they had done.

“Well, now it’s not just the visions throwing you into other people’s pain,” I said. “Because you’re coming with me to Urek.”

“No, we’re not.”

I leaned in close, so close we were sharing breath, and lifted both hands, holding them over Eijeh’s face. My currentshadows were so dense now that I had no trouble displaying my power in all its horror, the dark tendrils weaving over my skin and under it, staining me and enfolding me. Pain shrieked through every izit of me, but having a goal had always helped me to think through pain.

“Come with me,” I said in a harsh whisper. “Or I will kill you, right now, with my bare hands. You may have some of Ryzek’s learned skill, but you are still in the body of Eijeh Kereseth, and he is no match for me in a footrace or a fight or even a goddamn contest of wills.”

“Threats,” he gritted out. “I would say they are beneath you, but they never have been, have they?”

“I prefer to think of them as promises,” I said, smiling, all teeth.

“Why do you even want us to go?”

“I am doing something that requires expertise in the habits of Lazmet Noavek,” I said, “and your mind is a treasure trove.”

He opened his mouth to object, and Sifa spoke over him.

“He will go,” she said. “And so will I. Our time here is done.”

I wanted to argue, but my logical side couldn’t quite manage it. It wouldn’t hurt to have not one, but two oracles on board to help with our assassination plan. Even if one contained my evil brother and the other was the biological mother who abandoned me.

It was ridiculous.

But so was much of the galaxy.





CHAPTER 43: AKOS


“THE MOST IMMINENT OF our problems is Vakrez,” Yma said.

Akos lay on the floor by the fireplace, his guts grumbling. He had gotten faint earlier while walking back from the bathroom and, rather than getting up when Yma came in, had just flopped onto his back. She shoved another satchel of food into his hand, and he took it, not half as eager as he’d been the last time she came. He’d discovered that half a meal was almost worse than no meal at all.