The Fates Divide (Carve the Mark #2)(92)

“Not a finely made knife,” Lazmet said.

“It would have done the job,” I said.

“Any fool with a hammer can smash in a skull, little daughter,” he said. I had forgotten how tall he was. Though I stood taller than most women, he still towered over me, as Ryzek had. And with his pale skin tinted green by the light through the jars of preservative, he looked like a rotting corpse. “I thought you more refined, based on upbringing alone.”

“My access was limited,” I said. “Trust me, I would have wrapped my mother’s blade in silk and crammed it in your eye socket if I had had unlimited resources.”

He released me halfway, so my arm fell to my side, and my posture straightened. I regained the use of my eyes, so I could blink and look at Akos, who sat motionless at his place at the table.

He had only been here for two weeks, if the information we had gotten from Ara was correct, but he had changed. He had always been lean, but his face was now gaunt, and if he had stood, I was sure the slight paunch that had made his waist soft was now gone. The bones in his wrists stood out like little rocks under the skin. He was paler than pale, as green in this light as my father was, and unkempt, like he had not bothered to bathe in several days.

I ached with hunger, with sympathy, and yes, with longing, even still, as I looked at him. Knowing that he hadn’t abandoned me just to return home and wait out the war had made it more difficult to be angry with him. Coming here had been stupid, but it had at least been for a greater purpose.

I stared at him, trying to get some kind of acknowledgment that I was standing right in front of him, and he stared back, but without recognition. He almost looked the way Eijeh had, after Ryzek had traded his first memory with him—like he didn’t know who I was, or where he was. Like someone had broken him and put him back together incorrectly.

“There is a saying from a Shotet cleric that seems apt, given the situation,” Lazmet said. He spun the knife on his palm, and caught it by the blade, offering it back to me, handle first. I gritted my teeth as the wriggling in my brain began again, and my hand extended, my fingers closing around the handle. “Only use a blade if you’re prepared to die by it.”

I shuddered, hard, as I realized what he was about to do. I fought the thing in my brain with every ounce of my strength as my hands both clasped the handle, turning the blade to face my own stomach. He had left my mouth free so that he could hear me scream, I was sure of it.

“Akos!” I yelled. “Touch him!”

“My son’s currentgift is not active at the moment,” Lazmet said. “But he is, of course, welcome to try.”

Akos had not moved. I watched as he swallowed, hard, and fixed his gaze on me.

“No,” he said quietly. “There’s no point.”

My hands pulled closer, and the tip of the blade touched my stomach—and somehow I had always known this was how death would find me, at the hands of my own family, and at the end of my own knife—

But though this felt familiar, and even expected, I refused to accept it.

It hadn’t occurred to me until then that though Lazmet controlled my muscles, he didn’t necessarily control my currentgift. And while I couldn’t control it that well, either, I knew that it was hungry to be shared—as ever, it wanted to devour everything in its path, even if what was in its path was me. The doctor my mother had taken me to when I was young had told me my currentgift was an expression of what I thought I deserved, and what I thought other people deserved: pain. Perhaps there was truth in that. Perhaps I was now learning that I didn’t deserve it as much as I had once thought. But regardless, I did know one thing: there was no other man in the galaxy who had earned pain more than the one who stood in front of me.

I didn’t send out a hesitant tendril, wondering if it would work. I threw my currentgift at Lazmet Noavek with all the force of my will, and a black cloud engulfed him like a swarm of insects. He screamed, without control, without the luxury of pride. The knife stopped moving toward my gut, but I couldn’t release it, either.

Then I heard a sharp pop as one of the jars on the shelves that lined the walls burst, like a balloon, its contents spurting over the floor. Another one shattered right after it, and another. Soon the air was pungent with the smell of long-preserved flesh and the light was changing from greenish to white. The floor was slick, and white lumps rolled this way and that. The wriggling in my brain subsided, and hands grabbed my shoulders from behind, dragging me backward.

I screamed, “No!” I had been so close, so close to killing him—

But the hands pulled me into the hidden hallway behind me, and once I was in the dark, I knew better than to try to run back. Instead I threw myself forward, spotting the bobbing of a knot of hair that told me it was Ettrek who had grabbed me. We ran, my father’s shouting chasing us into the shadows. I jumped down half a flight of stairs I knew was coming, and turned a sharp corner, only to find Yma Zetsyvis standing at the exit in the kitchen, her blue eyes wild.

“Come quickly!” she said, and together we ran to the back gate, where Teka was waiting, motioning us out.

Running through the streets around Noavek manor reminded me of the Sojourn Festival. My hand wrapped around Akos’s, my face itching from blue paint. Chasing him with water cupped in my hands, though it was raining down from above. And the quiet of afterward, when I stripped my blue-stained clothes in my bathroom and realized there was something calm and still inside me that hadn’t been that way since before my mother died.