The Fates Divide (Carve the Mark #2)(94)

Yma went to her in the way that only family could, wrapping her arms around her niece and clutching her close. I stood nearby, not willing to leave, but unsure how to stay. In more ways than one.

Sifa had walked over. Her hair was tucked into a bumpy braid, the same wavy-thick-smooth texture as my own.

“Did you know?” I said. I could have been asking about a dozen things, but I didn’t bother to clarify.

“I suspected. I am still not sure exactly what’s coming, or how to steer us. The situation has become . . . exponentially more complicated.”

My chin wobbled when I spoke next: “If you don’t know how to steer us . . . why did you come?”

“You won’t like my answer.”

As if that had ever mattered.

Sifa lifted a shoulder. “I came to be with you.”

Sifa—the woman who had abandoned her husband and children to the horror of murder and kidnapping, the woman who had coaxed her son into killing Vas Kuzar and allowed Orieve Benesit to die in the name of fate—had come here, not to maneuver, but just . . . to be with me?

I wasn’t sure whether to believe her or not, so I just nodded, sharply, and walked away.

The slant of light coming through the broken ceiling had taken on a burnt color, like still-cooling embers. That meant the day was done, with no plan, no path, no way back to Lazmet Noavek. Morning would come, and the time Isae Benesit had given us would run out.





CHAPTER 48: CISI


I WAKE WITH A sour taste in my mouth. I am not sure where I am. The last time I knew anything, I was in my bathroom with blood soaking my side, and Ast had just stabbed me. I thought I would die. But wherever I am, I don’t seem to be dead.

My tongue feels like it’s fuzzy. I cringe a little at the feeling. Someone sticks a straw between my lips, and I drink. Water fills my mouth, and I swish it around before swallowing.

And oh—swallowing hurts. Not my throat, but my stomach. It’s like someone tore right through my abdomen.

I open my eyes. I’m not sure why I expect to see the big crack that’s above my bed at home. When I was sick as a kid I used to think about what it was shaped like. A floater? A bird? I could never decide.

There’s no crack in this ceiling, though. The ceiling here is a moving image, like the ones in the walls at Assembly Headquarters. It shows a blue sky with puffy clouds drifting across it.

I lift a hand. There’s a patch of tech just under my knuckles. I can feel it, stinging a little as I wiggle my fingers. It’s probably monitoring my vitals, heart rate and temperature and blood sugar. There’s a little exit point on top of it, attached now to a tube with clear liquid running through it. Keeping me hydrated, I assume, though it’s not doing anything for the taste in my mouth.

“Miss Kereseth?”

I blink away the film covering my eyes and see a woman dressed in a crisp white uniform—shirt and pants—with a dark blue apron over the top of it. Her hair is tied back and secured with pins. She wears rubber gloves.

I feel unmoored. In my mind, I list the things I know. I am not at home. Judging by the ceiling, I am in a rich place. Assembly Headquarters? No, Othyr—Othyr is where we were last. I’m hurt. My stomach. It’s like someone tore right through my abdomen. . . .

I remember his face in the mirror, right next to mine. Someone did just that.

“Ast,” I croak.

“What?” The nurse frowns. “He’s not here right now—he came yesterday to check on you, though.”

He came to check on me? No, he came to make sure I was still unconscious, or in the hope that I was dead. A shiver runs through me. He was here while I was unconscious—what if he did something else, what if he tried to finish what he started? I imagine a pillow pressed to my mouth, a vial of poison tipped down my throat, stitches pulled from the wound in my abdomen until my guts spill out—

“No,” I say, and it comes out a growl. “No—Ast did it, Ast stabbed me—”

“Miss Kereseth, I think you’re confused, you’ve been out for a couple days—”

“I am not—”

“The security footage of your room was missing,” she says softly.

Of course it was, I think, but can’t say. Ast found a way to delete the evidence—!

“But they found the weapon, wiped of fingerprints,” she continues, “in the house of a man whose currentgift allows him to put on different faces. The Othyrian police suspect he was trying to kill the chancellor and got you instead.”

I squeeze my eyes shut. Of course. Ast plays at being too simple for politics, he senses currentgifts, he grew up with real-world smarts and contacts with seedy reputations, no doubt . . . of course he knew how to cover his tracks. He deleted the footage, misled the police, found a likely suspect to frame for the crime, planted the weapon. . . .

But why? Why would he take this risk? Just to be right? To get his way? Why did he even care so much about what happened to Thuvhe in this war?

“It was him,” I say with some difficulty.

Maybe, I think as I drift off again, it’s not Thuvhe he cares about, but Shotet.

Isae told me the story, once, of how she got the scars. I never asked her, because that wasn’t the sort of thing you just asked about. But she told me anyway.

We had been sitting on the old, grungy sofa in my school apartment. There were pots brewing on burners everywhere, so the corners of the room were full of vapor. We were in Shissa, so through the floor-to-ceiling windows on the far wall, all I could see were snowdrifts far below. My room was hardly even wide enough for me to stretch out my arms in both directions, but it had a good view.