Ariah (15 page)

Dirva was thin. His face when he looked up at me was gaunt: all cheekbones and hollow eyes. His beard was slightly unkempt, and his hair was longer than I’d ever seen it. The weeks had been rough for him, but he retained his steely dignity. He looked anything but frail. “Ariah, may I speak with you?”

Sorcha darted close. “You can tell him no.”

I couldn’t tell him no. I let go of Sorcha’s hand. “Of course, sir.”

Dirva stood and pointed to the door. Sorcha told me again I didn’t have to speak with him, but I tucked my chin into my chest and followed Dirva out the door. He walked us to the shadow of Sanctuary. The window was open, and I could hear the shouts of the prisoners and the prayers of the desperate. “I have only just realized what day it is,” he said. “Your training has ended.”

“
It’s strange, the way things can end before they’ve finished,” I said. Sorcha had rubbed away a good deal of my meekness.

Dirva looked at me, surprised, somewhat amused. “Yes, it is strange the way that happens. Cadlah tells me you’ve done well by the squat house.”

“
It’s done well by me.”

He studied me for a moment. “You are not the same as you were.”

I looked away. It was both a compliment and a condemnation. It stirred in me a thousand feelings, none of which I knew what to do with. “May I ask why you’re here?”

“
I don’t know,” he said quietly. He sighed. “This is not a good place for me. There is little left for me here. I will return to Rabatha soon. I suppose I…I am here to see if you want to return with me.”

And then what?
my heart screamed at him.
Return for what? Return to what?
My training was over. My few promising contacts were lost, and I saw no way out of the factories. If I even made it far enough into the Empire to get conscripted into the factories. There was a good chance I would be detained at the border this time. I had nothing to bribe the Qin with. My voice locked in my throat. I stared at him for a long time. I felt a hard-edged, wild anger in me; the kind of anger that only comes from a well of urgent love.

“
I will think on it,” I said. I said it in his voice, exactly the way he’d said it to me weeks before.

Dirva raised his eyebrows. Again, he studied me like he’d never seen me before. I had a moment of uncertainty then—was I really that different now? What did it mean to be different? What did it mean that I felt largely the same? If I couldn’t tell, maybe I’d lost my footing. Maybe I still needed him. Maybe I still needed the Empire.

“
Yes,” he said. “You should think on it. I will be at Liro’s until the end of the month. I will be there if you need to speak again,” he said.

CHAPTER 10

When I came back inside, Sorcha wanted to know everything that had happened. I told him. Sorcha is a very canny man, a man who has an instinctive knack for other people. He has always asked me probing questions, ones to which I have no answers. And I know he had a host of them, and because I felt very raw just then, I decided to head them off. “Let’s smoke,” I said. “Let’s smoke a lot.” And we did.

We smoked on the platform for hours. It was high summer then, and the only relief from the terrible heat is the dry, sandy summer winds. The height of the buildings and the way they’re placed one on top of another serves to funnel these scratching winds through the streets. They move with a ferocious velocity. We sat on the platform wrapped in high-collared quilted vests in the sweltering heat, remnants of a fashion the refugee Athenorkos had brought with them from the cooler, wetter climes of the land south of the mountains. When Sorcha dragged me inside, my face and hands were covered in a film of dust. The sand coated my hair. I had smoked enough by then that I had grown passive and insensate. He had me strip off my sandy clothes, wash my face and hands and hair, and then piled me into the bed. I assumed he was going to pile in after me. I think I imagined he had. But the truth was that he lingered until I fell asleep, which likely only took a bare handful of seconds, and then he struck out on his own.

He woke me well after night had fallen. I had slept the majority of the day and woke bleary-eyed and disoriented. “Ariah! Ariah, damn it, wake up!” he hissed in my ear. He was crouched over me, shaking my shoulder to and fro. When I opened my eyes, he pulled me upright. “You awake?”

“
Yeah.”

He squinted at me. Light from the clockwork lamp flooded the room. I blinked at the unwanted brightness.

“
You sober?”

“
Uh, yeah. I think so. What time is it?”

“
Late,” he said. “Or early. I don’t know. Look, that don’t matter none. Look, I got something to ask you. You awake?”

I broke free of his grasp and rubbed my eyes. “Yeah. I’m awake. What’s going on?”

“
I got something to ask you.”

“
Well, ask it.”

He bit his lip. Nervousness poured out of him. “Right. So. I’ll, uh…I’ll just come out with it. I don’t think you should go with him. I don’t want you to go with him. You know you got a place here. In case you don’t, I talked to Caddie and she says you’ve got a place here as long as you follow the rules, and she said she can’t imagine you not following them. I can’t either. And in case that’s not what you want, I’ve got other options. I mean, I know this place is no palace, right? So if you’re thinking of heading out with him ’cause of that—’cause this place is in shambles—you’ve got another option. I know folks going to Vilahna. A crew, and every crew could use another good violinist, yeah? So there’s Alamadour. You and I, we could go to Alamadour if you didn’t want to stay here. You don’t have to go with him. What do you think?”

“
I don’t know,” I said.

Sorcha frowned. He leaned away from me. “You don’t know?”

“
I don’t know.”

“
What don’t you know?”

“
It’s a lot to think on,” I said. “I can’t decide just like that.”

“
Why not?”

“
Because it’s a lot to think on.”

Sorcha let out a frustrated noise and fell back against the wall.

“
Why are you mad at me?”

“
I’m not mad. I just…really? You really got to think on it? He’s a leaver, Ariah. Up and left us and Liro, and he up and left you for months. I been here. I’m the one you called a ghalio, not him, and I’m still here. What, loyalty counts for nothing with you?”

Loyalty actually counts for very much with me. But loyalty is not a one-sided thing, and it’s rarely an even thing between two people, and despite all that had transpired I was still quite loyal to Dirva. It was the fact that I was loyal to Sorcha, too, that complicated things. “I’m not saying no! I’m saying I need time to think. That’s all. A day or two to think about it. I wouldn’t need that time if I didn’t want to go with you.”

He cut his eyes at me, petulant, like a half-grown boy. “You wouldn’t need time to think if you didn’t want to go with him, too, eh?”

“
It’s complicated. It’s not just him. My parents are still there. I owe them…I don’t know what I owe them, but if I went with you I’d be throwing something away. It’s not just you or him. It’s all of it. Just let me think, yeah?”

Emotions flickered across his face: anger, resignation, a stray burst of happiness, resignation again. “Yeah, all right. Yeah, think on it long as you want.”

And I did. I left him there in the room and went to the platform. The summer night was warm. I needed space from Sorcha to make the decision; I think we both knew that instinctively, and I think it’s one reason he pushed me so hard for an answer as soon as he asked. But, to his credit, when I took the space, he didn’t intrude.

My mind is indecisive, wretchedly so, but my heart is not so patient. I approached the problem from a hundred different angles, but over and over the same thought came to me unbidden. Dirva thought on it and opened the door again. The possibility of redemption, I think, is embarrassingly seductive to me. I worried about what would happen to him if he returned to his life in Rabatha alone, with no one there to ground him. Just after dawn I struck out for Liro’s house. It was early yet and the streets were empty. The day was already hot. I was sweating when I knocked on the door.

Liro answered. He was dressed severely, in a loose Semadran tunic and loose Semadran trousers. He looked like a living mockery dressed like that. It struck me as brave for him to have dressed like that. Liro himself seemed unfazed by his choice of clothing. He grinned at me. “I called it,” he said, mostly to himself. “Dirva, I called it,” he yelled over his shoulder. He opened the door for me and ushered me inside.

Dirva was on the couch, drinking tea. He stared at me for a second, caught and frozen. He shot an acid look at Liro, which made Liro laugh. “There is no need to gloat.”

“
The hell there isn’t.” Liro patted me on the shoulder as he let himself out.

Dirva and I stared at each other for a moment, then simultaneously looked anywhere but at each other. I was the first to break the silence. “I haven’t decided.” My voice shook, half with bravado and half with nerves. “I have some questions.”

“
That’s fair,” Dirva said. “Do you want to sit?”

I shifted my weight from one foot to the other. The questions came out in a steady stream. “Are you going back alone? You’re going back without Liro? What about your family? Aren’t things still tense between you and Falynn? Why did you need so much time to think? Why ask me to go back with you? The training’s over. What is back there for me with you?”

“
If you choose not to come with me, I’ll go to Rabatha alone,” he said.

“
Are you sure that’s wise?” I asked.

He stared into his teacup. “I am sure that is what I will do.”

“
Why did you come and find me after so long?”

“
I meant to speak to you before your birthday,” he said, “but I have been distracted. It is not easy for me to forgive. It’s a failing of mine, and it always has been. When you spoke to me that day, I knew you’d never see me the same way. Liro says that is the nature of things; he says we are all constantly evolving. But he doesn’t live the way I do, and the life I’ve chosen requires discretion. And now you know.” He sighed. “I came and found you after so long because I am the one who brought you here. And because I didn’t finish your training. I came and found you because we have both wronged each other, and because after all those years of feeding you and teaching you, it seems a waste to go on wronging each other. I am not a young man. I am too old to be this self-righteous. One of us had to offer peace, and it needed to be me.”

* * *

Sorcha took the news better than I thought he would. He was stoic about it, and he wrapped himself up in a carefully constructed nonchalance. I had prepared myself for the worst and had approached him with a gentle caution one typically reserves for injured animals or the sick and elderly. I sat across from him on the bed we shared and took his hands. “I don’t know if I’ll stay there,” I said slowly, “but I have to go back.”

He pulled his hands from mine. “Yeah, all right. How long ’til you go?”

“
Two weeks, I think.”

He nodded. Sorcha leaned back against the wall, his head tilted up in some slight cocky defiance. He smirked. “You know you’re walking yourself into a trap, yeah?”

“
He doesn’t have anyone else, Sorcha.”

He raised his eyebrows at me. “Well, who’s at fault for that? And it’s not like he’s the only one who needs you.”

“
I know. I’m sorry. But I’m the only one he needs right now.”

Sorcha smiled, but it was a private smile, one that was unreadable to me. It surprised me to see he still had hidden corners, that there were parts of him I didn’t know. “Two weeks, you said?” I nodded. “Well, let’s not waste them. Kiss me.”

“
Sorcha, no.”

He rested his head on my shoulder. “Hell, it was worth a shot.”

The day I left, Sorcha pulled that deliberate nonchalance back on like a coat of armor. He skipped his morning set with Prynn to stay with me. We checked and double-checked my things against lists I had made. He made me take an extra set of his clothes. Dirva and I had agreed to meet at the East Gate, and I’d said my goodbyes to the Natives and various members of Sorcha’s family the day before, so Sorcha had my last morning in the City all to himself. We smoked a final bowl together. We talked about how I’d miss pipeherb back in Rabatha. He asked to see my papers and scolded me for being honest enough to list myself as a shaper. I told him I hadn’t known better until I’d tried to leave the Empire.