Ariah (20 page)

Dirva is more mimic than I am, or at least a slightly different variant, because he picked up Droma in half the time it took me. He came with me to the markets, always close, protective, shepherding me away when curfew drew close. He spoke to me in Droma and helped me hone it. We took to speaking it at home. He told me he had been compelled by Vahnan Vinkenti the same way. He told me there are languages, sometimes, that feel like home. Some languages that have a siren’s call, and that Droma must be mine. He learned Droma, with its peculiarities, and he knew it was my home, and he did so without question or judgment. And it was a peculiar language: it was so very communal, with few pronouns and ways of speaking of the discrete, individualized self. There was little sense of “I” in Droma; much more focus was spent on an intoxicating and obliterating “we.” And there was the question of gender, too. It took me some time to parse it, but it became increasingly clear that the Droma did not understand themselves as men or women, but simply as people. The slaves in the city, likely as a means of survival, acknowledged that we divided ourselves as such, and they must have understood that we divided them that way, too, but in the conversations I overheard they only ever used variations on the word
voe—
the Droma word for “person”—to refer to other Droma and themselves. It fascinated me—how could something so fundamental and so obvious as gender go unseen among them? And what did it mean? How could I be myself without being a man? I wanted very much to understand it, but it was elusive and exotic and always just out of my reach. I couldn’t help but gender them while listening: that one is a male person who is speaking to a female person, went my thoughts.

It took me a month to absorb Droma, and another two weeks to regain my balance. After that I once again ventured to the Qin markets alone. I tracked the gold elves through the streets; I knew their rhythms, and I listened. And at first I was content to listen. Like elves everywhere, they traded gossip. This family broke Sabbath. This family’s Exalted Eye was not actually silver: it had been hocked to get a wayward son out of debt.

But on Saturday afternoons, when the markets teemed with Qin fresh from their devotions, many of the Droma found ways to get to the slave stages. You would not know they were there unless you knew where to look. They perched on roofs and awnings. They wedged themselves on window ledges. They slipped into the shadowed hollows under the stages themselves.

The stranded Droma soaked the songs up, these pieces of home. I haunted the slave stages, and I took down every Droma song I heard. The way they were sung gave credit to those who first composed them. They start with “Yalivva said to me” or “Vrisini told me that”—that sort of thing. As I collected more and more of them, I developed favorites. The things Shithilat said were quiet and full of stoic courage. The things Binnira said were simple but grandiose in the telling. And the things Halaavi said made me homesick for a world I’d never actually seen.

CHAPTER 14

“
Do you like poetry, Shayat?”

She propped her chin in her hand and smirked at me. Semadran passersby on the streets cut their eyes at us, and I blushed. She laughed. “Why, professor? Do you have a love poem for me?”

“
No.” I sighed at her and stared out at the street. She laughed again. “I just thought…I have heard that poetry and songs help you learn languages quicker.”

“
You heard that about me?”

“
No. You, like a general you.”

“
I know what you meant, professor.”

I sighed again. “You’re so juvenile.”

“
Well, you’re prissy. You think poems will work?”

“
I think they might work. I can’t say for sure. They might not. But they might work.” I pulled a small volume of Lothic poetry from my pocket and handed it to her. I had searched Dirva’s library specifically for a book that had few love poems in it. She flipped through it and found one anyway. She knew enough Lothic to read the incriminating title. She grinned at me, and I blushed. It was a typical thing between us. She knew, and I knew she knew, and the teasing, somehow, took the sting out of it. “This is purely educational.”

“
Oh, is it? You think you can teach me a thing or two?”

“
Oh, wouldn’t you like to know.”

She laughed. She had a brash, loud laugh, the kind that jerked attention to her. I grinned stupidly beside her. “My, my,” she said. She glanced over at me. “My, my. In front of my father’s house.”

“
Oh, I-I meant no disrespect, and honestly, Shayat, I…it was a joke, a badly told and ill-timed joke, and…”

She shook her head at me and laughed again, quieter and softer this time. “So, what am I supposed to do with these poems?”

“
Well, you read them. And you translate them. And you may want to recite them, because your pronunciation needs work.”

“
It’s a stupid language,” she said, but she tucked the book in the pocket of her robe.

“
City Lothic is better,” I said. She looked over at me, eyebrows raised, and I wished I hadn’t said anything. I couldn’t exactly articulate why, but the fervency of her curiosity about me scared me. “If this helps you, I’ll try to sneak an Athenorkos volume out of the Library.”

“
You wouldn’t dare.”

I had dared already. I had cased it, and I had learned which of the guards paid little attention to elves in workman’s clothes and which stopped everyone. I had, during my tenure as a lecturer at Ralah College, stolen some thirty books. Dirva had told me that I shouldn’t tempt fate, but he also read everything I brought back, and I was fairly certain he would pay the fees if I got caught with one. But I didn’t plan on getting caught. A smile flashed across my face. I think she saw it, and I think it confused her, but I couldn’t be sure. “Are you taking classes this term?”

“
No,” she said. She pulled the book of poems back out and flipped through the pages.

“
Why not?”

“
I can’t afford it. Besides, it’s just these two languages I want to learn, and I’ve got you teaching them to me for free.”

“
Free for you. Parvi’s losing time and labor and wool to me.”

“
He likes you. And he likes making your peculiar clothes. He gets bored of robes.”

This was, clearly, her way of asking me to remain on as her tutor. I knew her well enough, by then, to know she never asked for things directly and rarely even suggested. Mostly, she did what she did, and she left it up to the rest of us to decide whether or not to acquiesce. I left soon after that, but I left quite pleased that there was yet an excuse to see her week after week. And then the day got strange.

I had meant to go to the markets to steal more Droma songs, but I wound up at Dirva’s apartment instead. This was not a matter of veering slightly off course; Dirva’s apartment was embedded in the borough. It was in the opposite direction from the markets. I didn’t know then what had led me there, but I knew when I looked up and saw our building that whatever waited inside was not going to be pleasant. I felt it in my bones. And I was right.

I heard voices from the landing. I heard Dirva’s voice, muted by walls, quiet, and I heard Liro’s voice pierce through those walls, clear as a bell. “No, I don’t know why you sent it back!” he yelled. “It don’t make no sense! It must have cost you an arm and a leg to smuggle it back to the City. Why not just send a letter, Dirva? If you just wanted to say it was over, why not write me a cheap, easy letter?”

“
It belongs with you,” said Dirva.

“
It taunts me!” shouted Liro. “It dredges it all up, every single moment! I don’t want to face it every day!”

“
Then sell it! Sell it and make back what you spent smuggling it and yourself all the way here.”

I told myself it was best to give them space, but my body didn’t listen. Before I knew what I was doing, I was through the door. Against the wall was
The Reader.
It lay on its side, upended. Dirva and Liro stood close together in the middle of the room. There was a charge in the air, a yearning. I could feel it, how much both of them wanted the other, and I could feel the steely walls Dirva had thrown up. It all happened in an instant, and it overwhelmed me. I stumbled back against the door, disoriented, and Dirva rushed to my side. The tension in the room broke. He’d called me there to give himself a distraction, an escape.

“
He’s more than a bit shaper,” Liro said.

“
Please get some water,” Dirva said. Liro stepped into the kitchen. Dirva took my face in his hands. “Ariah. Ariah.” The smoothness of his voice, the palpable relief he felt at seeing me, pulled me back. I took hold of his forearms. “Build a wall.”

“
I can’t.”

“
Take a breath, take a moment, and build a wall,” he said. He said it without urgency, without pressure. My heart slowed. I felt my mind draw into itself, the curiosity pulling back in like a turtle to its shell. The trick is to feel yourself. I tracked my own heartbeat, let it grow loud and booming in my ears, a steady, doubled rhythm of me-ness.

Liro appeared next to Dirva, glass in hand. “He’s past training, and he’s like this still?”

Dirva said nothing. He took the glass and handed it to me. I slid down the wall and sat on the floor, drinking it, intently focused on the way the water felt sliding down my throat. I listened to their conversation distantly. Dirva said he and I were cut from the same cloth.

“
You’re not. Untrained shapers don’t fare well,” Liro said.

“
He’s no more than I am.”

“
The hell he isn’t.”

“
I’m more than you think.” This is what began to catch my attention. That he’d say this to Liro, that he’d speak so openly about himself and his gifts…it was a shock to me. “You don’t always notice,” he said. I drank more of the water, but I watched them now. Contained and separate, but only barely so, and still under the threat of a broken wall, I watched them.

“
Dirva, you got trained,” Liro said. There was a gentleness in his voice. “You’ve not trained him deep enough.” Dirva said nothing. He sighed. Liro took him by the arm and turned him slightly away from me. “You can’t keep pretending you’re not yourself. I know you never liked it, and hell, I wished you’d not left, but Vathorem was good for you. The way you came back…Dirva, you needed it. You were right to go. Give this kid what you got,” he said. He said it quickly, it a tight, low voice.

Dirva gently pulled his arm away. “You have never been good at taking your own advice.”

“
This is not about me.”

“
And it’s not about Ariah, either.”

A taut, cold anger lashed through Liro. It filled him up and spilled out into the room. I winced. “Yeah, all right, well, let’s talk on what this is about then.”

“
He has problems with walls, Liro.”

Liro swallowed. The muscles of his jaw twitched. He fought it back down. I drank more water. “We have to do this in front of your boy? Really, we do?”

“
I can’t send him out in this state.”

“
Did you bring him here, Dirva?”

Dirva didn’t answer. The silence was damning. Liro crossed his arms against his chest. There was a bottled bitterness in him that had me half-undone again. “This kid, you’re using him as a shield. This kid, he waited for you, and he broke himself down for you, and you are toying with him. It ain’t right, Dirva. You know it’s not right.”

The wall burst. I felt everything. I felt the loss, and I felt the guilt, and I felt the love and the hope and the tenderness and the wounds. I felt it all, and I felt it as a broken mess, and I couldn’t tell what belonged to whom or where I began and they ended. I lost a sense of time.

The next thing I remember is waking up late in the night. I was on my cot, still dressed, but I smelled of pipeherb. I had slept heavily; my limbs had the stiff soreness of a too-deep sleep. The gifts were at bay. The herb lingered in my blood just the slightest bit, but even a slight bit has its benefits. I heard them talking in the next room. The walls in the borough are thin, the buildings are cheaply made, and voices carry. I couldn’t help but listen. I hated myself for it, I tried to marshal the strength to leave the apartment, but I couldn’t do it. I heard every word.