Ariah (22 page)

“
Your family approves a match.” I blurted it out, mostly out of shock. He smiled at me. “Oh! Ah, I…Oh, Dirva, I…” I laughed. I grinned like an idiot. “Are you sure?”

“
I am.”

“
Your mother or Abira or Cadlah, they would…”

“
Maybe. Maybe they wouldn’t. But I am asking you.” I drew in a breath. He reached across the table. “Remember what I said!”

“
You’re sure about this?”

“
Yes. I said I was. You always ask so many questions. Ariah, you can think it over. You don’t have to answer now.”

“
Of course. Of course I will!”

“
You can think it over,” he said, but he grinned as he said it. His eyebrows knit together. “Considering these past few days, you didn’t even sleep here last night, if you need time…”

“
I don’t need time. Of course I will. Of course.” He hid his grin behind his hand. He nodded to me in thanks. I wanted very much in that moment to ask about Liro, to ask why he’d sought a match in the first place. I didn’t understand it. But he was happy then, happier than I had ever seen him. He looked, in that moment, like he’d shaken off the weight of his da’s death, and like he had no regrets and just a promising future. “It’s a good match?” I asked.

“
It is,” he said. There was a trace of surprise in his voice. “I truly think it is.”

“
When? When do I meet her? What is she like?”
And why?
I wanted to ask.
Why seek a match in the first place when you’ve had once since you were younger than me?
But those questions went unasked.

“
Soon. You’ll see when you meet her.” He hid another grin behind his hand and peered at me. “Thank you, Ariah.”

“
It’s an honor.”

“
The honor is mine.”

I beamed. I sputtered something incoherent. I think I repeated that it was an honor. I managed, after a few stilted seconds, to ask him if he had something else to talk about.

“
Ah, yes. Yes, there is,” he said. Some of his brightness dimmed. “It’s about your training. I thought about it. You’re right; Liro was right. I didn’t give you all the training you needed. I don’t know that I can give you all the training you need. And the other day, with Liro, when he said you were past your training, I saw your face, and you believed him.” He waited for me to say something, but there was a ringing in my ears. It was a thought, which had haunted me well before Liro had voiced it. I hadn’t wanted the shaper training, I’d sidestepped it, and over and over again the thought came to me that maybe the shaper in Ardijan had been wrong, that I should have had a different path, and that the window had closed on me. “Ariah, that’s not true. I don’t know where Semadrans got this idea, but it isn’t true.”

“
Magical theory says…”

“
Magical theory,” he said, “is just a theory. I never explained any of this because it’s complicated. And because I’m not very good at explaining things about myself. There had been little reason to until I took you in. Ariah, back in the City, Da found me a mimic to train with. I was like you: the shapers knew, but I hid it. They said they’d leave me alone if I wanted them to, and I wanted them to. Da knew, probably because he’d been raised here, but everyone else just thought I was smart, observant. Well, everyone except Liro. He…he knew, too.”

I had a guess as to how Liro found out, and I blushed. I couldn’t help it, and the embarrassment I felt at blushing in the first place made me burn a brighter red.

“
Yes. Well. They knew,” Dirva said quickly. “They knew, but no one else. My parents still don’t know. Falynn doesn’t know. Abira and Amran have suspicions, I think, but they’ve never asked. Cadlah only asked because you mentioned it as a secondary ability to Sorcha. In any case, what I’m trying to say is I was trained purely as a mimic at your age, solely as a mimic. I know I haven’t trained you well with the other gift, but I’ve given you something. I didn’t even have that. I refused it. It got to be too much. I couldn’t…I couldn’t stand to be around my family. You’ve been around them. They were too much. I couldn’t stand to leave the borough. I was a raw nerve around Qin, around Inalans. The musicians’ district was overwhelming, especially if I heard a bard playing. All the bards are is loss. I couldn’t stand to be with Liro anywhere but his place. There were looks, slurs, and I felt it all. I ran from it, Ariah, and it isolated me. I got through the days stoned, but I’ve never liked herb, I don’t like the way it feels. It was…it was an unpleasant time.”

His voice had grown rougher, darker, the longer he spoke. He stood abruptly from the table and put on a second pot of tea. The rest of it he told me with his back to me, pulled inward, walls creeping up. “Da had an interesting life. He’d been many different men before he was my da, and he knew people all over. During the rebellion he’d lived in Susselfen. He had worked with some of the rebels. He knew people who knew people, who knew Vathorem, who he knew to be a shaper outside the City. The queen’s right hand. He pulled strings, he got Vathorem interested, and he arranged travel. All in secret. I was not in a state to handle a confrontation. You may understand. What I’m trying to say is that training has no window. Vathorem was older than me when he was trained. I was as old as you are now. As you know, I have mastery of it. If you would like mastery of yours, I would suggest you see Vathorem. It is a way to get the training without the label.”

“
But he’s in Vilahna,” I said. I think what I meant was,
he wasn’t Dirva
. That I didn’t know how to have a second mentor, that I didn’t know how to break off from the one I had.

Dirva glanced at me over his shoulder while the water rose to a boil. “Yes. I would understand not wanting to go there alone, to an unknown person. I have a way, I think, for you to make an informed decision. Should you approve the match, there would be a wedding. He is someone I would invite to the wedding. We are close. We write,” he said. This was, actually, news to me. Even though I picked up what I thought was all of Dirva’s correspondence, it was news to me. “I have mentioned you. What I am saying is that you may need space from me, and you may need training for what you’re finally willing to admit you’ve got, and he may be a solution to both.”

“
Can I think on it?”

“
You will have months to think on it.”

* * *

I had, perhaps, two days to dwell on the choices ahead of me before life sprang up. The term at Ralah began, and I was to teach Athenorkos and Lothic again. I was on probation, watched carefully, but they had retained my position. This time around, I had no Semadran students at all. Shayat increased our tutoring schedule to three times a week, citing the fact that she wasn’t in classes any longer and that once a week seemed insufficient. I had to agree with her. A week and a half into the term, a few hours before curfew, Dirva and I stood at the door of the matchmaker’s house. He carried a bottle of Semadran wine in his hand, and he stood taut, and he stood smiling.

The matchmaker’s house was deep in the heart of the borough, only a block away from the schoolhouse. I wondered if she had papers. Many shapers don’t; many burn them, go underground, to avoid Qin assignments. We protect them. They are powerful, and they are fragile, and the community rallies for them. I wondered what my life would have been like if the Ardijan shaper had thrust me into this path. I wondered what it must be like to be a matchmaker but yet be closed off from marriage. So many shapers turn matchmaker. I don’t know that I would have done well with that, being faced day after day with a thing and a life I wanted but could never have. Dirva could feel the thoughts the matchmaker’s house kicked up in me. “Ariah,” he whispered. “Shh.” I tried to focus on the rhythm of my breath with limited success.

Dirva did not knock on the door; the matchmaker already knew we were there. She was approaching middle age, a thin woman with a sharp nose. Her hair was cut short, and her clothes were threadbare and a size too large. She had a willful carelessness about her own presence that intrigued me. She had that imperious remoteness of a trained and polished shaper, a sense of remove, which permeated the air around her. She was a fortress. She looked at me, and it burned me alive. I gasped. I held onto the door frame for support. “Another like you, Dirva.”

“
He is not here for that,” Dirva said. He stepped slightly in front of me. He had grown steely. He did not like her.

She turned and walked into the house. “Such arrogance,” she said.

Dirva followed her, and I followed him. She led us to a back room in the house and pointed to a couch. “She will be here soon,” the matchmaker said. She left the room without looking at either of us.

I sat next to Dirva on the couch. “Who is she?”

“
A matchmaker.”

“
Which one?”

“
Shayma Hepzah’Brahim.”

The name was familiar. She was well known in the community, highly respected. A well-known shaper invariably has two qualities: prodigious talents and a deep sense of discretion. This meant she knew about Dirva, and his secrets, and that he had chosen her because he knew she would keep those secrets from his match. “Why doesn’t she like you?”

“
The same reason she doesn’t like you. The same reason no shaper will ever like you, Ariah,” he said gently.

Some minutes later, the door opened again. The matchmaker came in first, her face a perfect, empty mask. She carried four wineglasses in her hands. My heart beat a fast rhythm when I saw them. Just behind her was a young woman dressed in factory coveralls. There was grease on the elbows of her suit, and her hair was wrapped in a Semadran headscarf. She lit up when she saw Dirva. She and the matchmaker sat on the couch across from us. The matchmaker opened Dirva’s bottle of wine and poured it. All eyes turned to me.

I did not really know what I was supposed to do. Typically it’s your parents that bless the match, and if they are your parents, it means they’ve already been matched themselves and seen the blessing done. I only knew of the process secondhand, through hearsay. I looked at the matchmaker, helpless, frozen. She blinked, but it was a blink that communicated a good deal of impatience and frustration. “There will be introductions,” she said, “and you will ask your questions. You and Dirva may speak in private. You make a decision. The courtship either proceeds, or it ends. If it proceeds, we drink the wine.” Her voice was soft and clipped and as expressionless as her face.

“
Right. Thank you. I have never done this.”

“
I know.”

“
Of course you know. I just…I don’t want to get it wrong. I don’t…” Dirva laid a hand on my arm. I calmed a little. I looked over at his match, and she looked back. Even in the factory clothes, she had an elegance to her. She had regal features. She held out a hand to me. “Nisa. Nisa Sidera’Chadan. You’re Ariah?”

She had a strong handshake. “Yes.”

“
He speaks of you often.”

“
Oh, well.” I laughed nervously. “We’re cut from the same cloth. You do know why I’m here, yes?”

She gave me a strange look. “Yes, I do. The date has been set for weeks.”

“
Right! Yes! I, uh, I mean that…it doesn’t matter what I meant. It doesn’t matter. So, I…” I cut a glance at Dirva. I lost my train of thought and found it again. “Questions! I’m to ask you questions. Let’s see. You have a factory assignment?”

“
I do,” she said. “Prototypes. Engineering. I’m in the workshops, not the assembly line. Train work. Engine work.” She leaned forward slightly, conspiratorial, sly. “Chasing the dream, you know. Perpetual motion.”

“
Are you getting very close?”

She laughed. “And work myself out of this placement? No.”

There was an odd silence. I remembered suddenly that I was the one asking the questions. “Where are you from?”

“
Here. Rabatha. I’ve never been anywhere else.”

I struggled for more questions. Everything I wanted to ask seemed rude or was rude. I wanted to know what gifts she had. I wanted to know what her politics were, and if she had ever been arrested, and what she had been arrested for. I wanted to ask her what she was like, but it seemed a strange question to ask. Failing that, I wanted to read her. It was hard not to. Frankly, I was a bit useless. I turned to Dirva. “May we speak in private?”