Ariah (3 page)

The thing that was strange about this was that he and I grew quite close. Well, that’s not so strange. A man is usually quite close to his mentor; it’s a pity when a mentor and a student don’t bond. What’s strange is that we grew quite close, we bonded, and he wove me into the fabric of his life—but that as well as I knew him, I knew virtually nothing about his past. It never occurred to me to ask. He was a single man, just him and me in his apartment. He kept me as busy as he kept himself, so I had little time to ponder him. I got used to him, and I forgot to wonder about his blood and black hair and foreign spices. He was just Dirva. That’s just who he was. I think part of me didn’t want to ask. To him I was just Ariah, just myself. He never asked me about my green eyes. It didn’t matter to him. I wanted the strangeness of him to not matter to me in turn.

I spent four years in Rabatha with Dirva. By my last year of training, I was happy and comfortable and making good progress. He groomed me to become a linguist like him, perhaps to be placed in an important city when my time with him was up. I felt very potentially important. I think he was happy and comfortable, too. But then his past came knocking, and life grew much more complicated.

His sister did not tell him she was coming to see him. We found her asleep on his doorstep. His apartment then was a bachelor’s apartment: he had no family to insulate from the Qin, so he lived in a set of three rooms carved out of the attic of a building which housed a smuggler fronted by an ink-and-stationery shop on the first floor, the smuggler herself on the second, and Dirva on the third. The building sat on the outer edge of the district where the Semadran shopkeepers congregated. It was not an obvious place or one that was particularly easy to find, and in fact it did not even have his address listed outside. The only sign that the third floor had an apartment was a set of narrow, iron stairs discreetly bolted to the back of the building, which led to a small landing at Dirva’s door. He had his mail addressed to the ink shop. His sister must have known where he lived. She must have had more than an address, because it would have taken a measure of familiarity with the district in Rabatha to know where to look. More likely, she had to have been there before to have found it.

We didn’t see her until we came around the back of the building. It was deep winter the day she arrived and getting on towards dusk. The days in Rabatha never get properly cold, but at night the temperature drops like a stone. “We have a vagrant,” I said.

Dirva looked up. She was wrapped in a patched coat up to her ears. Her white hair was the only thing visible. I could tell by the way her clothes hung on her that she was not a large person. The white hair and her size made me think she was a half-grown runaway seeking shelter in the district. Possibly a nahsiyya. Possibly an escaped slave from the Qin parts of town. In any case, I had assumed she was at least mostly Semadran. Dirva knew better. He cursed, which was exceedingly rare for him. “It’s not a vagrant,” he said. “It’s my sister.”

He started up the stairs before I could ask him about it. I scrambled up the stairs after him, and between the two of us, we made a bit of a racket. The figure in the doorway stirred. She pulled her head up and blinked. Her skin was very pale, a milky white. Her cheeks had a smattering of freckles across them. Her eyes were elvish—flat, broad pupils, no whites—but the pupils were ringed in a steely gray. Where Dirva’s face was narrow and angular, his sister’s was round and wide. His eyes were almond-shaped, one of the few decidedly Semadran things about him, but hers were ovals with deep folds. His nose was thin, hooked, and hers was flat. They looked nothing alike. I saw absolutely no family resemblance. She grinned. Her face lit up when she grinned, her emotions so raw and uninhibited that it embarrassed me. She had a grin that made me feel like I’d eavesdropped. “Lor! Was wondering when you’d get home.”

She spoke in City Lothic, which I’d never heard spoken before. Dirva spoke City Lothic back. He pinched his forehead with one hand and rested the other on his hip. “Abbie, what are you doing here?”

She pulled herself upright. She was short. She had a roundness to her, frankly outlined by her close-cut City-style clothes, which embarrassed me further. She shrugged on her coat and ruffled her short, white hair. “Came to see you, you daft bastard. What else would I be doing here? What, not happy to see me? Been ages.”

Dirva’s eyebrows drew together, then apart, then together again. The corners of his eyes crinkled. I could feel a ripple of contradictory emotions flicker through him. He frowned at me and I marshaled my rough skills to pull the shaping back. “I am happy to see you. Of course I am happy to see you. But there’s a catch, I know there is.” His sister’s grin turned canny. He sighed and hugged her, and then he unlocked the door.

She stared at me as he unlocked the door. It was different than the stares I usually get, something more penetrating. More overtly judgmental. It made me extremely uncomfortable.

“
Hey, Lor?”

“
Yes, Abbie?”

“
Who’s this little copper shit you got following you about?”

Dirva sighed and held the door open for her. “He speaks Lothic. He can hear you. Please stop insulting him.”

She hovered in the doorway, still looking me over as she gathered her things. “So what’s your story, kid?”

I blinked. I opened my mouth, and then closed it again. Dirva pulled her into his apartment by her elbow. She half-stumbled through the doorway, head cocked to one side, watching me too closely, like I was a potential threat. Dirva’s sister, who had the improbably Semadran name of Abira, declared herself hungry as soon as she stepped inside. She found Dirva’s armchair, the single comfortable piece of furniture in the apartment, and curled up in it. She was dusty from travel and left a trail of sand wherever she went. She seemed bored and playful, and I was left at her mercy when Dirva went to go start dinner. I took a seat at the table and made a pretense of sorting through Dirva’s correspondence. There was nothing to sort through, just a handful of already-opened envelopes, and I could feel her watching me. The shaper in me fought to the forefront of my mind, reaching out to her, as curious about her as she was about me. I kept my eyes pinned to the envelopes. They passed through my hands, one after another after another in a steady, unending, and pointless march. I could feel her canniness, her curiosity. I hated the way she studied me; it made me feel meek and trapped. Periodically, she shouted something to Dirva, questions and quips for which I had no context, but her voice was distracted, and I knew I was what she really wanted to ask about.

I had hoped that when Dirva laid out the food that she would turn her attentions to him. After all, they hadn’t seen each other in at least four years and likely much longer. I thought, perhaps, that her interest in me was a placeholder until he came back again. He sat down next to me and pulled the mail from my hands. He waved her over, and Abira sat on his other side, right across the table from me. I very much wanted to slink into the other room. I paid far more attention to my food than was strictly necessary.

Abira leaned across the table, her head cocked to one side. Her hair was fine and straight; it slid in lazy waves across her forehead, this way and that as she moved. She had hair like mine, but her brother’s was coarse and tightly curled. “Kid, you are a copper, yeah?”

I glanced up and back down again, blinking fast. “I’m sorry, miss—”

“
Miss?” she said, cocking an eyebrow. She turned to Dirva. “He’s a proper one, eh?”

“…
a copper what?” I stammered.

“
It’s City slang for someone with mixed parentage. Someone with Athenorkos and Semadran blood,” Dirva said. He waved at both of us. “Eat.”

I couldn’t eat. My stomach was in knots. I took a piece of bread and tore it slowly to pieces. Abira dove into to the food, eating with a passion that precluded table manners. She kept talking to me and about me regardless of how full her mouth happened to be. “Still odd as all hell. What’s your name, kid?”

“
Ariah,” I said quietly.

“
That mean anything in tink-speak?” she asked.

Dirva frowned at her. “It means wild. Don’t say it like that.”

Abira snorted. “Gah, you’re a quarter, tops.”

“
I’ll throw you out. I know it’s hard for you to show respect to anything, Abbie, but you’ll have to find a way to do it.”

Abira started to say something, thought the better of it, and went back to her food. “Don’t seem wild to me,” she said after a second. I hated that I was once again the topic of conversation. I had hoped that she would continue to press Dirva on whatever old nerve she had just pressed so that they would fight, and I could slip away.

“
He isn’t. Ariah’s very, very well-mannered. Unlike you,” Dirva said, grinning at her.

“
Manners are overrated,” she said. “Like education.”

Dirva’s grin evaporated. He tapped the fingers of his left hand on the table, a gesture I had come to notice—after four years at his side—meant he was holding his tongue. “Abbie, please.”

“
Rest of us turned out just fine,” she said. Dirva’s jaw clenched tight. He went to the faucet for a glass of water. Abira once again turned her attentions to me. “How old are you?”

“
Thirty-four.”

“
And he’s just got you stuck up here day and night with your nose in a damn book, eh? What a waste of youth. Gah, when Lor there was your age, he was…”

“
He doesn’t need to know, Abbie,” Dirva said sharply from the other side of the kitchen.

Abira raised her eyebrows. “Oh, someone’s a might protective. Guess he’s red enough after all.”

Dirva’s head whipped around. “He is my student.” His voice was a touch too even, too controlled. It made me uneasy.

“
Bet you’re giving him all sorts of lessons, eh?”

“
Don’t,” he said.

I looked over at him. It happened by itself, thoughtlessly. We made eye contact, and I could feel it: shame and fear and a hot, visceral anger. I’d read him before when he’d been upset, but I’d never picked up anything like that from him. I sat up a little taller. My eyebrows shot up of their own accord, a hundred questions leapt to my tongue, and then I grew protective. Tentatively, very slowly, I reached out and tapped Abira’s arm. “I’m a quarter Athenorkos,” I said. I spoke Lothic, but Coastal Lothic. It’s a flat language with none of the colloquial flair of City Lothic. I have never particularly liked speaking it. “My mother’s mother was Athenorkos. My mother’s father was a cartographer with a caravan. He met her in Susselfen and brought her to the Empire.”

She turned to me, surprised that I’d spoken. “Yeah? I know a fella back in the City whose folks were like that. Must’ve been a grand romance, them. Can’t imagine coming here to all these rules you lot lay down for yourselves were it not grand.”

Dirva leaned against the counter with his eyes closed. I felt that he was grateful, but I couldn’t have told you why I got that impression. I don’t think it had to do with the gifts. I think I just knew him well by then, and sometimes, when you know someone well enough, you can tell how they feel without magic. I pushed on. “I don’t know. My mother’s father was killed before I was born. She didn’t talk about him much. But she did say she’d take the constraints of the silver over the war in the South.”

Abira nodded and ran a hand through her hair. “Well, hell. No arguing with that. My pa ran from that war. Always seemed a smart move to me. Hey, want to split a pipe?”

She was not talking about tobacco. “Oh. No, thank you.”

“
Gah, just silver through and through, green eyes or not, eh? Hey, Lor, smoke with me for old times’ sake, yeah?”

“
No, Abbie.”

Abira sighed and leaned back in her chair, craning her neck to look at him. She was a small person, but she was the kind to take up as much space as possible. “Why not? Long trip. Could stand to take the edge off. And you should loosen up.”

“
It’s illegal here.”

“
I know.”

“
You could have been thrown in jail.”

“
I wasn’t though, was I? Be a shame to take all that risk and not savor it. Would make sense to smoke it all up here before I risk crossing the border with it in tow a second time, eh?”

“
There is a child in the house; it’s irresponsible,” Dirva said.

Abira looked me over, a quick flick of her eyes that measured me and summed me up. I’d seen Dirva do the same thing when meeting new Qin bureaucrats or Lothic dignitaries. “Hell, he’s mostly grown, and it’s not like that stopped our folks back in the day anyway. C’mon. It’s City-grown, can’t get any better.”