Ariah (10 page)

Dirva’s return was something that threw this family out of balance. It was unexpected, and it was unsettling. I think they thought they knew him better than they did. They had an idea of who he was which calcified into family lore over the years of his absence, and his return did not fit neatly into the mold they had cast for him. It brought out buried hatchets. It raised ghosts of half-remembered childhood rivalries. The family dinners I attended were storms with Dirva at the center, but Dirva himself seemed peculiarly unaffected. He paid very little attention to anyone but his da, and his da paid little attention to anyone but Dirva.

His da was Semadran, but only skin deep. He wore his hair long and unbound like a red elf. Even very old and very weak, he shaved daily. Like the rest of Dirva’s siblings, he was a man who made his way through shady dealings. He was a forger. He sat on the left of Dirva’s father; their hands stayed clasped as they ate. They were old men who had loved each other much of their lives, and the love was a thing so deeply woven into both that I could not find a way to understand who either of them were apart from it. Believe me, I tried. I was, as I have said, very young then. It was a relationship I could not yet understand, one that did not make any sense to me. I studied them—fascinated, disgusted, fascinated by my own disgust. Dirva sat at the left of his da, their chairs pulled close and conspiratorial. They spoke Semadran with each other, and his da was the only one of the family to call him Dirva instead of Lorcani. When they were together, Dirva’s face broke open, relief painted across it, comfort etched in every line. He looked young with his da. He looked sweet and full of life. He looked like the boy in the painting. And his da responded to him with an equal fervor, a matched love. Dirva was his favorite: it was unequivocally, unabashedly a fact of the family, and perhaps one that the other members of the family had tried to forget while Dirva was gone.

But Dirva had come back. This old man was dying, the life leaking out of him second by second no matter what Falynn did, and in Nuri’s final days all that seemed to matter to him was Dirva. He was dying, leaving many children behind, but Dirva was the one who had his attention. The pair of them cloistered themselves together, living those missing twenty-five years together in the space of weeks while Dirva’s brothers and sisters looked on.

Those family dinners were extremely hard on me. The shaping has always been harder for me to handle than the mimicry, though neither has ever been easy, and those dinners were a thicket of traps and thorns I could not navigate on my own. I drowned in the jealousies, the tensions, the bright spots of laughter. I felt too much at those dinners: those dinners were the meeting place of too many people living full, complex lives, and they were the site of grief and mourning. There is a reason why known shapers notoriously avoid funerals. The reason is that a place like that, with all the weight and the woven emotions, is a place where the gift threatens to swallow its host whole. I felt the emotions of Dirva’s family so much, so deeply, that at times a sigh of disappointment caused me literal physical pain. But I kept going because, except in very rare circumstances, I only saw Dirva during those dinners. I needed to see him. I needed to see he had not fallen apart.

I had thought, before I went to the first one and saw his entire family assembled with all their tangled histories and threaded presents in that tiny, cramped apartment deep in the South Quarter, that I knew what I was getting into. I remember some years ago a mundane friend of mine told me that those of us with magical gifts are arrogant. We know slightly more than the mundane, she said, so we think we know everything about everyone. And she’s right. I knew Athenorkos. I knew by then that Athenorkos and Semadran, as languages, are peculiar mirror images: Semadran is a language of fastidious precision; when you say something in Semadran, you’re trying to communicate the objective truth about a concept as specifically as possible. We are known for the complexity of our sentence structure and the breadth of our vocabularies. But sometimes truths are simple and can be best expressed simply. For a Semadran, the family is one such simple thing: mother, father, sister, brother, son, daughter. That’s all. There’s no word for cousin, for example, just a qualification that whoever it is you’re speaking about is your mother’s brother’s son. Instead of grandfathers, we have our mother’s father. We have small families. Factory assignments cause us to settle in areas far away from our natal homes, so you don’t find many dense familial networks among my people. We have no need for nuance in such relationships because we keep them as simple as possible. Divorce and remarriage is unheard of. Children are not born out of wedlock. Your father is always your mother’s husband; it’s as simple as that. That is the world I was born to.

But I knew that Athenorkos was different, and I thought that by knowing the language I understood the people. Holistically speaking, Athenorkos is a fascinatingly simple language, one with few descriptors. Speakers of Athenorkos rely almost exclusively on nouns and verbs. I find the clarity of it somewhat intoxicating. The purity of the language, its simplicity, evaporates with the family. A Semadran is faced with a mind-boggling number of names for the complex, reflective, shifting relationships the red elves have to each other. Siblings can be full (meaning you share both biological parents) or half (meaning you share your mother) or split (meaning you share your father) or linked (meaning you bear no actual biological relation, but you regard this person as a sibling because of his or her relation to your biological parents; for example, if your half sibling’s father has a child with another woman and the two of you are raised in the same household). There are close-links and far-links. There is an elaborate typology of relationship structures: romps (fleeting physical relationships with little emotional interaction), flings (short-lived relationships with a highly emotional component that end amicably), tosses (short-lived relationships with a highly emotional component that end badly), joinings (the Athenorkos equivalent of marriage), broken bonds (essentially a divorce), knots (several individuals all married to each other), and tangles (a messy sort of arrangement of those engaged in joinings and broken bonds). I was fluent in Athenorkos. I thought that meant I understood what these terms meant. I thought, as I stood outside the door that first evening with Sorcha, that my fluency with the language meant little would surprise me. But everything about these people surprised me. The depth of the relationships they had with one another—even when they weren’t related by blood—shocked me. The bareness with which they expressed themselves with one another overwhelmed me. The palpable trust they had with each other was a thing that felt like it would swallow me whole.

Dirva came back, and I came with him, and at those dinners I bore witness to the trail of carnage he had caused by both leaving and returning. It sunk into me, through my pores and into my blood. It rooted itself in me. And then I would see Dirva and his da, this ghalio criminal who had made him the man I knew, the only one in the room who saw Dirva for himself, and it took every ounce of strength I had not to weep.

CHAPTER 6

It took me three days to forget all about my Semadran clothes. I lived in Sorcha’s cast-offs without complaint because he was right—they suited me better than the clothes I’d brought with me. It took a week for our sleeping arrangements to lose their forbidding strangeness. It took a week and a half for my drab Coastal Lothic to blossom into florid City Lothic. It took three weeks for my ear to fully heal, and a few more days for me to forget it had ever been pierced. By then, I looked and sounded like I belonged at the squat house. I lost a little weight and gained the hungry look of the rest of them. I had been hassled by peacekeepers while minding my own business in the Square and had picked up their defiance. Sorcha and I were inseparable. We woke together, I followed him around while he conducted his musical business, we ate together, and then we fell asleep together. We were rarely apart for longer than an hour. Three weeks was all it took for me to grow closer to him than anyone else I’d ever met. I fell into the rhythms of his life, which were smoother and simpler than the rhythms of my own.

Three weeks in, though, I still could not shave to Sorcha’s satisfaction. I had never had to learn; Semadrans don’t shave. My beard was a mark of manhood back home. Granted, it was patchier than I would have liked, but it was mine, and it had its worth. Sorcha would have none of it. He himself had enough red blood in him that he grew little facial hair, so his razors left much to be desired. Even when he scraped together enough to present me with my own—a Qin razor bought in the Qin markets—I still was not very good with it. I was unused to its sharpness and nearly slit my own throat at least twice. And then, out of fear that I would hurt myself further, I took to scraping very gently, so gently I was hardly shaving at all.

One morning, just shy of a month after my arrival, Sorcha woke me after my morning nap and told me he couldn’t stand it anymore. If I couldn’t shave myself properly he guessed he’d have to do it himself. I laughed and burrowed under the blankets. I didn’t think he was serious. And, looking back I don’t think he actually was; I think it was a pretense for what followed, but he claimed he was serious. He dragged a chair over. He went outside and brought back a basin of water from the pump outside. He slung a tattered towel over one shoulder and told me to pull my shirt off and sit down.

“
Why do I have to take off my shirt?” I asked.

“
Fine, you want to run about all day in a damp shirt, be my guest,” he said.

I sighed, but I pulled off my shirt and sat down. “This is pointless,” I said.

“
Is not.”

“
What’re you going to do? Shave me every day?”

He grinned. “Well, hell, Ariah, someone’s got to do it. Mark of my generosity that I’d take care of you so.”

“
Mark of your vanity, more like.”

He laughed. “Lean back.” I did as he asked. He came over and set the basin on the floor. I heard him sharpen the razor on a whetstone. I sat with my head titled back, resting against the wall, with my eyes closed. I was still half-asleep. I felt his hand on my bare shoulder and thought nothing of it. The actual shave itself was relaxing in an odd way. I didn’t have to do anything. The water was pleasantly warm. Despite the fact that Sorcha himself never needed to shave, I had absolute trust that he knew what he was doing. After a few minutes, he cleared his throat. I opened my eyes. “Hey, you mind if I take a seat? Looming over you like this is a bit awkward.”

“
Yeah, that’s fine.” I settled back in my chair.

He laughed, and I opened one eye. “We only got the one chair, yeah? Mind if I take a seat on you?” he asked.

I blinked at him. It was such an odd request. He stood there, waiting for a response, his head cocked to the side. “Uh…all right.” One corner of his mouth hitched up. He straddled me and finished the shave with his chest pressed against mine. The physicality of our relationship was, by then, something I accepted without much question. At first it had shaken me, but it was always so innocuous and so gentle that I could never find a good reason why it should shake me. I would wake with Sorcha’s arm thrown over me. There were times when he’d decided I need to try whatever he was eating and he’d pop it into my mouth. Sorcha had no reserve, no sense of privacy, and as I lived with him, he steadily chipped away at mine. When he curled up against me that day I thought nothing of it.

He washed and dried my face when he finished the shave. He ran a hand down the right side of my jaw. “There, that’s better. Hey, Ariah.”

“
Hmm?”

He poked me in the ribs until I opened my eyes and looked at him. He was smiling, but it was a rare smile: hopeful and soft and utterly without guile. “Ariah.” And the way he said my name just…it was like a lullaby. Like a private siren song. My name in his voice echoed around the emptied reaches of my mind.

“
Yeah?”

He put his hands on my chest and leaned forward. “Ariah.”

A warmth spread through me. Everything outside of that room fell away. I felt something welcome and wanted wrap around me, tying me in place. I felt like a fly trapped in a spider’s web, but it was a very pleasant web to be stuck in, and I was a fly who really didn’t mind the spider. I noticed things about him I never had before: the thickness of his eyelashes, long and lush and dark, and the way his lips were thin and full at the same time. It is all a haze now, but I think I might have touched him, reached for him. It was all very surreal. He was himself and not himself at the same time. “Sorcha?”

“
Yeah.” He wrapped his arms around my bare neck and came so close I could taste his breath. He ran a hand through my hair. “Yeah, it’s me,” he said. And then he kissed me. It was a deep kiss, a slow and unhurried kiss. If I am being honest, and I might as well be honest, it was likely a series of kisses. I have no idea how long he kissed me. Or how long I kissed him back. Eventually, Sorcha dropped the razor. It fell with a heavy thud to the floor, and the noise of it was enough to wake me from the haze. Whatever the case, when I snapped back into my right mind, he was shirtless, and I had a hand on his thigh. I let out some terrible wordless noise. I tumbled out of the chair and skittered back to the opposite wall, putting as much distance between us as I could.