Ariah (16 page)

“
You didn’t know shit about anything before you got here,” he said, and I admitted it was true.

The seconds piled on top of each other, and the minutes flew by hideously fast, and then it was time to go.

I stood up, and Sorcha stood up with me. He handed me my pack. I studied the room, trying with some desperation to memorize what it looked and felt like, how it smelled, and the shape of our shared pillow. I looked at anything and everything but him. I took a step towards the door, and Sorcha slammed into me. He fell into me with enough force to send us both stumbling back against the far wall. He was raw, and he made me raw, too. He held me tight and planted a long, lingering kiss on my cheek. “Gonna miss you, Ariah. Damn it, I’ll miss you.”

“
Sorcha, I…yeah. Same.” I held him back and took a deep breath. The smell of him—herb, and honey, and resin from his violin bow—flooded me. I was drunk with it, the smell of him. “Same.”

“
You take care, yeah? Don’t go all silver again.”

“
I won’t.”

“
And, you know, don’t stay there if you don’t have to.”

“
I won’t.”

He held me just a little tighter. He sighed into my neck. “Lor’s lucky to have you,” he said, and then he pushed me out the door.

PART THREE:

RABATHA: A RETREAT

CHAPTER 11

The scarred man at the border did not recognize me at first. He stood against the wall and directed his men through curt gestures: Dirva was to go with one group, and I was to be brought to him. He separated us before he had even seen our papers. His green eyes shown with suspicion, wariness, when he saw me. The border guards shoved me into a cell; my papers were ripped from my hand. This treatment, which would have left me cowed and pliant before, hardened me. When the man with the desert scars came in, I stood leaning against the back wall. My arms were crossed against my chest, and this time, I looked at him. The guard sat at the table. He gestured for me to sit across from him, but I refused.

“
I saw you,” he said, “and I thought to myself what a bother it is when the City-born try to cross this border. No good ever comes from a City-born nahsiyya coming into the Exalted’s lands.” He fished my papers out of his pocket. “But you are not City-born. A man from Ardijan dressed like that. A ring in your ear. A jaw as naked as my own.” He pulled the hood of his robe back. I pretended not to notice, but it intrigued me that he did it. I had made him for a religious man. With his fingers, with slow deliberateness, he snuffed the flame of the lantern, which lit that windowless room. In the dark, he could see, and I could not. I swear I could hear him smile. “I remember you, Mr. Lirat’Mochai. I am kept awake some nights by the drums that brought you freedom.”

“
I have nothing to buy my freedom with this time,” I said.

“
You had nothing to buy it with last time, either. They weren’t your drums. Just a few months and you come out of that place looking like that.”

I suspected I was to be detained. Dirva had warned me to change into Semadran clothes before we got there, but I, bitter about nameless things, obstinate, and willfully careless, stayed in Sorcha’s hand-me-downs. Looking back, I think I know why I did it. Ambivalence tends to drive me to self-sabotage. I do not do well with internal conflict; I do not do well when I am unmoored. I suspected I was to be detained, and I was. Dirva tried to buy my passage, but the scarred captain of the guard could not be bought.

When you are detained and pressed into the Exalted’s service, your papers are marked that you have been arrested, but truly it’s closer to slavery. You are not sent to prison, but instead to a cell where you sleep. I will say this much for the captain: he was a clever man. He knew enough about magic to think of devious ways to use my talents. If a group of emigrants came to the border, sometimes when one was deemed suspicious they would extract information by standing me outside the window and having me plead with the guards in the voice of the emigrant’s companions. I begged for my life as a man’s wife. I shouted vicious threats in retribution for violence done to a brother in a father’s voice. It was cruel, and I hated it, but the captain knew enough about the gifts to know how to trigger mine. There are times where the gifts come out unbidden. Their preferred tactic was to choke me until I’d nearly blacked out. Just before I blacked out, more often than not, the magic came out just the way they wanted. Sometimes it didn’t. Sometimes I woke some minutes later on the ground.

My tenure there seems like it lasted years, but in fact it was only about six weeks. Six weeks after I stupidly, defiantly, got myself detained, Dirva appeared back at the gate. He came with a Qin dignitary from the Rabathan courts. Their camels trotted up side by side, Dirva keeping pace, at ease, with little regard for the status to which his nahsiyya birth relegated him. For a brief moment, I thought him a mirage. When it sank in that he was really there, it took a lot of effort to hold back the tears.

Dirva and the razehm rode into the border station. He rode right up to the captain. “Let him go,” Dirva said. He held his hand out to the razehm, who handed him a sheaf of official documents requiring my release. Dirva threw them down at the captain’s feet. “His detainment is relinquished.”

The captain did not move to pick them up. He said nothing. All he did was look at the razehm. The razehm nodded. The captain let out a noise that was half-growl and half-laugh. He gave me a dismissive wave, and then he walked away. I was free.

“
Return his papers,” Dirva shouted after him. His voice was sharpened steel. The captain pulled them out of his robe and threw them on top of the release orders without a backward glance. I scooped them up and scrambled onto Dirva’s camel. I left everything else behind me.

“
Thank you,” I whispered.

“
I am sorry it took so long,” he said. “Read the orders.”

Dirva had pulled strings. I found out later he pulled as many strings as he could find, as hard as he could. It was not a simple thing to get me out of the border captain’s clutches: I was a young elf of no reputation whom no one particularly cared about. There was no reason to ruffle feathers to get me freed. The razehm who’d come with him, who had issued this order, did so knowing there would be raised eyebrows, gossip, and possibly an investigation. He was not friends with Dirva. They did not speak, not once, the entire trip to the Tarquintia train station. There was no warmth between them. I can only surmise that this Qin judge owed Dirva something, but whatever his motivations, they were never revealed to me.

The orders issued by that silent razehm on the camel next to me, a man who never so much as looked in my direction, were reassignment orders. He had, for undisclosed reasons, had the concerns of disloyalty stricken from my papers, and he had assigned me to a teaching position at Ralah College in Rabatha. I was to take over Dirva’s linguistic instruction classes.

* * *

There is no such thing as a private car for elves on the Imperial trains, but there is such a thing as private conversation in a language just you and another speak. Early in my training, Dirva taught me a dialect of Vinkenti—Vahnan—specifically for this purpose. We elves were packed into our car tight—you couldn’t breathe without brushing against a foreign body. Dirva and I whispered to each other in Vahnan, our voices low and drowned out by the sounds of bodies shuffling, vying for space, the sighs, the cracking knuckles. “Thank you, Dirva,” I said. My voice held within it reverence and devotion. All the bitterness from before had drained away.

“
You got yourself detained, Ariah. Why did you do that?”

“
I don’t know.”

“
Where is your sense, Ariah?”

“
I don’t know. But I…I don’t regret it. I wish I hadn’t been detained, but I don’t regret it.”

He sighed. He squeezed my shoulder. “There are ways to resist where you keep yourself safe. You can’t barrel in like that. You have to have leverage. The Empire is not the City.” He paused. “The City isn’t what you think it is. It is no haven.”

“
I know that.”

“
I hope so. I don’t mean to lecture you. I have no right to; I’m not your mentor anymore. But be more careful from now on. If you must court attention, make sure you’ve got a way out of trouble.” He pulled a stack of letters from his bag. “These are from your parents.”

I read the letters slowly. I read and reread them the entire way to the capital: four days by train. It was right that I had come back. They worried. They were concerned. They reminded me that I was not so adrift as I’d thought, that I had roots, and that I did indeed have obligations. I was someone’s son, which is not always an easy thing to be. All of us exist in a web of other people, tethered to them and pulled by them this way and that. Mine was a life that mattered, at least to some people, and perhaps shouldn’t be thrown away so carelessly. Mine was a life not entirely my own. The letters were not actually addressed to me but were in fact correspondence with Dirva. I only saw their responses, but I could catch glimpses of the things he’d told them in the letters. The training had ended, but he was my mentor still. In many cases the end of training is little but a formality, and such was the case with me and Dirva. In the letters, he took responsibility for my detainment. He made promises to get me back, and he wrote them as soon as he’d figured out a way to make good on those promises. The tone of the first letters from my parents to Dirva were livid. That is not so surprising, given that I followed him across borders without informing them of my departure, and given that I’d managed to get myself trapped in Qin clutches in my failed attempt at reentry. But as the letters went on, the tone softened. Respect tempered the anger, and gratitude finally eclipsed it. I was lucky to have him, my mother wrote, and she only hoped I was bright enough to learn from Dirva his clear-headedness in times of trouble and his impressive sense of loyalty. My mother had phrased it exactly that way: “impressive sense of loyalty.”

When we neared Rabatha, I asked Dirva for a pencil. I wrote to my parents that I was safe, that I had been assigned to teach at the college, and that I loved them. I thanked them for pairing me with Dirva. I told them nothing about the City, and I told them nothing about the border. I told them I’d learned my lesson, and when I wrote it, I certainly believed it was true, but it turned out to be an unintentional lie. We arrived in Rabatha, spat out of the train into the heart of the Qin district. The station was crawling with police. Dirva took pains to embed the pair of us deep in the heart of the herd of elves rushing through the station. All of us walked with our heads down, but it was no use: the police spotted us anyway. Dirva’s black hair and my odd clothing drew attention no matter how we tried to hide from it. A policeman whistled. We kept moving. “You there, you in City clothes, come here.”

Dirva kept a hand on my arm and kept going.

The policeman whistled again. “We’ve got two nahsiyya here,” he called out. Enforcement men broke through the wary elves. We were shoved to the side, our hands were bound, and we were taken into a room for questioning. One policeman looked through our papers, while another pawed through Dirva’s things. “Where’s your luggage?” he asked me.

“
At the border,” I said. Dirva shot me a warning look, which I pretended not to notice.

“
They took everything but your papers?”

“
Yes,” I said. “And they tried to take those, too.”

The policemen traded rough laughs. “What were you trying to bring in? Had to have been something for all of it to be confiscated.”

“
Probably drugs,” said the one flipping through our papers.

I was about to answer that I’d tried to bring in some dignity, but Dirva spoke first. “Spices,” he said. “Ariah was traveling with spices, and the guards felt they were best allocated to those who protect the Exalted’s borders. Ariah relinquished them willingly; they were not confiscated. May I ask why we’ve been detained?”

“
Well, this one’s papers say he has the gift. Maybe he can read us and tell you,” said one of the policemen.

“
As you can see from my papers, I work in the foreign office. There are those expecting my return. Further detainment will lead to questions,” Dirva said. He smiled. “I ask only to help you prepare to answer those questions.”

The policemen stared at him for a long moment. The one with our papers showed the other something in Dirva’s documents. “We’ll have an eye on you, nahsiyya,” said one as he unlocked the manacles. “Tinkers strange as the pair of you warrant watching.”