Ariah (44 page)

There came days when, on my walk home, it was men who drew my eye more than women. A man with his build, his narrow hips. There was no one moment of startling clarity, no frenzied epiphany. I settled into the realization that I wanted him slowly, acclimating inch by inch, like a child easing into a cold bath.

It happened on the night of Nuri’s first birthday. We spent the afternoon and early evening doting on him, cheering as Nuri sat up on his own, grinning back when he smiled at us, cooing to him in his own private language. Nisa and Dirva put him down to sleep and must have been caught in his thrall, because they never came out of their room. Sorcha and I waited for a little while, trading stories about Nuri, wading through memory after memory. Sorcha grinned and rifled through the pantry. He pulled out a bottle of good Semadran wine and raised his eyebrows. “Sorcha, no,” I said.

“
Why not? It’s a celebration!”

“
For a child.”

“
Well, the child’s gone to bed. Just grown men left awake now.” He grabbed two glasses with one hand. He pulled the cork from the bottle with his teeth and spat it out onto the floor. “They’re all down for the night. Come on,” he said.

I followed him up the stairs. The wine was still a bad idea: I had to work the next morning, and besides that I do not handle it particularly well. I get drunk very fast, and I am prone to wicked hangovers. But…he was right. It was a celebration.

We piled into bed. I turned on the lantern but set it glowing low. Sorcha had brought the glasses, but they sat untouched at the foot of the bed. We passed the bottle back and forth, back and forth. The movements were precise in their sobriety at first, but grew looser as the wine took root. When he passed me the bottle, my hand lingered on his. I stopped listening to the things he said. His voice washed over me, warm and dark and safe and familiar. At first I simply drew close to him. I slipped my arm behind him, and Sorcha leaned into my chest. I sat turned towards him, but he faced out into the dark room. My eyes slid along the planes of his profile, took in his face which one second was so masculine and the next so feminine. I had drunk enough, by then, that the gift was in slumber. I had no idea what he was feeling just then, if he noticed my attentions. The thing with wine, though, is that it makes me reckless. Sorcha said something, he laughed, and he looked over at me with his eyebrows slightly raised, waiting for a reaction. And I kissed him.

It was not a gentle thing, or a timid kiss. It was an expression of hunger and desire. The force of it knocked the wine bottle from his hand. He drew back from me like he’d been shocked. His face froze on the edge of a question. I nodded, wild-eyed, breathing in the smell of him and kissed him again. Sorcha fell into it with an unbridled ferocity. He was a current, a spark. We devoured each other, breaking apart for air in sudden violent movements. We grappled like boys wrestling after school, but our hands lingered, teased, and grasped. He was strong. The sinuous strength of his arms set me on fire. The push-pull push-pull of us hypnotized me. Sorcha shoved my hand to his breast. His nipple was hard, the flesh damp with leaked milk, and my hand slipped along it, frictionless, smooth, electric.

He was right when he’d said in the desert that I wouldn’t know what to do with him if I had him. I didn’t. My hands drifted to the small of his back, to his hips, but no further. I felt the hardness of him, the heat of him, the slickness against my thigh, and I wanted him, but the mechanics were elusive and terrifying.

He took the lead. He touched and stroked, his face always just above mine, always grinning. When I began to cry out, he kissed me to keep me quiet, to keep the others asleep. He brought me to the edge but not over—the ache, the need pulsed through me, a fire stoked higher with every heartbeat, every gasped breath. Sorcha toyed with me, brought me to the brink and then a pause, to the brink and then away.

“
Tell me what to do.” My voice was ragged, parched, desperate. Elated. Enraptured.

“
Fuck,” he breathed in my ear. He licked my hand and taught me what to do with him. “Like this,” he said.

He lay on his back, one leg wound around my back, gripping me like a vice. My face fell against his breast, breathing in this new scent of him. He wound his fingers in my hair. I was artless; I had none of his finesse. I could not tease and taunt for him like he had for me. All I could do was give him release. He laughed when he came, a throaty, full laugh. He lay in the lamplight, laughing, his hands covering his face. I fell on to him, into the stickiness, the sweat, and laughed into his chest with him. He took my face in his hands and pulled me to him, kissed me, smiled. “Your turn,” he said. He half-purred it, half-growled it, and then he took me between his thighs. The tightness of his grip, the heat, it was so strangely different from being with a woman. Strange and similar at the same time. The strangeness of it, the singularity of it, intensified everything. Sorcha caressed me, held me with his large, strong hands, whispered in my ear a stream of unheard words in a voice of pure, raw, untempered pleasure. I confess it hardly took any time at all. I collapsed, boneless, onto him, my face in the curve of his throat. I felt the rise and fall of his breath, a steady, calm thing that grounded me.

We lay there together for a long time. We did not speak. The quietness was a simple thing, a consonance, a comfort. Eventually we cleaned ourselves up and found fresh bedding. Eventually, we fell asleep. I held him like I’d held him every night before that one, except that night we lay together naked, and that night the last shreds of mystery between us were torn away. I kissed the nape of his neck as I drifted to sleep. I told him I loved him. He told me he loved me back. The words when I said them felt no different than they had the night before, but their meaning was clearer.

CHAPTER 30

Sorcha and I lived with Nisa and Dirva for two years more. When Nisa had weaned Nuri and Sorcha’s milk had dried up, it felt like time to find space for ourselves. Nuri walked and ran and climbed out of their bed and into ours. He spoke and laughed and threw tantrums. His things—toys, clothes already too small the third time he wore them, picture books—outnumbered my own. The fact was that Semadran homes are not built to house red elvish families, and we had run out of space. When Nuri was three and weaned, Dirva gave up his post at the Office of Foreign Relations. The borough allowed him into the schoolhouse to teach literacy and magical theory to Semadran youngsters. He taught with Nuri at his feet while Nisa returned to the prototype labs. Nuri spent probably three quarters of his childhood in that schoolhouse. So, when Nuri was three and weaned and underfoot in the schoolhouse, there was nothing left for Sorcha in Dirva’s home.

Nisa found us a bachelor’s apartment two blocks south of their house. The woman who rented it to us was one of the engineers from Nisa’s workshop. We would not have found a place on our own. Shayat was right: there were rumors about me. Nisa never believed those rumors, even though they were true, and apologized over and over again because the apartment she found us had only one room.

We went the two blocks north every night and had dinner with Nuri and Nisa and Dirva, and for a time I still worked during the day for that man who wanted the Empire to push east, east, endlessly east into the Droma grasslands. The nights were just mine and Sorcha’s. I had wondered—worried—what would happen between us when motherhood left his body. I had worried I would prove fickle and heartless. I didn’t.

During the day, Sorcha wandered. He played his violin. Quietly, discreetly, he strayed from me. He wound up in the 23rd again. It was hard for me to get him out; the jealousy was something I did not expect. He took a beating for flirting with a Qin girl. The beating left him with a broken rib and a broken nose. A Qin doctor intervened before it got any worse and took him to the borough’s healer. Sorcha flirted with the borough healer, a young woman transplanted to Rabatha from the Chalir foothills for her training. She healed him for free, and she advocated for him in the borough so he could find work as a midwife. Some of the pregnant women refused to see him, but some let him in, trusted him, and paid him for his service in bread and tea. Midwifery was good for him. It gave him focus and kept him out of trouble. More or less.

It was not an easy life: we were warily watched by half the borough and contemptuously ignored by the other half. Few Semadrans acknowledged me on the street, and fewer still would speak to me. Sorcha was an outsider, and for that he was given a measure of latitude, but I had lived there with them, and left, and returned a man with nothing but a trail of broken rules behind him. I was a pariah, but I was tolerated because Sorcha had proved useful and Nisa and Dirva had carved out respect from their neighbors. Still though, there was no one to advocate for me when Sorcha’s run-ins with the law cost me my job. The stamps of contact covered my papers, marking me as a friend of a repeat convict, and despite my skills I was not worth the trouble to the Qin. I ended up on a factory line. I worked in a wool factory, where I fed raw fiber into the spinners, great metal gears that turned as fast as the wheels of a train. The factory was full of us: disposable people, forgotten people, desperate people. Some were Semadran, but many more were nahsiyya or displaced Chalir. Some bore the brands of the slaveborn on their cheeks. There were accidents, and the accidents were grisly, but I was lucky. The worst I got were burns.

The factory was a terrible place, but still, I was happy. I had Sorcha. I had nothing but Sorcha, but having him was enough. I was happy, and I was settled, and I expected life to stretch on like that forever. But of course it didn’t. Life never settles. It slows sometimes, and it grows smooth sometimes, but it never settles.

A woman knocked on the door of our place one afternoon in the brief window between when I got home from my shift on the factory line and when I’d cleaned up enough to go to Dirva’s to see my godson. She was young. She was a shaper just starting her training. She had no control, no decorum, nothing but burning curiosity. I winced when she looked at me. She made me nervous; there was a chance she’d see me for what I was and add another rumor about me to the pile. What little reputation I had could not have survived the blow, and there was the chance that Nisa’s friend’s patience would finally run out. I was afraid I’d land us on the street. I never could build walls, and I never could block, but by then I knew shapers. I knew we are an arrogant bunch, and that resistance of our gifts draws attention. It was painful and nerve-wracking, but the smart thing to do was let her read me.

“
You are nervous,” she said.

“
You are a shaper,” I said.

She smiled. She handed me a slip of paper. “My mentor requests your presence.” I waited until she left to read the note. All that was written was an address, a familiar one: Shayma Hepzah’Brahim’s house.

I pulled Dirva aside after dinner. “This is your matchmaker’s address, yes?”

He looked at the address and frowned. He switched to Vahnan. Sorcha heard the switch and looked over, eyebrows slightly raised. Dirva often spoke Vahnan in front of him. Even three years after the move to Rabatha, even while raising a child together, Sorcha and Dirva rarely spoke directly to one another. Neither spoke to me about the other. The weight of Dirva’s secrets, the fact that Sorcha himself was one of those secrets, pushed them apart. “Did something happen?” he asked.

“
I don’t know. Have you heard anything about me on the street?”

“
Nothing new. Nothing good.”

“
Nothing about the gift? Or why I was in Alamadour?”

“
Word on the street is you were in Alamadour for him,” he said, nodding discreetly at Sorcha.

“
Then why does a shaper want to see me?”

Dirva shrugged. He sighed and rubbed a hand through his beard. “She’s met you. She knows what you are. They all know what you are, and what I am. They keep the secrets.”

“
Then why does she want to see me?”

“
I don’t know. They won’t tell me any more than they would tell you. I’m passing, too.”

“
What do I do?” Dirva gave my shoulder a gentle squeeze. He let me feel his worry for me, his steadfast concern for me, without showing any of it on his face. “Be careful. Go after curfew or before curfew lifts. It’s a risk, but not as big a risk as it would be to go during the day when the borough can see you. You can count; count the curfew enforcers.”

* * *

I went to Shayma Hepzah’Brahim’s house very early. Dawn was little more than a hazy gray creeping across a black sky. The Pet was close; I relied on it to help with the count. I’m not sure I needed magic, though. The night was desolate, the streets were empty, and you could hear echoes of the Qin enforcers’ boots a street away. I crouched in the shadows of her doorway and knocked: two sharp raps loud in the night. Her student answered the door wrapped in a shawl. When she saw me, she drew the shawl tight around herself, protective, and leapt back from the door. “It is after curfew,” she hissed.