Ariah (29 page)

CHAPTER 19

Sorcha and I fell easily back into old habits. We shared a bed. When I was not with Vathorem at court, I was with him. But the time I spent with Vathorem preoccupied me. The training was not so much a set of practical instructions as it was an effort to force me to face myself. Vathorem pushed me to lay myself bare, to inspect the nooks and crannies of my heart. He said it took remarkable self-awareness to be a shaper and live among those who weren’t. He was right. The hours I spent with Vathorem left me questions to ponder during the hours I spent with Sorcha.

What was I to him? I wanted so badly to know. There were times I felt it was a balanced thing between us. When he’d come to Vilahna, he’d brought the stack of sketches Liro had drawn of him. They were tacked now above the mantle of the fireplace. But among them, directly in the center, was a small painting of me. Liro painted it from one of the sketches he drew of me the day Nuri died. He painted it for Sorcha, and Sorcha carried it across deserts and mountains with him all the way here to Vilahna. Sometimes, when he did not realize I was watching, Sorcha gazed at it. Sometimes, when he didn’t think I could see, he gazed at me. The way he felt then, what I was to him, was obvious.

But there were other moments, and there were other people. Life in Alamadour was not like life in the City. There was no ailing parent; there was no terrible well of grief. He had long ago decided he and I were platonic. Several times I’d come home to find him in the throes of someone else or lounging with some red boy or girl, both of them stark naked on the floor. Once or twice he’d come home very late smelling of someone else. Once he did not come home at all. Those nights, the bed felt foreign and large.

I am not a red elf. I wasn’t steeped in their flexibilities. I did not know what it meant to be so curious about him in this terrifying way, to need him so much, and to see him so indiscriminately generous with his time and affections. He was my roots. I woke next to him and knew, with unwavering certainty, that I was more myself when he was there beside me. That with him it was not a matter of getting swept away, or lost: he pulled the slippery, shy me-ness to the surface. I didn’t know why it was him that did it instead of someone else, and I didn’t know how he did it, but I knew he did it. And I knew that being apart from him had taken a toll, and that I didn’t want to brave a separation again. But what was this life I led with him? I had no word for it, no understanding of it. More than friendship. Was it love? Yes. What kind of love? I didn’t know. I think it seemed simplest to me if sex was involved. There’s no understanding of romance without sex for a Semadran, and no conception of romance with a friend. There are just spouses. But the specter of rejection was paralyzing.

Things grew much more complicated when Dor’s half-sister, Fallinal, appeared at court. She was related to him through his father, and they had been raised together. They were close; she seemed to understand him more than anyone else but Vathorem. She came to court, arm in arm with Dor, on a bright fall morning thirteen days after I arrived in Vilahna. She grew herb in the mountain compounds in the north and came to Alamadour to bring crops to market for the harvest a few times a year. That’s all it took: thirteen days.

I was a mess when she came through that door. I had spent my whole life hiding from this gift, fighting it, and there I was in a different country with a man who demanded I let it out. Not just that I feel it, and know it, but that I admit it was the way I understood the world around me. That this gift was me, and that I had to embrace it in order to wield it with anything approaching competence. I had stopped holding back. I tried to hold my tongue, but I no longer fought the urge to read someone, and I no longer struggled against wherever my instincts wanted me to look. So, there I was, this conduit for the gift, raw and untempered. Confused, and very young yet, with a young man’s curiosities.

She came through the door, and I felt her before I even saw her. I felt an invitation. I felt an attraction like a steel cable between us formed in the space of a heartbeat. I saw her, and she was beautiful. I saw her and I felt her see me as beautiful. I saw her and saw in the way she stood, the way she smiled, what she wanted from me. And I lost myself. The gift came alive with a ferocity. It’s all I was, suddenly. The story goes that she came through the door, that she looked at me, and that I jerked upright in my seat like I’d been electrified. The story goes that she laughed, and I was across the room in three steps, and then I had her locked in a kiss. That’s how the story goes. All I remember is Vathorem. It was a fog, a haze, until he pulled me out of the room. He held my chin and stared into my eyes. “Ariah. Ariah!”

“
Yes, yes, I’m here. What happened?”

“
You know why back in the Empire ones like us don’t marry, right?”

“
Mercy. I…mercy.”

“
No harm, not this time. But desire is one thing and wanting it is another. You understand? This is a thing you’ve got to control. You cannot do that, take someone like that. It’s not right. It’s not fair to them. Do you understand?”

“
I didn’t mean to,” I said. I clutched at his forearms. I felt very small, very weak, and very young.

“
Ariah, it don’t matter if you meant to if the other person does not want it. You cannot take what is not offered to you. You cannot. No excuses. Understand?”

“
But it just happens, doesn’t it?”

“
Only to those with no respect for anyone but themselves. No. It’s a hard thing, I know it is, but I will have nothing to do with you if you think the inconveniences of your gift outweigh the damage you could do to someone with this.”

“
I understand.”

“
You sure?”

“
I do. I am. I understand. What do I do?”

“
You train yourself, you train your body to wait. You stay put. When you feel your grip slipping, you will yourself to stay where you are. You stay with someone who can watch you until you’ve got it under control. You tell a person who links you like that you’re willing, if you are, but you will wait for them to decide when and where and how.” He sighed. He grew softer with me. “And Ariah, you…you have to remember you owe it to no one, all right? No matter how much they want you, you never owe them a thing, link or not.”

Vathorem sent me home early. He spoke to Fallinal about it. She knew him, and she had a rough understanding of what shaping was, and apparently she’d heard rumors about what shapers can do. And apparently that made her curious. Dor must have told her where I lived. I am certain Vathorem never would have. In the late afternoon, there was a knock on my door. Sorcha went to answer it. As soon as the door opened, I felt the force of that link. It drilled into me, inexorable, inescapable. “Afternoon,” she said. “Does Ariah live here?”

Sorcha turned towards me, surprised, but I was already past him. I don’t remember moving. I don’t know how I got from the couch to the door, but there I was, and there she was, and then my mouth was on hers, and my hands were already working at her clothes. What I remember most is the pattern of her breath as it caught or deepened. I remember the rhythm of her body as mine moved against it. I don’t know how we wound up on the floor. I have no idea how long it was. All I know was there was pleasure, her pleasure and my need to give it to her. I was a slave to it, enraptured by it, and I must have felt some myself, but I can’t remember what she did to me.

My first clear memory afterwards is her laugh, and the feeling of her fingers in my hair. “A shaper,” she said, and she laughed again.

She was sated, and her mind had wandered elsewhere, away from my face and hands and body, and I was left to my own mind again. “I am so sorry,” I said. It came out a whisper.

“
For what?”

“
I am so very sorry.”

“
What’s there to be sorry for?” she asked.

I sat up. I blushed at the sight of my own naked body. “Where’s Sorcha?”

“
Who’s Sorcha?”

“
He was here.”

“
Oh, the other tinker?”

I looked at her. “What?”

“
The tink who was here with you? Red hair?”

“
Don’t call us that.”

She sat up and pulled her hair over her shoulder. “That’s what you are, though, right?”

“
No, I’m Semadran. Don’t call me that. And he’s from the City. Is he still here?”

“
I don’t know. I think he left.” She bit her lip and leaned forward. “That was something else. Let’s go again.”

“
You should go,” I said. I stood up and found my pants on the other side of the room.

“
Really?”

“
Yes.”

“
It was so good, though!”

I looked at her over my shoulder. Her wants reached out to me, poured into me, threatened to pull me over. “You called me a tinker. Please, go,” I said. I kept my eyes pinned to the floor and went into the bedroom. I leaned against the door, barricading it, hiding from her. A few minutes later, I heard the front door creak open and slam shut.

Sorcha came home an hour or two later. He eased the door open slowly, silently, and peeked through. “Ah, you’re done,” he said. He came in and dropped his violin case on the couch. He shot me a grin. “You know, I never made you for the exhibitionist type.”

I crumpled into a ball. I hugged my knees to my chest and hid my face in my arms. Sorcha was next to me in a second. “Hey,” he said. “Hey, what’s going on?”

“
I hate this.”

“
Hate what?”

“
Hate being a shaper. I hate this.”

“
Oh.” He stroked my hair. “I just thought, you know, it’s been over a year…I just thought you’d broken out of your shell.”

“
I can’t control this. Who could control this? Why am I like this?”

“
Hey, hey.” He coaxed me out. He held me by the shoulders. “Ain’t nothing wrong with what you are. It’s not easy being anyone, right? You’ll be all right. You will. I’ll help. If I can, I’ll help. Can I help?”

“
Next time, stay,” I said. “And pull me off. I can’t do that again. I woke up from it so hollow.”

“
Yeah, all right,” he said. “Sure, I can do that.”

* * *

Word about Fallinal and I spread like wildfire. In the Empire, it would have isolated me. People would have crossed the street and taken pains to keep from looking me in the eye. But Vilahna was not the Empire. The story spread, and it kicked up the old rumors and curiosities about shapers. Within three days everyone in Alamadour knew that the new tinker at court was the best lay in town if you could charm him, and anyone could charm him.

Vathorem tried to protect me at court, but there were times the queen needed him, and I was left alone. Sorcha took to walking me to the palace and walking me home again, but there were times he was out playing sets and we needed fruit, and I braved the markets alone. Within a month of my arrival in Alamadour, I woke up in the beds of seven separate strangers. Two of them were men. I remembered virtually nothing about the sex itself, which disturbed me profoundly.

Afterward, when I was myself again, I forced out questions. Where was I? What time was it? Who were they? How had it happened? Had I made the first move? Sometimes I had started it, sometimes I had frozen and they had started it for me. I could divine no rhyme or reason to the times I showed restraint and the times I didn’t. I was never brave enough to ask if it was an intrusion. Or worse, a violation. I am still ashamed I never asked.

I begged Vathorem to let me smoke. “I need it. It’s too much.”

“
What, you think I don’t have to weather those storms? No. The herb’s a crutch.”

I was on the brink of tears. I hid my face in my hands. “I don’t remember anything. There’s nothing in it. I feel used, Vathorem. I feel empty and scared and…”

“
And when you’re scared, the gift comes out screaming, which makes it that much more likely to happen,” he said. He sighed. He pulled my head to his shoulder with a thoughtless and gentle caress to the back of my head. I fought it, I fought it as hard as I could, but I wept into his shirt nonetheless. “Ah, Ariah. You are so open, and the world is so large. Do you know anything about dancers?”