Ariah (31 page)

“
There’s not enough space in a person for more than one heart.”

He frowned slightly. “Well, no, not literally.”

“
I know you didn’t mean it literally,” I said. “When it happens, I get…pushed out. There’s nothing in me but them, what they want, what they feel.”

“
You’re not pushed out,” he said. He spoke fast, with a smile playing around the edges of his mouth. His palpable excitement was contagious. I started to wonder whether this would work. “You’re pushed to the side. You’re still in there. It’s your brain, Ariah! Where else would you be? So, what we have to do is we have to let them wrap around you. You stay right there, right in the center, and they fill up all the rest of the space on the edges. You see?”

“
No, not really.”

He sighed. “Six months and we’re still stuck in place. It was so much faster with Dirva.”

“
He can build walls. And he can charm. And he…”

“
Ariah, you’re not him, but that don’t mean you’re hopeless.”

I nodded, even though I didn’t really believe him. After a moment or two, I looked over. “How would I do it? How does it work?”

Vathorem pulled his long gray hair off his shoulder. He sighed. “You got to care less.”

“
Care less? Care less about what?”

“
Everything. Anything.”

“
I don’t understand.”

“
Of course you don’t,” he said. “What I mean to say is you need to learn to just see the world how it is. You’re so wrapped up in the future, in the what-ifs and might-bes. And when you’re not running the possibilities, you’re stuck in the past. Ariah, you don’t really live. You got no sense of the present, the moment to moment. And you need it. You need to learn to feel what you feel—just feel it as it unfolds—and feel what someone else feels, too, without trying to fit it in to some future life or make it make sense with some past thing.”

“
Actions have consequences.”

“
I’m not saying they don’t. I’m saying you spend a whole lot of time and effort trying to force yourself to feel and think and be one way instead of another. It eats up your energy. Ariah, you’ve gotten nowhere with this. Maybe you don’t know who you are in some grand, total way. Maybe you’re not a person like that. Maybe who you are changes moment to moment. That’s all right. That’s fine. But if that’s the case, let yourself change moment to moment.”

The words sunk in. They felt true. Later that night I tried to write Dirva about it. I wrote him about everything, partly for him, and mostly for me. It helped me to process the things Vathorem said, which often seemed simple at first and grew increasingly complex as I tried to implement his advice. I was curled up on the couch scratching away at a pad of paper when Sorcha came home. “Writing to Lor?”

“
Yeah.”

“
That old bastard do something awful again today?”

“
No, he did something good, maybe.” I put down the half-written letter and looked at him. There was a confused pang of something, some unnamable want, some line waiting to be crossed between us. I looked away again, at Liro’s painting above the mantle. “Do you think I live in the present?”

There was a slight pause. “Fuck, Ariah, are you a seer? I swear, every other day you’ve got some new talent.”

“
No! No. It’s something Vathorem said. He thinks I dwell too much on the past. And the future.”

“
Yeah, that sounds like you.”

“
He thinks I should change that.”

“
Well, maybe. You’re fine the way you are,” he said, “but you might be wound less tight.”

He dropped his violin case in a chair and sat down next to me. He held my feet in his hands to warm them up. “It’s getting on to winter. It gets cold here, you silly bastard. Why don’t you ever build a fire?”

“
It’s a lot of work.”

He shook his head at me. “So, what’re you supposed to do?”

“
I don’t know. He said something about two hearts. I’m supposed to be myself and not myself at the same time. Or something.”

“
That man, he just strings words together.”

“
No, I think he’s right. I just don’t know how to do it.”

“
Well,” Sorcha said, “you’re not about to figure it out tonight. Want to smoke?”

“
I shouldn’t.”

He grinned. “Ah, you want to.”

I grinned back. “I do.”

“
You’re supposed to be all in the present, yeah? Sounds like you ought to smoke a bit to me.”

We smoked. The pipeherb in Vilahna is uniformly good. A man’s status can be derived by the quality of the herb he smokes there, and we were nobodies, but it was still the best herb I’ve ever had before or since. City herb, coaxed out of an inhospitable climate by blue elvish magic, is extremely potent but harsh. Mountain herb is a soft thing, a smooth thing, a pure pleasure. We lay together in bed, mostly naked, under piles of thick wool blankets. For hours we’d nestled up close, trading stories. I told him about Ardijan. I told him about the odd rhythms of factory life. I told him about hours spent swimming the river. He told me about the time he spent living at Falynn’s house. Falynn had three wives and a husband; between them, they had nine children. Sorcha said he slept under piles of children at night. He told me of the first person he’d slept with. It was a girl who worked at a musician’s pub. When I asked him what it was like, all he would say is it was clumsy. But he grinned when he said it. Slowly, the herb wore off. Sobriety crept up, and as my mind began to clear, I could feel the way Sorcha’s mind turned. It was like his thoughts and his feelings flowed out of his skin and into mine. I was on my back, one arm tucked behind my head and the other cradling his shoulders. He lay on his side, both arms wrapped around my ribs. He’d woven one leg over and around mine.

The gift tugged at me. I let it out, and I read him, and what I felt was strange. It was like seeing myself through someone else’s eyes. Like looking in a particularly flattering mirror. For him, in that moment, there was nothing but the two of us in that bed. The rest of the world did not exist.

“
You reading me, Ariah?”

“
I’m sorry.”

He nestled tighter against me. I could feel him smile against my bare chest. “What did you find out?”

“
Nothing. You can’t read an empty mind.”

“
You ass.”

“
Will you do me a favor?”

“
Depends.”

“
Will you charm me?”

Sorcha pulled away from me. “What?”

“
I need practice breaking them.”

“
Oh.” He let out an odd, muted laugh. At the same moment, he closed up. Not walls, perhaps, but screens formed between us. “Ah, yeah. Sure. Just any charm?”

I propped myself up on my elbows. The air outside the blankets was terribly cold. “How did you do that?”

“
I didn’t do nothing yet,” he said.

“
No, forget about the charm. How did you pull back like that?”

Sorcha’s eyebrows furrowed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“
You just—just then, you just made us…uh, separate? How did you make that distance?”

“
I don’t know.”

“
Well, what are you hiding from me?”

He sat up. The curve of his back as his shoulders slumped away from me spoke volumes. I immediately wished I hadn’t pressed him. If I had stopped at all to think, if I had taken even a second to myself, I would’ve known. But I hadn’t. Wrapped up as I was in my own anxieties, I forgot that he had some, too.

“
Ariah, I thought you’d thought it through and come around,” he said quietly. He glanced at me over his shoulder. “I didn’t mean to pull back. Just happened. I don’t know how I did it, honest. I’d tell you if I did.” He lay down again beside me, this time on his stomach. “Hey, I’m good. You know I’m good. Been meaning to ask you something, though.”

“
Ask me what?”

“
I just don’t understand why you’re here. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad for it, but this training you’re putting yourself through. What’s the point of it? You were fine in the City.”

“
I wasn’t fine.”

“
You were.”

“
I wasn’t. Do you remember the family dinners?”

He was quiet for a moment. “But you weren’t like that all the time. You managed all right.”

I laughed. It was a harsh thing, a bitter thing. He looked over at me. “I was stoned. After you kissed me, I kept myself as stoned as possible. There’s nothing to manage when I’m stoned. And then, after, Sorcha, I…the gift had me twisted. I got detained at the border. I did stupid things. I was constantly on the verge of getting arrested or reassigned to line work or worse in Rabatha. Dirva pulled a lot of strings to keep me safe.”

“
You got detained?”

I nodded.

“
For what?”

“
For being a shaper. For wearing your clothes. For being an elf. Not for any good reason.”

“
What happened?”

“
Nothing good.”

He reached over and took my hand. “You’ll be all right. This training, though. You sure it’s worth it?”

“
I think so.”

* * *

Dor charmed me without a word. We sat in the library of the palace, just him and I. He had been translating letters of asylum from Athenorkos to Semadran, and I was there to check and double-check his grammar and vocabulary. He had, in particular, problems switching tenses. “This conjugation here is wrong,” I said. I looked up to see if he was paying attention. Dor’s chin was lifted slightly. He stared down the length of his nose at me. One corner of his mouth turned up.

I felt the pull of it. I think he was bored, or perhaps he was stuck on someone. He may have been curious about me, like Fallinal all over again. Maybe he just wanted me to stop correcting his grammar. In any case, he wanted me. He wanted me there in a room with no locks.

I felt the pull of it, and my body moved towards him of its own accord. Dor smiled just a hair wider. The way he sat, the way he breathed a silent laugh, sent his amusement pouring into my mind. The shift in him was slight, fleeting, but the shift was a thing I sensed.
I
sensed it; my mind found it and tracked it. There was a startling moment of clarity there, an awareness that I was still there, that my mind still turned. I froze in place. I shut my eyes. And the charm broke.

“
Did you just break that?” Dor asked.

“
I…I think so,” I said. My eyes stayed close. I laughed. “I think I did.”

“
I’ll go get Vathorem,” Dor said, and then he was out of the room.

Vathorem rushed in with Dor close at his heels. “You broke a charm?”

“
I did!” I laughed, giddy, drunk on pride. “I did.”

Vathorem laughed. He clapped his hands together. “Grand news. Grand news. It’ll get easier from here, I’m sure of it.” He looked over his shoulder at Dor. “You know better than to charm him.”

“
Falo, he broke it. If I’d not charmed him, he’d not have anything to break.”

“
Dor.”

After approximately two seconds of defiance, Dor apologized. I accepted it. “What now?” I asked. “What’s next?”

“
Now, Ariah,” Vathorem said, “now we work.”

Endless drills. Regimented schedules. Ruthless discipline. Vathorem had a work ethic that could have been forged in an Imperial elvish ghetto. First, he ran me through charm after charm after charm to hone this trick on which I’d stumbled. It was nearly a week before I managed it again, and then four days before I managed it a third time. Then, it happened again after just one more day. After that, I managed to break charms with something approaching consistency. It was like learning a language: once I had the grammar of it, once that elemental pattern emerged, everything else about shaping, about charms, began to make sense. I felt immensely accomplished for about two hours, and then he pushed me into hard, uncharted territory again. He had everyone and anyone charm me. Everyone charms a little differently. If you are sensitive enough, you can tell who is charming you or shaping you by the feel of it alone. It took a little while to get the hang of breaking anyone’s charms, but not as long as I expected. I found it simplest to break charms by people I knew, even though those charms tended to be deepest. I think it’s because with someone I know it’s easier to distinguish between my heart and theirs when both are inside me.