Ariah (32 page)

I made progress quickly, but that’s not to say it was easy work. I learned to break charms and mirrors, and I learned what it meant to use my gift. I had always thought mastery meant you kept the gift walled up within, doling it out in the right dose at the right time. That’s largely how it is with mimicry. But shaping is a completely different animal. It’s a gift that permeates everything you do, everything you are. It is a way of living more than it is a talent. After a lifetime of trying to separate it and me, this was a hard lesson to learn.

In his writings, Moshel Atoosa’Avvah talks about walls and anchors. His techniques are built on separation, a stability of self, which I have always lacked. It felt strange to abandon his techniques, which were steeped deeply in the traditions and gathered knowledge of Semadran magic. Abandoning them felt like yet another wedge between the life I lived and the life I was expected to live. Vathorem and I drew on anything and everything we could find to build a new framework for me. We found different tools to reach the same end. Vathorem taught me much about the litanies. I learned Old Athenorkos for it, and he was thrilled to teach someone even a little bit about it. “Litanies, they’re rare,” he said one day. He sat next to me and blew the dust off the cover of a large, leather-bound book. It was hundreds of years old, the pages made of vellum instead of paper. “It would be a shame for them to die out with me.”

“
You’re the only one?” I asked.

Vathorem shrugged. “Perhaps. Perhaps not. They’re rare. The woman who taught them to me, who gave me this book, she’s long gone.” He ran his hands over the cover and smiled.

“
There are coppers in the City.”

“
Coppers?”

“
Half Semadran, half Athenorkos. I bet some of them could do it.”

“
Huh. I bet that’s so. If I’m ever allowed to retire, maybe I’ll make my way to the City, seek some out. That’s enough talk; let’s get to work.”

To perform a litany, you catch attention first with a charm. Then, you sync your mind with the receiver’s. Chants in Old Athenorkos are used for this. The chants function as a way to keep yourself focused, to keep hold of yourself, while also letting someone else into you. The mantras worked well for me. It was easier to track myself when I allowed my mind only one train of thought. Vathorem taught me everything there is to know about litanies and the kind of shaping they use. They give you a measure of control over someone else. They let you guide someone’s feelings, and when you guide their emotions, you have a good chance at guiding their thoughts, too. It is a powerful and dangerous thing. He made me a true shaper before he taught me restraint, or how to catch just bare glimpses, or how to pull back my instincts. In school, they teach us that mastery is shown through restraint of a gift rather than its use. It was years before I could claim mastery, but there with Vathorem, I can say I began to understand the shape of my gift, the things it could do, the way it functioned.

The progress was intoxicating. With each new skill, it seemed the world was a little different, a little less mysterious. I had an urge to revisit things. I dug out my notebooks of Droma songs, read and reread them. I spent nights poring over them. It was a search, but for what was not clear to me until I found it. Phrases began to jump out at me: “A shared skin between vim and I,” or “the thoughts were mine and vis and ours at once,” or “in the grass, there is no you or me but only an us.”

There is not much that can be gleaned from a handful of stolen songs, but these phrases haunted me. They felt like truth. They felt like hope. But I didn’t understand them. I translated some of them and brought them to the palace once. Vathorem read them, then gave me the oddest look. “Ariah, why did you give these to me?”

“
I think they could help?”

“
Help with what?”

“
With my training.”

Vathorem read me. It was a hot flash; he could have charmed me, but it took time to make me comfortable that he did not always want to waste. “Ariah, these are just poems.”

“
Well…yes.”

“
This is not a technique.”

“
Well, no, not outright,” I said. I took the sheaf of papers from him and thumbed through the pages. “It’s not what they say, it’s what they’re about. There’s some technique they have that could help, I think. I can tell from the poems.”

Vathorem sighed. “If reading them helps, keep reading them, but all they are to me are strings of pretty words.”

CHAPTER 21

The longer I stayed in Vilahna, the less likely it seemed I would ever return to the Empire. The longer I stayed in Vilahna, the less I wanted to return to the Empire. I had Sorcha in Alamadour. I had Vathorem to keep me sane. I had a clumsy but firm grip on the shaping. When I had honed my ability to break charms and mirrors, sex became more fascinating than terrifying, and in Alamadour I had the space to explore it. Fallinal came again to the markets, and again she sought me out. This time, though, I was trained and stoned when she appeared at my door. I remember it all. I didn’t like her, but I wanted her, and I wanted a memory built on my own terms. She came to my door, and I answered, and she smiled. When I didn’t come barreling across the threshold at her, she frowned. “Come in,” I said, holding the door wide for her.

“
You sick or something?” she asked.

I caught Sorcha’s eye and nodded to the door. His eyebrows leapt up, but he gave me the space to do it. “No, I’m not sick. You can come in. Have you eaten?”

She lingered near the door. “You sure you’re all right?”

“
I’m fine. Charm me.”

She stepped close to me. She smiled and said my name. The charm held for two, three seconds, and then I shook it off. I grinned at her, triumphant, with some play at dominance. She smirked in response. “I see you’ve done some learning since I saw you last.”

“
I have.”

“
It’s a shame.”

I wanted to lash out at her. I wanted to scream at her and tell her how terrifying it had been to realize what had happened when she’d ambushed me months before. I wanted control of the situation this time. I wanted to take it without asking the way she’d taken it from me, and that scared me. I took a step away from her. “You can go if you don’t want to.” I said it careful, measured, reading her just a little to make sure she saw it as an offer and not as a challenge or a threat. “You can go any time you like.”

She shook the hair out of her face. She grinned. “But I can stay, too, eh?”

“
Yes, Fallinal, you can stay.”

She chose to stay. I chose to let her. It was a slow, drawn-out thing. It was an exploration of my body as much as it was an exploration of hers. I let her tell me what to do, when to do it, and where. I took her direction well. I reveled in taking her direction. I was well and thoroughly stoned when she’d arrived, but some residue of the gift must have been coaxed out during the act itself. The longer we stayed locked together, the more I fell into the rhythms of her body and lost sight of the rhythms of my own. But I remember it. I remember every caught breath, every shudder. I remember the way her hands felt against me and the way her sweat tasted. When we lay side by side on the floor afterward, both naked, both slick and panting, I laughed. I couldn’t stop laughing. I pressed my hands against my face, but it did no good.

“
What the hell?” she asked.

I was too spent too care. I was too boneless to have any dignity left. “Well, that was something,” I said. The laughter grew softer, more sporadic.

“
Not bad,” she said. “Not like it was before, but not bad. You’re new at this?”

“
I am.”

“
Aye, you seem it. Now, you seem it. Seemed an old hand before.”

“
That wasn’t me. That was the magic.”

“
You are your magic.” She rolled her eyes as she said it.

I studied her profile. She stared up at the ceiling, one arm tucked beneath her head. Her red hair—a bright, golden red—was pooled around her, looped over an arm here, tucked under a shoulder there. Her nose was sharp. Beads of sweat dotted her forehead, glinting in the fickle light of oil lamps strewn throughout the room. “I am, and I’m not.”

She frowned slightly. “You lot, you always talk in riddles.”

I sat up and ran a hand through my hair. My limbs felt loose and long. “Don’t.”

“
Don’t what?”

“
Don’t talk about Semadrans like you know anything about us. Are you hungry?”

“
I don’t know. What have you got?”

“
Eggs. Bread. Apples.”

“
Bacon?” she asked.

“
I don’t eat meat.”

“
That’s to do with…”

“
Yes,” I said. I stood up and went towards the pantry. “That’s to do with being Semadran. I’ll make you eggs.”

She was gone by the time Sorcha returned. I was curled up in bed by then, still naked. A laziness came over me after sex, a willful luxuriance of my own skin. There are times I still get that way. He shook my shoulder until I woke up. I sat up, blinking at him, wincing in the light of the lamp he’d lit. “Hey, you all right?” he asked.

“
I’m fine. Have to get up tomorrow. Douse the lamp.”

“
I will in a second. Ariah, you all right? Really all right?”

I fell back into the bed and pulled a blanket up over my eyes. “I’m fine.”

“
Last time you weren’t.”

“
This time was different. I remember it.”

He was quiet for a long time. The room grew dark, and I felt him slide into the bed next to me. His arm wound around my ribs, and my hand patted his forearm. His face tucked into the space between my shoulder blades. “Nice to see you not scared for once,” he said softly. “That girl’s a terror.”

I laughed. “She is. You know, she really is. I made her eggs, and she complained about them the whole time she ate them.”

Sorcha laughed and held me a little tighter. “Ariah, you silly git, you didn’t have to cook for her. Could’ve just sent her on her way.”

“
Well, I was hungry. It only seemed fair to offer her some food, too.”

Sorcha laughed again. “You got your memory, you said?”

“
I did.”

“
Well. That’s something. I’m glad you got it.”

* * *

There were others after Fallinal. There was the bartender from the bar downstairs. There was a guard at court. There was a musician friend of Sorcha’s, a guitarist with perfect hands. They were each so utterly unique, each woman a private little world, but it always happened the same as it had with Fallinal. They came to me. They coaxed me through it. I gave, and they took, and I delighted in the giving. Afterward, invariably, I offered to cook for them. I don’t mean to imply that this was a frequent thing, because it wasn’t, but it did happen. And each time it happened, I felt that much more settled outside the Empire. I felt that much more comfortable in the life in which I’d landed. And I always returned to Sorcha. No matter how late it was, I always made the walk home to him. It felt like the day hadn’t really ended until we were tucked against each other in the shared bed. Those nights I wondered about him and me, about what we were, about if I wanted from him what he wanted from me. I never found an answer. I could feel myself approach one, make slow inexorable progress towards it, but life intervened before I reached it. Life has a way of doing that.

Given the single entrance to the apartment, I passed through the bar every morning. This had its perks, as sometimes the bartender would pass me a slice of bread on my way out if I looked harried and ill-slept and generally like I might have skipped breakfast. One morning in high summer, about two years into my stay there, Sorcha and I passed the bar. Pannali was already there. She grinned at me, and I blushed. I shot her a shy, hopeful smile. Sorcha laughed and pushed me past the bar. “You’ll be late, you silly git!”

“
Wait!” Pan called after us.

“
He ate,” Sorcha said.

“
No, there’s this…well, shit, I don’t know what it is, but it looks Semadran.”