Ariah (4 page)

Dirva looked over. “City-grown? Really?” Abira nodded, and to my great surprise, my mentor seriously considered consuming drugs right in front of me. He caught me staring and shook his head. “No, no, I shouldn’t.”

“
Yeah, you should. Used to right along with the rest of us back in the City, it’s not like the herb’s changed any just ’cause you did,” she said.

“
I did not change!”

“
Guess you’re right. Guess you were always a selfish ass.” There was a moment of heavy, sharp silence. Dirva left the room. He gave no pretense at all, just left. Abira shook it off like a dog shakes off water. She pulled a small wooden pipe and a pouch out of her sleeve. She packed herself a bowl, watching me watching her do it with a sly smile. Her fingers were quick and deft; in a few seconds the pipe was packed, and she fished a match out of her other sleeve. She shoved the pipe and the match at me. “Quick, kid, before he comes back.”

I took it. I admit I was intrigued. My grandmother smoked pipeherb right up until her death. It has a rich smell, one I still associate with her and all her stories of the war in the South and her life before her silver husband swept her away up into the Empire. Thinking back on it, I’m not entirely sure how she supplied herself with it way out there in Ardijan. She was resourceful; she may have grown it herself. Still, though, she never let me have any. My parents very much disapproved of her smoking it, and she said it wasn’t worth the trouble getting me into to trouble with her.

I must confess I was also intrigued by Abira. She was unlike anyone I’d ever met. She struck me as someone totally unfettered, a person with no comprehension of law. That she was Dirva’s sister fascinated me. They had been raised together yet were so different. Part of me had always wanted to be wild and lawless, and that part of me had been handily seduced by Abira. I struck the match. Abira grinned and nudged me with her elbow. My heart pounded against my ribs. She elbowed me again, harder this time, and I sucked in a huge, billowing lungful of smoke. It was heavy smoke, dry smoke, which felt like it was strangling me from the inside. It sent me into a violent coughing fit. I doubled over, gripping the edge of the table for dear life. My eyes watered. I felt I was going to vomit any second. The pipe clattered to the floor.

Dirva rushed around the corner asking questions I couldn’t quite hear and couldn’t answer. He shoved Abira out of her chair and ordered her to get me a glass of water. He pulled me back into my seat and patted my back until the coughing subsided. I felt safer when he was next to me. Once I felt safe again, the situation struck me as impossibly absurd, and I began to laugh. It was a painful sort of laugh, one of those laughs where it seems like there’s a muscle trying to launch itself out of you, and the more you try to stop, the harder you seem to laugh. Dirva snatched the glass out of her hand. “Drink this, it’ll help,” he said. I took the glass in both hands and drank as much of the water as quickly as I could. The pipeherb had taken hold by then. I remember having some strange epiphany about the pureness of water, which I fully believed was quite profound. “Abbie, what the hell is wrong with you?” Dirva hissed.

“
Hell, I didn’t know he was going for half the bowl,” she said.

Dirva plucked the empty glass out of my hands. “Ariah, are you all right?”

I let out a couple of weak-sounding coughs and nodded.

“
He’s fine! Look at him, happy as a clam,” Abira said.

I grinned and gave Dirva’s sister a playful shove. She no longer seemed so threatening. “Did you bring drums? Did I see drums?”

Abira sat next to me. “Oh, sure. I’m a drummer.”

“
Let’s play the drums.”

“
Do you play?”

Dirva sighed. “No, he doesn’t play. Ariah, I think you should lie down.”

I let him lead me to my bed. Sometime soon after that, I fell asleep.

My life before Abira’s arrival had been a very stable thing and comfortably slow-paced. By that I mean that very few things happened to me suddenly. Even moving to Rabatha had not been a sudden thing. I had known for months beforehand. The train ticket had been bought five weeks before I left. My single bag had been packed a week and a half in advance. I didn’t know that life could change direction so sharply so quickly. I was young enough to think there was ample time to consider any major decision, and I was inexperienced enough to think that life gave you ample time to make the right one.

I fell into a deep, black sleep that first night of Abira’s arrival. When Dirva woke me the next morning, her things were still piled in his armchair, but she herself was nowhere to be found. I could feel the change in the air as soon as I woke. There was a certainty of difference, intangible but inescapable. Dirva carried in him a steely darkness that day. He was closed and hard, whatever he felt secreted away from the rest of the world. There was no warmth to him. He asked me if I was hungry. I said I wasn’t. He looked at me closely. “How’s your mind? Can you think straight? Have you slept it off?” he asked.

“
I don’t know. I think so.”

He leaned against the wall and peered out the window down into the narrow alley below, his arms crossed against his chest. “There are things I need to explain to you, Ariah, and then you will have to make a choice, and you will have to make it today. Do you understand?”

“
Yes?” I said, but I didn’t, and he knew I didn’t.

“
Your mother’s mother was red. Tell me, did she tell you much about the way the reds live? Families and marriage, things like that?”

“
Not terribly much, no.”

“
You are unfamiliar with the term ‘da,’ then?”

“
I am. I’m sorry.”

Dirva shot me an impatient frown. “Why should you be sorry?”

“
I…because, well, I…”

He waved at me. “I’m going to tell you the situation, and then you can ask me for clarification if you need it. You’ll get tonight to think it over, but you’ll have to make a decision by morning.” The fingers of his left hand drummed against his right forearm. As he spoke, as he explained himself and where he came from, he watched me closely. He wasn’t reading me; I would have felt it if he were. Instead he regarded me with a deep and yearning curiosity. I knew him well enough to know that however I reacted mattered and would have consequences. I was still very Semadran then—as Abira said, Semadran through and through, green eyes be damned—so I pulled out all my silver reserve and showed him nothing at all. My face remained a perfect silver mask while he spoke. Looking back, I wish I hadn’t. I wish I’d shown him something. Compassion, understanding, something. I didn’t realize how vulnerable he was forcing himself to be.

“
As you may have guessed by now, I grew up in the City. As anyone who has seen me can tell, I’m nahsiyya. I tell you this to say I had a different sort of family than yours, though now that you’ve met Abbie I’m sure that’s another thing you’ve guessed. My mother is nahsiyya. City-bred. My father is a red elf from the mountains. My da is Semadran. You have two parents; I have three. My father’s married to both of them. Ma and Da are not married to each other, but it works out somehow anyway.” Dirva’s dark eyebrows pulled together, and he turned towards the window a little more, a little further away from me. “My da is not well. Abbie is here to bring me back. She’s been here before to bring me back, but she says if ever there was a time to return it’s now. I believe her. I’m leaving for the City tomorrow. You are welcome to come with me. The timing is not ideal for your training, I know. You are welcome to come with me, but I will understand if you choose not to. Sleep on it tonight. Think it over.” He looked at me over his shoulder. “Do you have any questions?”

“
Yes, I do.”

He frowned. “Well, ask them.”

His annoyance with me made me flustered. I ran a hand through my hair, stalling. “About your father. He is married to both?”

“
Yes.” His answer was short, curt. The way he said it was a closed door, but I ignored it and pushed on anyway.

“
He has two wives?” This was a thing I’d heard implied in the stories my mother’s mother told, a thing which had fascinated me, but a thing which I had always believed could not really be true. The truth was actually stranger.

Dirva stood minutely taller. A hardness settled on him like armor. “No, Ariah. My father has one wife and one husband. Da is a term for a male co-parent.”

The words sunk in very slowly, but my mask was impenetrable, and he was not reading me, so I don’t know if he could tell how much the facts of his life caught me off guard. I took a quiet second to recover. “You are close to him? Your da?”

“
Very close.”

“
And he is not well?” Dirva frowned at me. “Yes, you said that. Well, I…it is not a fast trip to the City, is it?”

“
No, it isn’t.”

“
So, this will take some time. The travel, and then you’ll want to stay with your family, and then there’s travel back.”

Dirva stood still, calm and composed, but his fingers beat a twitchy rhythm against his elbows. “There’s half a year left in your training, and this trip would take you out of the country for most, if not all of it. I welcome you to come, but I should say that you’re quite bright, quite disciplined, and I am not convinced you actually need these last few months of training.”

I swelled with pride when he said it. There was a kindness to Dirva, but he was a man who was not generous with praise. I was, and still am, a man who laps up praise like a cat laps up cream. “Oh, I need the training.”

“
I don’t know that you do. And I don’t know that I’ll be in a state to teach you much of anything in the City.”

“
I have tonight to think it over?”

Dirva nodded and stared back out at the alley. “You have tonight.”

The rest of the day was a blur. Dirva was in and out of the apartment sporadically as he and his sister tied up loose ends and made arrangements. Looking back, I think he might have been planning to return for some time. Perhaps planning is too strong a word—he may have suspected he’d have to go back. It only took him a day and a half to tie up his loose ends in Rabatha. He already had everything in place, ready to go in case he got called back. He was, after all, nothing if not practical. For my part, I stayed out of sight and tucked out of the way and agonized over the decision of whether or not to go. It was a huge decision to make, a heavy one, which changed the course of things. I felt so torn: I wanted to be there for him in a time of need, but I wasn’t sure if he wanted me there. I wanted to know more about him, where he came from, but it struck me as invasive to find it all out. I wanted to travel, to see the City, to see more exotic and fascinating people like his sister, but I was afraid of the effect they might have on me. After all, in less than an hour his sister had turned me to drugs. I knew I was impressionable. My mother said it had to do with shaping, and perhaps that’s true. I had the feeling that if I went with him, the City would leave indelible marks on me, and I wasn’t sure I would still fit in the Empire if I let it mark me. I knew by then I was not like Dirva. He had a will of iron. He was a man that changed the world around him instead of it changing him. I was, and still am, the opposite.

More than anything, I kept thinking I needed more time to think. I wanted to talk it through with someone, but the only people to talk it through with were Dirva and his sister. Everyone else I knew in Rabatha knew him, too, and to explain my quandary meant sharing personal information about him I knew he wouldn’t want shared. I mulled my choices over well into the night. I lay awake on my cot going over it and over it. I didn’t sleep, and I was still thinking about it when Dirva woke at dawn. He raised his eyebrows at me. The unvoiced question demanded an answer, and I couldn’t give him one. I just stared at him, terrified and paralyzed. Helpless. “I can’t tell you what to do, Ariah.”

“
Yes, you can.”

“
No, I can’t. I have preferences about this, strong preferences, and they are not rooted in what’s best for you or your training. My preferences are personal. I don’t…I don’t want to influence your decision, and I know I will if I give you advice.” He smiled slightly. For the first time since he laid the choices out to me, some of his warmth resurfaced. “You ought to trust your instincts more. You have a sound mind.”

I dropped my head into my hands. I had spent hours thinking about the choice as it related to me. I spent seconds thinking about the choice as it related to him. I’d seen him with his sister, and I’d seen how the bond between them was a thing that brought him both deep comfort and a wealth of pain. My own future was a vague, unformed, looming thing. My future was something too fraught with unnamed failures to make sense of. I didn’t know how this decision would impact it. But I did know how it would impact him. “I’ll go with you.”