Carve the Mark

I knew the names of everyone else gathered around them: Vas, of course, at my brother’s left. His cousin, Suzao Kuzar, eagerly laughing at something Ryzek had said a moment before; our cousin Vakrez, who trained the soldiers, and his husband, Malan, swallowing the rest of his drink in one gulp; Uzul, and his and Yma’s grown daughter, Lety, with the long bright braid; and last, Zeg Radix, who I had last seen at his brother Kalmev’s funeral. The funeral of the man Akos Kereseth had killed.

“Ah, there she is,” Ryzek said, gesturing toward me. “You all remember my sister, Cyra.”

“Wearing her mother’s clothes,” Yma remarked. “How lovely.”

“My brother told me to dress nicely,” I said, working to enunciate though my lips were numb. “And no one knew the art of dressing nicely like our mother.”

Ryzek’s eyes glittered with malice. He lifted his glass. “To Ylira Noavek,” he said. “The current will carry her on a path of wonder.”

Everyone else raised their glasses and drank. I refused the glass offered to me by a silent servant—my throat was too tight for me to swallow. Ryzek’s toast was a repetition of what the priest had said at my mother’s funeral. Ryzek wanted to remind me of it.

“Come here, little Cyra, and let me have a look at you,” Yma Zetsyvis said. “Not so little anymore, I suppose. How old are you?”

“I’ve sojourned ten times,” I said, using the traditional time reference—marking what I had survived rather than how long I had existed. Then I clarified, “I began early, though—I’ll be sixteen seasons in a few days.”

“Oh, to be young and think in days!” Yma laughed. “So, still a child, then, tall as you are.”

Yma had a gift for elegant insults. Calling me a child was one of her mildest ones, I was sure. I stepped into the firelight with a small smile.

“Lety, you’ve met Cyra, haven’t you?” Yma said to her daughter. Lety Zetsyvis was a head smaller than I was, though several seasons older, and a charm hung in the hollow of her throat, a fenzu trapped in glass. It still glowed, though dead.

“No, I haven’t,” Lety said. “I would shake your hand, Cyra, but …”

She shrugged. My shadows, as if responding to her call, darted across my chest and throat. I stifled a groan.

“Let’s hope you never earn the privilege,” I said coolly. Lety’s eyes widened, and everyone went quiet. Too late, I realized that I was only playing into Ryzek’s hands; he wanted them to fear me, even though they followed him devoutly, and I was making it so.

“Your sister has sharp teeth,” Yma said to Ryzek. “Bad for those who would oppose you.”

“But no better for my friends, it seems,” Ryzek said. “I haven’t yet taught her when not to bite.”

I scowled at him. But before I could bite again—so to speak—the conversation moved on.

“How is our recent batch of recruits?” Vas asked my cousin Vakrez. He was tall, handsome, but old enough that there were creases at the corners of his eyes even when he wasn’t smiling. A deep scar, shaped like a half circle, was etched in the center of his cheek.

“Fair,” Vakrez said. “Better, now they’re through the first round.”

“Is that why you’re back for a visit?” Yma asked him. The army trained closer to the Divide, outside Voa, so it had been a few hours’ journey for Vakrez to make it here.

“No. Had to deliver Kereseth,” Vakrez said, nodding to Ryzek. “The younger Kereseth, that is.”

“His skin any thicker than when you first got him?” Suzao asked. He was a short man, but he was tough as armor skin, crisscrossed with scars. “When we took him, it was touch him and—wham!—he bruises.”

The others laughed. I remembered how Akos Kereseth had looked when he was first dragged into this house, his sobbing brother at his heels, blood still dried on his hand from his first kill mark. He had not seemed weak to me.

“Not so thin-skinned,” Zeg Radix said gruffly. “Unless you’re suggesting that my brother Kalmev died so easily?”

Suzao looked away.

“I am sure,” Ryzek said smoothly, “that no one means to insult Kalmev, Zeg. My father was killed by someone who was unworthy of him, too.” He sipped his drink. “Now, before we eat, I have arranged for some entertainment for us.”

I tensed as the doors opened, sure that whatever Ryzek called “entertainment” was much worse than it sounded. But it was just a woman, dressed throat to ankle in tight, dark fabric that showed every muscle, every bony joint. Her eyes and lips were traced with some kind of pale chalk, garish.

“My sisters and I, of the planet Ogra, offer the Shotet our greetings,” the woman said, her voice raspy. “And we present to you a dance.”

At her last word, she brought her hands together in a sharp clap. All at once, the fire in the fireplace and the shifting glow from the fenzu disappeared, leaving us in darkness. Ogra, a planet wreathed in shadow, was a mystery to most in our galaxy. Ograns did not allow many visitors, and even the most sophisticated surveillance technology couldn’t penetrate their atmosphere. The most anyone knew about them was from observation of spectacles like these. For once, I was grateful for how freely Ryzek indulged in the offerings of other planets, while restricting the rest of Shotet from doing the same. Without that hypocrisy I would never have gotten to see this.

Eager, I tilted forward on my toes and waited. Tendrils of light wrapped around the Ogran dancer’s clasped hands, weaving between her fingers. When she pulled her palms apart, the orange tongues of fire from the fireplace stayed in one palm and the blueish orbs of fenzu glow stayed hovering in the other. The faint light made the chalk around her eyes and mouth stand out, and when she smiled, her teeth were fangs in the dark.

Two other dancers filed into the room behind her. They were still for a few long moments, and movement came slowly, when it did. The dancer farthest to the left tapped her breastbone, lightly, but it wasn’t the sound of skin on skin that came from the motion—it was the sound of a full-bellied drum. The next dancer moved to that off-kilter rhythm, her stomach contracting and her back rounding as her shoulders hunched. Her body found a curved shape, and then light shuddered through her skeleton, making her spine glow, every vertebra visible for a few faltering seconds.

I gasped, along with several others.

The light-handler twisted her hands, bending firelight around fenzu light like she was weaving a tapestry from them. Their glow revealed complex, almost mechanical movements in her fingers and wrists. As the rhythm from the chest-drummer changed, the light-handler joined the third, the one with glowing bones, in a lurching, stumbling dance. I tensed, watching them, not sure if I should be disturbed or amazed. Every other moment I felt like they were going to lose their balance and hit the floor, but they caught each other every time, swinging and tilting, lifting and twisting, all flashing with multicolored light.

I was breathless when the performance ended. Ryzek led us in our applause, which I joined reluctantly, feeling it unequal to what I had just seen. The light-handler sent the flames back into our fire and the glow back into our fenzu lights. The three women clasped hands and bowed for us, smiling with closed lips.

I wanted to speak to them—though I didn’t know what I could possibly say—but they were already filing out. As the third dancer made her way to the door, though, she pinched the fabric of my skirt between her thumb and forefinger. Her “sisters” stopped with her. The force of all their eyes on me at once was overwhelming—their irises were pitch-black, and took up more space than usual, I was certain. I wanted to shrivel before them.

“She is herself a small Ogra,” the third dancer said, and the bones in her fingers flickered with light, just as shadows wound around my arms like bracelets. “All clothed in darkness.”

“It is a gift,” the light-handler said.

“It is a gift,” the chest-drummer echoed.

I did not agree.

The fire in the dining room was just embers. My plate was full of half-eaten food—the shreds of roasted deadbird, pickled saltfruit, and some kind of leafy concoction dusted with spices—and my head was throbbing. I nibbled the corner of a piece of bread and listened to Uzul Zetsyvis brag about his investments.

The Zetsyvis family had been charged with the breeding and harvesting of fenzu from the forests north of Voa for almost one hundred seasons. In Shotet we used the bioluminescent insects for light more often than current-channeling devices, unlike the rest of the galaxy. It was a relic of our religious history, now waning—only the truly religious didn’t use the current casually.

Maybe because of the Zetsyvis family industry, Uzul, Yma, and Lety were highly religious, refusing to take hushflower even in medicine, which meant eschewing most medicine. They said any substance that altered a person’s “natural state,” even anesthesia, defied the current. They also wouldn’t travel by current-powered engines. They considered them to be a too-frivolous use of the current’s energy—except for the sojourn ship, of course, which they defined as a religious rite. Their glasses were all full of water instead of fermented feathergrass.

“Of course, it’s been a difficult season,” Uzul said. “At this point in our planet’s rotation, the air doesn’t get warm enough to foster fenzu growth properly, so we have to introduce roving heat systems—”

Meanwhile, on my right, Suzao and Vakrez were having some kind of tense discussion about weaponry.

“All I’m saying is—regardless of what our ancestors believed—currentblades aren’t sufficient for all forms of combat. Long-range or in-space combat, for example—”

“Any idiot can fire a currentblast,” Suzao snapped. “You want us to put our currentblades down and turn soft and doughy year by year, like the Assembly nation-planets?”

“They’re not so doughy,” Vakrez said. “Malan translates Othyrian for the Shotet news feed; he’s showed me the reports.” Most of the people in this room, being Shotet elite, spoke more than one language. Outside of this room, that was prohibited. “Things are getting tense between the oracles and the Assembly, and there are whispers the planets are choosing sides. In some cases getting ready for a greater conflict than we’ve ever seen. And who knows what kind of weapons tech they’ll have by the time that conflict happens? Do you really want us to be left behind?”

“Whispers,” Suzao scoffed. “You put too much stock in gossip, Vakrez, and always have.”

“There is a reason Ryzek wants an alliance with the Pithar, and it isn’t because he likes the ocean views,” Vakrez said. “They’ve got something we can use.”

“We’re doing just fine with Shotet mettle alone, is my point.”