Veronica Roth - Carve the Mark

Ryzek stared down at Akos, who was clutching his face, his neck streaked with blood.

“I do not know this Thuvhesit word, ‘please,’” Ryzek said.

Later that night I heard a scream echoing in the quiet hallways of Noavek manor. I knew it didn’t belong to Akos—he had been sent to our cousin Vakrez, “to grow thicker skin,” as Ryzek put it. Instead I recognized the scream as Eijeh’s voice raised in acknowledgment of pain, as my brother tried to pry the future from his head.

I dreamt of it for a long time thereafter.

I WOKE WITH A groan. Someone was knocking.

My bedroom looked like a guest room, no personal touches, all the clothes and beloved objects hidden in drawers or behind cabinet doors. This drafty house, with its polished wood floors and grand candelabras, held bad memories like too much dinner. Last night one of those memories—of Akos Kereseth’s blood trailing down his throat, two seasons earlier—had come into my dreams.

I didn’t want to take root in this place.

I sat up and dragged the heels of my hands over my cheeks to smear the tears away. To call it crying would have been inaccurate; it was more an involuntary oozing, brought on by particularly strong surges of pain, often while I slept. I raked my fingers through my hair and stumbled to the door, greeting Vas with a grunt.

“What?” I said, pacing away. Sometimes it helped to pace the room—it was soothing, like being rocked.

“I see I’ve found you in a good mood,” Vas said. “Were you sleeping? You do realize it’s well into the afternoon?”

“I don’t expect you to understand,” I said. After all, Vas didn’t feel pain. That meant he was the only person I had encountered since I had developed my currentgift who could touch me with bare hands, and he liked to make sure I remembered that. When you get older , he sometimes said to me when Ryzek couldn’t hear him, you may see value in my touch, little Cyra . And I always told him I would rather die alone. It was true.

That he couldn’t feel pain also meant he didn’t know about the gray space just beneath consciousness that made it more bearable.

“Ah,” Vas said. “Well, your presence has been requested in the dining room this evening for a meal with Ryzek’s closest supporters. Dress nicely.”

“I’m not really feeling up for a social engagement right now,” I said, teeth gritted. “Send my regrets.”

“I said ‘requested,’ but maybe I should have chosen my words more carefully,” Vas said. “‘Required’ was the word your brother used.”

I closed my eyes, stalling in my pacing for a moment. Whenever Ryzek demanded my attendance, it was to intimidate, even when he was dining with his own friends. There was a Shotet saying— a good soldier does not even dine with friends unarmed. And I armed him.

“I came prepared.” Vas held out a small brown bottle, corked with wax. It wasn’t labeled, but I knew what it was anyway: the only painkiller strong enough to make me fit for polite company. Or fit enough, anyway.

“How am I supposed to eat dinner while I’m on that stuff? I’ll throw up on the guests.” It might improve some of them.

“Don’t eat.” Vas shrugged. “But you can’t really function without it, can you?”

I snatched the bottle from his hand, and nudged the door closed with my heel.

I spent a good part of the afternoon crouched in the bathroom, under a stream of warm water, willing the tension from my muscles. It didn’t help.

And so I uncorked the bottle and drank.

As revenge, I wore one of my mother’s dresses to the dining room that evening. It was light blue and fell straight to my feet, its bodice embroidered with a small geometric pattern that reminded me of feathers layered over each other. I knew it would hurt my brother to see me in it—to see me in anything she had ever worn—but he wouldn’t be able to say anything about it. I was, after all, dressed nicely. As instructed.

It had taken me ten minutes to fasten it closed, my fingertips were so numb from the painkiller. And as I walked the halls, I kept one hand on the wall to steady myself. Everything tipped and swayed and spun. I carried my shoes in my other hand—I would put them on right before I entered the room, so I wouldn’t slip on the polished wood floors.

The shadows spread down my bare arms from shoulder to wrist, then wrapped around my fingers, pooling beneath my fingernails. Pain seared me wherever they went, dulled by drugs but not eliminated. I shook my head at the guard outside the dining room doors to stop him from opening them, and stepped into my shoes.

“Okay, go ahead,” I said, and he pulled the handles apart.

The dining room was grand but warm, lit by lanterns that glowed on the long table and the fire along the back wall. Ryzek stood, bathed in light, with a drink in his hand and Yma Zetsyvis at his right. Yma was married to a close friend of my mother’s, Uzul Zetsyvis. Though she was relatively young—younger than Uzul, at least—her hair was bright white, her eyes a shocking blue. She was always smiling.

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.