[Closed] Keep Ourselves Afloat

[Tom Cooke]

The Ibutatu Estate • Muluku Islands

Afternoon on the 26th of Yaris, 2719

T
hank you,” replied Tom politely, inclining his head. His eyes’d returned to Tsadi pezre Awameh, and he didn’t look up as Niccolette shifted the curtain back into place over her shelf and moved to a seat over near the desks. The light that poured in behind him was just beginning to turn gold with the setting of the sun. Every time the wind picked up and stirred the air around, he could smell a waft of fresh, strong spices. He realized idly he was getting fair hungry again; he hadn’t eaten since that morning, but he’d lost track.

With another rasp, a soft crackle of old paper, he turned a page, then another. He blinked and forced his eyes to focus through his lenses. He felt himself settling in again. Niccolette had sat down with a book in hand, and Tom’s focus narrowed, again, to the lines of verse on the page in front of him.

The sea is ink, the sky
Paper – the distance between
Not so great, for my pen –

Niccolette spoke again, to his surprise, and he looked up at her over the rims of his glasses.

If the twilight wasn’t fooling his eyes, softening the edges of things, he’d’ve said there was still a slight smile playing about her lips; there was something in her eyes he couldn’t read, and he didn’t try, ’cause he knew better by now with her. “Tsabiyi,” he repeated emptily, fingertips wandering to the middle of the open book, smoothing along the crease where the two pages met, like he was considering marking his place.

He watched her as she went on; one of his eyebrows twitched at the word hematology. It was instinct – the memory of a numb, tingling line; sharp, burning pain – his fingers closed in a loose fist on the arm of the chair, fingertips settling in his palm. There was nothing there but the lines of Vauquelin’s palm, its unfamiliar lines, one of the many little foreign landscapes of his body. It hadn’t scarred, not from just the once, but the fading line had lingered for a week or two, and Tom had thought – but it would’ve been a damned unseemly scar for an incumbent to have, in the end.

He let the fist unravel. He heard the soft shuffle as Niccolette opened up her book and turned the pages, but his eyes didn’t leave her face; there was an expression of faint interest on his. At the question, he opened his mouth – hesitated – then laughed, a grin breaking across his face.

“I think it’s fair to say the interests are related,” he said, taking off his glasses. Marking his place, he closed Tsadi pezre Awameh on the temple and laid the book aside gently on the arm of the chair; the warm light glinted in the gold lettering on the cover, glinted in the gold wire-frame of the spectacles. With a tired grunt, he pushed himself up out of the chair, stretched, and moved to Niccolette’s shelf.

He moved the curtains aside soundlessly, this time, scanning the spines, squinting in the growing dark. “I wouldn’t’ve looked into a living conversationalist, being honest, and, ah – it’s hard to make the leap between those two,” he offered over his shoulder, with an edge of wryness, “if you don’t know where to look.” Again, two fingertips skimmed the tops of spines; again, they found a volume and eased it out. Then, they went hunting again, this time further up.

Tom drew the curtains back together again, and when he turned round, it was with two books under his arm: one fair thick, bound in black; one a slimmer volume, a deep, cinnamon reddish-brown. He wove his way back round the low table and to the chair where he’d left the book of poetry. He sat, then looked at Niccolette again.

“It doesn’t surprise me that Utúla was involved with him.” He glanced down, started to open the thinner book, then paused, running a hand over the cover. Indecisive, he reached for Tsadi pezre Awameh, then paused, then sacrificed his place to put his glasses back on. “Utúla’s, uh – openness, maybe – to the overlap between conversations appealed to me. We like to compare clairvoyant and quantitative, clairvoyant and perceptive, perceptive and living – not usually clairvoyant and living. But blood does something for a ward; anyone who says otherwise –”

He looked back up at Niccolette; he held the books closed in his lap for just a moment more, propping his head up on a hand.

“– has never used blood in a ward.” He raised his eyebrows, then opened up the book. He pushed up his glasses on the bridge of his nose, squinting down. “I’m curious if there’s more the body can tell us about the monic relationship than Brunnhold’d like to admit.”

[Niccolette Ibutatu]

Late Afternoon, 26 Yaris, 2719
The Ibutatu Estate

Niccolette had sat, ankles still crossed, hands resting on the book in her lap, and watched Vauquelin cross the room back to the shelves. Related, he had said, and Niccolette had lifted her eyebrows, curiously, engaged enough not to rush him, but to let him wander across the room. Aching, she thought, idly, lightly. Stiff. His hip, she was almost sure, from the careful way he’d risen. It was there, if one paid attention and knew what to make of it.

Vauquelin selected the books – one, and then the other, and went back to his chair. Niccolette wondered, suddenly, what he had been reading when she came in. None of her books, she realized. And none of Aremu’s, surely, not unless Vauquelin had developed a sudden interest in farming. So –

Niccolette’s eyes lingered on the small volume. Poetry? She lifted her gaze to Vauquelin, and realized he was already looking at her. Her eyebrows lifted again, slowly, as he spoke, and her lips pursed faintly at the comparison between clairvoyant and living. But she did not interrupt; she listened, all the sharp focus on her gaze on him, never looking away for even a moment. Her head tilted, slightly to the side, and without thinking about it Niccolette shut the book in her lap, both hands settled onto it.

“I think there is a good deal Brunnhold would not like to admit,” Niccolette said with a little smile – and then a grin, suddenly, bright and vivid. She wore no make-up, not today; there was a redness to her eyes and at the edges of her nose, even in the dim golden light; there was a feeling of dryness that she knew, by long experience, meant she had wept herself swollen. But she grinned, then, and she felt it swell in her chest, the sudden surprise of learning yet another way in which Vauquelin was interesting.

If she had not found Tsabiyi for herself already, Niccolette would have said it was absurd. She had not gone looking for him, precisely, but when one came across a rare book with such an impressive history, one did not turn it aside. Even Uzoji had been curious, although he had said, later, that he hadn’t quite known what to make of it. Naturally, she thought, living conversation underlay all things to do with life. And monic pathways were a part of living things; therefore, Niccolette decided, it seemed right that living conversation should encompass at least a part of clairvoyant conversation as well.

“It is interesting,” Niccolette agreed. She shifted; she set her book off to the side. “The leymancists, of course, would tell you that we have measured the ley lines,” Niccolette made a little face. Blood does something for a ward, she thought, curiously, still looking at the Incumbent. “We can measure them, but we cannot dissect them,” the living conversationalist said, unperturbed. “We talk of them as in the brain, or in the body, and we call them invisible – as if that…” Niccolette raised her eyebrows. “It is not as if there are there, floating in the body, some invisible organ which we cannot see, but you could feel with your fingertips,” she turned her hands over, flexing them lightly, and settled them back in her lap.

Uzoji, she thought, would have said –

Quiet, then; a moment of stillness, and Niccolette felt tired, all of a sudden. Her gaze lowered; she sighed. She reached back to the table, and opened the book again, and looked down at it. She had found the right page again, as if the memory – her eyes closed for a moment, and then opened again, and she felt a prickling heat behind them.

“I should be interested to know what you think of Tsabiyi,” Niccolette said, quietly, looking down at the pages before her, then back up at Vauquelin. She felt tired; she felt, suddenly, as if she could have gone back to bed and slept another day. She looked back down at her book, hands resting on the pages; she blinked, and a tear slipped free, and pooled on the back of her skin. She shuddered, and closed her eyes, and wiped the back of her hand on the arm of the chair. Another breath, slow and shaky.

Niccolette closed her book, then, again, and rose. “I shall see you later,” she said, quietly. She turned, and left, stumbling once, and went down the hall from the library, book clutched too tightly in her hand.

Niccolette curled herself up in her bed; she had thought – she had felt the urge to weep rising up in her, kindled bright and burning hot in her chest. The tears would not come, and it was even worse; she was left shaking, keening softly into her pillow, for a long time – until finally a sob broke through her, and then another, and she was shaking and crying, emptying out slowly. She gasped, and held the pillow a little tighter, and she wept until she couldn’t breathe, and then she wept a little longer, and then, finally, blessedly, she was still.

It was dark by the time she heard the door ease open, a faint creak.

“Poa’na,” Aremu said, gently. She could barely hear the soft shuffle of his feet; he knelt next to her at the edge of the bed, still in the maelstrom of her field. Niccolette shuddered, and opened her eyes to the blue-shifted world around her; her sheets, her bed, all the air turned blue. She sighed, and closed her eyes, and let all the misery drain away from the air around her, back beneath her skin.

Aremu was watching her when her eyes opened again, frowning softly. “Dinner?” He asked.

Niccolette shook her head. She sat up, slowly; she brushed her hair back from her face, and set Demontmarcy down, her arm aching where the spine of the book had pressed against it.

Aremu was quiet, looking up at her. He rose, then, easily, and sat next to her on the bed. He smelled, Niccolette thought, like salt water, a faint drift of it; she supposed he had been swimming. She closed her eyes again. Gently, Aremu settled his arm around her, and drew her carefully against his side. Niccolette shuddered, tense – and relaxed, slowly, and eased her head onto his shoulder.

“Ahura has made lamb curry,” Aremu said. She thought he was trying to sound light, but there was an ache in his voice, somewhere that he couldn’t hide.

“I know,” Niccolette whispered. Her eyes closed, and she thought – she opened them again, and looked at him, tears spilling down her cheeks. “It is so hard, Aremu – it is –” She shuddered, and broke again, and began to weep, tight little pained noises filling the air.

“I know,” Aremu whispered. “I know,” he held her, and she heard his breath catch; there was something like a stifled sob beneath his breath, but when she looked up his cheeks were dry, and his gaze soft still. Niccolette could feel the weight of her sadness in the air around them, and she sighed, and drew it back inside herself once more.

“I should meditate,” Niccolette sighed. She brushed her lips against Aremu’s cheek, and drew away, and wiped her face with her hands.

“After dinner,” Aremu said, then, looking at her.

Niccolette looked at him, and she frowned. “I told you no,” she said, a little sharply – a little irritated.

“And?” Aremu asked, and he looked squarely at her, sitting on the edge of her bed.

Niccolette flexed; she bore down on him, scowling now, and he didn’t flinch. If anything – he grinned at her, and Niccolette – she was grinning too, then, and she sighed, and released the pulse.

“You cannot scare me, poa’na,” Aremu said, lightly. He squeezed her hand in his. “Not like that.”

“I should,” Niccolette grumbled, but she was smiling, still.

Ahura served bowls of lamb curry to the three of them, a truly enormous serving for each – even Niccolette. There were plates of irukewi too, two for each of them, and a heaping pile of extra in the middle of the table. She had beamed at Niccolette when she entered the room, a smile that had made Niccolette feel faintly guilty that she had entertained the idea of skipping the meal.

Aremu sat, carefully, taking a napkin for his lap.

“Coconut juice,” Ahura said in cheerful, sonorous Estuan, setting a jug on the table. She brought three cups full, and set down one for each of the three of them. “In case of heat in mouth.” She grinned at Vauquelin, brushed a light hand over Niccolette’s head, and left them to eat in peace.

Niccolette sighed, looking down at the bowl in front of her. It smelled, she thought, very good. “I wish she would tell me how much turmeric she uses,” The Bastian said, grumpily, more than half-beneath her breath; Aremu snorted, softly, smiling at her. She ripped off a piece of irukew, and picked up a piece of lamb with it. Her stomach grumbled at the taste, and Niccolette sighed, softly, again, and settled in to eat.

[Tom Cooke]

The Ibutatu Estate • Muluku Islands

Evening on the 26th of Yaris, 2719

O
f course,” said Tom, lightly, easily as he could. He smoothed the page underneath his hand, blinking up at her over the rims of his glasses; for a moment, there was a slight frown on his face, a little crease between his eyebrows. It smoothed out into something almost like a smile, but not perfectly. He watched Niccolette shut her book and get to her feet, and he watched – his lips pressed thin – her turn, stumble just a pina on the way to the door. He didn’t say anything else because he couldn’t think what to say, and he didn’t want to bring attention to it, and he reckoned she was beyond listening anyway.

It wasn’t a surprise. He didn’t think he’d ever seen her without kohl, and he hadn’t been sure if it was that, fooling his eye, but he hadn’t thought so. He’d seen the breath catch in her chest, and the light’d caught a glisten on the back of her hand. He knew the way she’d shut her eyes. There wasn’t much on Vita that was more familiar to him, these days, than all those little motions. Go, he’d thought. Go, cry; it’ll be here. That, if anything, surprised him.

He remembered what Aremu’d said; more to the point, he remembered the hushed Mugrobi at the breakfast table, the empty seat that, now and then, asserted itself like a presence.

Seats, maybe.

Sitting alone in the library, he tried to focus his tired eyes on the page. He wasn’t sure for how long. The sharp-bright shapes of the furniture, the stirring curtains and the pooling shadows, fell to gloaming. It was some time before he found it in him to get up and light a nearby lamp; he sat quiet and watched the shifting shape of his hand on the title page in front of him, two fingertips still perched underneath a neatly-printed line of Estuan. The veins seemed to him like the branches of a tree, or the hairline arms of a stroke of lightning.

He thought, as he rose and ambled over to light the oil lamp, he’d take Niccolette up on her offer. His glasses were still perched on the very tip of his nose, where he’d forgot to take them off, and he squinted over them at the matchbox. The lamp shed a pool of soft, warm light over the chair, the window-sill, the drapes moving in the breath of the dark outside.

He smiled, remembering the grin that’d spread across her face. Good for something, he thought, and maybe it was a pina sad, but it was proud, too – in a quiet, tired sort of way. Like a bright-colored scarf from a plain black waistcoat, but this time, he thought, it’d worked. He thought he’d caught her eyes narrowing, just a pina, when he’d spoken of clairvoyance and blurred edges; she hadn’t offered to talk over him, but there’d been something pleasant about knowing he’d engaged her enough to make that kind of face. He wondered what it’d been, and he hoped he’d have the opportunity to disagree with her good and proper-like, sometime; the thought scared him just enough to be interesting. Enough, at any rate, to distract him from –

He paused, taking off his glasses and rubbing his eyes, before he sat. With a wince, he took Tsadi pezre Awameh back to Uzoji’s shelf, settling it in where he’d taken it from and drawing the curtain back. When he sat back down in the armchair, it was Tsabiyi he opened. He was restless for awhile, but in the fresh light – why had he even been trying to read in the dark? – he found it easier to focus.

The pages went by; leastways, he read what he could understand, and he put the rest aside for when he could get the book upstairs to his lexicon. By the time a voice lilted from the doorway, sir, he’d lost himself, and the finding was jarring. But when he looked up and saw Ahura in the doorway, half-lit and half-hazy with shadows, a little sweat glinting at her brow, he found a smile and shut his book and put his spectacles back in the pocket of his trousers.

It hadn’t been chill in the library, not exactly, but there was a bite to the night wind that it seemed the sun’d guarded them from; it was a familiar sort of chill, the chill of the Tincta, but it wasn’t so kind to the incumbent’s aches. The kitchen, on the other hand, was Circle-damned divine.

Tom wasn’t the first at the table, but Aremu’d left for upstairs quick enough, to fetch Niccolette, and it was easy to sit in comfortable quiet as Ahura finished up. He wasn’t sure when he’d become achingly hungry. By the time Aremu came back down with Niccolette and they’d all settled in, his stomach was grumbling; the steaming bowl she set in front of him was full to brimming with curried lamb, and though some part of him was warning him he’d regret finishing it, he couldn’t bring himself to care.

Seeing the great stack of irukewi in the middle of the table, it was nearly impossible not to smile. When Ahura brought out the coconut juice, he grinned back at her, and murmured, “Thank you, ada’na,” and was still smiling as she left them alone to eat.

There was something fair strange about it, if he’d thought hard enough, if he’d let himself think. Him, in the body of an Anaxi statesman, sitting barefoot at a table with a galdor and an imbala, eating with his hands. It was hard to believe Yesufu’s dinner was in a day; it felt like the calm before the storm, this strange little peace.

For a few moments, he was too busy working at the lamb to speak, or pay attention to much of anything else. His hands were shakier now than they were this morning; back in Vienda, he’d’ve been struggling with a fork, but this was a little easier. The irukew surprised him; he hadn’t been sure what to expect, but it wasn’t the crisp, lacy edges with their little pinprick holes, warm and soft in the middle. The curry, unsurprisingly, had him sniffling within moments; he’d thought he was getting used to it, at first, but the heat crept up on him as ever, and he was sipping coconut juice fair quick. It was a pleasant complement to the lamb and the irukew.

He heard Niccolette’s grumble, and he glanced up to see Aremu snort softly. He raised his eyebrows, trying to picture – but he reckoned he’d heard of stranger things, by now, and he smiled and went back to his food. “I watched ada’na Ahura cooking, earlier,” he said after a few moments, between bites. “Browning the lamb by the pan-full. There’s nothing smells like ghee.”

He thought of hama, of what he could cobble together of how he’d grown up eating in Manatse; it was nothing like this, but sometimes – Tom guided his mind away from it, gentle-like, tucked the thought away for later. After a few more bites, when he’d got through his first irukew, he forced himself to slow down.

When he could speak through the heat, he glanced up at Niccolette – a slight crease of concern, again, between his brows.

“Ada’xa Yesufu pez Edun,” he started, careful-like; he didn’t like breaking the comfortable silence, but he didn’t know he’d get another opportunity. “I’m afraid it’s been – some time since I’ve seen the man, and I was never very familiar with him. Are either of you acquainted?” He’d met Aremu’s eye maybe once during dinner; he made an effort to do it again, now, his eyes moving between the imbala and the galdor.

[Niccolette Ibutatu]

Evening, 26 Yaris, 2719
The Ibutatu Estate

For years, Niccolette thought, she had tried to understand how it was that Ahura cooked so well. She had measured; she had stopped Ahura at every spice, every step of the way, and written it all down, in precise amounts with measured spoons; she had counted the minutes, the stirs, tried to estimate the heat of the stove. In time, with patient effort, she had learned to cook. She had known nothing of it, when she married Uzoji; she had not ever imagined she would learn. The idea of having a chef on an airship still struck her as strange, and oddly painful; she was glad to be off the Uccello di Hurte.

Her first few meals had been disastrous. Perhaps more than the first few. Uzoji had eaten every bite she had ever set before him, and when she had asked him how it was, he had told her he loved her. Sometimes he had kissed her forehead; sometimes he had only smiled at her. If she had stopped? Niccolette was not sure. Perhaps, in the end, she would have taken other duties on the Eqe Aqawe, in the rotation, and left the cooking to the rest.

Niccolette had not given up.

She had sat, at Ahura’s side, and she had watched and measured and weighed, and she had learned. Her hands had ached; she had gotten spices up in her nose and in her eyes; she had cried, hot and furious tears huddled against the wall outside, when she had burnt one too many irukew. Slowly, bit by bit, in time, she had learned.

Niccolette ripped off another piece of her irukew, and ate another mouthful of lamb. She had not known she was hungry; she would have said she did not want to eat. She had, she thought, said she did not want to eat. But now, with the food before her, in her hands – Niccolette ripped off another piece of her irukew, and scooped up another bite full of lamb, and ate.

When Vauquelin spoke, Niccolette looked up at him. Her hands were clean, still, with only the faintest trace of grease from the irukew, but she wiped them delicately and picked up her coconut juice, taking a small sip. Her mouth burned, pleasantly, and she smiled a little, long used to it, feeling the spices linger on her tongue.

“Yes, of course,” Niccolette said, raising her eyebrows at Vauquelin. She paused, and settled her cloth back on her lap. “I thought you knew,” she said after a moment, and shrugged, lightly, sitting back slightly. She cradled the cup of coconut juice between her hands, and took another small sip, the last quarter of her irukew still sitting on her plate.

“We have – ” Niccolette paused, her breath catching for a moment. She cleared her throat, carefully, and looked back at Vauquelin, “we have known him for some time. Seven years, I should say?” She glanced over at Aremu.

Aremu nodded; he was on his second irukew already, Niccolette noticed with a little smile, and she did not think he was slowing down yet. He ate neatly, as ever, precisely, but always intently – especially Ahura’s cooking.

Niccolette looked back at Vauquelin then, and proceeded ahead to the questions he had not asked. “He has always been welcoming,” The Bastian said with another shrug. “He lives mostly here on the islands, I believe. I am sure he has a place in Thul Ka as well,” she ripped off a piece of irukew, and folded it idly between her fingers – set it back down on the edge of her plate. She wiped her fingers again, settled her hand around the coconut juice, and did not drink it.

“He keeps budgies,” Niccolette said, after a moment, smiling. “Other birds as well, and he tends to them himself. He is very fond of them all, but the budgies especially. They are lovely.” She picked up the irukew again, as if to dip it in the lamb, then set it back down once more. “You have met his son, perhaps?” She raised her eyebrows. At Vauquelin’s answer, she shrugged. “Eduxu pez Yesufu,” Niccolette said. “A professor of history at Thul’Amat. Uzoji quite liked him."

Niccolette was quiet, then; she dipped the irukew in the lamb, wrapped it around a piece, and held. After a moment, she glanced at Aremu. “Anything else?” She asked.

Aremu wiped his hand. “He lost his wife a few years ago,” he said, quietly, looking at Niccolette.

“Yes,” Niccolette was quiet as well. She set the piece of irukew down, for a moment, hands tangling in the napkin on her lap, and said nothing else.

Aremu was quiet, looking at her, and turned back to Vauquelin. “He changed parties, recently, sir. He belongs to the Bull Elephant now.”

“Bull Elephant!” Niccolette said, abruptly, looking at Aremu. “Ada’xa Yesufu?”

Aremu nodded.

Niccolette pressed her lips together, and shook her head. “You saw him recently?” She asked.

“Yes,” Aremu said. He reached down to his irukew, and ripped off another piece, and kept eating.

“Yes,” Niccolette said. “I – I remember now.” She looked down at her plate, her hands tightly wound into her napkin. Her face twitched at something like a smile, although it made little headway against her frown. She sighed. “I suppose the party in two nights shall be interesting,” Niccolette said, bitterly. She closed her eyes for a moment.

Then, slowly, with a deep breath, Niccolette picked the irukew and lamb back up, and ate it, gently. She ripped off another little bit of her irukew, and looked back up at Vauquelin. “We shall all be attending,” Niccolette said, evenly, and it was easier now to smile.

[Tom Cooke]

The Ibutatu Estate • Muluku Islands

Night on the 26th of Yaris, 2719

H
e froze, head bowed, a scoop of lamb halfway to his mouth. But if Niccolette thought anything of it, nothing happened; he wasn’t sure if he’d skidded by, or if she’d decided it was none of her business, but he was damned grateful. A mouthful of lamb excused him from having anything more to say, and regardless, she was speaking again, and he listened intently.

He started to relax. Aremu seemed content to let her answer the question; he reckoned if the imbala’d run afoul of ada’xa Yesufu during his time running the plantation, he’d’ve spoken up by now. Still listening, Tom turned back to his curry.

He took a second piece off his second irukew; he was almost – but not quite – keeping up with Aremu. He wondered where he’d found this appetite. He was tired, tired in a way that clung to all his bones, and maybe that was it; it wasn’t the kind of tired, rainy season tired, dinners-with-Diana tired, that made him feel an old man. Being honest, he felt halfway… Another bite of lamb, stinging at the inside of his mouth; another sniffle; he decided not to think too hard on it, lest it slip away, lest in interrogating it he found something he didn’t want to know.

Best, for now, just to be pleased with the feeling, and pleased with his newfound appetite. He glanced up at Niccolette again, catching her smile. He raised his brows, but smiled, too, thinking of it. He’d met a man who kept budgies, once – old Shep, back in Lionshead. Tsuter with business, but so long as you didn’t run afoul of him, sweetest dagka you ever met. A picture of Yesufu pez Edun was taking shape in his head, and he let it, wiping off his fingers momentarily to get at his coconut water again.

His mouth was full of lamb again, so when Niccolette asked him about his son, he just shook his head and frowned. He was relieved to see her shrug again. Eruxu pez Yesufu, and he paused, squinting back down at his bowl, as if he might know the name and just couldn’t put it to a face; it was an act, ’course, but it couldn’t hurt nothing.

Aremu spoke, finally, tentative. Tom didn’t look up; he couldn’t bring himself to see the expression on Niccolette’s face. So, he thought instead: toffin, Thul Ka old money; dagka; keeps birds; secular professor son; widower. He tore off another piece of irukew, frowning faintly. Without looking up, he thought about it. He’d no godsdamn clue why Hawke was concerned –

He glanced up, sharply, and met Aremu’s eye. “Bull Elephant?” he said softly, at the same time Niccolette did. He looked at her, then down and away.

Aremu was back at his food; there was a bitter tilt to Niccolette’s lips. Interesting indeed, Tom thought, and didn’t say. But when she met his eye again, he mustered up a smile, and even a quirk of one eyebrow. “I’ll be glad of the company,” he said, even more softly.

There was a prickle of anxiety at the back of his neck that didn’t go away, not this time. He resumed his attack on the lamb with a renewed fervor, trying to keep himself from the tide of thoughts that threatened to wash over him. No point thinking about it before the sap got spilt; that was a sure way for a kov to get himself killed, thinking hard enough he was wont to flinch, when the time came.

He didn’t say much, over the rest of dinner. He didn’t see as he could. It was funny to think – once, it would’ve been ’cause he was human, but at least he’d’ve known what was coming out of his mouth, at least he’d’ve known who he was. It was funny to think you could sit at a table with folk who hadn’t the foggiest clue of who you were, who looked at you and saw something wildly different from how you felt.

There were things he could’ve said, he reckoned, about ada’na Ahura’s cooking, about the heat, about the job, even, but he didn’t know how they’d sound. There were some mirrors that couldn’t be covered up, no matter how much you ate with your hands. There was no real camaraderie, he thought, anywhere, not among toffin politicians, natt, tsat, spokes, Brothers. He wondered when he’d become – like this. He thought sadly of Ava.

But there was warmth in eating in company, and Ahura was a damned good cook. (He wondered what sort of cook Niccolette Ibutatu was; he still couldn’t picture it.) He ate, quietly, meticulously, and when he retired to his room upstairs with its covered mirror and its cool breezes, he was more than full.

He sat up reading Tsabiyi before he went to bed, sitting by the open window in the low glow of an oil lamp. The sky was dark enough now to be a wash of stars, no reflections in glass, no glowing light like smog on the horizon to obscure them. The salty breeze was tinged with night-smells, full of secrets, it’d always seemed to Tom; the crickets were loud.

Aremu brought him a bundle after a while, a pair of sandals. It was a quiet, unobtrusive knock at the door, but one that’d sent a current of shock through him; his hand shook when he took off his spectacles and laid them on the book. He got the door, trying like a fool to block the room from sight. The imbala was polite, but most importantly brief; Tom was grateful for that. He could no longer bring himself to care about anything else.

Once he’d taken the clothes and shut the door, he sat on the bed with them in his lap, running his hands over them. He couldn’t quite bring himself to unfold them. He wasn’t sure how long it had been, but he found himself with his face buried in them, finally – finally shaking – finally spilling out tears, gasping shuddering breaths against the soft linen, silent.

He wasn’t sure how long it’d been, but he found himself curled in bed on his side, breathing evenly, finally, the very edge of the bed, still neatly-folded. Tomorrow, a voice said, gentle-like. You can deal with it tomorrow.