ot my own, Aremu said.
He remembered it vividly. Fire, was what he might’ve compared it to; fire in his skin, inside him, as if it were flowing through his veins. It was why he hadn’t even thought to look in the mirror – or to make sense of the hands he saw clutching at the sheets – for weeks. He hadn’t known to call them ley lines then, or to call what hung round him a porven. Other fields hadn’t been much better, like sandpaper against something inside him. It had been too much, buzzing wild, a maelstrom even inside his mind, parts of which had seemed newly alien to him.
I didn’t sense it before, there was no need to say. I don’t think I could’ve; I don’t think our folk – such as I was – can. The smile was still on Aremu’s face against all odds, like something precious, and he didn’t want to say that. Nor did he want to think what he’d’ve said if Aremu had brought it up in Dentis; he wouldn’t’ve been so sure, then.
Maybe Aremu didn’t feel it now because he’d had it all his life, even as a boch. But that sat ill with him; Aremu had, he said, felt it in others, and he didn’t much like the idea for other reasons he couldn’t’ve put words to.
Like a lodestone, he thought again, maybe only another metal – or another lodestone – could feel it. Could a lodestone feel what’s around it?
He almost wanted to say it, but something about comparing Aremu to a rock aloud didn’t seem wise. It still stretched fragile between them, like spiderweb still being spun. Silk, he thought, could be made from webs, but only if the web survived.
Some seasons, Aremu said.
He glanced down at their hands, feeling Aremu shift. He let him find his way, the soft smile still on his face. He turned Aremu’s hand over; he took it in both of his, stroked his thumb over it, cradled and pressed it. He didn’t think he could risk kissing it here, but he wanted to.
Dentis, then. Aremu had maneuvered round it gracefully; he’d known what it was he was asking, underneath the question, and he’d gone on to answer it. The breeze was cooler, wet with the Turga, and he almost shivered. “It hasn’t been so long, then, dove,” he said finally, looking up as Aremu did, finding that smile tugging tenuously at the other man’s lips again.
“I don’t think I’d know where to start, knowing what to make of it. I don’t know what it must be like, but, uh – I know something of – struggling to make sense of things.” He glanced down, wondering if he presumed. “New things from within, not just without,” he added quietly.
The toe tip of Aremu’s sandals was resting on the stone. His hip wasn’t twinging so badly now; squeezing Aremu’s hand, he eased up from the wall. The way they’d come was as quiet as it had been. He could almost see the office behind the hotel from here.
There was more night ahead by far. It was hard for him to believe they’d got here from tsia’tsia and lamb; he was desperately, achingly grateful. But the moon hovering now just above the tops of the buildings, the sky around it thoroughly black.
Black, he thought, looking down at his long white tunic, chagrined. He felt rather like the moon himself. All this talk of sensing, of feeling, of seeing. My field’s like a trumpet, and I’m dressed in the moon. I feel like a luminous carrot.
He tried to set the worry aside, for now.
The Liar’s Market. He glanced sidelong; he could almost picture Aremu there now. What’s it like, he wondered, going back there? “I’ve never felt another; only yours.” He shook his head. “But I haven’t tried to…” I’ve thought about it most sleeping with you, in the dark. When the only sound is you breathing, nothing grating at me, the only feeling your arms wrapped round me. It’s almost easy, then – almost – when there’s nothing to scatter me.
He shook his head, then leaned it on his shoulder again. “How does it seem to you, when you do feel it?”