Swordcrossed

by Freya Marske

Now I walk from the south side of Ash Bridge all the way to Kupa’s stall, and one day when I break my ankle on the same holes there will be no more japetas on our dinner table.” The tiny pancakes of mashed vegetables spiked with garlic and smoky burr-spice were a Yaghali dish, and only one street vendor in the city made them in what Nessa proclaimed was the proper manner.

That was when Luca realised that he’d emerged into a small square containing an unfamiliar food market, and he no longer had any idea in which direction the harbour lay. Smells gloriously assaulted his nose: roasting nuts, an elusive herby fragrance, hot bread, briny seafood mingled with vinegar. Luca paused in front of a stall selling one of the few foods he’d never seen before: small balls of dough lifted sizzling from oil and rolled in dark sugar. They were a shade of green that bordered on lurid.

It was one of those days when he had to keep pinching the webbing of his fingers, punishing, to keep his focus. If he closed his eyes for more than a moment he found himself dreaming about a fall—not a fall into anything, not with any intent, just the act of falling. Back and back into a soft darkness that demanded nothing and expected nothing, and was what Matti imagined a solid nine hours of sleep probably felt like.

admirer and followed his nose. He filled a plate with spiced fish and steamed bread, and then was held at bay from a bowl of what looked like whipped goat cheese with lacha syrup by an ancient man with a voice that creaked like warping floorboards.

Luca had eaten raskils in Cienne, but had discovered since arriving in Glassport that nobody in the harbour city considered the cheese-and-herb pastries, in the shape of a curling snail shell, to be real raskils unless they were made locally. The one from Erneska’s was certainly the best example he’d ever tasted, with an audible buttery crunch to the browned edges and melting threads of cheese still so hot that Luca burned his tongue on the first bite.

“Matti, you’ve been destroying yourself. You’re not fine.” “It’s not that bad,” Matti said, but weakly. He thought of the physician’s contemplative silence when Matti talked about his dizziness and nausea. “Fine means normal. Fine means I’m coping. And I am, it just feels as though…” He struggled, moving his hand in an effort to pluck the right words out of the air. Luca bent one leg up, one arm wrapped around it. He rubbed his mouth on his own knee as though clearing dust from it to make way for something. Then he looked down at Matti. “It feels like you’re in a box,” Luca said. “Not a cage. A box. Whenever it shrinks, it’s like there’s less air in there with you.” Matti wouldn’t have found those words given ten hours and a magnifying glass, but Luca had glimpsed them, somehow. Luca, who had cracked the lid of the box and shown Matti how much space there was outside it.

Matti’s plate was full of all the things he usually loved, many of which his family had long been going without. Red-spiced flaking smoked fish. Chocolates with caramel centres. Tiny cheese tarts. Slices of fresh early-autumn pear sprinkled with nutmeg. Soft milk-glazed bread in an intricate knot.

He and the twins ate lemon curd on thick slices of white bread with a shattering crust, and grilled cubes of lamb threaded onto rosemary sprigs, and great dollops of cherries stewed in lacha and stirred through whipped goats’ cheese.

“Cruel is when you decide that what someone wants doesn’t matter, just because you want them and you think that means you’re owed something.”