Carve the Mark (Carve the Mark, #1)

by Veronica Roth

The current flowed through every living thing, and showed itself in the sky in all different colors.

Akos knew by the tone of his dad’s voice that he was asking their mom about her visions. Every planet in the galaxy had three oracles: one rising; one sitting, like their mother; and one falling. Akos didn’t quite understand what it meant, except that the current whispered the future in his mom’s ears, and half the people they came across were in awe of her.

“The current flows through every planet in the galaxy, giving us its light as a reminder of its power.” As if on cue, they all looked up at the currentstream, its light showing in the sky through the red glass of the dome. At this time of year, it was almost always dark red, just like the hushflowers, like the glass itself. The currentstream was the visible sign of the current that flowed through all

of them, and every living thing. It wound across the galaxy, binding all the planets together like beads on a single string.

“I thought we’d make tonight’s lesson a special one,” Sifa said. He thought of her that way—by her given name, and not as “Mom”—when she taught him about iceflowers. She’d taken to calling these late-night brewing sessions “lessons” as a joke two seasons ago, but now she sounded serious to Akos. Hard to say, with a mom like his. “Get out a cutting board and cut some harva root for me,” she said, and she pulled on a pair of gloves. “We’ve used hushflower before, right?” “In sleeping elixir,” Akos said, and he did as she said, standing on her left with cutting board and knife and dirt-dusted harva root. It was sickly white and covered in a fine layer of fuzz. “And that recreational concoction,” she added. “I believe I told you it would be useful at parties someday. When you’re older.” “You did,” Akos said. “You said ‘when you’re older’ then, too.” Her mouth slanted into her cheek. Most of the time that was the best you could get out of his mom. “The same ingredients an older version of you might use for recreation, you can also use for poison,” she said, looking grave. “As long as you double the hushflower and halve the harva root. Understand?” “Why—” Akos started to ask her, but she was already changing

the subject. “So,” she said as she tipped a hushflower petal onto her own cutting board. It was still red, but shriveled, about the length of her thumb. “What is keeping your mind busy tonight?” “Nothing,” Akos said. “People staring at us at the Blooming, maybe.” “They are so fascinated by the fate-favored. I would love to tell you they will stop staring someday,” she said with a sigh, “but I’m afraid that you . . . you will always be stared at.” He wanted to ask her about that pointed “you,” but he was careful around his mom during their lessons. Ask her the wrong question and she ended the lesson all of a sudden. Ask the right one, and he could find out things he wasn’t supposed to know. “How about you?” he asked her. “What’s keeping your mind busy, I mean?” “Ah.” His mom’s chopping was so smooth, the knife tap tap tapping on the board. His was getting better, though he still carved chunks where he didn’t mean to. “Tonight I am plagued by thoughts about the family Noavek.” Her feet were bare, toes curled under from the cold. The feet of an oracle. “They are the ruling family of Shotet,” she said. “The land of our enemies.” The Shotet were a people, not a nation-planet, and they were known to be fierce, brutal. They stained lines into their arms for every life they had taken, and trained even their children in the art of war. And they lived on Thuvhe, the same planet as Akos and his family—though the Shotet didn’t call this planet “Thuvhe,” or themselves “Thuvhesits”—acro...

said. And the city of Hessa still wore the scars of Shotet violence, the names of the lost carved into low stone walls, broken windows patched up instead of replaced, so you could still see the cracks. Just across the feathergrass. Sometimes they felt close enough to touch. “The Noavek family is fate-favored, did you know that? Just like you and your siblings are,” Sifa went on. “The oracles didn’t always see fates in that family line, it happened only within my lifetime. And when it did, it gave the Noaveks leverage over the Shotet government, to seize control, which has been in their hands ever since.” “I didn’t know that could happen. A new family suddenly getting fates, I mean.” “Well, those of us who are gifted in seeing the future don’t control who gets a fate,” his mom said. “We see hundreds of futures, of possibilities. But a fate is something that happens to a particular person in every single version of the future we see, which is very rare. And those fates determine who the fate-favored families are—not the other way around.” He’d never thought about it that way. People always talked about the oracles doling out fates like presents to special, important people, but to...

and sisters. The violence infects each generation.” She bobbed her head, and her body went with it, rocking back and forth. “And I see it. I see all of it.” Akos grabbed her hand and held on. “I’m sorry, Akos,” she said, and he wasn’t sure if she was saying sorry for saying too much, or for something else, but it didn’t really matter. They both stood there for a whi...

Everybody got a currentgift when they got older, after their bodies changed—which meant, judging by how small Akos still was at fourteen seasons old, he wouldn’t be getting his for awhile yet. Sometimes gifts ran in families, and sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes they were useful, and sometimes they weren’t. Osno’s was useful.

Osno was the tallest boy in their class, and he stood close to you when he talked to you so you knew it. The last time he’d talked to Akos had been a season ago, and Osno’s mother had said as she walked away, “For a fate-favored son, he’s not much, is he?” Osno had said, “He’s nice enough.” But Akos wasn’t “nice”; that was just what people said about quiet people.

“Little thin-skinned boy,” the soldier spat. “You, as well as the rest of your pathetic kind, would do better to surrender now.” “We are not pathetic!” Akos said. It was a stupid thing to say—something a little kid said when he didn’t know how to win an argument. But for some reason, it stopped everyone in their tracks. Not just the man with his hand clamped around Akos’s arm, but Cisi and Eijeh and Aoseh, too. Everyone stared at Akos, and—damn it all—heat was rushing into his face, the most ill-timed blush he had ever felt in all his life, which was saying something. Then Vas Kuzar laughed. “Your youngest child, I presume,” Vas said to Aoseh. “Did you know he speaks Shotet?” “I don’t speak Shotet,” Akos said weakly. “You just did,” Vas said. “So how did the family Kereseth find itself with a Shotet-blooded son, I wonder?” “Akos,” Eijeh whispered wonderingly. Like he was asking Akos a question. “I do not have Shotet blood!” Akos snapped, and all three of the Shotet soldiers laughed at once. It was only then that Akos heard it—he heard the words coming out of his mouth, with their sure meaning, and he also heard harsh syllables, with sudden stops and closed vowels. He heard Shotet, a language he had never learned.

So unlike graceful Thuvhesit, which was like wind catching snowflakes in its updraft. He was speaking Shotet. He sounded just like the soldiers. But how—how could he speak a language he had never learned?

“Cyra,” my father said, and I stiffened, almost going still as he turned toward me. He reached for my hand, and I gave it to him, though I didn’t want to. My father was the sort of man a person just obeyed. Then he swung me into his arms, quick and strong, startling a laugh from me. He held me against his armored side with one arm, like I was weightless. His face was close to mine, smelling of herbs and burnt things, his cheek rough with a beard. My father, Lazmet Noavek, sovereign of Shotet. My mother called him “Laz” when she didn’t think anyone could hear her, and spoke to him in Shotet poetry. “I thought you might want to see your people,” my father said to me, bouncing me a little as he shifted my weight to the crook of his elbow. His other arm, returning to his side, was marked from shoulder to wrist with scars, stained dark to stand out. He had told me, once, that they were a record of lives, but I didn’t know what that meant. My mother had a few, too, though not half as many as my father. “These people long for strength,” my father said. “And your mother, brother, and I are going to give it to them. Someday, so

shall you. Yes?” “Yes,” I said quietly, though I had no idea how I would do that. “Good,” he said. “Now wave.” Trembling a little, I extended my hand, mimicking my father. I stared, stunned, as the crowd responded in kind.

“Not everything that is effective must be done in public,” Father said casually as he flipped the switch to turn the amplifiers off again. “The guards will whisper of what you are willing to do to those who speak out against you, and the ones they whisper to will whisper also, and then your strength and power will be known all throughout Shotet.” A scream was building inside me, and I held it in my throat like a piece of food that was too big to swallow.

“Cyra,” Ryz said. Tears stained his cheeks. “It’s only fair. It’s only fair that we should share this burden.” He reached for me again. Something deep inside me burned. As his hand found my cheek, dark, inky veins spread beneath my skin like many-legged insects, like webs of shadow. They moved, crawling up my arms, bringing heat to my face. And pain. I screamed, louder than I had ever screamed in my life, and Ryz’s voice joined mine, almost in harmony. The dark veins had brought pain; the darkness was pain, and I was made of it, I was pain itself. He yanked his hand away, but the skin-shadows and the agony stayed, my currentgift beckoned forward too soon. My mother ran into the room, her shirt only half buttoned, her face dripping from washing without drying. She saw the black stains on my skin and ran to me, setting her hands on my arms for just a moment before yanking them back, flinching. She had felt the pain, too. I screamed again, and clawed at the black webs with my fingernails. My mother had to drug me to calm me down. Never one to bear pain well, Ryz didn’t lay a hand on me again, not if he could help it. And neither did anyone else.

The pain was just part of life now. Simple tasks took twice as long because I had to pause for breath. People no longer touched me, so I had to do everything myself. I tried feeble medicines and potions from other planets in the vain hope they would suppress my gift, and they always made me sick.

“Well, I’m sorry to tell you that Cyra is not simply growing into her gift,” Dr. Fadlan said. “This appears to be its full manifestation. And the implications of that are somewhat disturbing.” “What do you mean?” I didn’t think my mother could sit up any straighter, and then she did. “The current flows through every one of us,” Dr. Fadlan said gently. “And like liquid metal flowing into a mold, it takes a different shape in each of us, showing itself in a different way. As a person develops, those changes can alter the mold the current flows through, so the gift can also shift—but people don’t generally change on such a fundamental level.” Dr. Fadlan had an unmarked arm, and he did not speak the revelatory tongue. There were deep lines around his mouth and eyes, and they grew even deeper as

he looked at me. His skin was the same shade as my mother’s, however, suggesting a common lineage. Many Shotet had mixed blood, so it wasn’t surprising—my own skin was a medium brown, almost golden in certain lights. “That your daughter’s gift causes her to invite pain into herself, and project pain into others, suggests something about what’s going on inside her,” Dr. Fadlan said. “It would take further study to know exactly what that is. But a cursory assessment says that on some level, she feels she deserves it. And she feels others deserve it as well.” “You’re saying this gift is my daughter’s fault?” The pulse in my mother’s throat moved faster. “That she wants to be this way?” Dr. Fadlan leaned forward and looked directly at me. “Cyra, the gift comes from you. If you change, the gift will, too.” My mother stood. “She is a child. This is not her fault, and it’s not what she

wants for herself. I’m sorry that we wasted our time here. Cyra.” She held out her gloved hand, and wincing, I took it. I wasn’t used to seeing her so agitated. It made all the shadows under my skin move faster. “As you can see,” Dr. Fadlan said, “it gets worse when she’s emotional.” “Quiet,” my mother snapped. “I won’t have you poisoning her mind any more than you already have.” “With a family like yours,...

I didn’t know it at the time, of course, but that was the last season I had with her. She passed away after the next sojourn, when I was nine. We burned a pyre for her in the center of the city of Voa, but the sojourn ship carried her ashes into space. As our family grieved, the people of Shotet grieved along with us. Ylira Noavek will sojourn forever after the current, the priest said as the ashes launched behind us. It will carry her on a path of wonder. For seasons afterward, I couldn’t even speak her name. After all, it was my fault she was gone.

Beside him shuffled a boy, much smaller than I was, his skin a patchwork of bruises. He was narrow through the shoulders, spare and short. He had fair skin, and a kind of wary tension in his body, like he was bracing himself. Muffled sobs came from behind him, where a second boy, with dense, curly hair, stumbled along. He was taller and broader than the first Kereseth, but cowering, so he almost appeared smaller. These were the Kereseth brothers, the fate-favored children of their generation. Not an impressive sight.

“Your brother has a particular destiny,” Ryzek said, looking the knife over. “I assume, since you did not know your own fate, that you don’t know his, either?” Ryzek grinned the way he always did when he knew something other people didn’t. “‘To see the future of the galaxy,’” Ryzek quoted, in Shotet this time. “In other words, to be this planet’s next oracle.” Akos was silent. I sat back from the crack in the wall, closing my eyes against the line of light so I could think. For my brother and my father, every sojourn since Ryzek was young had been a search for an oracle, and every search had turned up empty. Likely because it was nearly impossible to catch

someone who knew you were coming. Or someone who might lay on a blade to avoid capture, as the elder oracle had in the same invasion that had brought the Kereseths here. But finally, it seemed Ryzek had found a solution: he had gone after two oracles at once. One had avoided being taken by dying. And the other—this Eijeh Kereseth—didn’t know what he was. He was still soft and pliable enough to be shaped by Noavek cruelty. I sat forward again to hear Eijeh speak, his curly head tipped forward. “Akos, what is he saying?” Eijeh asked in slippery Thuvhesit, wiping his nose with the back of his hand. “He’s saying they didn’t come to Thuvhe for me,” Akos said, without looking back. It was strange to hear someone speak two languages so perfectly, without an accent. I envied him the ability. “They came for you.” “For me?” Eijeh’s eyes were pale green. An unusual color, like iridescent insect wings, or the currentstream after the Deadening time. Against his light brown skin, so like the milky earth of the planet Zold, they almost glowed. “Why?” “Because you are the next oracle of this planet,” Ryzek said to Eijeh in the boy’s mother tongue, stepping down from the platform with the knife in hand. “You will see the future, in all its many, many varieties. And there is one variety in particular that I wish to know about.” A shadow darted across the back of my hand like an insect, my currentgift making my knuckles ache like they were breaking. I stifled a groan. I knew what future Ryze...

now he had one. I wanted Shotet to be recognized as a nation instead of a collection of rebellious upstarts just as much as my brother did. So why was the pain of my currentgift—ever-present—mounting by the second? “I . . .” Eijeh was watching the knife in Ryzek’s hand. “I’m not an oracle, I’ve never had a vision, I can’t . . . I can’t possibly . . .” I pressed against my stomach again. Ryzek balanced the knife on his palm and flicked it to turn it. It wobbled, moving in a slow circle. No, no, no, I found myself thinking, unsure why. Akos shifted into the path between Ryzek and Eijeh, as if he could stop my brother with the meat of his body alone. Ryzek watched his knife turn as he mov...

get to it. Why don’t we start with a version of the future in which Shotet, not Thuvhe, controls this planet—hmm?” He nodded to Vas, who forced Eijeh to his knees. Ryzek caught the blade by its handle and touched the edge of it to Eijeh’s head, right under his ear. Eijeh whimpered. “I can’t—” Eijeh said. “I don’t know how to summon visions, I don’t—” And then Akos barreled into my brother from the side. He wasn’t big enough to topple Ryzek, but he had caught him off guard, and Ryzek stumbled. Akos pulled his elbow back to punch—stupid, I thought to myself—but Ryzek was too fast. He kicked up from the ground, hitting Akos in the stomach, then stood. He grabbed Akos by the hair, wrenching his head up...

visible. Unavoidable. “Please,” Eijeh said. “Please, I don’t know how to do what you ask, please don’t hurt him, don’t hurt me, please—” 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 v...

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.

Across from me, Lety’s eyes were focused on the webs of dark color that stained my skin, surging into new places every few seconds—the crook of my elbow, the rise of my collarbone, the corner of my jaw. “What do they feel like to you?” she asked me when she caught my eye. “I don’t know, what does any gift feel like?” I said irritably. “Well, I just remember things. Everything. Vividly,” she said. “So my gift feels like anyone else’s. . . . Like ringing in my ears, like energy.” “Energy.” Or agony. “That sounds right.” I swallowed some of the fermented feathergrass in my glass. Her face was a steady pinhole with everything spinning around it; I fought to focus on her, spilling some of the drink on my chin. “I find your fasci—” I paused. Fascination was a difficult word to say with so much painkiller coursing through my veins. “Your curiosity about my gift a little strange.” “People are so afraid of you,” Lety said. “I simply want to know if I should be, too.”

At first I just stood by my place at the table, clutching the glass of fermented feathergrass. I clenched my jaw as my body filled with shadows, like black blood from broken vessels. “Cyra,” Ryzek said quietly. He didn’t need to threaten me. I would set my glass down and walk over to him and do whatever he told me. I would always do that, for as long as we both lived, or Ryzek would tell everyone what I had done to our mother. That knowledge was a stone in my stomach. I put my glass down. I walked over to him. And when Ryzek told me to put my hands on Uzul Zetsyvis until he gave whatever information Ryzek needed to know, I did. I felt the connection form between Uzul and me, and the temptation to force all the shadow into him, to stain him black as space and end my own agony. I could kill him if I wanted to, with just my touch. I had done it before. I wanted to do it again, to escape this, the horrible force that chewed through my nerves like acid. Yma and Lety were clutched together, weeping, Yma holding Lety back when she tried to lunge at me. Our eyes met as I pushed the pain and the inky darkness into her father’s body, and all I saw in her was hate. Uzul screamed. He screamed for so long I grew numb to the sound. “Stop!” he wailed eventually, and at Ryzek’s nod, I took my hands from his head. I stumbled back, seeing spots, and Vas’s hands pressed to my shoulders, steadying me. “I tried to find the exiles,” Uzul said. His face was slick with sweat. “I wanted to flee Sh...

will now administer your punishment.” I willed the shadows in my body to drain out like water from a wrung rag. I willed the current to leave me and never return—blasphemy. But there was a limit to my will. At Ryzek’s stare the currentshadows spread, like he controlled them more than I did. And maybe he did. I didn’t wait for his threats. I touched my skin to Uzul Zetsyvis’s until his screams filled all the empty spaces in my body, until Ryzek said to stop.

A while later—I didn’t know how long—the door opened again, and I saw Ryzek’s shoes, black and clean. I tried to sit up, but my arms and legs shook, so I had to settle for just turning my head to look at him. Hesitating in the hallway behind him was someone I recognized distantly, as if from a dream. He was tall—almost as tall as my brother. And he stood like a soldier, straight-backed, like he knew himself. Despite that soldier’s posture, however, he was thin—gaunt, really, little shadows pooling under his cheekbones—and his face was again dappled with old bruises and cuts. There was a thin scar running along his jaw, ear to chin, and a white bandage wrapped around his right arm. A fresh mark, if I had to guess, still healing. He lifted his gray eyes to mine. It was their wariness—his wariness—that made me remember who he was. Akos Kereseth, third child of the family Kereseth, now almost a grown man. All the pain that had been building in me came rushing back at once, and I seized my head with both hands, stifling a cry. I could hardly see my brother through the haze of tears, but I tried to focus on his face, which was pale as a corpse. There were rumors about me all throughout Shotet and Thuvhe, encouraged by Ryzek—and maybe those rumors had traveled all

throughout the galaxy, since all mouths loved to chatter about the favored lines. They spoke of the agony my hands could bring, of an arm littered with kill marks from wrist to shoulder and back again, and of my mind, addled to the point of insanity. I was feared and loathed at the same time. But this version of me—this collapsing, whimpering girl—was not that person of rumor. My face burned hot, from something other than pain: humiliation. No one was supposed to see me like this. How could Ryzek bring him here when he knew how I always felt, after . . . well, afterward? I tried to choke back my anger so Ryzek wouldn’t hear it in my voice. “Why have you brought him here?” “Let’s not delay this,” Ryzek said, and he beckoned Akos forward. They both drew closer to me, Akos’s right arm pulled close to his body, like he was trying to stay as far away from my brother as possible without disobeying him. “Cyra, this is Akos Kereseth. Third child of the family Kereseth. Our”—Ryzek smirked—“faithful servant.” He was referring, of course, to Akos’s fate, to die for our family. To die in service, as the Assembly feed had proclaimed two seasons ago. Akos’s mouth twisted at the reminder. “Akos has a peculiar currentgift that I think will interest you,” Ryzek said. He nodded to Akos, who crouched beside me, then extended his hand, palm up, for me to take. I stared at it. I almost didn’t know what he meant by it, at first. Did he want me to hurt him? Why? “Trust me,” Ryzek said. “You’ll l...

made me sick, at worst, and dulled all sensation, at best. It was like returning to the way I had been before my gift developed; no, even that had never been as quiet and as still as I felt now, with my hand on his. “What is this?” I said to him. His skin was rough and dry, like a pebble not quite smoothed by the tide. Yet there was some warmth in it. I stared at our joined hands. “I interrupt the current.” His voice was surprisingly deep, but it cracked like it was supposed to at his age. “No matter what it does.” “My sister’s gift is substantial, Kereseth,” Ryzek said. “But lately it has lost most of its usefulness because of how it incapacitates her. It seems to me that this is how you can best fulfill your fate.” He bent closer to Akos’s ear. “Of course, you should never forget who really runs this house.” Akos didn’t move, though a look of revulsion passed over his face. I sat back on my heels, careful to keep my palm on Akos’s, though I couldn’t look him in the eye. It was as if he had walked in on me while I was changing; he had seen more than I ever let people see. When I stood, he stood with me. Though I was tall myself, I only came up to his nose. “What are we supposed...

“I do.” I had to be careful not to provoke him. The last thing I wanted was more of Ryzek’s memories replacing my own. “Thank you, Ryzek.” “Of course.” Ryzek smiled. “Anything to keep my best general in prime condition.” But he didn’t think of me as a general; I knew that. The soldiers called me “Ryzek’s Scourge,” the instrument of torment in his hand, and indeed, the way he looked at me was the same way he looked at an impressive weapon. I was just a blade to him. I stayed still until Ryzek left, and then, when Akos and I were alone, I started pacing, from the desk to the foot of the bed, to the closed cabinets that held my clothes, back to the bed again. Only my family—and Vas—had been in this room. I didn’t like how Akos stared at everything, like he was leaving little fingerprints everywhere. He frowned at me. “How long have you been living this way?” “What way?” I said, more harshly than I meant to. All I could think about was how I must have looked when he saw me, cowering on the floor, streaked with tears and soaked with sweat, like some kind of wild animal. His voice softened with pity. “Like this, keeping your suffering a secret.” Pity, I knew, was just disrespect wrapp...

talked quietly when she was angry. She said it made people listen. I didn’t have her light touch; I had all the subtlety of a fist to the face. But still, he listened, stretching out his hand with a resigned sigh, palm up, like he meant to relieve my pain. I brought my right wrist to the inside of his, grabbed him under his shoulder with my left hand, and turned, sharply. It was like a dance—a shifted hand, a transfer of weight, and I was behind him, twisting his arm hard, forcing him to bend. “I may be in pain, but I am not weak,” I whispered. He stayed still in my grasp, but I could feel the tension in his back and his arm. “You are convenient, but you are not necessary. Understand?” I didn’t wait for a response. I released him, stepping back, my currentshadows returning with stinging pai...

“Should take a few minutes to set in,” he said. “You wear that thing to sleep?” He gestured to the sheath of armor around my arm. It covered me from wrist to elbow, made from the skin of an Armored One. It was scratched in places from the swipes of sharpened blades. I took it off only to bathe. “Were you expecting an attack?” “No.” I thrust the empty vial back into his hands. “It covers your kill marks.” He furrowed his brow. “Why would Ryzek’s Scourge want to hide her marks?” “Don’t call me that.” I felt pressure inside my head, like someone was pushing my temples from both sides. “Never call me that.”

“You don’t know how to fight already?” I said. “Why did Ryzek send you to my cousin Vakrez for two seasons, if not to teach you competency?” “I’m competent. I want to be good.” I crossed my arms. “You haven’t gotten to the part of this deal that benefits me.” “In exchange for your instruction, I could teach you to make that painkiller you just drank,” he said. “You wouldn’t have to rely on me. Or anyone else.” It was like he knew me, knew the one thing he could say that would tempt me the most. It wasn’t relief from pain that I wanted above all, but self-reliance. And he was offering it to me in a glass vial, in a hushflower potion. “All right,” I said. “I’ll do it.”

“You assume I’m brutal because that’s what you’ve heard,” I said. “Well, what about what I’ve heard about you? Are you thin-skinned, a coward, a fool?” “You’re a Noavek,” he said stubbornly, folding his arms. “Brutality is in your blood.” “I didn’t choose the blood that runs in my veins,” I replied. “Any more than you chose your fate. You and I, we’ve become what we were made to become.”

“Are you insane?” he said, his voice husky from sleep. “Come now, you must have heard the rumors!” I said cheerfully. “More importantly, though: Are you insane? Here you are, sleeping heavily without even bothering to bar your door, a hallway away from one of your enemies? That is either insanity or stupidity. Pick one.” He brought his knee up sharply, aiming at my side. I bent my arm to block the strike with my elbow, pointing the blade instead at his stomach. “You lost before you woke,” I said. “First lesson: The best way to win a fight is to avoid having one. If your enemy is a heavy sleeper, cut his throat before he wakes. If he’s softhearted, appeal to his compassion. If he’s thirsty, poison his drink. Get it?” “So, throw honor out the window.” “Honor,” I said with a snort. “Honor has no place in survival.”

This seemed to surprise him. “The way I move,” he repeated. “How do I move?” “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that a Thuvhesit hardly knows himself,” I said. “Knowing how you fight isn’t knowing yourself,” he retorted. “Fighting isn’t important if the people you live with aren’t violent.” “Oh? And what mythical people are those? Or are they imaginary?” I shook my head. “All people are violent. Some resist the impulse, and some don’t. Better to acknowledge it, to use it as a point of access to the rest of your being, than to lie to yourself about it.”

“So tell me about your marks,” I said. My book was still open to the chapter on “Opponent-Centered Strategy,” after all. There was no opponent quite like one you had marked on your arm. “Why?” He clasped his left wrist. The bandage was gone today, displaying an old kill mark near his elbow—the same one I had seen seasons ago in the Weapons Hall, but it was finished now, stained the color of the marking ritual, a blue so dark it was almost black. There was another mark beside it, still healing. Two slashes

on a Thuvhesit boy’s arm. A unique sight. “Because knowing your enemies is the beginning of strategy,” I said. “And apparently you have already faced some of your enemies, twice-marked as you are.” He turned his arm away from his body so he could frown at the dashes, and said, like it was a recitation, “The first was one of the men who invaded my home. I killed him while they were dragging my brother and me through the feathergrass.” “Kalmev,” I said. Kalmev Radix had been one of my brother’s chosen elite, a sojourn captain and a news feed translator—he had spoken four languages, including Thuvhesit. “You knew him?” Akos said, face contorting a little. “Yes,” I said. “He was a friend of my parents. I met him when I was a child, and watched his wife cry at the memorial dinner after you killed him.” I cocked my head at the memory. Kalmev had been a hard man, but he kept candies in his pockets. I had watched him sneak them into his mouth during fancy dinners. But I hadn’t mourned his death—he was not, after all, mine to mourn. “What about the second mark?” “The second . . .” He swallowed hard. I had rattled him. Good. “. . . was the Armored One whose skin I stole for my own status.” I had earned my own armor three seasons ago. I had crouched in the low grasses near the army camp until the daylight waned, then hunted one of the creatures in the night. I had crawled beneath it as it slept, and arched up to stab the soft place where its leg joined its body. It had taken hours to...

grieved the loss of a man who robbed my sister of two brothers and a father.” He had a sister. I had almost forgotten, though I had heard her fate from Ryzek: The first child of the family Kereseth will succumb to the blade. It was almost as grim a fate as my brother’s. Or Akos’s. “You should put a hash through your second mark,” I said. “Diagonal, through the top. That’s what people do for losses that aren’t kills. Miscarried babies, spouses taken by sickness. Runaways who never return. Any . . . significant grief.” He just looked at me, curious, and still with that ferocity. “So my father . . .” “Your father is recorded on Vas’s arm,” I said. “A loss can’t be marked twice.” “It’s a kill that’s marked.” His brow furrowed. “A murder.” “No, it isn’t,” I said. “‘Kill mark’ is a misnomer. They are alway...

I touched the point of a knife to another one of the hushflower petals, and dragged it in a straight line. This time, the petal unfurled at my touch, flattening on the board. I grinned. Our shoulders brushed, and I twitched away—touch was not something I was used to. I doubted I would ever be used to it again. “Good,” Akos said, and he swept a pile of dried harva leaves into the water. “Now do that about a hundred more times and it will start to feel easy.” “Only one hundred? Here I thought this was going to be time-consuming,” I said with a sideways glance at him. Instead of rolling his eyes at me, or snapping, he smiled a little. “I’ll trade you a hundred hushflower slices for a hundred of the push-ups you’re making me do,” he said.

I pointed the hushflower-stained knife at him. “One day you’ll thank me.” “Me, thank a Noavek? Never.” It was supposed to be a joke, but it was also a reminder. I was a Noavek, and he was a Kereseth. I was nobility, and he was a captive. Whatever ease we found together was built on ignoring the facts. Both our smiles faded, and we returned to our respective tasks in silence.

“Cyra has many qualities that are useful to the sovereign, but ‘sense’ is not one of them; I would not take her opinion of me too seriously,” Vas said. “While I do love our little chats, Vas,” I said, “why don’t you just tell me what you want?” “What are you brewing? A painkiller?” Vas smirked. “I thought groping Kereseth was your painkiller.”

Record my father’s loss. It belongs to you. —Lety Zetsyvis Ryzek may have blamed Uzul’s death on Thuvhe, but Uzul’s daughter knew where it really belonged. On me, on my skin. My currentgift, when experienced for long periods, stayed in the body for a long time even after I took my hands away. And the longer I touched someone, the longer it lingered—unless, of course, they drowned it in hushflower. But the Zetsyvis family didn’t believe in taking hushflower. Some people, when faced with the choice between death or pain, chose death. Uzul Zetsyvis was one of those. Religious to the point of self-destruction. I did carve Uzul’s mark on my arm, right before burning Lety’s message to ash. I painted the fresh wound with feathergrass root extract, which stung so badly it brought tears to my eyes, and I whispered his name, not daring to say the rest of the ritual words because they were a prayer. And I dreamt of him that night. I heard his screams and saw his bulging, bloodshot eyes. He chased me through a dark forest lit by the fenzu glow. He chased me into a cave where Ryzek waited for me, his teeth like knifepoints.

I woke, sweat-soaked and screaming, with Akos’s hand on my shoulder. His face was close to mine, his hair and shirt rumpled from sleep. His eyes were serious and wary, and they asked me a question. “I heard you,” was all he said. I felt the warmth of his hand through my shirt. His fingertips reached over the collar, brushing my bare throat, and even that light touch was enough to extinguish my currentgift and relieve my pain. When his fingers slipped away, I almost cried out, too tired for things like dignity and pride, but he was only finding my hand. “Come on,” he said. “I’ll teach you to get rid of your dreams.” In that moment, with our fingers laced together and his calm voice in my ear, I would have done whatever he suggested. I nodded, and pulled my legs free from the twisted sheets. He lit the fixtures in his room, and we stood side by side at the counter, the jars, marked now in Thuvhesit letters, stacked above us. “Like almost everything,” he said, “this blend starts with hushflower.”

“The current’s light and color is always strongest over our planet,” I said to Akos in a low voice. “Wrapped three times around it, Shotet legend says—which is why our Shotet ancestors chose to settle here. But its intensity fluctuates around the other planets,