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Standing beside its squarish, silk-draped bulk was someone he had hoped to see: Sanao Sonami, the youngest of Protector Sanao’s six children. Sonami had just turned fifteen, yet still wore the genderfree tunic of a child, their hair cropped to a small square at the top of their head and gathered into a bun.
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Some unknown Tensor architect had knitted living wood around stone foundations, folded them into right-angled, geometric shapes indistinguishable from traditional construction. Even the carvings on the ends of roof beams were live wood, guided into precise shape by slackcraft.
She wore plain robes, the thick linen dyed dark blue, with none of the finery associated with her office. But she didn’t need ornamentation to occupy the room as the sun occupies the sky.
He folded his hands together. “But I don’t understand the purpose of twins.” She must have had a reason for conceiving two children. “It was an accident,” Sonami said. “Conception through slackcraft has its risks.” “But why would she keep both infants?” Sonami stared. “Mother is not infinitely cruel.”
It was a long way down the mountain, and a long way up to the Great High Palace, and in recent years his knees had begun to hurt during the morning rituals and when thunderstorms were coming. The onset of age was like a dam breaking: slowly at first, then all at once.
Sonami was the first to exit the cart, a graceful figure wrapped in a light silk dress the color of chrysanthemums and jade. She had chosen her gender the same year the twins were born and had grown well into that role.
I am very excited by worldbuilding where people choose a gender instead of being assigned one
Thennjay had grown up on the margins of Chengbee, several generations removed from Antam Gaur. His father had been a fire breather and a storyteller; his mother a stilt walker and a doctor. In the circus, everyone took on multiple roles. Everybody did what they could. The line between community and family was thin and blurred here.
“In the monastery,” Mokoya said, “they taught us that fortune is both intractable and impartial. That when bad things happen, it’s the result of an incomprehensible and inhuman universe working as it does. The mountain shrugs, but thinks nothing of the houses crushed in the avalanche. That was not its purpose.”
They conjured an image of what Mokoya might look like as a woman, silk-draped and pigment-smeared, hair wrapped into unnatural shapes. This woman, this stranger, laughed with painted lips and clung to the arm of the tall, handsome man who smiled approvingly down at her. She made trite jokes and used the feminine version of “I.”
He sighed with the weight of a thousand stones cast into water.
“You lied to me,” Mokoya spat. “I didn’t,” Thennjay said. “I said nothing. There’s a difference. You never asked how much slackcraft I knew.”
She was six years old. She had no business fearing for her little brother’s life like that.
