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“This is harder than I thought,” Siya told the Aldish heathen. “I can’t feel it like I can feel clay or wood.” The golden lump in her hands was supposed to be the design for a three-dimensional glamour of Orin, the hero of her adventure story, but all of the details were wrong, wrong, wrong. His jawline was uneven, his wings looked like tumors, and his locs were melting into his skull. “Look at this. I’m no good!”
Miki—who probably didn’t spell it that way herself, but Siya thought she could use the extra luck—turned away from the chiseler’s controls and bent over the sculpting table, resting her elbows on the edge. “My father would say you just need practice,” she said, the words shaped by both the Tainish accent she’d arrived with and the traces of a Crescian one she’d picked up since. “You only started trying a few minutes ago. It took me almost a year to get it working in the first place.”
I don’t have a year to spare, Siya wanted to say, but there was a peculiar lightness in Miki’s voice that gave her pause. It sounded forced, like she was hiding something. The young defector— refugee, Siya reminded herself, Miki didn’t like that other word—was staring intently at the misshapen Orin, head cocked. Siya took the opportunity to look her over just as intently, searching for some clue in her face or posture to what she was thinking.
But Miki looked just like Siya expected her to. There was the pinned-up golden hair, which caught the light in a way that Siya had taken weeks to learn to replicate in pencil. There were the awkward teenage limbs, whose changing proportions had made their way into Orin’s action poses where Miki had modeled for reference. And there were those bright green eyes, which seemed to distill everything they lingered on into the materials and Aspects that underpinned Miki’s pymary, just like Siya could break her surroundings down into shapes and lines.
She looks normal, Siya thought. Or maybe Normal— and suddenly Miki’s pale face was blotchy, her eyes red from recent tears.
Siya frowned. “You told me about perceptive glamours. It doesn’t work if I know,” she said. “What’s wrong?”
Miki turned even redder. “I didn’t want you to feel like we have to talk about it. You’ve been waiting so long to try this thing…”
And I’m running out of time, Siya’s thoughts drummed. “I’m no good at it anyway,” she said, crumpling Orin into a ball with both hands and stepping away from the chiseler. She sat down on the floor against the nearby railing and patted the space to her right.
Miki sighed and knelt down beside her, with her back held primly straight and her hands on her knees—Aldish etiquette that even a year at Litriya hadn’t managed to shake. “It started with… downstairs. Earlier today,” she said in a low voice.
Siya nodded. She knew very little about the deal Miki had made in exchange for sanctuary at Litriya and ongoing instruction in pymary, but it meant spending long hours in the parts of the shrine where the kept twins were no longer allowed.
“They started asking me questions about home.” Siya knew better than to ask who “they” were. “Spellburns, politics, people I knew… It used to just be about me, my tacit casting, how I got away. I think they waited because they wanted me to want to tell the truth. Because I’m grateful. Because I love people here.”
“I know you don’t like talking about that place,” Siya said, trying not to think about the heat rising in her cheeks. “I wouldn’t either.”
“I knew coming here was a risk. I’d heard all the propaganda. Evil Cresce lets women learn combat pymary, which… you know, good. Evil Crescians would never show mercy to an Ald—not so good.” Miki was swapping the colors of her dress and apron back and forth, her version of stress-fidgeting. “When I wound up here, instead of dead or in prison, I thought the second part must have been just one more of Alderode’s lies. But I don’t think it’s a coincidence that they put me somewhere isolated with a military presence. And some of the things people have said to me… I’m getting special treatment, aren’t I? I’m like the man in that play.”
It didn’t sound like she meant any of the shrine’s traditional pageants, but the pilgrims passing through were sometimes willing to talk about plays they’d seen. Siya ran through a mental list of candidates. “The one with the Plat?”
“Right. He had that construct, that story, he got to stay because he was useful. They must think they can use me, too. And I don’t want to be used against Alderode." She wouldn't meet Siya's eyes. "I...I don’t want to hurt my family more than I already have.”
“What? Miki, we talked about this.” Most of Miki’s misconceptions about Cresce hadn’t survived a year of living among actual Crescians. It had been months since she’d last expressed this kind of unwarranted suspicion. “Gefendur means givers, remember? No one wants to hurt your family. Even if they did hurt you first,” a surge of secondhand resentment compelled her to add.
Miki gave her a sharp look. “Alderode hurt me. My family loved me.”
“I thought you said your dad stopped teaching you pymary.” Siya’s image of the man was a towering abstraction, a shadowy-faced cultist tearing books out of little girls’ hands. “He told you you weren’t allowed to do it.”
“But he did teach me. He loved teaching me. Fefe…” Her voice cracked on the Tainish word. “My father just wanted me to be happy. He only stopped the lessons because he thought they were hurting me.”
“You mean hurting your reputation with a bunch of old busybodies?” Siya barely kept the contempt from reaching her voice; it grated at her to hear Miki defend the man. “Hurting your marriage prospects?”
“Yes, obviously,” Miki said. “But it was more than that. The idea was, he’d teach me to do it safely and I’d get it out of my system. So when I only fell more in love with it… Where was I supposed to go from there? I couldn’t go to the Academy, I could never be a battlewright or a Composer, not as myself. I’d have to either give up being a woman, or a wright.” She wiped angrily at her eyes. “He stopped the lessons because he thought they were turning me into someone who could never be happy in Alderode. And he was right, wasn’t he? Maybe he never should have taught me anything.” Her voice dropped almost to a whisper. “Maybe I wouldn’t have left.”
“How can you say that?” The words bubbled up from a part of Siya that she didn’t like—the bad-thinking part, the Tirna part, the bitter, jealous knot that would choke her heart if she let it. “You’d rather not be a wright? Spend your whole life on small things? Cooking and cleaning and babies and—” pointless, doomed crushes? “—and never doing anything that matters to you, anything anyone will even remember?”
Look at what you have, she wanted to say. If you don’t even want it, why isn’t it mine? It was an ugly, familiar thought, and Siya was instantly ashamed. Her friend’s freedom had cost her nothing, and the alternative…
There was a picture in her mind of Miki dead behind those shining green eyes; Miki cracked and hollow like a ceramic doll. She wanted to tear apart the world that would tell Miki she owed that to anyone—and all for the sake of some fiction about what a woman should be! For nothing!
At least Siya was going to die for a reason.
“…didn’t mean it like that,” Miki was saying, as Siya pulled her focus back into reality. “I’ve been so happy here. I get to work real pymary, I don’t have to talk to a matchmaker ever again, I met you… I wouldn’t give up any of that.”
She shook her head. “But I got here by using what my father taught me to betray him in every possible way. I probably ruined my family’s reputation by running away. I’ve shamed my faith and my caste.” It was like someone had pulled the drainplug holding in a year’s worth of self-recrimination. Miki was staring down at her hands, tears dripping onto her skirt. “I took away my parents’ daughter, Simon’s sister… I hurt everyone I cared about to get what I have. I chose that.”
“That’s not fair,” Siya said. “You didn’t choose for that to be the choice! If—if I put a knife to your throat and say ‘You can never be a wright unless you leave your family or pretend to be a boy for the rest of your life,’ then no matter what you pick, I’m the one who’s bad. Not you!”
“I’d just leech the blade,” Miki said. “Or throw the Edge at you, or swap it with the heel of my shoe and—”
“You’re missing the point—”
“No I’m not, because the point is that’s not how real life works,” Miki threw up her palms the way she always did when she was frustrated. “You’re telling a story where there’s some ‘person with a knife’ I can blame, but the only one making a choice was me.”
They were both silent for a long moment. “I don’t think that’s true,” Siya said finally. “Alderode is the way it is because enough people agree to keep it that way. You swam against the current. Everyone who goes with it is making a choice too.”
Miki wiped her eyes again. She wasn’t sniffling; Siya wondered if she had been spelling her nose clear this whole time. “I try to tell myself these things, but I still feel guilty all the time. I keep thinking I’m going to be p-punished somehow. I have nightmares where our soldiers storm the shrine… And Uncle Lemuel…” She squeezed her eyes shut, pressed her lips together. Whatever she was picturing was too terrible to describe.
The selfish part of Siya was wishing she hadn’t tugged this thread. I don’t know how to help her, it was saying. I don’t have time to help her. The chiseler was only a few feet away, the sand was draining from her hourglass, and it was stupid to care this much about someone she’d never… Who probably didn’t even…
She should never have let those green-glass eyes lodge themselves in her heart; she couldn’t stop picking at the wound they’d made. Girls like Siya didn’t get to have love stories. They didn’t get swept off their feet by mysterious travelers, they didn’t get to collaborate on some grand marriage of art and pymary, they weren’t even supposed to date. So why did she keep pretending any of this mattered? Every second she’d spent building her relationship with Miki would be erased from this world when she died. Every second spent consoling her now was one in which she wasn’t practicing her art, wasn’t getting any closer to making something that would outlast her.
But then—Siya thought—wasn’t that why she had to change Miki’s mind while she still could? She would outlast Siya, whether or not any of her creations did. Where would these dark thoughts take her, after Siya was gone?
Miki was still kneeling with her eyes closed, trying to control her breathing. Siya drew up her knees and turned her whole body to face her, putting a hand on her forearm. “Listen…”
Miki lifted her head and looked back at her, and Siya swallowed sudden nerves; there was a feeling of the stakes heightening, of needing to get this right.
“I’m sorry I got mad at you,” she said. “You feel the same way anyone would. But loving your family isn’t the same as owing them your whole life. Someone like you shouldn’t… I mean, if anyone…” Nothing was harder than telling Miki what she thought about her; it was too close to telling her what she felt. “Look, you’re brilliant, and so brave, and you want to do pymary more than most people want anything and now you can. You can spend your whole life doing things that matter. You could be the kind of hero that…someone like me would tell stories about.”
Miki looked shaken; did that mean she understood? Siya needed her to understand. “You deserve more than they had planned for you, Miki,” she pleaded. “You lost so much. I know it hurts. But that doesn’t mean you should regret it.”
She was not prepared for the way Miki looked at her then. Was it compassion? Sorrow? She didn’t know what to make of it; it wrenched in her chest. “Oh, Siya,” her friend whispered. “Do you hear yourself?”
And before Siya could ask what she meant, there were Miki’s arms around her neck, Miki’s hair pressed against her cheek, Miki’s voice and breath in her ear. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she was saying. “Forget what I said. You’re right, okay? You were right all along.”
Siya’s heart was hammering, and the fear that Miki might notice only made it beat faster. Or was that Miki’s heartbeat she felt? The longer the two of them held each other, the less it seemed to matter.
At last Miki pulled back, just enough that they could see each other. Her hands were still gripping Siya’s shoulders. “I mean it,” she said, staring into Siya’s eyes like she was searching for something. “Everything you said was true.”
“Of course it was,” Siya said, cracking a smile. “Just promise me you’ll remember that. You go be the best wright in centuries, and don’t ever try to talk yourself out of it again or I’ll know. Even if it’s after the sacrifice, I can just ask the gods.”
“Ha.” Miki let go of her and sat back against the railing, smiling ruefully. Had Siya disappointed her somehow? She had never found her friend this difficult to read before. “I can promise I’ll try not to. When I’m missing them really badly, it’s…hard to be objective.”
Siya tried to imagine what it would be like to be a country away from Sara. There had been times when she’d entertained a similar thought as a fantasy, but if it were for real… “Yeah. I get that.”
“And some of it is just Alderode baggage, I guess,” Miki said. “I’m probably going to spend the rest of my life figuring out how much of that I want to keep. I don’t even know how much of what I believe is me and how much is just what I internalized growing up. There’s so much I took for granted, until I happened to bring it up here and everyone was like...” She made a theatrical expression of disgust and pity.
Siya nodded. “I remember. Like the money thing, and the torture pits. Of course evil things seem normal to you if they’re all you’ve ever known.” Maybe the next chapter of her story could be about Orin confronting some previously unexamined assumption of his own. She’d been looking for a new conflict to follow up the Mt. Bludknuckle arc.
“I don’t think it’s all bad, though,” Miki said, her tone wistful. “Like, with Ssael… If my father saw me now, he would think I’ve turned my back on him, and I couldn’t blame him. Everyone but you already thinks I did.” Mistress Lori’s good graces were indeed contingent on Miki keeping her heathenry to herself, but Siya had never minded hearing about it. Some of it was interesting if you thought of it as an adventure story. “But I don’t see my faith as one of the things I left behind. If anything, it helped convince me to leave.”
“What’s the connection?” Siya asked. “Wouldn’t your god say you should hate everything about this place?”
“Well, Ssael is supposed to inspire us,” Miki said. “Risking divine wrath in defiance of an unfair system… There’s a similarity of spirit there, don’t you think? I like to think he would understand. Maybe even forgive me.” She leaned her head back against the railing, staring up at the ceiling. “If you asked my father he would tear the whole idea to shreds, with citations. He’d say it’s an enormous oversimplification. But he has his relationship with God, and I have mine.”
Siya huffed. “You don’t need a dead guy’s forgiveness anyway. He can’t do anything to you.”
“You know…” Miki paused, then shook her head. “Never mind. It’s nothing.”
She rolled her head to the side, meeting Siya’s eyes. “Listen, thank you for talking through this with me. This whole year, no one’s been here for me the way you have, and I…I hope you know I’m here for you too. Anything you want to talk about, anything you need, I’m here.”
Siya almost said it, then. The words burned in the back of her throat, reached her tongue, sputtered and died when she opened her mouth. “You’ve already been here for me, Miki,” she said instead. “The modeling, the feedback on my drawings, fact-checking the pymary in my story, the new ideas I get just from talking to you… Not to mention you spending all year figuring out the chiseler just because I wanted to try something new.”
She was beginning to realize how much she’d taken all of that for granted. How could she have imagined, even for a moment, that she had to choose between Miki and her art? Miki elevated and enriched her art. Somehow, recognizing that only made the green-glass cut hurt more.
Miki grabbed the railing behind her and hoisted herself to her feet. “Speaking of the chiseler, how about I reset it for you?” she said, stepping over to the control panel. “I’ve kept you away from it long enough. The next Orin’s going to be the one, I can feel it.”
It was a relief to put painful thoughts aside and return to her wheelhouse. Siya plunged both hands into the sculpting table, molding the basic structure of an Orin that she could immediately tell would not be the one. It was intensely frustrating, but in a way she found invigorating. This was what it felt like to pour her whole soul into the act of creation; to know her vision with such clarity that every mistake instantly caught her eye; to reach beyond her grasp, because the things she wanted to make were worth reaching for. Sometimes she could even imagine she would get there before she died.
She tried to lose herself in it, to become nothing but a conduit from the picture in her head to the spell-stuff in her hands, but something was needling at her. Some part of her beneath awareness had been going over her conversation with Miki, and it offered up a connection that troubled her.
“Hey, Miki.” Siya tried to keep her voice light, her eyes fixed on the sculpting table. “If ‘they’ ever did ask you to do something you’re not okay with…would you run away again?”
“Maybe.” Miki gave her an odd, crooked smile. “If it didn’t mean leaving you.”