LITMIR.BIZ

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about your meeting put her in a huff. Should I pull her aside?”

      “No,” Anna said. The surest way to seal off a child’s heart was to scorn them. “Let her drink if she wants to, but keep a blade out of her hands.” She glanced around. “I haven’t seen Mesar lately.”

      “He’s meeting with some Chayam captains.”

      “He never told me,” Anna sighed.

      “Do they make you nervous?” Yatrin asked. But they was too vague, in Anna’s mind. “Those who serve the state,” he added.

      “Not so nervous.” They were just one tier on a hierarchy of mistrust, but they were far below Volna, the nationalists in Kowak, and the various hired blades setting up shop in Hazan and the plains.

      “Those bearing the state’s blood are trustworthy,” Yatrin said. “I’m not speaking about Konrad, of course, but I know my people. You can breathe.”

      “I trust you,” she said honestly. “And that’s enough.” But her mind was fixed on an endless track. “I ought to find Mesar.”

      Yatrin took her arm gently. “Sit, stay. He can handle the logistics for one evening.” He gestured to Khara, who was poring over the depths of her cup with distant eyes. “They need you.”

      The monotony of recent years washed over her with the phrase one evening, with all of the death and sleepless nights and empty words revived as a hideous, wasted mass. Joy had become a foreign thing. The world had done its part to assure that, but how much of it stemmed from her own mind? A need to be busy, to be so forward-thinking and wary that she would’ve earned Bora’s rebuke. Be here, be now. Easier said than done.

      With some effort, she smiled and met Yatrin’s creased eyes. “You’ll need to teach me how to breathe.”

      Yatrin laughed. “Hasn’t meditation taught you that?”

      “I’m forgetful.”

      “Whatever they’re drinking seems to help,” Yatrin said.

      Some of her fighters, too deep in their cups, had copper-red cheeks and glassy eyes. “I’d like to think too.”

      “One cup won’t put you under,” Yatrin said, the corner of his lip peeking out through black hair. “So, what do you say?” He went to the table, took a pair of tin cups, dunked them into a small tub and pulled them up full, and returned to Anna. The liquid within reminded her of honey wine her father had once kept in the rafters. “If you’d rather not, I understand. But maybe we—you—deserve it. When was the last time you really lived, Anna?”

      “The Kojadi said that pain is living,” she said, arching her brow.

      “They had their time,” Yatrin replied. “Nahora savors peacetime, and it always has. We refuse to linger in wariness like our sisters. Give bliss a try.”

      Over the past years, brooding in dugouts and hayat-woven bunks and underground tents, she would occasionally recall the offer she’d received in Malijad. Yatrin and his fellow easterners had proven everything Nahora had offered, including the serenity she’d seen in meditation, and it was chilling to consider that she—a half-forgotten, untrained, broken girl—had damned the path of every future self by refusing their aid. But it wasn’t too late to right things. Anna took the cup, gulping in spite of the throat-burning fumes and bitter tongue-prickling.

      With every sip, it became less repulsive.

      She drank until she hardly thought of Konrad.

      Soon Anna was dancing like everybody else, adrift in the strange melody of flutes and small, hard drums, though she couldn’t recall when she’d decided to join the others or set her short blade on the tabletop or pull Yatrin closer. Within Yatrin’s shadow, where the air was humid and dark and tinged with peppermint, she was more vulnerable than she’d been in nomadic encampments or bathing chambers. It was worrying to lose caution in that place, but even more worrying to find comfort. Her feet swept in quick, synchronized rushes beneath her, and her hands grew slick upon Yatrin’s tunic, upon the fabric she rustled as she felt along the small of his back and all of its hidden scars. Then her eyes were closed and her lips sensed warm, damp pressure, even as her mind revolved with coordinates and wicked names and—

      “Are you all right?” Yatrin asked.

      Reality’s fragments slid back into place, returning her to the pod’s ethereal oscillating and the pockmarks across the easterner’s cheeks. “Yes,” she said, surprised—but not alarmed—by the lack of control in her voice. “Keep dancing.”

      Yatrin’s hands moved back to her hips. She heard every clinking tin, every rising word that warned of violence. Anna pulled away.

      “Yes, you,” Khara barked, stalking closer to Ramyi. Her eyes were wild, purged of their usual Nahoran composure.

      Ramyi too had her brows scrunched and fists balled, but Khutai grabbed her wrist and pulled her back just before Khara came within striking range. The girl grunted, spun around, and nearly tripped on her own ankles.

      “I wish it had been you,” Khara said. “You wretched little worm.”

      Ramyi tore at Khutai’s grip, ignorant to the spectacle forming around them.

      “How dare you cast your foolish words at the state?” Khara continued.

      “I hope it burns,” Ramyi said.

      “Your breed knows nothing about sacrifice,” the easterner said. She carried on as Yatrin hurried toward her, hissing his commands in Orsas. “The Halshaf should’ve let you shrivel.”

      Yatrin took the woman’s shoulders and led her aside, but it was too late. Shouts and slurs were breaking out among the fighters, some of whom were still drinking from their tin cups; in fact, many rushed to scoop more from the trough. Drunken barbs overtook the music:

      “The state? Fuck the state.”

      “Uz’nekkal, you coward! Show me your teeth!”

      “Control your runt.”

      “Will you bleed, or just bitch?”

      Their voices swelled until Anna could no longer tell Nahorans from Hazani, old comrades from new, youths from elders. Pale and bronze and black, their flesh melded together in a dizzying blur. There was no way to calm the storm, especially with Anna’s mind so unfocused, so clouded—

      “What’s going on?” Mesar’s voice, though weaker than his men’s, stilled most of the quarrels. His bone-white robes glowed like a beacon in the shadows. Two of his picked fighters wandered ahead of him, gently parting men about to exchange blows and lifting bruise-eyed stragglers from the rugs. Mesar wore a father’s mask of disappointment; it cut deeper than any curse or shout. “Is this how we treat our hosts? Brothers, I address you with particular severity.”

      The Alakeph in the crowd, who’d become indistinct from their fellow fighters by shedding their robes, bowed their heads.

      “Even those beyond the fold,” Mesar continued, glaring pointedly at Anna. “Have you come here to preserve life, or grapple like children?” When he regarded Ramyi, he grew crestfallen. “And you, a blossom of our order. Must we be your keeper at all hours?”

      Ramyi paid it no mind. She was busy muttering curses, thrashing at Khutai’s arms and broad chest, on the verge of tears she smothered with rage.

      Summoning her composure, Anna approached the girl. “We’ll take her,” she said to Mesar. No matter how much authority she conjured, the others would see her as incapable, scrambling to make amends with their leader. Ramyi’s mindlessness was her burden. That burning realization bled into her hands as she seized the girl’s shoulder and pulled her away from Khutai, nearly bruising her shoulder as she did so. They left in silence.

      Later, in Anna’s personal quarters, she knelt before an oval-shaped window and the blackness beyond it. Kneeling was all she

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