Marie Rutkoski

Foolish. If she felt dingy and small, it was her own fault for comparing herself where no comparisons could be made. She’d seen a mirror.

Kestrel missed her, remembered and missed her at the same time, which made her wonder if memory is always a kind of missing.

“An eastern liquor. Roshar gave it to me. He said that if you drink enough of it, the dregs start to taste like sugar. I suspect a prank.”

“But you’ve no head for drink.”

He looked as startled as she felt. “Of all the things, you remember that.”

To hide from her would break him. Simple things, so apparent, so not anything other than what they showed themselves to be.

And they love you. They think you’re some holy gift from your gods. Very nice work, I must say.”

“I didn’t mean for that to happen.”

“Even better. Makes it seem more authentic. Convenient, you understand, when sending people to their death

Her voice was a mere thread. “How would you be?”

He thought of the wrongness of loss, how as a child he’d step right into it, and fall, and then would blame himself not only for every thing he hadn’t done when the soldiers had invaded his home, but also for his fathomless grief. He should see the gaping holes in his life. Avoid them. Step carefully, Arin, why can’t you step carefully? Mother, father, sister. What could you say about someone who walked daily into his grief and lived at the bottom of its hole and didn’t even want to come out?

He remembered how he’d begun to hate himself. The sculpting of his anger. He thought about how certain words mean themselves and also their opposites, like cleave. Come together, split apart. He thought about how sorrow limns the places where parts of you join. Your past and present. Loves and hates. It sets a chisel into the cracks and pries. He wanted to say this, yet worried. He feared saying the wrong thing. He feared that his anger for her father might twist what he wanted to say. And he wasn’t sure, suddenly, if he should answer her question . . . if by answering it he might, without meaning to, push his own loss into the place of hers, or make hers look like his.

“The mother knew whose blessing she sought,” she said. “It can’t be that hard to guess your age, give or take a year. Which god ruled your nameyear?”

“Sewing.”

She squinted, then laughed.

He smiled a little, yet said, “You shouldn’t laugh.”

She laughed harder.

“Actually, I sew quite well.”

“Perhaps. But you don’t exactly seem like the god of sewing’s chosen one. The baby’s mother knew what she asked for.”

There was a startled silence. “My child.” Arin tried the words, exploring them. She heard in his voice what she’d seen on his face in the village as he’d held the baby.

She looked at the tree. It was a tree. A leaf, a leaf. Some things just are. They don’t signal other meanings. They aren’t like a god, casting its meaning over an entire year, or like a conversation, which is itself and also all the things that aren’t said.

Her swift heart scurried along.

“It wouldn’t be up to me,” he said finally. “It would be my wife’s choice.”

She met his eyes. He touched her hot cheek.

A tree was not a tree. A leaf, not a leaf. She understood what he didn’t say.

So you won’t?”

“Now, it would be nice if information fell out of the sky. Given that it doesn’t, it is still nevertheless comforting that certain people do horrible things so that other people don’t have to. We should be grateful to such people. Or we should at least not ask questions when we don’t want answers.”

It is.” His face was unhappy. “There is a difference between you and me. If I die, you’ll survive. If you die, it will destroy me.”