26. A Stable Structure (Adranaya)¶
Even with a dozen candles burning, Adra almost had to touch her nose to the page to read the tiny print. The diagrams in the book she’d stolen from her mother’s study were more detailed than any the School provided, and the one before her depicted a scalp, its meridians branching out like frozen lightning.
The study lounges on the upper floor of the School were the only sanctioned places for novitiates to gather in private. The three of them each contributed something different to their sessions: Vaye with her fiery, challenging intellect, Gadarien’s refreshing points of view (when he wasn’t being a contrarian), and Adra’s wealth of knowledge. But the tension between herself and Vaye was souring the mood. Although she’d apologized and taken responsibility for the Moons of Paradise incident, the awkwardness remained, stubborn as dried glue.
“I can’t tell which of these meridians is supposed to connect the spine to the eardrum,” Vaye said, shuffling her notes. “This diagram says it’s the hatji-ijaj, but isn’t that a lung meridian?”
“They’re the same one,” Adra said. “It goes all the way down. Here, this has separate diagrams of the neck.” She flipped to the relevant page and slid the book to Vaye, hoping her eagerness didn’t come across as desperation.
“Thanks,” Vaye mumbled, her eyes barely flicking up.
“Okay, that’s enough,” Gadarien said, exasperated. “Whatever happened between you two, we’re going to talk about it now.” He snapped his fingers in a quick rhythm. “Adra, what’s going on?”
Vaye closed her notes with a sigh, then crossed her arms and leaned back in her chair, staring at the candles. Adra tried to think of something to say that she hadn’t already said. “Vaye,” she started hesitantly. “Look. I’m sorry if I saw something that wasn’t there, or made you feel pressured. I thought you were attracted to me.”
“I very much am,” Vaye said bluntly. Her orange eyes glowed, sending a flood of warmth through Adra’s body. “That’s not the problem.”
“What is it, then?” Gadarien said.
Vaye’s lips parted as she pressed her tongue against her teeth in thought, a mannerism Adra found inappropriately distracting. “I’m afraid of making people afraid,” she said at last.
Adra glanced at Gadarien. He set down his slate and leaned forward. “What do you mean?”
“Circamo,” Vaye said. “It’s not that I don’t want to. I mean, of course I want to. But if we get caught...”
“People do it all the time,” Gadarien said dismissively. “The Sihiri use circamo as an excuse to arrest people, not a reason.”
“Maybe so, but everyone associates it with Anashi. I can’t afford to slip up. I have to be perfect.”
Adra frowned, disliking the echo of her own thoughts. She knew how it felt to believe the world was waiting for her to slip up, for cracks to appear in her veneer of stability. Unlike her stolid, dependable older siblings, she’d been a temperamental child, prone to tantrums and bouts of inconsolable sadness. Her mother, who was about as emotional as a sarcophagus, had dismissed her sensitivity as “the artist’s curse”, often warning her to keep her passions in check lest she end up hidden away like Aunt Işen. That expectation of fragility had shaped the way her family had responded to what happened with Liade.
“No one’s perfect. Not even me,” Gadarien said with a smirk. Adra shook her head, pulling her attention back to the present. This conversation was about Vaye.
“No, you don’t get it,” the Anashi said, frustrated. “If they think I’m trying to do what my ancestors did, then...”
“Then what?” Adra asked softly. “What are you really afraid of?”
The Anashi pinched her thumb like she was trying to reattach the fingernail. “I haven’t told this story in a long time. It’s hard for me to talk about.” Tentatively, Adra reached out. To her immense relief, Vaye took it, giving her hand a light squeeze before continuing.
“I grew up in a Dzharian mountain village called Ewederi, along the border with Sarmala, just south of Anash. We were poor, but I loved the smell of the forest, so clean and alive. My mother hated those trees, though. She was a washerwoman, and she cursed like a logger whenever someone brought in sap-stained clothes. You couldn’t get that shit off, especially in cold water.
“The river was fed by a lake high up in the mountains. Most of the time it was quiet, but every once in a while it would rumble like an old man with indigestion. Even as a toddler, I could sense what was going on beneath the surface, like it was part of my body. And sometimes…” Vaye paused and glanced up, then quickly looked back down at her lap. “Sometimes Grandmother would speak to me in my dreams.”
Adra suppressed a shudder. She glanced at Gadarien and saw her unease mirrored there. Vaye’s eyes remained downcast, as though she were afraid of what she’d see on their faces. Given her general skepticism, though, it was surprising that she held such a literal belief in the Anashi goddess. Adra kept her faith to herself, especially around Gadarien, but perhaps she and Vaye weren’t as different as she had assumed.
“My mother told me never to tell anyone,” she went on. “The villagers already hated us. They said we were cursed, that we could get the stains out of their clothes but not our own skin. Sometimes the other children would throw ink on me when I walked by.”
Adra wanted to speak up, to offer comfort, but bit her tongue. This was the most Vaye had ever said about her past. Adra hadn’t been exactly forthright about her own history, and if Vaye finally felt comfortable opening up about hers, it was important not to interrupt.
“One night,” Vaye continued, “I woke up and knew something was happening under the lake. It felt wrong, not like the other times. I told my mother we should warn everyone, but I was only eleven, and sometimes I would still get confused and mistake ordinary dreams for premonitions. My mother said we had to keep our secret, no matter what. So we didn’t warn anyone. We just fled up the mountain.
“It was early in the morning and everyone was still asleep when it happened. There wasn’t much to see. No smoke, no lava, not even a smell. Just some kind of bad air that bubbled up from the lake and rolled down the valley like hot wax, smothering the valley. Everyone near the river died in their beds.”
Adra met Gadarien’s eyes. The bleakness she felt was reflected in the tightness of his jaw and the clenched fists atop his thighs.
“I don’t remember what my mother told people after we came back down,” Vaye said, her voice low and guttering like the candles. “Whatever it was, they didn’t believe her. They needed someone to blame, and there we were.”
The Anashi looked up, her lower lip trembling. It was especially heartbreaking given how unflappable she usually was. “They held her under the water,” she said, her voice quavering. “They said it was the only way to get the stain out.”
Gadarien made a sound halfway between sigh and a hum, somehow producing several notes at once. The chord expressed sorrow in a way that words could not. Vaye didn’t react, but the sound shattered something inside Adra’s chest, and a sob rose up through her, then another and another until she was boiling over with them. She wasn’t just crying for Vaye, though. It was for everyone who had been forced to grow a shell, to hide an essential part of themselves in the shadows. It was for herself.
Vaye sat as still as a figurine, staring at the candles. Slowly, as if waking from a trance, she looked up, blinking. Her eyes glistened, but the tears brimmed and held their place as though waiting for permission to descend. “No one’s ever cried for me before,” she said, surprised.
Gadarien’s rough hand was comforting as it closed over Adra’s. He was weeping silently as well, his lips pressed together. It was only when Vaye took Gadarien’s hand too that her sobs finally emerged, bursting free like a cloud of moths. “It was my fault,” Vaye gasped, rocking back and forth.
“No,” Gadarien countered, his voice low and soothing. “No, it wasn’t.”
“You were a child,” Adra said. “How could it possibly have been your fault?”
Vaye withdrew her hands and covered her face, doubling over. “I knew it was real! I should have tried harder. I should have convinced her.”
Gadarien scooted over and put his arm around Vaye, resting his chin on her back, and Adra scooted closer on Vaye’s other side. For a time they just held her while her pain bled out. The stain of her grief might never fully disappear, but perhaps with time it could fade.
The Anashi sat up and wiped her nose with her sleeve, brushing her frosty curls out of her face. The three of them remained touching, propping each other up like a tripod supporting a heavy cauldron. “I’m so sorry, Vaye,” Adra said. “I know how hard it is to let go of the past.”
Gadarien snorted. “Yeah, you do know how to hold a grudge.” He pointed at Adra with his thumb. “She still thinks I made her late to that Geomancy exam on purpose so I could beat her score, but—”
“Gada,” Adra interrupted. “Not now.” He really needed to learn that sometimes people had to just feel bad for a while.
“My fault or not, it happened,” Vaye said bitterly. “Bad things happen around me.”
“Bad things happen everywhere,” Gadarien said darkly. “People are terrible.”
“No they’re not!” Adra exclaimed, surprising even herself with her vehemence. Gadarien swayed back, raising his hands defensively. “They’re not,” she repeated. “Deep down, most people are good. They want to do the right thing.”
“Why don’t they, then?” Gadarien said. He could be so smug sometimes, as if he were older and wiser and not just another novitiate like her.
“Because they’re trying to protect what they love,” Adra replied, bristling at his tone. She turned back to Vaye. Surprisingly, the Anashi seemed open to what she was saying. “The problem was that you and your mother were outside of their circle. Most people aren’t bad. Their circles are just too small.”
“Maybe,” Vaye said, sniffling. “But I still feel like I should have died that day.”
“Look. It’s true that bad things happen everywhere,” Adra said, gentle but insistent. “But so do good things. And what we have right now is good.” She took Vaye’s hand in both of hers. “I’m glad you didn’t die that day, because it means you’re here with us. If you let that moment define you forever, you might as well have died.” As she said it, Adra realized she was speaking to herself as much as to Vaye.
Gadarien wiped a tear off Vaye’s cheek with his thumb, then stuck it in his mouth. “Hmm. Needs pepper,” he said. Despite her tears, a laugh burst out of Vaye’s mouth.
“Gadarien, you are disgusting,” Adra said, shaking her head.
“I sure am,” he said, grinning. “So what does that say about you?”
Adra’s faith had been a comfort to her during her own ordeal. If Vaye truly believed she was touched by the divine, though, it meant she was afraid of herself as much as others. That was something Adra definitely understood. But she also knew that a structure needed more than two legs to carry the weight of the world.
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