Isae came out of the bathroom, her hair wet but pulled back in a tight knot, like it was lacquered to her head. She wore a different shirt, another one of their mom’s, embroidered at the collar with little flowers. She shook out the other one—wet, like she’d washed it by hand—and hung it over a chair near the furnace.
“You’ve got grass in your hair,” Isae said to Cisi, with a grin.
“It’s a new look I’m trying,” Cisi said in response.
“It works for you,” Isae said. “Then again, everything does, doesn’t it?”
Cisi flushed. Isae avoided Akos’s eyes, turning toward the furnace to warm her hands.
There were a couple more people crammed in the low, dim room with the flaking walls when Cisi, Isae, and Akos went downstairs again. Jorek introduced them to Sovy, one of his mother’s friends, who lived just down the road and wore an embroidered scarf in her hair, and Jyo, who wasn’t much older than them, with eyes that looked a lot like Isae’s, suggesting some common ancestor. He was playing an instrument that lay flat on his lap, pressing buttons and plucking strings faster than Akos could follow. There was food on the big table, half-eaten.
He sat next to Cisi and shoveled some food on his plate. There wasn’t much meat—it was hard to come by out here, outside of Voa—but plenty of saltfruit, which was filling enough. Jyo offered Isae a fried feathergrass stalk with a big smile, but Akos snatched it before she could take it.
“You don’t want to eat that,” he said. “Unless you want to spend the next six hours hallucinating.”
“Last time Jyo slipped someone one of those, they wandered around this house talking about giant dancing babies,” Jorek said.
“Yeah, yeah,” Teka said. “Laugh all you want, but you would be scared too if you hallucinated giant babies.”
“It was worth it, whether I will ever be forgiven or not,” Jyo said, winking. He had a soft, slippery way of talking.
“Do they work on you?” Cisi asked Akos, nodding to the stalk in his hand.
In answer, Akos bit into the stalk, which tasted like earth and salt and sour.
“Your gift is odd,” Cisi said. “I’m sure Mom would have some kind of vague, wise thing to say about that.”
“Ooh. What was he like as a child?” Jorek said, folding his hands and leaning close to Akos’s sister. “Was he actually a child, or did he just sort of appear one day as a fully grown adult, full of angst?”
Akos glared at him.
“He was short and chubby,” Cisi said. “Irritable. Very particular about his socks.”
“My socks?” Akos said.
“Yeah!” she said. “Eijeh told me you always arranged them in order of preference from left to right. Your favorite ones were yellow.”
He remembered them. Mustard yellow, with big woven fibers that made them look lumpy when they weren’t on. His warmest pair.
“How do you all know each other?” Cisi asked. The delicate question was enough to dispel the tension that had come up at Eijeh’s name.
“Sovy used to make candy for all the village kids when I was little,” Jorek said. “Unfortunately, she doesn’t speak Thuvhesit very well, or she’d tell you about my misdeeds herself.”
“And I first met Jorek in a public bathroom. I was whistling while I”—Jyo paused—“relieved myself, and Jorek decided it would be amusing to harmonize with me.”
“He did not find that charming,” Jorek said.
“My mother was a kind of . . . leader of the revolt. One of them, anyway,” said Teka. “She came back to us from the colony of exiles from the Noavek regime about a season ago, to help us strategize. The exiles support our efforts to end Ryzek’s life.”
Isae’s brow was furrowed—it was furrowed a lot of the time, actually, like she didn’t like the space between her two eyebrows and wanted to hide it—and this time, Akos understood why. The difference between exiles and renegades, and the connection between them, wasn’t of much interest to him—all he wanted was to make sure Cyra was safe, and to get Eijeh out of Shotet; he didn’t care what else happened there. But to Isae, chancellor of Thuvhe, it was clearly important to know there was a swelling of dissent against Ryzek, both inside Shotet and outside.
“How many of you—renegades—are there?” Isae asked.
“Am I likely to answer that question?” was Teka’s reply. The answer was clearly no, so Isae moved on.
“Is your involvement in the revolt why . . .” Isae waved a hand over her face. “The eye?”
“This? Oh, I have two eyes, I just like the patch,” Teka said.
“Really?” Cisi asked.
“No,” Teka said, and everyone laughed.
The food was plain, almost bland, but Akos didn’t mind it. It was a little more like home, a little less like Noavek finery. Teka started humming along to Jyo’s song, and Sovy drummed on the tabletop with her fingers, so hard Akos’s fork rattled against his plate whenever he set it down.
Then Teka and Jorek got up and danced. Isae leaned over to Jyo while he was playing and asked, “So, if this particular group of renegades is working to rescue Cyra . . . what are the other renegade groups doing? Hypothetically, I mean.”
Jyo narrowed one eye at her, but answered anyway. “Hypothetically, those of us Shotet who are low in status need things they can’t get. And they need someone to smuggle it in for them.”