He doesn’t respond, but moves his head in a way that affirms my hypothesis.
I look at him. “How many times?” I ask.
It explains everything. It explains how I feel about him, my ‘dreams,’ the images that flash through my mind. My suspicions of being drugged, the memory lapses.
“Countless times,” he says, a note of regret in his voice.
“And I do it willingly?” I ask. “Every time?”
He nods. “There is no other way.”
I stare at the vial.
I’m suddenly furious. “What do you mean, no other way?” I whisper-yell. I feel like this, I have also said before. Tears of frustration well up in my eyes. I look at the door. I think of how close we are to the outside, to freedom. “Surely we could just leave, surely…”
He moves around the table to me, but he doesn’t embrace me. His hand floats above the table, hiskrythviolently yellow. His voice is calm when he speaks, but there is a note of impatience, of fury, behind the quiet of his words. “Zethki is a powerful Kerz, Anya. The most powerful Kerz. He is stupid, and he’s weaker than me, but he’s the Kirigok Kerzat. Do you understand this? His reach is everywhere, his eyes are everywhere, the Kerz are loyal to him like your Earthly wolves, like the subjects of kings.”
“You’ve told me all of this before,” I say.
He doesn’t answer. We both know this is true. I turn the vial over in my hands.
“I’m clever. I’m stronger than any Kerz. I will not let him have you—” He seems to get choked up here, the words stuck in his throat. I look at him, and his face seems twisted in agony. “Forever,” he finishes. “You are mine. You will have my blood in your womb.” He places a hand on my belly, and I know it’s true. I know that he’s right. “I put it there—”
“The pool,” I murmur. The pool, the hot spring of my imagination. It’s real, and I know that now, it was a place where we went to ensure that I didn’t become pregnant with his child… before. I don’t know how these thoughts come to me; they emerge as feelings, as intuition, as clouds in my cloudy mind, mixed and without clear lines. But I know this.
But there was no pool today.
Because he wants to breed me himself before…
A slight sob escapes my throat. I shake my head.
“I don’t want to,” I whisper. It’s not that I really don’t want to—Trasmea has explained to me that I can’t be hurt, that if I submit to Zethki, and to the breeding ceremony, it will be pure, carnal pleasure, and I don’t even fear it. It arouses me.
Or, at least, it did. It isn’t this that I don’t want. It’s something else…
“I can’t betray you,” I tell him, as soon as the thought occurs to me. I shake my head. “I can’t. I won’t. I love you.”
He lets me blubber on for a few moments, but I run out of words, and I know before he speaks what he will say. He closes his hand around mine, and the vial. “This is why, Anya. Why you will drink this vial. Why you drink it always.” He pulls me close to him, and kisses my head through my hair. “You must trust me,” he says.
Everything he has said is true, and I know it. The Kerz are everywhere. I knew this before I encountered them. I didn’tknowmy father was mixed up with them, but I should have suspected it. Maybe I did. I know that they take what they want, that they have immense and dark power that is only as legitimate in appearance as it needs to be, that they are an interstellar mafia-like clan unafraid of murder and worse. And Zethki is the Kerzat of the Kirigok clan, the most powerful, the most ruthless, the most connected, of all the Kerz. Nothing I have seen indicates otherwise.
I have no choice.
I wonder if I think this through this way each time, and I guess that I must.
I unfold my hand. He lets me. He takes the vial and opens it, and places it in my fingers.
“I trust you,” I say, and a sob swallows my last words.
When I bring the vial to my lips, Rysethk Kirigok turns away. A Kerz who has killed a man with a plate like he was putting garbage in a bin cannot watch me drink to forget him.
My chest is cold and sinking, and the feeling is terrible and beautiful all at once.
“How long until I forget?” I ask.
I must ask him every time, I think. He is weary when he turns to me. “You will forget in your sleep. Do not call me by name. Say this to yourself as you fall asleep. You must not call me by my name. I’m Kapsuk.Nothing more.”
“Nothing more,” I say, and the words hollow me out.
