Tears fall from my eyes. Because he is, I know now, even if I will forget, everything more.
He is everything.
CHAPTER16
Anya
I wish, now, that I had eaten. Or at least had something to drink. Trasmea tried; she pleaded with me, but I couldn’t shake the conviction that there is something in my food or my drink causing distortions of my thinking. For one thing, there’s the memory problem; I can’t remember some days, when I awaken in the morning. And it isn’t because they’re all the same.
I found the ‘note’ this morning—the morning of the wedding, which I didn’t remember having been told about. Trasmea entered my room before the small moon had turned toward the sun, while the planet was still large and blue in the nighttime sky. She came with six otherhyka’ar, filling the room with a busy energy. They physically pulled me from the bed, humming around in many different languages, guiding me in a bewildered state into a bath with petals of a delicious flower floating on the surface, combing my hair, chirping like birds.
“It’s… the day of your wedding ceremony, Za’aka,” Trasmea answered disbelievingly, when I asked her what the hell was going on.
I sent them out, with one of the few phrases I’ve picked up in Kerz. (“Gheikt!” if you’re wondering. Easy enough, sounds like ‘get’ with something caught in your throat.) I leaned on the edge of my pool-sized bathtub, searching my mind for some fragment of a memory, any memory, of this wedding plan being conveyed to me. Trasmea told me it had; she had no reason to lie. But I couldn’t remember it at all.
Like so many other mornings, when I reached into my memory for the day before, I found nothing. Feelings are the only thing I can find, feelings that make no sense. Snippets of images, all of them seeming to have come from the wild dreams I have.
And that’s when I saw it. At first, I thought I was hallucinating, or striving to see meaning in a pattern that had no meaning. One of the huge pots with a large tree planted in it, the one I stare at when I lounge in my pool-bathtub, face down, hanging over the side, indulging in my memories of my dreams about Rysethk. It’s a tan-colored pot with intricate patterns in blood red and dark brown, slashes and pictographs, probably Kerz script, and I have no idea what any of it says. I like it, the Kerz script. It’s—oddly—very curly and rounded, which isn’t what you’d expect of the script of a people so violent.
Tucked into the patterns that had always been there, it said: “U love R + R loves U,” with hearts instead of the words ‘love’ and ‘loves.’ It looked like part of the pattern, so much so that at first I didn’t see it at all. But I stare at this thing all the time, and so it was noticeable to me. I’m sure I’ve had the thought of writing something down. It flits about in my mind, one of those fragments that I can’t be sure if it’s a dream or not.Write it down, I tell myself, in my dreams, but there was never anywhere to write.
I looked at it for a long time, not quite believing it, thinking I was going mad. But there was no mistake about it, no mistaking the Latin script, no mistaking the hearts, the plus sign.
And then, when I reached out to touch it with my fingertips, as if to check if it was real, I felt the bruise of the puncture wound I had given myself, in my finger, to write that message in blood. The final ‘U’ was a struggle for me to write, I could see, abandoned hastily, half-finished.
But still legible.
So it was me, it had to be. A message I had written in blood to myself.
And the message? You love ‘R’? This could only be Rysethk, the Kapsuk. There is no other ‘R,’ no other plausible explanation.
I fell into a trance-like state after that, turning it over endlessly in my mind. It consumed my thoughts, even as they fetched me from the bath, dried me off, applied lotions and ointments and dressed me in a white, robe-like gown, one that was not see-through, embroidered with intricate Kerz lettering in gold. I sat staring at the sky while they painted my face with some kind of ink, arranged my hair… this went on for hours and it could have been moments.
I love Rysethk, and he loves me?
Why? Why did I have to write this to myself in blood? I tried to force myself to think, to think of what I had wanted myself todo,chastising myself for not writing a better message, a smarter message, for not finding something else on which to write.
But I must have wanted myself to read it, and wanted the message to be a secret. I hid it well, there is no chance that Trasmea would notice it, or be able to read it (she’s illiterate in Kerz). Butwhy?I must have known I was drugged, I must have had a chance to tell myself something, but why this?
And when I read it, I could feel that it was true, feel it in my bones and my heart. When I think of Rysethk, I feel like I know him somehow, as something more than what he is, more than what my memories are.
But we were leaving; the women draped me in a semi-transparent red silk piece of cloth and ushered me out of my room. They were excited, whispering and giggling, and Trasmea talked to me all the way there about the amazing life I would have and how lucky I was to marry Zethki, to breed with warriors and nobles, blah blah blah.
The wedding ceremony was bizarre. I went meekly, I’m ashamed to say, because I was still so stunned. It has been an inevitable event for some time now, and perhaps I accepted it. But it was always in the future, always ‘some time’ away. A deep, cool ache sprang in my heart, as I thought of Rysethk, and how he hadn’t even told me. I would have thought that he would, even before I read this note to myself.
And if he loves me? What then? Why send me to his cousin to be married?
I stared straight ahead as the women guided me to an altar. I’ve been to wedding ceremonies all over the world, and let me just say this: the universe is not a very creative place. Humanoids are not very creative, not really. They all have a ritual, wherever they are in their evolution as a species, for conjoining males and females. Sure, some of them are bat-shit crazy, like the Kerz with their ‘breeding’ ceremony, and some are hard to understand. But in the end, everyone stands in front of some kind of altar, with some kind of priest or official, and things like blood are exchanged, or hands are tied together.
In the case of the Kerz—I’m only guessing, because I had no idea what the hell was happening, and I let them move me around limply while I stared ahead, seeing nothing, in a state of shock—there seems to be some kind of ritual about thekryth. Only, because I have nokryth, Zethki used one of his sharp claws to draw open a cut on my palm, which he placed against the yellow, pulsing markings on his chest, over his heart. There was a lot of chanting in the room then.
I was still under the red fabric, barely able to see. There were Kerz males in the room, and only Kerz males, but I could not see far enough from the corners of my eyes to find out if Rysethk was one of them. Surely he was there, I kept thinking; he’s Zethki’s most trusted advisor, his cousin, his strongest soldier.
As I thought of him, the familiar and yet unfamiliar feeling of… what? This love I apparently feel for him? …swelled in my heart and rose in the back of my throat as a sob, which I choked down. I stared in front of me, and saw that as this feeling engulfed me, it seemed to travel through my bleeding palm and into Zethki’skryth, or his bloodstream, or whatever the hell it is—a white-hot color spread from my hand through the shifting, glowing yellow of hiskryth.
It moved like a liquid, the color diluting as it spread, and it sent a shudder through his body. A reaction reverberated through the room, through the Kerz gathered there, and I looked up as the red fabric was lifted away from me, to see Zethki’s face, his lips twisted in an expression of confusion, lust, and satisfaction. A snarl, but a pleased one. It was a terrifying expression.
Someone bound my hand to his chest with a ceremonial length of cloth, wrapping us tightly together, my right hand plastered to hiskryth.
