“It’s a shame,” Tesaryn Wen says, suddenly standing beside me, stroking her hand up and down the length of a long copper tube. “You think you know someone . . .”
I ball my fists and keep them down at my sides, trying to ignore her obvious taunt. “Where are they taking Baradonna?” I demand in defiance of the order.
“Who now? I’m not sure I know who you’re talking about.”
I snarl at her.
Tesaryn Wen smiles. “Well now, if everyone knew where we sent the banished, it wouldn’t be much of a banishment, would it? You’d be off visiting her every day, probably. Bring her a nice cheese roll for her birthday? Decorate the place for EE day? Can’t have that.”
I look into her eyes, see something behind them, just like Baradonna had said. “You know where they’re taking her, though?”
“All the Senate leaders do.”
“Well, I’m privy to all information the Senate leaders share. I’m Matris!”
“Ah . . . well, I suppose I could let you look at the map before we lock it away . . .” She places one end of the copper tube in my hand, then yanks it back. “Oh sorry, that’s right. Didn’t you recuse yourself from your duties for this trial?”
“Please, Tesaryn Wen.”
“It’s better you forget. This trial never happened. This map doesn’t even exist.” Tesaryn Wen’s smile grows more sinister. “But I suppose I could share what I know if you recuse yourself from all matters concerning the Senate from here on out. No one will think worse of you. You’ll be busy with that little newborn of yours, after all.” Tesaryn Wen smiles. “Mother and child are doing fine, I hear. You must be aching to see them.”
“What?” I say, confused and untrusting of every single word that comes out of her mouth. “Charrelle isn’t due for another month.”
“You must have missed the news. Shame. I can’t imagine what could have been so important to drag you away from your laboring wife. I suppose you want to know the child’s name?”
I shake my head. Watching her posture, it doesn’t seem as if she’s lying. On the contrary. She’s leaning totally into me, eager to use the truth as a weapon. But I don’t want to hear it . . . not from Tesaryn Wen’s lips. The important thing now is that I have an heir. I could meet with Charrelle’s mothers to sway them individually and hope they could do the same for their allies. Maybe their numbers could grow into something significant enough to bring Baradonna home.
“Kenzah,” Tesaryn Wen says. “A beautiful name.”
A boy’s name. She looks at me. Smile so much more vicious.
“I have a son,” I whisper.
“That you do.”
I nod, letting the shock roll over me. I can’t hold on to it. Can’t entertain the thoughts of ever-so-subtle disappointment. Don’t even dare wonder if my parents had thought the same when I entered the world. “This is wonderful news,” I say.
“Isn’t it? Such a rarity. A true blessing.” She strokes the copper tube again, almost erotically. Like she’s about to fuck it. Like she’s about to fuck me over. “Now, as I was saying. Recuse yourself. Go home, be a good dad. A dutiful husband. I can guarantee that no one will question the legitimacy of your marriages, particularly this last one. And of course, you’ll still serve as Matris in an ornamental sense. Oversee parades, dance at the finest galas. Smile and wave.”
“But I’ll have no power. No deciding votes.”
“You’ll be free of that burden.”
“And I suppose someone will have to step into that role of tiebreaker?” I squint at her.
“I suppose that before you resign, if you saw fit, you could appoint someone to act in your stead.”
“You?”
“I mean, I’d be the obvious choice . . .”
I don’t know what it means that I’m actually considering this plan. The whole Senate hates me now anyway. She’d be legitimizing our marriage, which means the Klang would retain their voice. Bakti could speak out about his people’s needs and change could start to happen. But still, as tempting as it is, her offer still feels wrong. People would notice that I’d stepped down. The pressure to be more than what everyone expects of me is relentless, but there are people out there rooting for me. People who have taken the time to get to know me. People like Baradonna. I can’t let her sacrifice be in vain.
“I can’t,” I say. I wish my words sounded as convincing as they had in my head. I clear my throat and draw up more confidence. “I won’t.”
Tesaryn Wen scoffs. “And here I was thinking that you actually cared about Baradonna.” She takes the tube and leaves. The crowd has departed as well, and I am left alone with my guilt.
Moments pass, and I become a heaving mess. I turn and rest my head against the wall, wondering how everything had gone so spectacularly wrong. A hand comes down on my shoulder. I jump at the touch, spin around, ready to knock out Tesaryn Wen this time, but it is Bella Roshaad who stands there before me. The compassion in her eyes is almost too much to bear. Do I look deserving of so much pity?
“You tried,” she says. “But the system is staunch in its ways, not matter how much we pretend otherwise.”
“Senator Wen tried to bribe me to step down.”
“Let me guess: she’s trying to get you to appoint her to fill the vacancy?”
I nod.
“She’s making a power play. I don’t like to speak unkindly of my fellow Senators, but that would be very bad for the Senate leadership. She already has too much sway as it is.”
“Don’t worry, I turned her down.” I don’t mention how close I was to saying yes.
“I know you think you are without allies here, but that is far from the case. I’ve been looking out for you. I know you’ve been trying to keep abreast of all the goings on among our people, but you spread yourself too thin. You’ll wear out too quickly. You’ve changed so much for the better. We need your leadership to last decades, not years.”
“I don’t know if I’ll last months at this point,” I mutter.
“Then take a break. Just a short one. Be with your family. Heal . . .” She presses her hand against my shoulder and looks me in the eyes. “I can work on getting Kallum a seat on the Senate. At least an interim one, while you’re away? It would go a long way toward warming the others to the idea of having him serve in a permanent capacity.”
“You shouldn’t make promises you can’t keep,” I snap at her. I know Bella Roshaad is on my side, but dangling my husband’s dream in front of me, knowing how the Senate feels about him feels like a more sinister layer of evil than Tesaryn Wen had shown me. “Kallum has petitioned to be considered at least a dozen times, and we haven’t gotten anywhere. The Senate wouldn’t—”
“For someone so well-versed in book knowledge, you have no idea of how politics really work, do you? You come here, trying your best to sway them, when in reality, 90 percent of the Senate’s decisions happen outside the chambers. It shouldn’t be that way, but it is.” Bella Roshaad shrugs. “I can fill in for you while you’re gone, if you’d like. At least it would chap Tesaryn Wen’s hide.” She laughs, and I join her. It feels good to laugh, even if it’s stilted. Even if the pain behind it is still there.
“I need to go meet my son now,” I tell her.
Bella Roshaad nods vigorously. “Yes, I’ve heard. Congratulations.” She presses an envelope into my hands, then smiles at me. “You’re going to make a fantastic father.” And with that, she takes her leave, and I find myself alone in the Senate chambers. I look down at the envelope, then open it carefully, expecting a handwritten card and a gift of crib worm eggs to be crammed inside, but when I unfold the paper, it is a map.
Seske
Of Loose Braids and Looser Lips
Well, the sex with Bakti has been decent. Okay, good. All right, it’s great actually. But every single time we’re done, Adalla immediately gets up and runs off to deal with some sort of heart emergency, leaving me and Bakti in bed alone. And I like him. I really do, but conversat
ions with him feel so technical, as if we’re two anthropologists studying each other. I wouldn’t be surprised if he kept a little notebook under the covers to document all the curiosities he’s observed of me and my people.
He looks at me, chest exposed, skin taut and a deep, rich brown. Twenty minutes ago, my mouth had been all over him, but now I am afraid to come too close to touching him, for fear he is some figment of my mind. A wild dream. I’ve had too many of those lately.
“There is a holiday coming up,” he says in his lilting accent. “I’ve heard the heart-wives chatting about it.”
“Ancestor’s Day,” I say with a nod. “A celebration to honor those in our Line who have come before us. We’ll light candles and dance and get drunk on ales from five exoduses ago. And that reminds me, we’ll have to get you properly fitted for formal silks.”
“Is it an old tradition?”
“Very. But it changed a few years ago. Now we honor the fallen Zenzee as well. We are just as much of their blood. Maybe even more so.”
“I will make sweet potatoes to bring to the festivities then.”
I smile. The event will be catered, but I don’t tell him that. He lights up so much when he’s in the kitchen. It has taken me a while to appreciate his cuisine, and like Bakti, it has mostly grown on me. We were both thrown into this arrangement, but slowly we’re learning more of each other. I know the situation is not ideal, but Bakti is eager to use his newfound voice to help his people, which will, in turn, help us all. I admire his unrestrained passion for creating change. I vaguely remember what such optimism felt like.
Our parents have finally thawed from the shock as well. Mostly. Bakti knows how to work a room, telling risqué jokes and musing about the differences between our peoples, and how odd our cuisine is. He even once got my stoic will-mother to crack a smile with a saucy double-entendre about the phallic nature of the crème-stuffed gall worm sausages she served at our family dinner.
His mother gifts me with flowers and interesting beads for my hair each time we go to visit the settlement. We were at a loss with what to do with Bakti’s hair after the wedding. It was too sleek to hold the braids of our family Line, so we’d settled on a single braid tied up in a bun in the position of our most prominent star. Tirtha had poked little flowers and shells into it, along with small patches of red moss—the same kind his mother wore in her hair on special occasions. I liked that our cultures were blending, ever so slightly, at the edges.
His bun had fallen out during our lovemaking, and the little ornaments had become sharp hazards to bare naked skin. I hadn’t much noticed in the moment, but the divot in my knee is now starting to smart.
“How are the work permits coming along?” I ask him in an attempt to make small talk.
“Thirty-three have been issued so far,” he says. “Not a lot, but it’s a start. My cousin Genaro has received one to work in the doldrums tending to the sails. Very exciting.”
“Very exciting, indeed,” I say. Then the awkward silence creeps back in.
“I enjoy wearing your silks,” Bakti interjects, grabbing a robe that had been tossed to the floor. It belongs to Adalla, but he wraps himself into it anyway. “Very pleasing against the skin.”
“The process for preparing the silks is very old. Longer than we’ve lived aboard the Zenzee.”
“I would like to learn more about it,” he says, a warm smile on his face, though in my mind, I see him reaching for his notebook.
“I actually don’t know much more than that. We could go to the archives sometime to see what we can learn. Or even visit where they spin the silk.”
“Oh really? Where would that be?” he asks.
“I actually don’t know that either. But—”
A knock comes at the door. Thanks to every single heart-father there ever was for sparing me from additional awkwardness. “Come in!” I say. “Please come in,” I mutter.
“Oh!” says Doka. “I’m interrupting. Again.”
“No, no. We were just chatting. Here,” I say patting the bed. “Come sit. You look tired. Got a lot on your mind? Fussy baby?”
Doka nods.
Kenzah’s screams could divert a whole herd of Zenzee in the opposite direction. Not to mention the arguments we hear coming from the head-parents running late into the night. Mostly it was them shouting about whether the baby was too young to take a crib worm or not. Charrelle insisted they wait at least until six weeks, stating that the neurotoxins could cause the baby not to nurse as frequently. Doka pushed that he’d had a crib worm at this age and turned out fine. Kallum fluttered between the two, based on the amount of sleep he’d had.
I don’t tell any of them that the heart-mothers have been attaching small crib worms to Kenzah’s thigh since his second week of life. Not for long enough to leave a bruise . . . just enough to enjoy a few quiet moments during their allotted caregiving time.
“But that’s not what’s bothering me. It’s Baradonna,” Doka says.
“Do you two need privacy?” Bakti asks. “Because I can get out of your hair . . .”
“No, don’t go,” I plead. I would never say it out loud, but it’s nice to have a third person in the room when I’m with Doka. It reminds me of the early days of our courtship, when his honor guard would eavesdrop on our conversations. I quickly shake my head, reminding myself that Bakti is my partner and Doka is the interloper.
“Yes, stay. I won’t be long,” Doka says. “I just feel so responsible for what happened to her.”
“I’m to blame too, then,” Bakti says. “We wanted to cause a stir, and we did. We didn’t fully anticipate that there’d be casualties.”
“She was trying to protect me,” Doka says. “Protect us.”
“There’s nothing we can do about it now,” I say softly. “I know it’s still a sore spot for you, but you really need to try to forget.”
I grimace, knowing that it’s so much easier to give that advice than to take it. I know Baradonna didn’t like me much, but she was a good person. And she was loyal to Doka above all. She deserved better.
Doka is silent for a long time. The kind of silence that reads like mischief in a bottle that’s yet to be uncorked.
“What?” I ask him.
“Maybe there is something we can do about it,” Doka says. “The location of the banishment is recorded and sent to the Senate’s Keep.”
“Well, there’s no way we can get into the Keep,” I say. It’s heavily guarded. High treason against Senators and governance didn’t happen often, and banishment was a fate worse than getting shot into space from the Zenzee’s third ass. It was worse than getting the ancestor’s lace. In fact, it had only happened one other time in my life . . . to my own sister when she’d tried to kill me.
Doka unrolls a sheet of paper, with ducts branching out in all directions. A map.
“How did you—?”
“I have a few allies in the Senate yet,” Doka whispers, cutting me off. He takes a deep breath, then points to the end of a branch, marked with a silver X. “Baradonna was banished here. It’d be a day’s journey through dangerous rivers, but with provisions and protection, I think I could do it.”
“You?” I shake my head. My thumbs are starting to ache just letting the conversation move in this direction. “You’re not risking your life to splash around in the bile ducts to save someone who no longer exists. We don’t know what’s out there, but I can promise you it’s not good.”
“Baradonna would do it for me. She has done it for me.” Doka lets his head drop. “It’s the least I can do to repay her.”
“But if you do find her, then what? You can’t exactly bring her back here.”
“I’ll find somewhere safe for her. Somehow. I don’t know. I just can’t leave her alone and suffering . . .”
Frustration curls my nerves. Doka isn’t going to let this drop. He’s not thinking straight, and someone’s going to have to keep him safe. I could think of a hundred reasons why it’d be unwise to
spend my evening venturing into our Zenzee’s rancid bile ducts. But who needs reason? The history books are already going to have a lot of awful stuff to say about me. Might as well make it all worth it.
“Well, let me come with you. You and me, going on an adventure, just like old—” I look at Bakti. I can’t just exclude him like that, right in front of his face. “You and me and Bakti, going on an adventure . . . making new memories.”
“Are you asking me to be a part of your mischief?” Bakti asks.
“We’re not asking,” says Doka. “We’re begging. You’ve got good reflexes, think fast on your feet.”
Bakti purses up his lips and shakes his head slowly. “I’m a will-father now. Aren’t I supposed to be encouraging you to make sound decisions and think things through?”
“You’re Kenzah’s will-father. Not ours,” I say. “You don’t have to encourage us to do anything.”
Bakti leans over, kisses me on the lips, then pulls back. “Well, someone’s got to stay here and be a father to Kenzah. Maybe I’ll read him some Uday and Ulmer fables. Mother sent over my old books. If our child takes after Doka, I’ll need all the head start I can get to keep him from diving into risky situations.” Bakti gets up, shakes the wrinkles out of his robe, then heads to the adjacent washroom. The soft sound of water falling into the tub follows.
“Bakti thinks this is risky,” I say. “Do you think it’s risky?”
Doka and I stare at each other, both knowing this is a bad idea, and not just because we’re venturing off into uncharted waters with no idea of what we’re doing. There’s something odd welling up between us, especially now that our family dynamics have changed so quickly and so drastically.
Doka lets the question hang and says, “Let’s do this.”
I run my hand along stiff, smooth bone, and a shiver runs through me. This feels wrong, riding in a boat made from the Zenzee’s bone, but Doka assures me it is the most viable option.
“Trust me—you don’t want to try the alternative,” he’d said as we’d launched.
Symbiosis Page 13
