The Secret Texts

by Holly Lisle

  “I don’t feel that way and you know it. I love you. I want to spend the rest of my life with you. I just want to be able to share my life—including you—with the little that remains of my family. Alcie is slowly coming around,” Kait said. “She will accept you.”

  “And I think she would accept me faster if we declared ourselves incanda and took our own apartments and shared our bed.”

  “That’s too . . . abrupt. My way is taking longer, but it’s better. Alcie understands that you’re not truly Sabir—”

  Ry’s skin crawled. He spun and stared at her, and she faltered and fell silent. He said, “What did you say?” and his voice was flat and hard.

  She flushed. “I’ve been explaining to her that you left the Sabirs rather than take charge of them, and that your own mother declared you barzanne in consequence, and that you aren’t really Sabir anymore. . . .”

  “And that is all that will make me acceptable to her? That I’m some gelded, tamed, caged thing that lives with you because I have no place of my own?”

  She was shaking her head. “No . . . no, of course not—”

  “I should have seen this coming. I should have realized that we had no future together—should have seen it when you presented me with separate quarters and a stupid explanation about how it was just temporary and just for show.” He took a step back from her. “I’m still Sabir,” he whispered. “My mother took my birthright, but she could not claim my blood. I will live and die a Sabir, and you will live and die a Galweigh, and all the Reborn’s love and tolerance and acceptance can’t change that, and all your wishes that I be something other than what I am can’t change that, either.”

  They stared at each other across the widening gulf of who they were and who they could not be.

  Kait’s fists clenched and Ry saw tears well at the corners of her eyes. “I love you,” she said.

  “And I love you. You are the only woman I’ve ever wanted. The only woman I’ve ever loved.” He took a deep breath and continued. “But if you can’t accept who I am, we can’t be together. I won’t be your embarrassment, Kait. I won’t be your shame or your mistake, the thing you did to yourself that you wish you could hide from the world. I won’t pretend that I’m not Sabir so that your sister will accept me.”

  “Why not? You pretend all sorts of things. You pretend not to be Karnee every day to save your life.”

  “And so do you.”

  “Yes. I do. We both pretend, Ry. Neither of us has ever let the world see who we are. Neither of us has ever been who we really are, except with each other. We share secrets no one else will ever know. We know each other—we’re the only ones who know each other. Why can’t you give up being Sabir so that we can have that?”

  He stared at her, seeing a stranger in familiar flesh. “That you could even ask me that tells me that everything I thought I shared with you doesn’t exist. I never asked you to give up being yourself for me. I never would, because who you are is much of what I love about you. If you weren’t Galweigh, you wouldn’t be you.” He paused, then said, “And if I weren’t Sabir, I wouldn’t be me.”

  He wanted her to take back what she’d said. He wanted her to say she was wrong, to say she was sorry for asking him to become someone else, to run to him and throw her arms around him. But she didn’t. She stood there staring at him and crying, and at last he turned away. He had his answer.

  “Where are you going?”

  He didn’t look back. “To pack. Once that’s done . . . I don’t know. It’s a big world. There’s bound to be a place in it for me somewhere.”

  She said, “Ry . . . please don’t go. I . . . need you. There’s no one else in the world for me.” Her voice sounded very small when she said it.

  He turned back then, just for a moment. “If you really needed me, Kait, I’d stay. But you need someone who isn’t Sabir to fit all the pictures you have in your head of what a dutiful daughter is supposed to be. I can’t be who you need me to be, and I won’t try.”

  He left the garden, and packed his few belongings, and found Yanth and Jaim and told them what was going on. The whole time, he kept hoping that she’d come to him and say something—anything—that would let him know she could love him without regrets; that she could find a way to put their pasts behind her and accept him as he was. But she didn’t come.

  At last, he and his lieutenants left Galweigh House. He tried not to look back, but he couldn’t help himself. She was standing atop the wall, silent, watching. When the wind shifted slightly, it brought her scent to him, and the yearning he felt for her was so great he almost couldn’t breathe. But she didn’t run after him. She didn’t plead with him to stay. She didn’t take back her words.

  So he turned and trudged toward the jungle, toward the hidden paths that would take him down to the city. He didn’t know where he would go from there. He didn’t care. Who he was and what he did mattered to him only if he was with her. Without her, the world was bleak and empty, and so was he.

  Chapter 22

  Kait sat in the far corner of her sitting room, her back to the door, staring out the window into the ruined garden where she and Ry had fought their last fight. She should have told him that she didn’t care if he was Sabir. She could have kept him if she’d said the words he wanted to hear—she knew it. But just saying it wouldn’t make it true, and if she could only have him with a lie, she would live without him.

  She heard the knock on her door and ignored it. This time, unlike the last few times, the door opened anyway.

  “You can’t sit in here forever,” Alcie said. “You have to come out eventually.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t be stupid. Dùghall’s frantic. He’s demanding that you come downstairs and eat something and talk to him. He says the two of you have unfinished business, and that the world won’t wait for your broken heart to heal.”

  Kait said nothing. She kept staring out the window, shutting out her sister’s voice.

  “Oh, for the gods’ sakes, Kait,” Alcie snapped, “you’re better off without him. You were infatuated with him, and I can see why. He was handsome, he was clever, he was passionate—but he was Sabir. Some night he would have remembered that, and he would have rolled over and strangled you while you slept. And then he would have crept through the House and finished off everyone else.”

  Kait felt rage beginning to build in her gut, but she didn’t show it. She kept her voice calm and said, “You didn’t know him.”

  “I didn’t need to know him. I know what the Sabirs did to the rest of us. You and I are all that remain of our family, almost all that remain of the Calimekka Galweighs. Maybe his weren’t the hands that wielded the sword that killed Maman and Papan and my Omil and my children and our brothers and sisters, but the killers’ blood runs through his veins.”

  “It does,” Kait said evenly. “And most of his Family is dead, too, destroyed by the same fight, on the same day, and by much the same means. We used magic, we broke the agreements and the covenants, and you can just as honestly say that killers’ blood runs through your veins. The Galweighs’ hands weren’t clean.”

  “Maybe not, but we didn’t start that fight. The treachery was theirs . . . and you admit he had a part in that treachery.”

  Kait turned away from the window and looked into her sister’s eyes. “The treachery was theirs that time. You and I cannot know about other times or other betrayals. With four hundred years of hatred between us and them, I cannot believe that the Galweighs were always innocent victims, or the Sabirs always vile aggressors. Ry did what his Family told him to do; he served out of duty. As did you. As did I. We were all obedient to our Families—”

  “And now he’s gone and you can cease to shame yours,” Alcie said. “It could never have worked, Kait. Passion dies after a time, and the newness fades, and all that lovers have left are those things they share in common. You could never have shared common ground with that . . . beast.”

  Kait turned back
to the window. I could never share common ground with anyone but that beast, she thought. We were both Karnee. Both kept outside the core of Family life because we were different. Tainted. We share a bond Alcie couldn’t understand, and wouldn’t believe—if I told her I know where he is right now, that when I sleep I can still feel his hands interlaced with mine, or that at this moment I can sense that he hasn’t eaten in two days, she would tell me I was suffering from the taunts of spirits and visions, that I could not know such things. Or that I was simply mad. But I’m not mad. We share something that is for us alone—in all the world there will not be another like Ry for me.

  “I could have,” she said. “I did. It’s over, but I will hunger for him for the rest of my life.”

  “You’ll get over him.”

  “As you’ve gotten over Omil?”

  Kait turned in the chill silence that followed her question and regarded her sister. Alcie’s lips were bloodless, her face pale, her body rigid with fury. “How dare you compare Omil with a Sabir, or your little infatuation with something you know nothing about?”

  Kait nodded. “If it’s yours, it’s sacred; if it’s mine, it’s something of no value. Is that what you think?”

  Alcie turned and stalked out of the room without another word. Kait stared after her thoughtfully, then returned to her place by the window. But Alcie’s words and her attitude kept interrupting her reverie. And Alcie was like Ian, who had stayed, and like Dùghall. None of them would see what she had lost; none of them would understand the depth of her pain. Perhaps none of them could. They saw only her duty, and that she neglected duty out of grief.

  At last she went to her armoire. From it, she pulled one of her presentation dresses—red silk in the Galweigh weave with a stiffened collar of black Galweigh Rose-and-Thorn lace, the soft black under-blouse chastely high, the sleeves cut and turned and heavily embroidered in black-on-black silk so that the roses stood out from the cloth almost like real flowers. She put it on slowly. She laced on formal shoes, watching their gems gleaming in the morning light as she caught the cord through the hooks in the back. She brushed and braided her hair, then pinned it up in a heavy loop at the base of her neck.

  She rummaged through her room until she found a kit she’d acquired as part of her diplomatic training; she opened it, found that its contents—powders, brushes, glues, and gems—were intact, and smiled grimly. She took the case, sat before her mirror, and powdered her face with iliam, a concoction of ground gold and bone dust and gods alone knew what else that made her look like she’d been cast of precious metal. She brushed lampblack on her eyelids and eyelashes and pressed little rubies at the outer corners of her eyes with spirit gum. She painted a red line carefully from the center of her forehead down to the tip of her nose, her hands only shaking a little as she did—she had painted such lines before, but never on her own face.

  Finally, she found the case that held her best headdress—the one with the woven platinum band that rested across her brow and held in place a cascade of gemstones that hung halfway down her back—and settled it on her head. As its immense weight came to rest on her, four hundred years of Galweigh history settled on her shoulders; four hundred years of ghosts told her what she must think and what she must feel and what she must do to honor them.

  She bowed to the mirror and to the ghosts, and then she went down to the solar to greet her uncle.

  • • •

  When Kait stepped into the solar dressed as if for her own funeral, Dùghall resisted the urge to beat his head against the cool stone wall only with difficulty. He had hoped to pretend cheerfulness with Kait, and to act as if Ry’s absence were only a temporary misfortune, but obviously he could no longer consider that an option. He could not offer her a meal and chat about inconsequential nothings while she ate. She presented herself as one already dead, and he couldn’t see any polite way to ignore that.

  He could, however, resent the melodramatic gestures of youth, and that he did.

  “Don’t you look lovely,” he said after an instant’s hesitation, and Kait gave him a hard look.

  “I’ve come to do my duty,” she said.

  “Oh, lucky, lucky us.” He leaned against a wall and crossed his arms over his chest. “You’re all enthusiastic about it too, I see. So few corpses rise from their pyres to attend the needs of the living.”

  “I’m doing my duty to my Family because it is my duty.” Kait stood before him like a paraglesa, chin up, spine rigid, shoulders squared. She would have looked quite grand, he thought, if it weren’t for the fact that parading around as an upright corpse was inherently ridiculous.

  “Duty for the sake of duty. . . . I’ll tell you something that may serve you well in the future. Families thus served are better left to rot into oblivion.” He looked at her standing there in all her outraged glory, and he gave in to the impulse and laughed at her.

  That, of course, was like throwing water on a cat. “I at least know my duty,” she snarled.

  “Right. Right. And you’re going to shove this magnificent sacrifice you’re making down our throats—you have loved and lost and you’re dead inside but you’ll bravely go on, giving your life up to serve your Family and the world, and all you want is for us to pity you and admire you for being the poor, brave creature you are.”

  He’d shocked her speechless. Her mouth dropped open and she stared at him, and he could see her fingers digging into the palms of her hands—he could see, too, a blurring at the fingertips, as if her hands couldn’t decide whether to have fingernails or claws. He recalled, then, her Karnee heritage, and decided he might be wise to take a less antagonistic approach.

  “I’m not saying the world doesn’t need you, Kait,” he said. “But it doesn’t need you to be a martyr.”

  “Really? You’re saying I don’t have to die. I just can’t have my Family and the man I love. Is that it?”

  “You had the man you loved. You sent him away.”

  “He left.”

  “You had nothing to do with his leaving?”

  “Family came between us.”

  “Family stood between you from the beginning, but you seemed to be managing well enough. Then all of a sudden he leaves and you go into mourning, and you declare the problem was Family. I don’t see it.” He didn’t mention his own part in their breakup—he still wasn’t certain exactly how significant that part had been, or why what he had done had been necessary.

  Kait was quiet for a long time. Finally, she seemed to come to a decision. In a quieter, less angry voice than before, she said, “He couldn’t leave being Sabir behind.”

  Dùghall shook his head. “You asked him to give up being Sabir?”

  “Yes. I had to—for you and for Alcie, for all the Galweighs who died.”

  “I see. And did you ask him to give you his balls on a plate at the same time?”

  “What?”

  “You might as well have. You can’t ask a man to be someone else for you.”

  “The longer I was here, the more I realized that I could not have him if he was still Sabir in his heart.”

  Dùghall sighed. “You’re young, Kait-cha, and youth has its charms, but that bullheaded idealism of yours is not one of them. You still think the world is made up of sharp edges and clear divisions, of good that has never known evil and evil that has never known good—and in spite of everything you have seen and done, you think you can force the real world to fit your picture of what it should be if you just want it enough.”

  “That isn’t so,” Kait argued, but Dùghall held up a hand to stop her.

  “It is so. You’re a good girl and you loved your family and you served the greater Family with your whole heart. And then you discovered a piece of the puzzle of your life that didn’t fit the rest of the picture . . . but that piece fit you. Ry fit you, girl, and you fit him. There was something more to the two of you than simple desire; magic coursed between the two of you through the Veil itself. You were shaped for each other by t
he forces of fate or the gods.”

  “You’re saying I should go after him.”

  “No. I don’t know that going after him would bring him back. You don’t see yet why what you did was wrong. You might never see it, or truly understand it, and until you do, you can’t hope to fix the rift you’ve created between the two of you. So, no. Don’t go running after him. You’ll likely only make things worse.”

  Kait pulled her heavy headdress off and dropped it onto a brocaded bench. It rattled and clanked, and Dùghall winced. She dropped into a deep chair, oblivious to the damage she was doing to her dress, which was not made to be sat in, and leaned forward, elbows on knees. “You really think our fight was all my fault, don’t you?” He realized that she was crying; tears carved little runnels through the gold powder on her face.

  He dragged another chair to a position across from hers and settled into it. “You look at Ry as a sacrifice you made for your Family,” he said. “And there are sacrifices you will have to make in your life—some of them may be as painful as sending him away. But”—he held up a finger—“you don’t sacrifice a gift the gods have given you.”

  “You say that so lightly—that he was a gift the gods gave me. How can you know that? Why would the gods give me a gift that would divide me from my Family?”

  “Why would the gods . . . And you question the gift itself. . . .” He rested his head in his hands and closed his eyes for a long moment. His own weaknesses rose before him, unbearable specters of failure, of insufficiency, of inadequacy. “Ah, Vodor Imrish, give me the words.” He sighed and looked up at her. “Love—true, abiding love—is the greatest gift the gods bestow. Solander felt it for every living creature—he was so moved by love that he transcended time and death to touch us with it. Vincalis felt it for his friend Solander, and for Janhri, who became his wife, and love so changed him that he marked the future with his words, and gave many of us a path to follow and a star to sight by.