Chapter 39
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
LYRA
“Had I known you were so good at cards, I would have never asked you to come to the tavern with me tonight.” Neilina frowns at the spread across the table.
I laugh. “I didn’t even know I was good at cards.”
Ophelia—the tavern’s fiddle player—rests her cheek on her fist. “So we’ve been bested by a complete and total rookie?”
“Are you hustling us, Neilina?” An older man asks, sitting to my right.
Neilina glares at him from across the table. “I’ve lost too, Jax. For the third time. I may be the youngest in this place, but I’m not that ignorant.”
“Come on, kid,” Ophelia pushes, her melodic voice not at all demanding. “Tell us your tricks.”
An outside breeze blows through the small tavern, bringing the floral scents along with it. The night air makes the mint somehow crisper, and the moonlight leaks through the threshold just so, shining upon Ophelia’s silver hair. It makes it glow. Makes her look like a goddess of sorts.
My chuckle deepens, and I shake my head, reaching for my mug of ale.
It is the freshest tasting alcohol my tongue has ever been blessed enough to taste.
Citrus, fermented, and a delightfully tangy aftertaste carrying a bit of zest. I sip, fighting the urge to smack my lips together after.
“I don’t have any tricks. I just…well, given my history, I had to learn how to read people’s intentions.
I spent a lot of time learning how to read the words hidden within a person’s eyes.
Learning their tells, their tics—anything expressive, really. ”
Jax huffs, shooting Neilina another look. “So you brought a bloody body language expert to a card game?”
“Pipe down, Jax. I didn’t know. She’s shit in combat. How was I supposed to know she wouldn’t be shit at cards?” Neilina winks at me before fixing her gaze back on him.
They continue bickering. I continue drinking.
Eventually, Ophelia grows tired of them, wordlessly getting up from her place at the table and retrieving her fiddle from behind the bar.
She begins to play, and the few other occupants of the tavern begin to clap along to her tune.
I watch, a smile helplessly splitting my face while my mug hovers in front of my lips.
The ale here really is delicious.
A woman who looks my age approaches me with a skip in her step. She reaches her hand out to me, a silent prompt for me to join her at the center of the wooden floor to dance. Luna is her name.
I’ve learned so many names over the past two weeks.
I wave my hands and shake my head. “I’m happy to just watch.”
She scrunches her nose. “To watch is to wonder. But to dance is to live.” Her accent is thick. Thicker than most around Halfaria, the name given to their home. Another name I’ve learned since opening myself up to this place. “Will you wonder about your life, or will you live it?”
Good question.
“I suppose I’ll live it,” I say, placing my hand in hers.
Luna beams, tugging me to the center of the floor where she loops her arm through mine and spins me around and around.
A fit of laughter pours from me as I attempt to follow along, mirroring the dance moves Luna shows me.
I haven’t the slightest clue what I’m doing—these are not like the dances found in Rivara’s courts—but I enjoy doing it nonetheless.
Finally, after two—okay, maybe three—more pints of ale and another round of dance, I say my goodbyes to everyone and head back to my chambers.
The night sky is striking, the silver stars stark against the depthless dark.
They sprinkle across the world’s ceiling in infinite numbers, on and on and on.
I am so lost in them, I don’t notice the person heading in the opposite direction down the same path as me.
I bump directly into their chest—surprisingly firm, unmovable.
When I pull back, I find Casimir standing before me, his raven hair loose and falling into his face.
He wears a loose sweater paired with loose pants that are fitted at the ankles.
As always, the fabric looks so soft. I lean forward, inspecting it.
“I’ve been dying to know what this fabric is since the first time I noticed it.” I pinch the hem of his shirt between my fingers. “You really have to tell me.”
“It’s called Spin Silk.”
“Spin Silk.” The words tumble from my tongue. “Never heard of it.” I glide the pad of my thumb along the seam of his shirt. “Gods it is soft. I think it’s softer than regular silk. I’d commit unspeakable crimes to have this on my body.”
“It is,” he confirms, a laugh bloating his words. “And more durable. Lyra?”
“Yes?”
“Are you drunk?”
“What? Why would you think such a thing?”
“Because you’re petting me.”
I freeze midmovement, realizing that I, in fact, am petting him. Well, his shirt, at least. I drop my hand and recede a step.
Casimir watches me, a pointed smirk on his lips. “Seems finally giving my home and family a chance has not been all that bad for you.”
I nod. “Oh, they’re great. I fully admit I was wrong to…” I trail off, not wanting to finish that sentence even with the disarming effects of alcohol.
“Judge them based on what you believed about all Abdites?” he finishes for me, folding his arms smugly.
“For assuming you knew the circumstances surrounding their madness? For pretending you were somehow better than them merely because you didn’t understand them?
For deciding that, because some who share their features have acted with evil, they all must act out of evil. For—”
“Okay,” I say through a wince, cutting him off. “I get it. I was terrible and judgmental and totally in the wrong. I. Get. It.” I sigh, gliding a hand across my cheek. “You know, you’re a real buzzkill.”
Still, though a buzzkill he may be, he is also right.
We finally had the conversation two days after returning back to Halfaria, after I had pressed him with questions about this place, and he had finally given me some concrete answers.
For example, the true origins of the people he calls his family.
They are the remaining bloodlines of the original Abdites. Their lineage has been cursed to carry the madness for, well, an undisclosed amount of time, evidently. It is the original members’ punishment for the choice they made. For corrupting such a purely sacred thing.
Casimir told me about how he blames himself. How, as the person closest to Magaius, he should have realized what he was doing—what he was planning—sooner.
“And what was he planning?” I asked Casimir that day, concertedly brimming with curiosity.
“To form an army which couldn’t be beaten. To form a band of wielders so powerful, no one would dare challenge them nor question their power. An army who would even make the progenitor bloodlines cower.”
“Did it work?”
Casimir had considered my question, ultimately shaking his head. “Not in the ways he thought it would.”
He didn’t elaborate further.
Still, I wasn’t ready to let the conversation end there. I pressed, “So there are different kinds of Abdites?”
He had sighed, threading fingers through his hair.
“Only in the sense that there are those who never asked to be born of their condition, and those who purposefully sought it out. Everyone here, in Halfaria? They are all the former. Those who still wander and roam in Solaya—who barter, and cheat, and hire themselves for coin; who willingly corrupt themselves for greed, or power, or because they are simply vile creatures—they are of the latter.”
“I never knew.”
“Of course you didn’t. How could you when nobody in Solaya in recent years has ever taken a moment to consider the root of creation for Abdites?”
“It’s hard when they seem so alike.”
He grew very still at those words. “Tell me, when I say to you that my hatred of humanity stems from it being an unsavable cause—that they are all the same to me—do you not wish to tell me I’m wrong? Do you not wish to protest what I’ve said?”
“That’s different. We’re different.”
“Are you the same as a murderer, then? As a rapist? As a mother who abandoned her children? Who used her last coin on a pipe instead of food for her own offsprings’ mouths?”
“What?” I asked, incredulous. “No—no, of course not.”
“Yet those I have listed still belong to your kind, do they not? Are members of the sick race known as humankind?”
Shame and guilt burned my cheeks. “Yes,” I had answered in a near whisper. “They are, despite how much I wish people like them were not.”
“Then I think it is now fair to ask that you do not compare the cursed ancestry of my family to the chosen actions of evil men who crave access to powers they should never touch.” He paused. “They are victims of cruel circumstances. Just like you were, Lyra.”
I had no words for him after that.
The following day, I asked Neilina to take me to the most popular spot in all of Halfaria. She had taken me to a large, glittering pool surrounded by jade sculptures, flowers, and towering trees with leaves far greener than anything I had ever seen before.
Sithraki. Sithraki, they all whispered as I passed.
Until I lifted my chin and finally declared, “I am not Sithraki. I am not a Savior. I am… Lyra. And I want to know who you are. So please, come and tell me not as Sithraki, but as one of you.”
To my surprise, they did.
Now, after my still occurring training sessions and free days between Veilreading, I have spent every day possible with the people of Halfaria, listening to their stories and hearing about their experiences with the small flickers of madness they must endure as the wards protecting their home begin to fail.
I try to offer them my earnest truth in consolation.
“I will try to help make the madness go away,” I tell them. I never use the word “cure;” it feels wrong after getting to know them more intimately.
Now, as Casimir observes me through seemingly far too knowing eyes, I’d like to make him go away. Cure myself of the infection of his presence.
His smile broadens, as if he knows my exact thoughts and feelings. “You should probably get some sleep,” he eventually says. “You have training with Neilina in the morning, and then you and I are to pick up where we left off with our cure experiments in the afternoon.”
“You’re right,” I agree through a sigh. “I probably should sleep.” I mock a curtsey, which results in a soft chuckle from him.
As I walk past Casimir, he reaches a hand out and lightly grips my wrist, stopping me.
“You didn’t say goodnight.”
I snort a laugh. “Did you want me to?”
“It would be nice, considering it is such a lovely night and yours is the last face I’ll probably see.”
“Fine,” I say through a laugh. “Goodnight, Casimir.”
His answering smile is…beautiful.
“Goodnight, Lyra.”