Page 80 of Daughter of No Worlds

His words hit on something within me. A wound that I had covered up, deep within my chest. I’d told myself so many times that I was lucky. I survived, after all, when the people I’d left behind had not.

And yet, I knew too that Max was right. I’d known it since the day Esmaris tried to beat me to death. I had seen such terrible things,livedsuch terrible things, that I mistook Esmaris’s meticulous care for love. Even though he cared for me the way one cared for a prize horse: pampered it, groomed it, broke it and rode it, and discarded it when it began to kick.

After all, I was theluckyone.

“The day I tried to buy my freedom,” I said, quietly, “he told me that I forgot what I was.”

When I glanced at Max again, his jaw was set, his gaze sorrowful, contemplative. He did not speak.

“Perhaps in a way, he was right,” I said. “But I forgot what he was, too. I forgot that he was someone who could never see me as more than a possession.”

I had been just a child, when I met him. Just a child, and he had taken me in, told me I should feel grateful because he only beat me sparingly, because he waited a few years to rape me, because he didn’t send me off to my death like he did to so many others.

Aren’t you lucky, Tisaanah. Don’t I treat you well.

My knuckles were tight around my pen. When I tore another vicious, mindless stroke over the paper, my fists were suddenly full of flower petals.

* * *

I spentthe night drawing Stratagrams, though unsuccessfully, other than that one singular victory in the garden. Max and I had settled into a comfortable routine. I was in my typical spot near the hearth, crouched on the ground, paper scattered around me. And Max, as usual, draped himself over an armchair with a book perched in his hands.

The night ticked by, and in the flickering flames my ink was beginning to waver and blur in front of my eyes. Sometimes we both fell asleep like this, waking up to greet each other bleary-eyed in the harsh morning.

“Tisaanah.”

Max’s voice was hoarse with almost-sleep, so quiet that I almost lost it in my own exhaustion and the crackling of the fire. When I looked up, he peered at me from behind low, slightly crooked reading glasses, face taut and thoughtful.

“The way I look at it,” he said, very solemnly, so quietly that his words slipped into the air like steam, “you didn’t forget what you were. I think you remembered. And I hope no one ever again has the fucking audacity to tell you otherwise.”

For a moment I blinked at him in silence. An odd, fleeting sensation rustled in my chest — like I had swallowed a handful of my silver butterflies.

“I know,” I said at last, as it if were nothing. “I am wonderful.”

Max shook his head, rolled his eyes. And in the dying scuff of his chuckle, we lapsed back into that quiet, comfortable silence.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Eight weeks.

That’s all we had left until my evaluations. And Max and I, armed with this odd new intimacy that Tairn and its aftermath had created in us, surged forward toward our goal with renewed focus. Our training days lasted ten, twelve, sixteen, eighteen hours, or as long as it took until one or both of us collapsed into an armchair in exhaustion.

Something had clicked into place. And neither of us seemed to be able to identify what it was, but we both saw it in each other — in the growing ease of our conversation, in the unspoken understandings of our training sessions, in the safety and silence of our evenings at home.

Our life settled into a pulse, a heartbeat, a collection of breaths. In the silence between them, I memorized the cadence of Max’s barefoot steps padding down the hallways at night, the way one single muscle in his throat twitched when he was stressed, the whisper of a laugh that always followed one of my quips (however unfunny). I learned that one side of his smile always started first — the left side, a fraction of a second before the right — and that he loved ginger tea above all else and the list of things he wasn’t made for.

And, in turn, he quietly memorized me, too. I knew he did, because one day I realized he had long ago stopped asking me how I took my tea and that we mysteriously always had a never-ending stock of raspberries, even though I knew he didn’t like them. And he would ask me, in quiet ways, about my life — always in the sleepy moments at the end of the day.Tell me about Serel. Tell me about your mother. Tell me about Nyzerene.

And for my part, I did the opposite: treaded carefully along the edges of questions with raw answers, pulling my fingers away from seeping, carefully hidden wounds. Max’s past still held so many mysteries. But as much as my curiosity nagged at me, I saw those shrouded winces. I understood the value of the relief — the mercy — in leaving them unasked.

In this mutual understanding, we became each other's stability. On the nights when my nightmares woke me, prodded me out into the clean air of the garden, he always found himself mysteriously restless, taking a walk through the night and offering me some quiet company.

My Aran improved dramatically. Still, every so often, I would unleash a string of truly nonsensical words that butchered every conceivable rule of grammar. On one particularly exhausting day, I committed one such crime when asking Max where the Stratagram ink had gone. (“Has gone where… black water?”)

Max hadn’t so much as paused as he reached into a drawer and produced the ink. At Sammerin’s look of somewhat horrified amazement, he shrugged and said, “After a while, you become fluent in Tisaanah-speak.” And we looked at each other and exchanged a small, proud smile.

The days slipped by, one after another, blending together. Days stretched longer, then curled shorter. A bite nipped into the air, warning of distant autumn. The garden grew wild and overgrown, vines snaking over each other, blossoms curling over cobblestone pathways in beautiful, feral greed.

We practiced amongst those flowers one crisp morning, one week away from my evaluation. I made some terrible joke and, in response, Max winced and shook his head. “Awful. Just awful.”

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