Page 86 of Cage of Starlight
As if he sees where Sena’s thoughts are going, Iri shakes his head. “This is when they’re sweetest,” he explains, and shrugs before taking another big bite.
Sena finally forces words through his throat. He looks back at the grayish chunks of the branch.
A few of the inkhstones plummet from his numb fingers to the rug. “What just happened?”
Iri’s grin goes soft again. “What do you think happened?”
“I . . .” Sena looks down at his bruised fruit. Where it was connected to the tree, it has veiny, blood-red coloring. Sena bites into it there, and his mouth floods with a sweetness just shy of offensive. It’s real. “It grew.”
“Clearly.” Iri finishes off his peach and uses his teapot to refill the bowl on the barrel with water before dropping the stringy pit inside. He bends to claw rich, dark soil and decaying leaf bits from the cold ground and drops them in, mixing them with a finger to make an unattractive slurry of water. He takes another fruit for himself. “Imissed these. But you see what I mean. I told you it wasn’t destruction. It’s just that your energy is so plentiful and so dense—” he gestures to the five stones still in Sena’s hand and the three on the ground “—and you are so horribly untrained—”
Sena winces. “Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize. It’s your disgusting, barbaric country at fault. Blunt-instrument sons of bitches,” he adds in Arlunian. “Anyway, all those factors combined and your frightening amount of accessible power ensured that the work you do happens so quickly it seems likedestruction. For all the beauty of life, things spend much longer in the states on either side of it—death or nonexistence. See, one inkhstone should subdue a moderately powerful Seed enough to allow for precision training. When I was training, I used two.” At this, his chin rises. “When my great-grandfather was a boy, there was a Voidseed who had to use four.” He waves at the stones in Sena’s hands. “That is ridiculous, in case you were wondering. I’m . . . I truly don’t—” he stuffs the peach in his mouth and babbles around a bite of it. “It’sobscene. What you do necessarily ends in destruction, because that’s the natural end of all things. Akaos: death is the way of all life.” Striding forward, he paces past Sena and lifts the cup with the muddy water and the peach pit inside. “But it’s not only death. Try.”
Sena reaches into the muddy fertilizer-water to touch the pit.
With three fewer stones in his hand this time, he’s not ready for the speed of it.
He wouldn’t be ready for this, regardless. Something spreads in the cup, then rises from it almost fast enough to spear Sena’s chin. He jerks back but fails to break contact, and then his vision is flooded with green, and then the cup is shattering—pretty shards that drip mud and bite at Sena’s palms, and Iri is yellingstop, stop,and Sena—finally—wrenches his hand away.
“Whoa, hey, shit,” Tory’s saying from the corner. “That’s a tree.”
It is, in fact.
It’s maybe three feet tall, pushing out spindly branches with a profusion of green leaves. Iri pulls the tree from Sena’s hands, and the muddy residue its roots didn’t consume drips to the ground, fast and thin and . . . red.
Sena stares down. “Oh.”
“You’re bleeding!” Tory is at his side, picking glass shards from his palm and flinging them to the ground with prejudice. He spins on Iri. “What the—”
Iri, tree in one hand and peach in the other, backs away from Tory’s murderous glare. “I didn’t expect—”
Sena turns toward Tory, and he must be smiling, because his face nearly hurts with it, body pumping joy to the tips of his fingers, and Tory dips to the ground and picks up the blindfold he threw earlier. He unknots it, careful, and takes Sena’s bleeding hand. With one last glare in Iri’s direction, he picks a few little slivers of porcelain from Sena’s skin and then says, “Sorry, it’s kinda sweaty. I refolded it so it should be on the outside, but . . .” and then he ties the cloth around Sena’s hand and looks up. His expression freezes, stricken.
Awkward, he mumbles, “It’s just a few little cuts, nothing to cry about.”
But Sena barely feels the pain. He was fourteen when he last cried from pain. No, this . . . He turns to face the tree, and heiscrying, probably looks like an idiot, but— “I made that.”
Sena has never been a maker. All his life, he’s broken things. Marriages, bodies, anything his hands could touch. But on the ground outside the ring, there are five or six blood peaches still in the bowl, and Iri is shaking the tree so its leaves make a pleasant rustle, and in Sena’s hands there are five inkhstones, and he brought something to life.
The tears won’t stop. This is ridiculous. Sena has always had better control of himself. He clears his throat and turns away. “How could I . . .”
Iri smiles. “The First Children’s Seeds are so much more than—whatever your warmonger of a Grand General calls it. Neutralizing.Channeling. When your people turned their backs on the Beast hundreds of years ago and chose to believe only in what their hands could touch, they left behind so much knowledge. Westrice’s understanding of Seeds is rudimentary, warlike. Quite simply, the First Children are different variations on the same theme.” With his peach hand, he waves at the tree. “Time.”
Iri gestures at Sena—shakes his tree-hand for emphasis. “Forward.” Then at Tory, who’s in the middle of digging a peach from the bowl. “And back. All other Seeds’ domain is the present.”
Forward. Death is the way of all life. And new life—Sena looks at the pit he made into a tree—is born from the death of other things.
Suddenly, desperately, he wants to throw his arms around Tory and feel the breathing warmth of him. If not for years of practice holding himself back, he’d probably have given in and shocked or disgusted Tory with the suddenness of it. Instead, he gingerly places a bare hand on Tory’s cloth-clad shoulder, just a thin layer of fabric between them.
“Imade that,” he says again. It’s not enough, notnearlyenough to give vent to the feelings that threaten to crack him open, but it’s all he can think to say.
Tory’s expression morphs into something soft. “You sure did. And it’s fucking beautiful.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Time. It makes sense. Without even realizing it, Tory has always thought of his abilities in those terms—as if he’s turning the body back to when it was whole. And Sena—
