"What Answered"

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"You're not even going to look?" Badina asked. "Everyone in this salt waste has looked at least once. You're going to stand here and study your own feet."

The circle was already raked and waiting---the black stone at its center, the four vessels set out at the edges under the last of the torches---but the Sorting had not started taking them yet, and the yard was still a yard, still full of the low unwilling sound of people putting off going quiet. Mida pressed her thumb to the silent mark on her wrist, out of old habit, and watched the ground.

"What am I looking at."

"Not what. Who." Badina's neck-beads clicked at her collarbone when she turned, coral-red and bone-white. "The Canyon one. He has a scar down his front." Badina bit her lip.

"Is there a reason I should look at him."

"He just---he just stands there like the rest of us are weather and he's the only rock in it. Half the girls here have found a reason to walk past him and he hasn't looked up once. I respect it. I also can't stop looking," she sighed. "I've made my peace with it."

"Then go and walk past him."

"I'm building to it," Badina said, and grinned. "I wanted a witness."

Mida did not look. She had spent twenty-two days deciding, over and over, not to look at any man she meets in the Dry Country, because somewhere in this crowd stood a Canyon boy the contract had signed her to before either of them had a say in it, and she did not know his face, only that he was out here, and she had worked out on the long travel that not-looking cost less than looking would. One could not want a thing, or dread a thing, that one refused to see. She had a great deal of practice not seeing things.

She told Badina none of that. No one at the Gate knew she was promised to anyone, and she meant to keep it that way as long as the salt let her.

"My mother says a girl who won't look at a thing is already carrying it." Badina said it lightly, watching a guard press a knot of Forest boys into a tighter arc. "Might as well set it down where you can see it."

"Your mother sounds exhausting."

"She is." Badina said it with such open love that Mida had to look at the ground again.

The Savanna girl had ridden at her elbow since the landing and had never once been shaken off. It was less lonely with her there. Mida would not have said so. She was fairly sure Badina knew it anyway; Badina knew things without being told, which was its own kind of danger in a girl one had decided to let stand at one's elbow.

Then the elders began to hum.

It came up through the salt, through the soles of her feet, up the bones of her legs, and the oldest mark on the inside of her wrist, that had been silent since the twelfth day of the dry country, woke.

It was warmth.

It was a pull.

It was the small, cold greeting of a thing answering---

Before Mida had decided anything, before she had had a single, careful thought, her whole body opened to it the way a mouth opens to water. Every mark she had, the whole dead map of them up her arms and across her ribs, lit at once, prickling, straining toward the sound the way her own delta's reeds bent to a current, and ten days of shut-away wanting came loose and flooded up her throat, and it was relief, it was so much relief it hurt, it was grandmother, it was the crowded house full again, it was---

She caught herself.

She caught herself with her thumb already pressed to the wrist-mark and her eyes already wet and her whole starved body leaning toward a sound she had not looked at once. She did not know what she was leaning toward. That was the thing. She had gone ten days as only skin, and the first thing to touch her marks in more than a week had not had to earn one single thing to get all of that out of her---the wanting, the wet eyes, her grandmother's name half-formed behind her teeth.

She had reached for it.

She made herself stop.

Because it was not a spirit.

She knew the weight of a spirit the way she knew her own hands, and this had no weight. A spirit had a face. A name. A debt it had come to press. This had none of that. It came from everywhere and from no one, a sound with no mouth behind it, and her marks did not know it the way they knew the dead. They only knew the shape of it. The way one knows a word in a language one can't speak---the sound sits familiar in one's ear and the meaning is a wall. Her marks knew this sound from somewhere, and she did not know from where, and it was not the dead, and she had gone wet-eyed with gratitude before she thought to ask.

She dragged the heel of her hand across her face before it could be a thing anyone saw.

Badina had gone quiet beside her. "Mida." Her hand came to Mida's arm, light. "You went somewhere."

"I'm here."

"You went---"

"I'm here," Mida said again, and Badina let it go, but her hand stayed, and that was worse, because Mida wanted to lean into it and could not afford to want anything twice in one morning.

The circle began to shimmer with heat, standing over the cold salt in a haze that had no business standing over anything at this hour. The Sorting had started to take them.

The mark over her ribs woke before her eyes found him.

One mark, low on the left side, somewhere between the fourteenth contract and the fifteenth---it did more than prickle.

It pulled.

It went warm and tight and turned toward a point across the circle the way a struck string turns toward the note that struck it, and Mida's eyes only followed after, tracking the pull to its far end, and found the Canyon boy with the scar down his chest, standing very still in the eastern arc.

The one Badina couldn't stop looking at.

So that was which one he was. Twenty-two days of not looking, and her own skin had gone and found him for her.

Her mother had pointed to that mark once, low on her ribs, and Mida had not fully believed her, because the mark had never done anything. It had sat there like all the others, an open debt in a hand that was not hers, and now it was warm, and now it had a direction, and the direction was a boy she had never spoken a word to who was about to walk to the stone. She had carried the debt her whole life and this was the first time it had ever told her where its other end was standing.

His name went out across the salt.

Kadrimani.

Her thumb found the rib-mark and pressed, and it pressed back, warm, certain, unwelcome. Beside her, Badina made a small approving sound, the way you do at something impressive---no idea at all that she was admiring the boy Mida had been signed to before she could speak.

He walked in with his arms at his sides, and the seam down his chest opened before he reached the stone, and when his hands came flat against it the dark came pouring out of him.

She did not need the sight of it. She had the sound.

She had heard a spirit torn out of a body it had no right to be in---the wet, wrong shriek of a thing losing its grip on borrowed flesh. She had heard the dead grieve in the dream-country, a low sound with no floor under it, a thing that has already lost everything and has all of forever to know it.

This was both.

The boy screamed the sound of a thing cast out and the sound of a thing that could not be, at once, out of the one throat, and Mida pressed her whole palm flat over the burning mark on her ribs to keep from making a sound of her own.

She did not go to him.

He was screaming forty paces off with something dark climbing out of his chest, and the mark that bound her to him was burning under her hand, and she kept her feet in the salt. There were reasons and she did not lay them out for herself: the contract that needed her people safe, the alliance that needed the marriage whole, and under those, unspoken, the plain fact that she did not love him and had no idea what it would cost to cross a circle full of strangers and claim a screaming boy as hers.

Badina's hand clamped on her arm.

Hard. Sudden. The grip of someone who'd just heard a scream and needed something solid to hold onto.

Mida stopped moving. Her ribs locked. The mark over her heart went molten.

Badina held on.

Kadrimani's hands clamped shut, and the dark snapped back into him, and the scream cut off, and he crossed to the cracked shield in the north and sat with his fist against his chest and did not look at anyone, least of all her.

A while later, the salt said her name.

She felt it before she heard it, the pull reaching in behind her ribs, taking hold of every debt at once and drawing her forward. Her bare feet crossed the white crust. The stone did not wait for one to be ready.

Her hands came flat against it. It was warm, and the yard went out.

She was standing in Uwaifo, and Uwaifo was burning.

The fire was unnatural.

It was black, and it was cold. It climbed the stilt-houses and ran along the rope bridges and gave off no heat, only cold, coming off it in waves, and it did not crackle. It burned in silence. The reed-lamps she had known her whole life guttered out one by one as the black fire reached them. The mangrove roots stood up out of the water and caught and went dark. Her whole floating world, her single village on its shifting islands, burning cold and quiet and giving nothing back.

And her marks began to go out.

The oldest first. The one at her wrist---her grandmother's, the debt signed into the family before Mida was born, the one that had greeted her every morning of her life until the dry country took it---she felt it go, a small cold closing, a door shut for the last time. She had lost it once already, and here it was being taken again, first, before anything living. That was the cruelty of the thing: the dead went before the living. She lost her grandmother, and then the next mark, and the next, the whole map of everyone she owed and everyone who had ever pressed a debt into her skin going dark up her arms in the black light, contract by contract, the crowded house emptying room by room until---

She did not scream.

She had been getting ready for this since she was six seasons old, since her grandmother first pressed a dead woman's debt into her wrist and told her what it would cost to carry it.

One did not scream at a thing one had spent one's whole life expecting.

She stood in the cold black fire and watched her world and her dead go out, and she took the measure of it the way she took the measure of any cost that had finally come due.

There was only one thing in the whole of it she had not accounted for.

At the center of the burning, where the fire bent away as though something stood there it would not touch, there was a figure. Tall. A man, or the shape of one. She could not see his face---the black fire folded the light around him and left him featureless, a darkness with a person's outline---and she did not know him, had never seen him, could not have named a single thing about him.

And her heart moved toward him.

That was the part she had not planned for.

Her whole body was dying, every debt going cold, the dead leaving her a second time---and under all of it, stupid and certain and entirely her own, her heart leaned toward a faceless man in the middle of the fire the way her rib-mark had leaned toward the canyon boy. Except that no contract had signed her to this man. No mark connected them. There was no debt in it at all. Her heart simply went, on nothing, toward a stranger she could not see, while the world ended around them both.

She had carried thirty-seven debts she did not choose. This was the first thing her heart had ever reached for on its own, and she could not see its face, and the fire was cold, and then---

The stone let her go.

She was on her knees in the salt with her hands still on the stone, and the hum was in her teeth, and every mark on her body was awake at once, roaring back from ten days of silence all together, and she could not tell one from another---could not tell the dead from the living from the faceless thing her own heart had done.

She needed to know. It was the only clear thing left in her.

She got to her feet. The four vessels waited at the circle's edge---the cracked shield, the spear weeping red, the cupped empty hands, and the bowl of water that would not go still, faces turning in it that belonged to no one leaning over it.

Mida walked past the shield and the spear and the hands, to the water.

The Eye. The ones who go out into the salt and come back knowing. She had a body full of debts gone silent and woken unnaturally, a vision of a faceless man her own heart had chosen, and a sound in the ground her marks knew the shape of and could not name. She did not want a shield to hide behind or a spear to die on. She wanted answers, and the Eye was the cadre that went looking for them. She pressed her thumb to the water. It was cold, and it did not still under her touch, the faces going on turning, and the bowl took her, and sealed her to the South.

The rest of the Sorting went on without her. Names she didn't hear. Bodies crossing the white. She sat at the bowl's edge with her hands in her lap and waited for the trembling to stop, and when it did, she stood and went to find Badina.

≈ ≈ ≈

When the Sorting was over, Mida was halfway back to Badina, when the mark on her right wrist went cold.

The cold came up from the inside of her right wrist---a deep ice, the cold of the dry country, the cold of the river's bottom---and it stopped her mid-step, because it was crawling backward, recoiling, and this was the death-mark.

The one that would kill her if she ever spoke her lineage's name aloud. The one that had never in her whole life answered anything because that was not what a death-mark did. A death-mark waited. It had waited her entire life, silent as a held knife, and now it had gone ice-cold and was crawling backward up her own arm to get away from something, and she followed the recoil the way she had followed the rib-mark's pull, and it led her to a boy.

Mountain-born.

She knew that before anything else---the fair gold of the skin, the way he stood like someone taught to hold a room, the soft hands hanging out of a set of borrowed rags that did not sit on him the way they sat on the people who owned such rags for real. She did not know his name. Her death-mark knew his blood, and it was crawling away from him up her arm, and she had no framework for it at all---a living man, a Mountain boy, making the one mark that had never moved in her life recoil like it had touched rot.

She was still staring at him, still trying to make the cold mean something, when the crowd shoved.

A knot of Mountain boys broke sideways around a guard, and one of them put a shoulder into the gold-skinned boy without looking, hard, and he stumbled---into her.

His hand caught her arm to keep them both up.

The death-mark shrieked cold where he touched it and the rib-mark flared hot on her other side, both at once, her body hauled two directions in the space of a breath, and she tore back out of his grip fast enough to nearly take them both down anyway.

"Don't touch me."

"I'm sorry---" His hands were up at once, open, already trying to make it right, already reaching to steady her elbow again out of some reflex bred into him. "I didn't---that wasn't---"

"It's fine."

"Are you---are you---" he said reaching out again. The marks screamed some more.

"Don't." She said louder than she intended.

Laughter, from the western arc. Mida did not have to look to know the shape of the boy it came off; she had learned the feel of that particular warm cruelty at her back a long time ago.

"Careful, Nameless." The voice carried, easy, pitched to be heard. "That one's witch-skin. Count the marks on her---every one an open debt, and not a single one paid. Get too close and they rub off." A pause, and the knife turned. "Though I suppose you've got nothing left for them to catch."

The laughter moved out through the Mountain cluster, the sound of people confirming a thing they had already agreed on among themselves.

The gold-skinned boy did not laugh, and did not answer it, and the way he took it was almost worth her attention on some other morning. This was not some other morning.

"I can help you up---" he started, to her, quiet, still trying.

"I'm up."

"Your marks---did I---" He had seen the wrist, maybe, or the way she'd wrenched away. "Did I hurt---"

"You couldn't." Flat. "I don't want your help. You're standing on my shadow and you're in my way, Mountain. Move."

He moved. And his face did the still thing again as he did it---the blankness a person puts on when they've been cut and have decided the one who cut them won't get to watch. She saw it anyway. She was very good at reading what people were trying not to show; it was most of what her marks had ever been for. She saw that she had cut him. She also saw that he was gold-skinned and soft-handed and everything the deep mines had been dug by, and she did not let the one soften the other.

Badina was there then, her hand back on Mida's arm, her grin turned on him with the edge tucked out of sight. "You can stop apologizing now," she told him, not unkindly. "She won't take it. She doesn't take anything. You'll save yourself a lot of time."

The boy the cluster called Deka did not laugh the longest. He watched the Mountain boy instead, watched him apologize once, then again, then stand there with his hands open after Mida had cut him twice. There was a brief narrowing around Deka's eyes. Then it was gone. He turned away before the others did, saying something low to the Forest boy at his shoulder. The boy grinned.

Badina was still half-turned the other way, saying something at the Mountain boy's back that Mida didn't catch. So no one but Mida saw the next thing.

Across the circle, from the north, where the cracked shield sat, someone was watching.

The mark over her ribs went hot again before she turned her head---hotter than it had gone during his scream, hot enough that she knew what she would find---and she turned, and the canyon boy was looking at her.

Kadrimani.

Still on the ground, fist still pressed to the center of his chest, still half-gone into whatever the stone had shown him. He was not watching the Mountain boy. He was not watching the laughing cluster that was dispersing. He was watching her, steady, with the flat dark canyon gaze that gave up nothing, and the rib-mark burned under her palm, and she understood that he had felt it from his side too---the pull, the contract's other end---and that he knew precisely who she was.

Spirits eat my marks, she thought, which was the worst thing her grandmother had ever taught her to say, and she let herself say it exactly once.

She had stood in a circle and not gone to him while he screamed. He had watched her get knocked into a Mountain boy's arms and say don't touch me and mean it, while the mark that tied her to him burned toward him the whole time. Whatever the contract was going to be between them, it had begun now, and it had begun with her not moving.

Badina steered her out of the arc by the elbow, toward the long low shape of the barracks at the western edge, and did not manage silence for even the length of the walk.

"So." A beat. The neck-bead clicked. "Striking eyes, though."

Mida's mind spun. "Who."

"Mountain boy."

Mida let out a relieved breath.

"Please don't start."

"I'm only saying. That Mountain boy. Gold all the way through, like gold stones the old mountain Eagles kept for themselves. And did you see his hands?" Badina's eyes rolled back as she bit her lip. "Soft as a child's. Not a day of work anywhere in them." Badina turned this over with enormous satisfaction. "You'd never guess he can't---" she caught it, softened it--- "well. You'd never guess."

"Badina."

"I'm making conversation. It's a long walk."

"Make conversations over something else."

"He apologized four times. Four. Nobody in this whole salt pit is going to say sorry to anyone for the next two seasons, and that one said it to you four times for a thing that wasn't even his doing." Badina was grinning at the horizon now, thoroughly pleased with herself. "I've decided I like him. Sad eyes, clean hands, apologizes like it costs him something. He'll be dead inside a moon and I'll be very upset about it."

"He's beneath me. He's Mountain. His people crystallize breath and sell it and call it money." Mida heard her own voice going cold, the way it did when she was rattled and would rather sound certain than be seen. "You want to know what the marks on my skin are? They're debts. And do you know what pays for the beads his people dig up? Debts like mine. People like mine, worked dead in the deep and turned into akobi. Turned into beads. Don't tell me about his eyes."

Badina, gently, not letting it land the way it was meant to: "I didn't know any of that. I only said he looked at you like---"

"He didn't look at me. My marks looked at him. There's a rut difference, and you don't have the skin to feel it." It came out harder than the rest, and it was aimed at the wrong target, and Mida knew it even as it left her, because Badina had not said a thing about looking, not really. Mida had. Mida had been thinking about a faceless man in a cold fire, and her own heart going toward him on nothing, no contract, no debt, and she had turned all of it on the only person standing close enough to hit.

"Mida," Badina said. "I only meant---"

"Shut up. Please. Just---" It came out too loud and too raw, nothing like the flat cold thing she had meant it to be---it came out like a girl who had watched her whole world burn cold an hour ago and had no room left in her for one more voice, however kind. "Shut up."

Badina shut up.

She did not argue. She did not defend herself. She did not point out that she had done nothing for the eighteen days but be warm at a girl who kept refusing it. She took a breath, and she reached over, and she took Mida's elbow again---the same steady, stubborn, unhurried grip she'd used since the goru---and she walked her the rest of the way to the barracks without another word.

Mida let herself be steered. The guilt sat in her throat where the gratitude had sat that morning, in the exact same place, and she did not say anything, because she did not know how to, because she never knew how to until later.

The barracks were a long room of packed earth and too many bodies, and Mida found a pallet near the wall and lay down on it, and Badina sat down on the floor beside her without being asked, her back to the wall, close.

For a while neither of them said anything. Outside, the horns had stopped. The hum went on, low, in the ground.

"I'm sorry," Mida said, to the wall.

"I know." Badina did not look at her. "You're always sorry. You just don't know how to say it until later."

It was so exactly true, and so exactly without blame, that Mida had to shut her eyes.

She lay in the dark with her whole body awake for the first time in twenty-two days. Every mark on her, roaring and warm and alive and impossible to read. The rib-mark that had burned toward a canyon boy who now knew her, the wrist-mark that had gone to ice at a Mountain boy's touch, and somewhere beneath both, quietest and worst, the place her own heart had reached for a face it could not see. She could not tell which of the three was going to cost her the most. She was too tired, and too full, and too newly un-alone in her own skin to do the accounting this very early morning.

She pressed her thumb to the mark on her left wrist, out of habit, the way she had every day for ten silent days.

This time it answered.