trouvaille (n.) a chance encounter with something wonderful; something lovely discovered by chance; a windfall.
"How do you do it?"
It was a question softly uttered, betraying more curiosity than she liked people to know she possessed, than she liked people to know she was capable of possessing. She was a naturally incurious person; she enquired little about the people around her, the world in which she dwelled.
It was simpler when she didn't bother; one didn't have to understand the forces of gravity in order to drop an object, she thought, or understand the processes of the body in order to do great damage to its functioning.
And yet, despite herself, it came forth, unbidden – was she trying to distract herself, perhaps, or trying to prove herself, perhaps, or just genuinely, honestly, wondering?
"How do you do it?"
He smiled, slightly. Did he smile otherwise? He had too hard of a face to grin too widely; it was too much like stone, too much like his brother's. It made the slight smile all the more valuable when it flitted across – like it had been earned. Nothing like Ghju, whose wide, white smile had been almost a default, a reassuring constant, reassuringly given and rarely rescinded.
She had never had to earn it.
"It's not a science." He kept his voice low, because Ina had drifted off to sleep on the futon on the other side of the workshop and it had been so long since Ina had been permitted to sleep soundly. Khalore slept too deeply to wake every night when Ina did, but even she could see the signs etched upon her friend's face the next day: the shadows under her eyes, the unnatural pallor of her skin, the exhausted hints of defeat in the lines of her mouth. It was getting better, Khalore thought, but slowly; grief was always harder the first, second, third time. It accumulated. It bore down heavier with each addition.
"Okay," she said, "does that make it an art?"
"In my experience," Eero said, "art tends to be beautiful."
She thought of the paintings Instructor had brought them to see in the Chancellery's Exposition, that broad art gallery near to the docks of Opona into which so many paintings, salvaged from the fall of the Kur Empire, had been collated for display on broad white marble walls. Instructor had fought for weeks for them to be allowed to go, a strange little field trip for all the remaining candidates in the Warrior Programme – Khalore had been about eleven at the time, so there must have still been about twenty of them, maybe twenty-five. Again and again, Halkias' office had refused permission – Kur needed special dispensation for the Exposition – but Instructor had persisted, and they had found themselves herded about the strange, echoing, empty space, tiny in their grey uniforms, made tinier beneath the shameful enormity of their fallen empire.
The paintings had so often been ugly, hadn't they: blocky shapes, slashed lines, faces contorted. The art of devilry on one side, the art of those who had vanquished devilry on the other. Khalore hadn't understood it, any of it: colours and shapes only. Others had understood, clearly understood – Ilja and Zoran had argued interpretations in hushed tones, Ina had read Azula the little plaques beside each piece and explained the long words patiently in a soft voice, and Hyacinth had stared up at the paintings with her eyes wide, her lips slightly parted.
They had all fallen as silent as Khalore was in the final hall of history, of course. It was full of statutes, granite and marble and onyx and others, stones that Khalore had no name for, people whose names she had never heard and would never hear. Some hadn't been fully stone – they had calcified with wet eyes, soft flesh, hair, still visible against other smooth hard skin. The frozen bodies of former Towers, Myghal had whispered, and no one – not even Instructor – had bothered to correct him, so Khalore had never thought to doubt him. There had been maybe fourteen, fifteen in all, which would have left generations unaccounted for even by the most generous estimate. Klaara Aas would have been brought to join them by now, wouldn't she? Pekka too, perhaps, if they had not buried him with Matthias and Jaga and Avrova and…
"Not always," she said, "art isn't always beautiful."
"Then yes," Eero said, "perhaps it's an art."
He uncurled his fingers. There, in his palm, laid two dozen small dull white crowns – teeth, Khalore thought dazedly, Ghjuvan's teeth.
It seemed real, now. More real now.
"I'll need a number," Eero said, softly, "a number of importance to him."
"To him?"
"Describe Ghjuvan Mannazzu to me as a number."
What a question! He couldn't have chosen a worse candidate; Khalore wasn't entirely confident of her own ability to count past one hundred, let alone distil her best friend into a single numeral. This certainly wasn't art, she thought sourly, too cold and calculating for that. But Eero had asked her, and Eero was teaching them how to transfer curses, and so she rolled her eyes and cast her gaze around the small workshop and feigned utter disdain even while her thoughts rather churned this question about and about, mimicking the storm which still battered, lifelike, against the windows and the doors of the little streethouse in which they sheltered now. How Ina could sleep like this, she wasn't quite sure.
Ghjuvan had ranked fifth among their graduating class – not the best, not quite the best. Not Kinga, who was more machine than human; not Pekka, who was strong and brave and dead; not Zoran, who was whip-smart and self-sacrificing to a fault, and not Ilja, who could be anyone that you needed him to be, anyone that he needed himself to be, including and especially when that anyone was a candidate ranked among the top five of the Warrior Programme. No, Ghjuvan had been…
Not five. How old had he been when he had died? How many siblings had he had? How many letters in I love you?
She said, "three."
Eero cocked an eyebrow. She wasn't sure what they would have done without him. Could she have coped with Ina alone? Could Ina have coped with her? Would there have been any hope of stealing the Radiance, without the World to instruct them how? "Three?"
She nodded resolutely.
He had an expression which suggested he had expected a larger suggestion, but said nothing; only drew a scalpel, with such a sharp edge that it was positively translucent, and handed it to her, handle-first, and said, "would you mind?"
She would not; it was a thrill to be useful. Her curse was as awful as she had expected it to be, but such was the nature of the Hanged Man; this was what she had bought into, what she had always known that it would be. If she had expected Arsen Grigoryan to whisper into her mind upon realisation of her curse, to make his appearance, to guide her at her most lost – well, Khalore was growing accustomed to disappointment. If that was the worst Illéa could do… she stopped herself from tempting fate further.
This was what she had craved – the feeling of contribution. Accepting the scalpel, she eyed her own arm, and, thinking of that poor bleeding girl who had tried to shuck her role in the Programme, decided against it; she instead raised it to her cheek, and pressed it tightly to her cheek, as though trying to push it through her skin, as though she thought she could swallow it from the outside. The cold kiss of the metal would have been staggering, if not for the sting of pain and the slow, wet, drip of blood down her cheek, curling around her jaw, dripping down onto her shirt, red as roses.
She withdrew the scalpel. It shone red along the edge, like a strange baptism; when she handed it to Eero, he accepted it gingerly, as though wary that the curse would not have imbued it as it ought. Khalore was unaccustomed to confidence when those around her were unsure, but on this occasion, she could just smile blithely at Eero and watch as he spun the scalpel in his fingers; with his other hand, he spilled the teeth across the counter and carefully observed where they fell.
"Three, you said?"
She nodded, firmly.
It was most unlike Khalore to be certain about anything.
Eero set about his work carefully, etching into the enamel with the scalpel. It shouldn't have been strong enough, not only, but a tithe had been made; it was like cutting into snow. Khalore squinted at the symbols, but they meant nothing to hear. She had hardly been the best student, of course – Tofana had despaired of her – but six months in Illéa had given her, at least, a rudimentary idea of what characters existed in their syllabary. These were not among them: གྷྗུ and སྐརྨ and བེལླེ.
Eero said, "you're sure we're giving the curse to Belle?"
Khalore blanched at the question. Was her input really expected? Valuable? She wasn't sure she should say; she wasn't sure she could. "Will the Radiance be able to detect it? Is it safe?"
"Maybe so," Eero said, "maybe not."
"Then we probably shouldn't, right? Not while Belle is still in the palace."
"The same risk would be true," Eero said, "for Azula and Ilja."
"Even so," Khalore said, "surely it makes more sense to leave someone out of it – entirely detached? If the Radiance can detect curses, they won't detect Belle… and if they can't, then…"
"The alternative," Eero said, "is leaving the Star out of commission until we return to Irij."
"Can you transfer within a generation?" Maybe this was a question that should have been asked earlier; Khalore felt stupid even uttering the words. They hadn't transferred the Tower, after Pekka had failed initiation; before him, they hadn't transferred Death, after Oxana had failed. Zoran and Nez were retrieving Mielikki's curse, but only to keep it, to prevent Illéa from taking it back. The devils retrieving a curse - god, they would never live it down. "Has it been done before?"
"They usually don't like to."
"They?"
"The Champions." Eero paused, inspecting the tooth on the counter before him; Khalore forced herself to ignore the fact that they were Ghjuvan's teeth, parts of his lovely white smile, scattered on the counter in front of her. "They're stronger, you know. The curses. Transferred together. Like a whole."
"So the Star will be weaker if we give it to Belle now?"
"Weaker," Eero said, "or worse."
Worse. Khalore pressed the back of her hand aginst her cheek and gently smeared the blood across her face. Worse. Than having no say on where you were, where you went, whose call you answered? Worse?
"Well," she said, "it's not my call."
"Whose is it, then?"
"Ina's, or Zoran's, or Ilja's, or..." She fell silent.
"Or?"
"Yours."
Eero's face seemed to split with that smile again. "Don't you put that pressure on me, little butcher."
"Right," Khalore said, "we'll just put it on Ina instead."
His smile faded slightly. "Well. Czarnecki's not here. He seems a more convenient scapegoat, right?"
"Skirting responsibility?" Khalore exhaled a laugh. "What would your brother say?"
"He'd be delighted to be the mature one for once, I imagine."
Eero handed one of the teeth to Khalore – the one etched with གྷྗུ. Not an Illéan character, or an Irij one; not a New Asian one, or a Swendway one. She wondered where he had learned it; she wondered how he had figured out that it was the right way to transfer the curse.
"Is this what you did," she said, "to take the World?"
"No," Eero said softly, "I did much worse."
She traced her thumb along the soft lines and contours of the shape which have been impressed into the tooth. It was still trailing a part of the root, where Ilja had wrenched it from Ghjuvan's head. Khalore's throat tightened to think of it.
Eero said, "what do you think? What do you feel?"
"I don't think anything," Khalore said. Her voice twisted and knotted in her throat, became barbed. "I don't feel anything."
Eero said, "you're smarter than you give yourself credit for, Khalore Angelo." He reached for her hand; uncurling her fingers, he dropped the other two teeth into her hand. "And we still need someone in the Schools."
There was a sharp knock at the door; Ina sat up straight on the futon, with a suddenness that suggested she had not been asleep at all. Ilja inched into the room, his dark charcoal hair dusted with rain and dishevelled with wind; he offered Khalore a slight, wan smile as he caught her eye. He looked tired, but well enough, all considered. He had been out with the Selection that day; he looked relaxed enough that all must have been going fine with Azula and Belle.
"How are we looking?" The door ripped itself from his hands and slammed shut, rattling the whole house with the sheer force of it. He blinked, as though personally offended, and then relaxed back into a smile, glancing at Khalore and Eero with a curious look on his face.
Eero looked at Khalore, his blue eyes frank and encouraging. Pinching the bloodied scalpel between his fingernails, he flung it lazily from his arm; it embedded itself deeply into the stone surface of the house's wall.
She swallowed, hard.
"We're ready," she said. "We're ready. I think."