Pink-cheeked, I dredged up the words from the very bottom of my belly. “I need to tell you something.”
“I can’t hear anything when we’re standing out here,” said Sevastyan. Already three women had stopped to gawk at him, their mouths unlatched and falling open. “Come with me.”
He turned, and I was so numb with shock that I could do nothing but follow him through the ebbing crowd. Perfume and tobacco smoke turned the air hazy, and the scent of Rose’s lemon balm grew fainter and fainter. I started to seize up like a rabbit hearing a branch snap, and with a twitch of panicked instinct I reached out and grasped at Sevastyan’s feathered cape.
He looked back at me, blinking in surprise, and I let go again with a vicious flush. But he read the fear on my face as calmly as a broker read the price of wheat on the weekly stock report, and then he took my hand in his.
I hoped he could not hear the choked noise I made as he led me up the steps, and behind the drawn curtain, to a narrow corridor lined with small doors. He stopped in front of the one that said his name and opened it, then pulled me inside after him.
By the time I could get my hand away my palms were slick. A bit of him was seeping into me, like little shoots of green. I saw behind my eyelids the smear of a memory, gauzy and brief: someone’s belt buckle glinting. A film of sweat chilled my brow. If I was touched long enough, held tight enough, my magic stirred and showed me things, no matter how much I ground my teeth against it.
It was an awful feeling, to draw secrets like blood, without the person even knowing that the needle was in them.
“I’ve never had a girl make me feel so loathsome before,” Sevastyan said.
We were standing in the same dressing room that I’d seen in my first vision, the boudoir mirror hurling our reflections back at us. “What?”
“You let go of me so quickly I thought I might have been bruising your hand, but now I wonder if you just find me repugnant.”
“No, I—”
“And you were so eager to get me out of your house that day, you and your father both. I can’t help but conclude that your stomach turns at the very sight of me. I know I didn’t make the finest of first impressions, retching on your shoe in a half-lit alley, but—”
“No,” I managed, nearly stumbling upon just the one word, cheeks furiously warm. “I don’t find you repugnant. I didn’t want you to go, but my father was furious. You don’t know what his rages are like. And this time, it was my magic that pulled me away. I don’t want to drain your secrets from you.”
Sevas only stared at me, a bright cheer in his blue eyes. He loosened the feathered cloak and let it pool at his feet. “Well, I’m happy to know I don’t repulse you.”
If he’d known what was really running through my mind when I’d stood with him in Rose’s storeroom, he’d have me thrown out of the theater for obscenity. The thought only deepened my flush.
Sevas began picking at the gold paint on his shoulders and chest, the lacquer flaking off him like rust. Where a bit of it peeled away I could see the beginnings of black ink, symbols scrawled along the line of his collarbone, down his forearm, over the back of his hand. I squinted at them, for a moment all my flustered panic vanishing, and asked, “What are they?”
“Blessings,” he said, and drew his thumb across the one on his shoulder blade. “Some of them, at least. My mother wanted me to take a copy of the holy book with me when I left for Oblya, so I told her I would compromise and get her favorite prayers inked on me, instead. When I came home from the tattoo shop she threw the book at my head.”
I could recognize the letters from the storefronts in the Yehuli quarter. “Why?”
“Because the tattoo artist was a Rodinyan man who misspelled our word for heaven?” A smile pulled up one corner of his mouth. “No, I’m only joking. More likely because my people have prohibitions against inking your skin. But there’s hardly anything in life worth doing that doesn’t make somebody angry. They say they won’t bury you in one of our cemeteries, but why should I care what happens to my body after I die? Cook up my heart and liver if you have a particular craving for the flesh of Yehuli men, though I think I’d be a bit gamy with all my years of dancing.”
As he spoke, he drew a white blouse over his head and buttoned it to his throat. I couldn’t help my mouth falling open a little bit, trying to square the humor in his voice and the glimmer of jest in his gaze while he spoke of such gory things. I saw Ivan’s wooden sword lying across the boudoir; from this close it looked even more obviously like a prop, the silver paint offering none of the luminance of real steel. Sevastyan ran his fingers through his hair, disheveling it with careful intention.