I laughed. “Mercy, you’re right. Sorcha, I leave this room, and so little makes sense. Everything is so complicated, so hard. But you make sense; being with you is easy. I don’t want to lose you. And I don’t know what it means that I want to let her court me. And I don’t know what it means for us.”

Sorcha pulled on a pair of pants. He sat cross-legged on the sleeping mat and leaned against the wall. “Fuck, I’d give my arm for some herb right now.”

I wrapped a blanket around my waist and sat down next to him. “Me, too.”

“All right. Well, the way I see it, her courting you, you wanting her to, that don’t really have to mean anything for us. Us is you and me; it’s a separate thing. If it don’t change the way you are with me, what I am to you, then it’s a separate thing. Which I think it is. I think you’re overthinking it.”

“You think so?”

He unlatched his violin case. “Ariah, you overthink everything. We’re fine. We’ll stay fine,” he said, and then he tuned his violin.

Chapter 31

CHAPTER 31

I fully expected every meeting with the matchmaker to be the last one. Certainly, Shayat would come to her senses, or Parvi would put a stop to things, or the matchmaker would refuse to broker the match. But Biral appeared week after week, and I ended up in that house with that matchmaker who had nothing but contempt for me. She read me mercilessly; she poked and prodded me. She asked me invasive questions and permitted herself small noises of disgust when I answered them.

I met with her the customary four times. Biral came to me with a date and a time for the fifth session, traditionally the session where the matched pair meets together. Something snapped in me. Something came loose. Sorcha went to Dirva’s house alone. I drank just enough to drown the gift and went to Parvi’s shop. I slipped around the back and pelted Shayat’s windows with pebbles until she stuck her head through her curtains. She stared at me in shock. She frowned and slammed the window shut. I pelted her window with pebbles again until she opened it once more. She glared at me and pointed into the alley.

She stormed through the alleyway wrapped in Qin robes worn all wrong. She took me by the elbow and dragged me behind a broken fence in the next yard. Emotions flickered across her face: irritation, then impatience, then amusement. She pinned me against the adobe wall of her neighbor’s house and leaned in to kiss me. I slid away, out of her grasp. “Shayat, what the hell is this?”

“It’s a courtship,” she said. She smirked.

“I’m with Sorcha,” I said.