He looked at me, surprised, unguarded. He had a bravado that made me think he was older than I was, but actually we were the same age, only months apart. In that moment, he looked terribly vulnerable and terribly young. “I could use a friend these days. Could stay the way it’s been, that’d be fine with me. But I could use you around.”

I didn’t feel that there was much choice. Yes, perhaps he was a bad influence. He was not the sort I should have been around. But he needed me, and it didn’t seem right to leave. I agreed to stay. In unspoken compromise, Sorcha slept clothed that night.

Chapter 7

CHAPTER 7

Curiosity is woven deeply into Semadran culture. There is a tension, a fine line we walk, where we are compelled to know what we don’t know, understand what we don’t understand, without giving anything of ourselves away. It is a thing of survival bred from generations of living under the thumb of the Qin. In any case, there was suddenly much about my mentor that I did not understand in the least. I was desperate for answers. I pumped Sorcha for all that he knew—all of which he told me, but it was not much. Dirva had left when Sorcha was very young, only about ten years old, so everything he knew were secondhand stories from his siblings. And Sorcha was the youngest—young enough that he was only a bare handful of years older than Falynn’s first child—so he had grown up with his siblings like they were his parents, and his siblings’ friends like they were aunts and uncles. He knew Liro, but not in a terribly personal way. All I could really get from Sorcha was that in their youth, Dirva and Liro had been inseparable. The family expected them to marry. But then, Dirva left for Vilahna with no notice, no warning. His da arranged travel and forged papers to get him to Vilahna, but no one else in the City knew he was planning to leave. Dirva, apparently, had not told Liro he was leaving. He, family lore claimed, had not even said goodbye. He was simply there one day and gone the next.