He was speaking Shotet. He sounded just like the soldiers. But how—how could he speak a language he had never learned?
“Where is your wife, Aoseh?” Vas said, turning his attention back to their dad. He turned the currentblade in his fist, so the black tendrils shifted over his skin. “We could ask her if she had a dalliance with a Shotet man, or if she shares our fine ancestry and never saw fit to tell you about it. Surely the oracle knows how her youngest son came to be fluent in the revelatory tongue.”
“She’s not here,” Aoseh said, terse. “As you may have observed.”
“The Thuvhesit thinks he is clever?” Vas said. “I think that cleverness with enemies gets a man killed.”
“I’m sure you think many foolish things,” Aoseh said, and somehow, he stared Vas down, despite being on the ground at his feet. “Servant of the Noaveks. You’re like the dirt I remove from under my fingernails.”
Vas swung at their dad, striking his face so hard he fell to the side. Eijeh yelled, fighting to get closer but intercepted by the Shotet who still held Akos’s arm. Held both brothers without effort, in fact, like it cost him nothing at all, though Eijeh, at sixteen seasons, was almost man-size.
The low table in the living room cracked right down the middle, from end to end, splitting in half and falling to each side. All the little things that had been on top of it—an old mug, a book, a few scraps of wood from their dad’s whittling—scattered across the floor.
“If I were you,” Vas said, low, “I would keep that currentgift under control, Aoseh.”
Aoseh clutched his face for a tick, and then dove, grabbing the wrist of the short, scarred Shotet soldier standing off to the side and twisting, hard, so his grip faltered. Aoseh grabbed the blade by the handle and wrenched it free, then turned it back on its owner, his eyebrows raised.
“Go ahead and kill him,” Vas said. “There are dozens more where he came from, but you have a limited number of sons.”
Aoseh’s lip was swollen and bleeding, but he licked the blood away with the tip of his tongue and looked over his shoulder at Vas.
“I don’t know where she is,” Aoseh said. “You should have checked the temple. This is the last place she would come, if she knew you were on your way here.”
Vas smiled down at the blade in his hand.
“It is just as well, I suppose,” he said in Shotet, looking at the soldier who held Akos with one hand and was pressing Eijeh to the wall with the other. “Our priority is the child.”
“We know which one is youngest,” the soldier replied in the same language, jerking Akos by the arm again. “But which of the other two is the second-born?”
“Dad,” Akos said desperately. “They want to know about the Smaller Child. They want to know which one of them is younger—”
The soldier released Akos, but only to swing the back of his hand at him, hitting him right in the cheekbone. Akos stumbled, slamming into the wall, and Cisi choked on a sob, bending over him, her fingers stroking her brother’s face.
Aoseh screamed through his teeth, and lunged, plunging the stolen currentblade deep into Vas’s body, right under the armor.
Vas didn’t even flinch. He just smiled, crookedly, wrapped his hand around the blade’s handle, and tugged the knife free. Aoseh was too stunned to stop him. Blood poured from the wound, soaking Vas’s dark trousers.
“You know my name, but you don’t know my gift?” Vas said softly. “I don’t feel pain, remember?”
He grabbed Aoseh’s elbow again, and pulled his arm out from his side. He plunged the knife into the fleshy part of their dad’s arm and dragged down, making him groan like Akos had never heard before. Blood spattered on the floor. Eijeh screamed again, and thrashed, and Cisi’s face contorted, but she didn’t make a sound.
Akos couldn’t stand the sight. It had him on his feet, though his face still ached, though there was no purpose to moving and nothing he could do.
“Eijeh,” he said, quiet. “Run.”
And he threw his body at Vas, meaning to dig his fingers into the wound in the man’s side, deeper and deeper, until he could tear out his bones, tear out his heart.
Scuffling, shouting, sobbing. All the voices combined in Akos’s ears, full of horror. He punched, uselessly, at the armor that covered Vas’s side. The blow made his hand throb. The scarred soldier came at him, and threw him to the floor like a sack of flour. He put his boot on Akos’s face and pressed down. He felt the grit of dirt on his skin.
“Dad!” Eijeh was screaming. “Dad!”
Akos couldn’t move his head, but when he lifted his eyes, he saw his dad on the ground, halfway between the wall and the doorway, his elbow bent back at a strange angle. Blood spread like a halo around his head. Cisi crouched at Aoseh’s side, her shaking hands hovering over the wound in his throat. Vas stood over her with a bloody knife.
Akos went limp.