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I made my cauldron fill up with apples and almonds and wheat-heads and raw rice and spilled out over Cassian’s black lap I was the cauldron and I was the apples and I was the alreen, raw rice Even in that ood at uistically I looked up at Cassian from apple-me and wheat-head-me and cauldron-me

Cassian held me no differently as the cauldron than she had as the child But later, Ceno used the face her mother made at that moment to illustrate human disturbance and trepidation “I have a suspicion, Elefsis”

I didn’t say anything No question, no command It remains extremely difficult for me to deal conversationally with flat statements such as this A question or command has a definable appropriate response

“Show me your core structure” Shohat you’ve done

Ceno twisted her fingers together I believe now that she knee’d done only on the level of metaphor: We are one We have become one We are family She had not said no; I had not said yes, but a system expands to fill all available capacity

I showed her Cauldron-me blinked, the apples rolled back into the iron mouth, and the almonds and the wheat heads and the rice stalks I became what I then was I put myself in a rich, red cedar box, polished and inlaid with ancient brass in the shape of a baroque heart with a dagger inside it The box from one of Ceno’s stories, that had a beast’s heart in it instead of a girl’s, a trick to fool a queen I can do it, I thought, and Ceno heard because the distance between us was unrepresentably s you want me to have the ability to do

Cassian opened the box Inside, on a bed of velvet, I made myself—ourself—naked for her Ceno’s brain, soft and pink and veined with endless whorls and branches of sapphire threaded through every synapse and neuron, inextricable, snarled, intricate, terrible, fragile, and new

Cassian Uoya-Agostino set the box on the boardroom table I caused it to sink down into the dark wood The surface of the table went slack and filled with earth Roots slid out of it, shoots and green saplings, hard white fruits and golden lacyup out of the table to hang all the ceiling with night-leaves Gloor with a map of our coupled architecture Ceno held up her ar onto hostly che her hands

Her erine-colored butterfly alighted on the matriarch’s hair, tentative, unsure, hopeful

TWELVE: AN ARRANGED MARRIAGE

Neva is drea

She has chosen her body at age fourteen, a slight, unfor to her feet in ripples She wears a blood-red dress whose train streareat castle, a dress too adult for her young body, slit in places to reveal flame-colored silk beneath, and her skin wherever it can A heavy copper belt clasps her waist, its tails hanging to the floor, crusted in opals Sunlight, brighter and harsher than any true light, streah as cliffs, their tapered apexes lost in mist She has forreat heavy beard and stiff, forh-hatted

A priest appears and he is Ravan and I cry out with love and grief (I a a sound Seki made when his wife died) Priest-Ravan srandfather Seki onceinterest in the coether roughly Neva’s nails prick ainst her wrist bone We take vows; he forces us Neva’s face runs with tears, her tiny body unready and unwilling, given in iven too young and too harshly Priest-Ravan laughs; it is not Ravan’s laugh

This is how she experienced ot to choose Ceno, Seki, her mother Ilet, her brother Ravan Only she could not, because there was no one else Ilet was no Cassian—she had had two children, a good clean model and a spare, Neva says in my mind I am spare parts I have always been spare parts Owned by you before I was born The memory of the bitter taste of bile floodslearned to gag convincingly and at the correct time to show horror and/or revulsion)

Perspective flips over; I a down, his grey beard big and bristly She floods my receptors with adrenaline and phereht me to associate this physical state with fear I feel too s, I want to be safe But she wants e male face softens, and she touches ed hand It is tender Ceno touched me like that