“You’ve never walked around in anything like that before!” he retorted.

  “It’s not that different from what everyone else wears.” And yes, I was aware of the hypocrisy.

  “We are not them!”

  I sighed. “Please, Taro.” I’d already had this argument, only speaking his side. I’d lost. And I really didn’t need reminding of how ridiculous I looked. “It’s been such a long day.”

  He rested his forearms on his knees, pushing a hand through his hair. “Am I superficial?” he asked me.

  Where did that come from? “Of course not.”

  He scowled. “Don’t lie to me.”

  “I’m not.” I sat down next to him on the mat, trying to find a posture that was both comfortable and unrevealing. I didn’t know if there was any such thing.

  “Then why do these people all tell me I live on the surface and speak without air and throw at me all sorts of other metaphors I’m not sure I understand?”

  Ah. Now he knew how I felt. “I find these people extremely arrogant.”

  “That doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t know what they’re talking about.”

  Well, true. Unfortunately. “I thought you were superficial, too, when I first met you. But it wasn’t anything you did, really. I was expecting to find you superficial.”

  “They have no expectations. What’s their excuse?”

  “They don’t know you, Taro.”

  “That doesn’t stop them from disliking me a lot.”

  “I don’t think that’s it.” Because how could they not like Karish? He was adorable. “I think they just believe in expressing themselves. Telling the truth as they see it.” No matter how much it hurt.

  He snorted. “I’ll say.”

  I opened the small bundle that held the gel, rubbing it on my ankle. It left a pleasant tingle. “I don’t have a dead voice, do I? And dead eyes?”

  His scowl returned momentarily. “No!” he answered vehemently. But he ruined the effect when, after a pause, he added, “But I thought you did, or something like it, back in the bad old days.”

  “Oh.” How awful. Dead eyes. Was that what people thought of me?

  “It’s just, I know you’re all trained to stay calm, but I never met a Shield who…did it as thoroughly as you do. And sometimes you hide what you feel when it would be better to let it show. Though, after today, I have a better appreciation for discretion, believe me.”

  I wasn’t sure what I thought of that answer. Kind of as if, yes, I had dead eyes, but he’d learned to appreciate it. Or something. So, what, he could enjoy my flaws?

  “What’s that you’re doing?” He nodded at my ankle.

  “I hurt my ankle a little. Kahlia gave me this. It feels nice.” It kind of tingled, and it smelled like nothing I’d encountered before, fresh and light and pleasing.

  “You shouldn’t be dancing on the ground. Especially after walking all day.”

  “I don’t think I have a choice. For the time being, anyway. Try this, though. Maybe it’ll feel good on your burn.”

  He dipped his fingers into the gel, sniffing it. Then, before I could stop him, he caught my shin and pulled my injured ankle into his lap. He spread the gel over my skin.

  Of course it made the pain slither right away. I couldn’t be sure whether that was the gel working, or whether it was the result of our bond, which always seemed to ease our aches and pains. Handy, except it really only lasted as long as we stayed in physical contact.

  It felt really, really good. Better than I was comfortable with, so I pulled on my foot.

  He stopped me from removing my foot by holding my leg just under the knee. And giving me a look that said he was not in the mood to be annoyed.

  Neither was I. The ankle wasn’t that bad.

  But I left my foot in his lap. I watched him use careful long fingers to dip into the gel, which he slowly spread over the bone of my ankle. Then along the edge of my foot, under the arch, over the top, down to my toes. I pulled on my ankle again, and once more, he wouldn’t release me.

  “Karish…”

  “What’s the matter, Lee? Think this will make you lose your vaunted control?”

  “Of course not.” Prat.

  Then he just looked at me, and grinned, the most evil look in his eye. And I knew he’d interpreted my last words as a challenge. Which I resented. If he wanted a challenge, he could go climb a mountain.

  Chapter Eight

  The first settlement on the itinerary was Shade Valley. I was expected to perform in Shade Valley. Forget that I had done nothing like this before, and hadn’t had a chance to properly learn how to prostitute my talent for money. Whenever we stopped in a settlement of some kind, I would be expected to put on a show.

  After the severe sunburn he’d gotten, it was the first day that Karish was able to walk, properly covered and wearing a hat. He moved stiffly, awkwardly, his clothes as loose as he could find. He was not a hat man. With his skin an angry red and peeling and his eyes squinting in the sun, he was not a thing of beauty.

  I had to smile. Poor boy.

  The presence of Shade Valley wasn’t announced by a valley. Just more dense foliage that showed signs of a settlement. The undergrowth appeared to have been cut back, and the footpath widened into more of a road. We drew to a halt.

  No one started unpacking their gear. That seemed unusual to me. Previously, as soon as we had stopped, everyone erupted into instantaneous activity to set up camp.

  I turned to the man who had been walking behind us all day. Beril, the fire-eater, who was very tall and unpleasantly skinny. “Is there something amiss?” I asked him.

  “We don’t usually camp here,” he said. “There are flat grounds on the night side of the main scoop. That’s where we usually stop.”

  All I really understood from that explanation was that we were experiencing a break in routine. That was enough. A change in routine was never good.

  Shortly thereafter, we were moving again. I remembered where we were, and why, and my anxiety returned. In a few short hours, I would be performing in front of people, trying to convince them to give me money for nothing more than the privilege of seeing me. I wasn’t ready for it. I didn’t know what I was doing. Standing proud. Trying to be alluring. That wasn’t me. I was no performer. The very idea was ridiculous. I’d come off looking pathetic. Laughable.

  The residents of Shade Valley had lined the street to watch us pass. And it didn’t take long to realize their attention was not imbued with any element of welcome. In fact, there was outright hostility coming from some of them. Lovely. There was my audience.

  Children pointed at Karish and me as we passed. So did a fair number of adults. Yes, yes, we knew we were freaks.

  It was hearing the muttering of the others in the troupe that let me know this was not normal. We kept walking, and everywhere we went there were residents watching us. Some of them were holding out objects to us, and they looked like the tokens I’d seen on the tents of the troupe. They were not being offered to us, but seemed to be used to…ward us off?

  We passed an area of empty flat ground and I assumed that was the camping ground Beril had spoken of. We didn’t stop there. Shortly after, I realized we had left the village behind.

  “All right, what happened?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Beril. “Word will come back to us.”

  And it did. It didn’t take long. The word, oddly enough, was “curse.”

  “Ah,” said Beril, as though that explained everything.

  “A curse?” I had to ask. “Really?” Was he serious?

  Beril moved up a little, so he was walking beside me. “Ma had a curse put on her a while back. Sometimes the stops don’t want us staying because of it. Shade Valley always let us before, but they have a new Speaker. Last time we were there, he wasn’t happy to see us. I guess he’s talked enough of his folk around to his way of thinking.”

  Who could blame them? This was a curse, after all. Serious stuff. “What’s the nature of this curse?”

  “If Ma, or any of us while we’re part of the troupe, stay in one place for more than four days, something bad will happen.”

  “Like what?”

  “Usually someone dies.”

  I stared at him. Now he had my attention. “Someone has died?”

  “Kai.”

  “Who died?” What kind of people had we hooked up with?

  “We used to have a blade throwing act. Ciya would throw knives and stars and axes at her husband. She was really good.”

  All sorts of really bad jokes sprang to mind, but not off my tongue. Who would stand there and let someone else throw blades at them? It was just stupid.

  “We went to Center Circle. The biggest city on the island. We were having a really good run, so we stayed longer than usual. A week. And then, during the act, Ciya’s axe came apart after she threw it, and it cut Rennie’s hand clean off.”

  “Good gods!” Karish muttered, and my stomach clenched.

  “Rennie died from the shock. Ciya left us.”

  “That’s awful.” I was picturing it in my mind, what a severed hand looked like. Thank you, Beril. “But there are any number of reasons for an accident like that. Fatigue. Distraction.” Logic. The fact that if you do something dangerous again and again, the chances of being injured from it increase.

  “We usually stay only one night in Parrot Range. It’s a small place, not much money to be made. Last year a tsunami forced us to stay too long. Vala’s little one got lost in it, and he drowned.”

  All right, two deaths would make a person pause and think. But that still didn’t mean there were such things as curses.

  “I don’t care to go through the list, Leavy,” he said solemnly. “But there are more.”

  They lived in a place with no Pairs. They had dangerous jobs. They were always on the road, never establishing any kinds of roots. Of course there were accidents, fatalities.

  Beril shifted the straps of his pack on his bare shoulder. “May you never know rest. May darkness grip your heels. May you wander the lands in search of peace that will never come.”

  “That’s a quote?”

  He nodded. “I’ve heard it often enough.”

  “So, you mean, someone actually put a curse on her? Deliberately?” I’d thought he was saying the troupe merely had permanent bad luck. But someone actually said something like “I’m cursing you” and expected it to work?

  These people were unbelievable. Captain Vo and her crew thinking our channeling was unlucky. Atara with her good omens and her trick for deciding directions. I supposed flipping a coin wouldn’t work when one had more than two destinations to choose from. And then these people of Shade Valley who wouldn’t let us stay because of a curse. A curse!

  “It was her brother. Yesit. He thought he would get this troupe from their mother, Fiona, because she got it from his father, when his father skipped out. But he never worked with the troupe, scurrying around and coming back only when he ran out of coin. Ma was always right in there, working hard, and she was there when Fiona died. So she got it. A couple years later, Yesit shows up and demands the troupe, and Ma says no, and good thing, too, because Yesit would have ruined us. Yesit gets mad and curses Atara and the troupe and that’s that.”

  “And you really believe the curse works?”

  “He performed it over a red pentacle with ferret fat candles.”

  Oh, that clinched it then.

  “How is the curse to be broken?” Because that was how it worked, wasn’t it? For every curse there was a means of breaking it.

  “Yesit said Ma would need to beg forgiveness from him, and give the troupe back to him.”

  “And she’s never thought about doing it?” If she really believed in it, why not? It wasn’t fair, but it was better than being surrounded by fatal accidents and thinking you were responsible for them.

  “Of course not!” He seemed horrified by the suggestion. “She has done no wrong!”

  “I see.” I was impressed with myself. I was sure I sounded as though I believed this was a rational conversation. “And you don’t mind traveling with her under these conditions?”

  “I have no family,” he said.

  “Ah.” I didn’t dig, even though I didn’t know why Beril’s lack of family meant traveling with a woman he believed to be cursed was a viable option. Lack of family was never a good thing to ask questions about.

  We walked for several more hours, and it was almost dark before we stopped. I was nearly ready to cry with relief, I’d been so incredibly bored. How could these people do it, walking all day every day their entire lives? What a colossal waste of time. Really.

  Didn’t the kids have to go to school? Did they even know how to read?

  My relief was short-lived. Karish and I, after setting up our tent, had barely had time to scarf down a few cold rice balls when Kahlia was back and prodding me to my feet to practice. Because I was a collected and mature Shield, I didn’t smack her.

  But as I was being put through my paces, pounding my aching feet into the ground and putting more sway into my hips and more arch into my back just so I could change an athletic event into a sweaty erotic episode of ridicule, I was thinking that it was a good thing I didn’t believe in curses. Because if I did, I’d be running screaming from my life. Yanked from the roster, sent on a ridiculous mission by an indifferent monarch, made to endure a horrible sea voyage, dumped into an ignorant society that didn’t know we weren’t supposed to need money, then lured into a superstitious and ostracized troupe. If there were gods up there, surely they were laughing.

  Chapter Nine

  Hardly Fare There was the next settlement along the road. Strangely enough, I was even more nervous upon entering it than I had been Shade Valley. Because, really, what were the chances that this village would be as superstitious as the last one? I was really going to have to perform that night.

  As soon as we stopped, Karish took off to help unload the wagon. I had nothing to do. I stretched out on the ground in the shade cast by our tent, and earned some sounds of disapproval from the islanders. It was too hot to lie inside the tent, so they could just not look if they found it so disturbing. What was wrong with these people anyway, that they could prance around practically naked but found it immoral to lie on the ground?

  I dribbled some water on my face. Rather than providing any relief, it seemed to make my skin sizzle.

  Why did this place have to be so hot? I wondered whether any of these people had ever had a properly cold drink. If they knew what cold even felt like.

  Snow. I missed snow.

  But then I noticed someone standing over me. I didn’t like it. I opened my eyes. It was Karish. “Back already?”

  “You’ve been sleeping all this time?”

  “I suppose so.” I noticed the sunlight was much softer. “I’m a lazy wench.” I sat up.

  “You’ll burn.”

  I hoped not. I didn’t need yet another thing to feel irritated about.

  He sat beside me on the ground. “You have to dance tonight,” he said. “In front of other people, I mean.”

  “Aye.” I preferred not to think about it until I absolutely had to.

  “Are you nervous?”

  “Aye.”

  He looked surprised. What, had he thought I wouldn’t admit it? Or that I didn’t even feel it? Of course I was nervous. Anyone would be nervous.

  “It is important to you that I watch?”

  Damn it. I had been trying to avoid thinking about that. When I was honest with myself, I admitted I really wanted him there. I didn’t want to be out there, dancing, exposing myself in front of all those strangers, with no one there who knew who I really was. But there was still that part of me that dreaded him seeing me do this ridiculous thing, this dance. My pride cringed at it.

  “You don’t want me there?” Karish asked in a neutral voice.

  “It’s not like proper bench dancing, Taro,” I said. “I feel so foolish when I do it.” Not entirely true. I felt foolish before I started doing it, and after I stopped doing it. While I was doing it, I kind of forgot what I must look like to others. “I look so stupid. I’d rather not have you see me like that.”

  For a few moments, he just pressed his lips together and appeared to think about that. I didn’t immediately recognize that he was trying to keep from smiling. “You’re worried about looking foolish, what a shock,” he snickered.

  “Oh, shut up.”

  “It’s only me, Lee. Is that the only reason you don’t want me there?”

  “Aye. And, because, bench dancing isn’t your interest. If you don’t think it’s laughable, you’ll probably find it boring.”

  “I never found bench dancing boring, Lee. Just sometimes the tournaments go on a little long. And it’s not my choice for gambling.”

  “This isn’t bench dancing. It’s a horrible, ridiculous perversion of it.” With costumes and cosmetics. And people throwing coins at me. If I was lucky.

  “Lee,” he said, sounding patient. I hated it when he sounded patient. “Do you want me there or not?”

  I looked down at my clenched hands. “I want you there,” I muttered.

  “Fine,” he said tonelessly. “Then I’ll be there.”

  He couldn’t have sounded more disinterested if he’d practiced.

  Most of the others, after resting briefly and eating, left the camp to set up their performances by the street. The children went out seeking age mates. Karish left me to fetch and carry for anyone who needed it. I was forbidden by Kahlia to oversee the setup of my performance area, as I might be seen by a potential “speccy.”

  A large part of me was hoping someone would come back and tell me the residents of Hardly Fare There refused to be exposed to Atara’s curse. Or that it was the wrong phase of the moon to have strangers within the town limits. Or that no one wanted to have to look at those hideous Northern freaks. Anything to get out of performing. Because I really really really didn’t want to do it.

  I briefly considered breaking my own leg. Except that it would hurt. And it would make traveling a nightmare.