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Five

KURAI

“ D o you want to take a bite?” Ciana held up a piece of roasted red pepper from her dinner plate.

With a quick glance at the food on her fork, I returned my attention to her face so as not to miss a single change in her expression.

It’d been almost four weeks since the night of her leilatha fitting, and I’d dedicated a lot of that time to catch and study the meaning of her many smiles.

“No. Thank you,” I declined her offering of the cooked pepper. “I prefer my food to be less wet.”

“Less wet?” She laughed.

I noted she’d been doing it more frequently lately—smiling with her eyes not just with her lips and laughing with all her heart.

“Like this then?” She lifted the thick slice of buttered bread from the tray in her lap.

“No. That’s too dry.” I shook my head, pointing at the fried rice on her plate. “This would be more suitable for my preferences. ”

“You like rice?” Dropping the pepper back onto the plate, she gathered a forkful of rice for me.

“I prefer rice,” I corrected. “‘Like’ implies pleasure, which I don’t derive from any food the way you do.”

“Why do you prefer rice to everything else?”

I shrugged. “It’s the texture, I guess. It's most agreeable with my tastes.”

“Is the texture the only thing you care about in a food?” She lifted the fork with rice to my lips.

I flicked the slice of cooked mushroom from the fork before taking the rest in my mouth.

“What’s wrong with mushrooms?” She gazed at me with amazement.

“Too slimy,” I said after swallowing. “I prefer mushrooms and vegetables ground into the rice, not cooked in pieces like that.”

She laughed, tossing back her braids.

“For someone who can’t taste any flavor, you’re a pretty picky eater, Kurai.”

I paused in appreciation of her laughter. Thankfully, Sefri had been too busy, matching other Joy Vessels to the nobles of the royal court. Otherwise, she would’ve noticed that joy had been returning to Ciana, and I would’ve probably lost the privilege of sharing meals with her by now.

Either way, Ciana was to be returned to her world in just two nights. The Watchers’ mission would soon be complete, and I’d never see her again.

Sadness gripped my heart at that thought. I should be relieved at the prospect of no longer having to fight the craving for her company or the temptation of her joy, but all I felt was loss.

“I can taste the flavor,” I replied to her comment. “I know that your rice is salty, unlike what I usually eat. It tastes like meat, mushrooms, and many herbs and spices that humans use to flavor their food with, but I derive no pleasure from any of those flavors.”

She licked her lip that had finally healed, leaving only a faint line of a scar now. Her smile slipped away as she seemed to consider something.

“Do you want to try what it feels like to me?” she asked, flicking a glance up at me, then at the leilatha on her right arm in an offer to connect to her emotions.

Her offer should’ve repulsed me. I should’ve recoiled from a mere notion of such a blasphemy.

But my skin itched under my gold armlets, with my tendrils eager to spring out.

I’d spent weeks trying to identify her emotions by studying her facial expressions.

Oh how I wished I could sample them all now.

“It’d be a sin,” I said, in a suddenly hoarse voice.

I had to say these words out loud. I needed to hear them as a reminder of my vow to serve the Joy.

A fae could not break a promise given or he would die a slow, torturous death. Lately, however, death didn’t seem like too high a price to pay for a taste of Ciana’s pleasure. The temptation was growing increasingly harder to fight.

It was a sin for me to connect to human joy. It’d be the gravest betrayal of my life’s work and of my current mission. Even thinking about it was sinful. I had to remember that.

“I can’t.”

“Is it because you’re a monk?” she asked, tilting her head to the side.

“A monk? That’s not what I am.”

“No? Why then do you have such severe restrictions on things that bring a little joy? What harm is there in enjoying a spoonful of rice?”

I opened my mouth to quote something from the scriptures in reply, because I couldn’t come up with anything useful on my own right now.

But she lifted a hand quickly, stopping me.

“It’s okay. I’m sorry. You don’t have to defend your beliefs to me, Kurai. Just because I don’t understand them, doesn't make them invalid, right?”

Right. It didn’t. Her understanding or the lack of it neither supported nor invalidated the divine dogma.

But something inside me itched to continue this conversation, and it came from my desire for her to understand.

I couldn’t make her believe what I believed in, but I would’ve wanted for her to at least understand my values.

Except that all my values fundamentally disvalued everything about her. According to the beliefs I’d held my entire life, she wasn’t even supposed to be here right now.

I exhaled in frustration, facing this impenetrable wall between us that could never be broken.

“Do you miss home, Ciana?” I asked. “I mean, your world. Not the dwelling that…” I let my voice trail off, unsure if I wanted to bring up the torment of her not-so-distant past.

“You mean not the apartment that I shared with my husband?” she finished for me with that smile she used to put people at ease, not to express happiness.

“Yes.”

“I do,” she replied simply. “I miss the people I left behind the most.”

“Who are they?”

“I know what you’re thinking.” She exhaled a short laugh. “I left my friends and family years ago to move in with Dylan. What right do I have to miss them now and blame it on the shadow fae, right?”

“That wasn’t what I was thinking.”

“Well, you could be, and you wouldn’t be wrong.

I left my town and everyone who lived there, but I thought it was only temporary.

I believed I’d come back for Christmas. Then when Dylan said that money was tight for traveling around Christmas time, I thought we’d make it in the summer for sure.

In the end, it added up to years, but it never felt as final as it does now, when I know I’ll never return. ”

Her throat moved with a swallow, and she glanced aside, hiding her eyes from me.

“You miss home,” I stated, and she didn’t argue. “But what if it wasn’t final?” I lowered my voice, leaning closer to her, lest anyone overhear us.

She snapped her gaze to me. “What do you mean?”

“What if there was a way for you to return to your world?”

“But…” she blinked. “The portal is closed, isn’t it?”

I darted a cautious glance around the sarai, to make sure no one was listening to our conversation.

Always a bit of a loner ever since her arrival to Alveari Kingdom, Ciana had been keeping away from the others—the humans and the Keepers alike.

When expecting my visit, she always chose a bench by the fountain with the fish statue that was tucked behind one of the buildings of the Joy Vessels’ bedrooms. Here, the occupants of the sarai tended to leave us alone.

Lately, it’d been discovered that drinking wine elevated humans’ emotions, increasing many pleasurable ones.

By the directive of the Royal Council, the Joy Vessel Keepers were serving wine to humans now, and many of the Joy Vessels appeared to enjoy drinking it this morning.

They laughed and even danced with the nobles of the court attached to them by their tendrils.

In the happy commotion taking place in the main gardens of the sarai , no one seemed to pay us any attention.

Still I hesitated how much I could or should reveal to Ciana about her future. She had the right to know, but the secret wasn’t entirely mine to tell.

“What if there was a possibility for another portal?” I asked, carefully choosing my words. “Would you be happy to go home?”

She bit her bottom lip in contemplation, and I waited for her reply with bated breath.

I hadn’t realized until now how much her opinion mattered to me. I knew what I had to do. But if it was also something she wished for, it would make my mission even more important to me.

“They say it’s impossible to return to the same time when they took us from,” she said. “That if we try, we could arrive centuries into the past or decades into the future.”

“But it could also be just days away too. Or even minutes. Would you like to have a chance to rebuild your life back in your world?”

Her brow furrowed as she worried her lip between her teeth, pondering my words. I watched her, afraid to miss a single change of her expression, but I had no idea what it was that I wished to see.

As a Watcher, I needed her to leave Alveari. But as someone who’d grown fond of her company, I dreaded to think what this world would be without Ciana. Or what my life would be without her.

“Is the queen planning to send us back?” she asked.

“No. The queen will never do that. Helping you get back would be against the royal orders, which is a treason punishable by death.”

She looked at me closely. “Yet you’re offering it to me?”

I mimicked one of her placating smiles. “I merely asked whether you’re missing home, Ciana. That’s all.”

“I do but?—”

A woman erupted in a loud laughter, interrupting Ciana and bringing our attention to the wine-fueled party in the central part of the gardens.

“Hey, Keepers, my glass is empty!” the woman shouted, waving a silver goblet in the air.

She tripped, and Councilor Jerti grabbed her around her middle, stopping her from falling. She laughed again, bending over in his arms. Her limbs tangled in his tendrils that were attached to her. He laughed too, in an unstoppable, hearty laughter that I’d never heard from a shadow fae before.

A human man stumbled down the path toward us.

“I’m not feeling so good…” he mumbled drunkenly, then bent over the mosaic edge and retched into the fountain.

Sefri rushed to him, along with two other Keepers .

“Is something wrong with him?” I asked one of the Joy Vessel Keepers who was passing by.