enjoying his gift and you can’t stand it. You have the whole world in your pocket and it isn’t enough for you.” Her laugh was a slap in his face.
Suald glared at an unoccupied corner of the room and muttered, “Ridiculous.”
“What festers here? If you think they’re such a source of entertainment, then why not use the tablet to get your own shoes?”
“Because I want his.”
After a moment she shrugged and replied, “Well, then take them. What stops you? You caused fig trees to grow on the main boulevards of all the spans you could think of; how much trouble is it to take two shoes?” She said this as if it were nothing, but she walked quickly away from him to the perch of her blue-and-violet bird, which clacked its beak at her and let loose a piercing screech.
He gripped the tablet in his pocket, finally withdrawing it, staring at it, holding it up as if testing its weight. In his other hand he fingered the tip of the stylus. Askance he saw his wife’s lips curl with contempt, but when he looked straight at her, she seemed to be petting the obnoxious bird, not even paying attention to him.
He licked the tip of the stylus while watching her. Her gaze shifted. She followed the arc of the stylus from his side to his mouth and down. She didn’t see him at all; only the stylus. Only the tablet. In her focus he read with utter certainty that she would kill him for it—for things she wanted but would never dare ask him to provide. He knew where her tastes ran to the perverse, and where his presence would be unwelcome. She would kill him when he slept, or poison the figs he ate at breakfast so that he would die too quickly to be able to write an antidote. Even if she didn’t kill him outright, she would find a way to get her hands upon the tablet. She would write him out of existence the moment he closed his eyes.
He could trust her no longer.
Baloyd arrived late in the afternoon. He was barefoot and carried his magical shoes before him. He seemed confused by his circumstances.
Suald met him at the door.
“I want to . . . to give you these,” Baloyd said, and held the red shoes at arm’s length. His eyes welled with tears. A kind of bottomless terror gnawed at him, the more terrible for being impossible to understand. But his wife understood.
Betinela had been with him when he suddenly expressed the urge to visit his brother. She’d followed him easily, for he hadn’t used the shoes and had lumbered stupidly through the streets as if not quite sure of his location. She knew her husband and all his faults: He was not a man given to acts of unconditional generosity. She glared at Suald as he accepted the shoes.
He smiled as innocently as he knew how.
“And where’s Seru?” she asked him.
“Away,” he replied quickly.
She looked past him at the bird on its perch, at the jewelry scattered through the room, at everything that denied his statement, finally following his gaze down to a yellowish smear on the floor where he’d crushed a very large cockroach. She chose not to contradict him.
Baloyd wept openly, his brain twisting with frustration.
“Your brother loves you so,” said Betinela, “to give up this wondrous gift that had pleased him so much, at the peak of his enjoyment. I never realized he felt so tenderly toward you.”
Suald’s eyelids half closed. “We’ve always been closer than people thought.” He carried the clumsy-looking shoes outside, where he sat and put them on before she could try and make him give them back. His brother shambled after him as if tied to a line.
The shoes were too big for Suald’s feet, but otherwise more comfortable than they looked. It was the first time he’d put them on, and he fumbled with the laces, finally tying them around his ankles to keep them out of the way.
As he started to take out the tablet, Betinela asked, “So where will you go then? You’ve always been smarter than your brother, Suald, so I assume you’ll use the shoes for something greater than entertaining children?”
He looked at her from under his brows, agitated by the accusation that edged her every word. Didn’t she appreciate the power he held right here in his hand? No, of course she didn’t. None of them did. He could obliterate them