violence the Empire perpetrated upon Elias’s mind and body. The crowd listens, their emotions rising and falling with Mamie’s—shock, sympathy, disgust, terror.
Anger.
And that is when I finally understand what Mamie Rila is doing.
She is starting a riot.
XX: Laia
Mamie’s powerful voice echoes across the theater, mesmerizing all who hear it. Though I cannot understand Sadhese, the movements of her body and her hands—along with the way Elias’s face pales—tell me that this tale is about him.
We have found seats about halfway up the terraces of the storytellers’ theater. I sit between Elias and Afya amid a crowd of men and women from Tribe Nur. Keenan and Izzi wait with Gibran a dozen or so yards away. I catch Keenan craning his neck, trying to make sure I’m all right, and I wave to him. His dark eyes drift to Elias and back to me before Izzi whispers something to him and he looks away.
In the green-and-gold clothes Afya gave all of us, we are, at a distance, indistinguishable from the other members of the Tribe. I retreat further into my hood, thankful for the rising winds. Nearly everyone has their hoods up or cloth over their faces to protect themselves from the choking dust.
We can’t take you directly to the wagons, Afya said as we joined her Tribe in walking to the theater. There are soldiers patrolling the depot—and they’re stopping everyone. So Mamie’s going to create a little distraction.
As Mamie’s story takes a surprising turn, the crowd gasps, and Elias looks pained. To have one’s life story told to so many would be strange enough, but a story with so much suffering, so much death? I take his hand, and he tenses, as if to pull away, but then relaxes.
“Don’t listen,” I say. “Look at me instead.”
Reluctantly, he lifts his eyes. The intensity of his pale gaze makes my heart stutter, but I don’t let myself look away. There’s a loneliness to him that makes me ache. He’s dying. He knows it. Perhaps life does not get more lonely than that.
Right now, all I want is for that loneliness to fade—even if it’s for a moment. So I do what Darin used to when he wanted to cheer me up, and I make an absurd face.
Elias stares at me in surprise before cracking a grin that lights him up—and then he makes a ridiculous face of his own. I snicker and am about to challenge him when I spot Keenan watching us, his eyes flat with suppressed fury.
Elias follows my gaze. “I don’t think he likes me.”
“He doesn’t like anyone at first,” I say. “When he met me, he threatened to kill me and stuff me in a crypt.”
“Charming.”
“He changed. Quite a lot, actually. I would have thought it impossible, but—” I wince as Afya elbows me.
“It’s beginning.”
Elias’s smile fades as, around us, the Tribesmen begin to whisper. He eyes the Martials stationed at the theater exits nearest us. Most have hands on their weapons, and they watch the crowd dubiously, as if it will rise up and devour them.
Mamie’s gestures grow expansive and violent. The crowd bristles and seems to expand, pushing against the walls of the theater. Tension fills the air, spreads, an invisible flame that transforms all who come into contact with it. In seconds, whispers become angry mutters.
Afya smiles.
Mamie points to the crowd, the conviction in her voice raising goose bumps on my arms.
“Kisaneh kithiya ke jeehani deka?”
Elias leans toward me, his words quiet in my ear. “Who has suffered the tyranny of the Empire?” he translates.
“Hama!”
“We have.”
“Kisaneh bichaya ke gima baza?”
“Who has seen children torn from their parents’ arms?”
“Hama!”
A few rows down from us, a man rises and gestures at a knot of Martials I didn’t notice. One of them has pale skin and a crown of blonde braids: Helene Aquilla. The man bellows something at them.
“Charra! Herrisada!”
Across the bowl, a Tribeswoman stands and shouts those same words. Another woman rises to her feet at the base of the theater. She is soon joined by a deep voice yards away from us.
Suddenly, the two words echo back and forth from every mouth, and the crowd transforms from spellbound to violent as quick as a pitch-soaked torch catching flame.
“Charra! Herrisada!”
“Thieves,” Elias translates, his voice flat. “Monsters.”
Tribe Nur rises to their feet around Elias and me, shouting abuse at the Martials, raising their voices to join thousands of other Tribesmen doing the same.
I think back to the Martials tearing through the Tribal marketplace yesterday. And I understand,