was doing just that: biting the meat off the bone and washing it down with wine. I reminded myself that Leopold had participated in their rituals, learned their language, ate with them, slept with them, learned their customs. I picked up the meat and took a bite.
“Are you in pain?” Aki asked, gesturing to my stitches. He sat on the other side of Ciba, putting his hand on her leg possessively.
“No,” I said, sitting up straighter, trying to mask how uncomfortable I felt. Everything was so strange and disorienting. It took all of my strength to remain calm. “It’s just . . .” I waved my hand to the others, to the fire, to all of it. “All of this is so strange for me.”
“When I was below,” Aki said, “I felt that way. I did not understand your ways. I felt afraid.”
“How long were you at the castle?”
He gave me a blank stare, as if he didn’t understand the question, and I remembered what Vita had said: the Icemen did not record time the way we did. Years and months and days, all the ways we tracked our experience of living in the world, meant nothing to him.
“You were a child then?” I asked. “When you lived with Vita?”
“I was a child,” he said. “Kryschia brought me down the mountain, to her home. It was warm and dark, without the sounds we have here. There were so many windows in every room. She taught me to speak your language and to eat your food. It was very different from our life here, but I soon liked it.”
I did a quick calculation. Aki looked to be between twenty-five and thirty years old. Basil had come over twenty years before, and Sal and Greta had not been at the castle until more recently. They hadn’t been there when Aki and Uma were living at the castle, but Dolores had been.
“And Ciba?” I asked, fishing for information. “Has she ever seen the castle? Or met Vita?”
He shook his head. “Ciba was not alive when the kryschia last came.”
I glanced at Ciba. She couldn’t be older than twenty, I realized, which explained why Vita had not discovered her brown eyes.
Ciba was watching us, her eyes narrowed, as if trying to understand our foreign words. “Does she understand anything we’re saying?” I asked Aki.
Aki shook his head. “She never learned your language. Very few of us want to learn it. Uma must fight, sometimes, to make the group understand that your ways can help us.”
The bowl returned to me, this time filled with thick cuts of meat. I took a piece and ate. It was good, gamey and rich, and I was hungry. I took another bite and washed it down with sour wine. The meat was warm, tender, the skin crunchy, an aftertaste of salt lingering on my tongue. A rush of chemicals hit my blood as I ate. My strength was beginning to return.
We sat together, me and Aki and Ciba, in the warmth of the fire. It was our first meal together, and while I did not understand it fully then, I felt the significance of our meeting deep in my heart: with the three of us together, a perfect configuration had been put in place, a triangle that would form the foundation of my life thereafter.
Ciba leaned into me, and I could smell her wet hair, feel the heat from her body, see the veins snaking through the transparent skin of her hands. Aki poured me more wine and made sure the bowl of meat came to me again. Their proximity made me feel every inch of myself—my arms, my neck, my heart—everything tingled with the pleasure of discovery. Nothing had prepared me for it, that sense of belonging I felt when I was with them, but I knew that this was what Vita had tried to describe. I felt how rare and precious this sense of belonging was, and how much I needed it. For the first time, I understood what drove Vita to protect the Icemen at all costs.
After a while, Ciba stood and walked from group to group around the fire, her hand resting on her belly, laughing and talking as she swam between pools of firelight and shadow. Everyone loved her, and I understood why: she was warm and friendly and beautiful. Every angle of her pale, alien features was exaggerated in the firelight. Ciba must have thought me equally strange. Every so often I caught