Snake Heart (Chains of Honor #2) -Lindsay Buroker Page 0,85

told her...

“I love you,” Yanko said, the words tumbling out so quickly that he didn’t know if she would understand them. “I love you,” he said again, more slowly. Carefully.

He expected surprise, stunned silence. Gaping. Staring. Disbelief.

Instead, Arayevo smiled sadly and said, “I know you do, Yanko.”

“Oh.” He groped for the next thing to say, but all useful words and thoughts had fled his brain. “Have you always known?”

She tilted her head. “Have you always felt that way?”

“Almost always. Ten years at least.”

“Since you were eight?”

“Yes. That’s not odd, is it?”

“No odder than the rest of you.” She smiled and squeezed his shoulder before lowering her arm. Their hips no longer touched.

Yanko sighed sadly. “Good to know.”

“I’m sorry, Yanko. I’ve tried not to be... encouraging, but sometimes I forget. I have come to think of you as a friend, not just the little pest who was always wandering off into the forest and disappearing for hours when I was in charge of you—do you know how many times your father came home and asked where you were and I couldn’t produce you?”

“Uhm. Three?”

“More like thirty-three. I was shocked he kept inviting me back for babysitting duty. I think it was only because you kept requesting me.”

Yanko scuffed the ground with his foot. He didn’t want to share memories of him as a child with Arayevo. He wanted to make new memories with her, and for her to see him as a man, though he supposed he knew that wasn’t going to happen.

“My point is that I care about you,” Arayevo said, “and you are a really good friend. I just can’t imagine... I don’t see you romantically. To me, you’re still the little boy who ran around calling me ‘Yevo and pulling my hair when I picked you up.”

He lifted his chin. He was not that little boy anymore.

“I’m sorry. I know that’s not fair, but we don’t get to choose who we fall in love with. And who we don’t.”

“No, I suppose not.”

“That doesn’t mean I won’t always care about you. And I’ll always be there if you need to be rescued from pirates.”

“Thank you.” Yanko thought about pointing out that he hadn’t needed rescuing, that his mother had been trying to recruit him for her fleet. But what was the point? That wouldn’t change how she saw him. “I’m going to try to avoid needing to be rescued in the future.”

“Good. That sounds healthy.” She patted him on the back and headed to the cairn.

Yanko took a couple of moments—and a couple of deep breaths—to collect himself. He hadn’t broken into tears. Maybe that was something. Or maybe he’d known in his heart for a long time that this would never be. Why did hearts sometimes know things before brains could accept them?

His neck hairs stirred at someone drawing upon the mental sciences nearby.

Yanko spun toward the cairn as the bush at its base burst into flames. Lakeo stood with her fingers splayed, and a triumphant expression on her face.

Something squealed in pain from within the fire, and Yanko cringed, sensing a pair of rodents that had been hiding under the boughs. They died before he could do anything to squelch the flame or help them.

“Oops,” Lakeo said, lowering her hands.

Dak clanked the cairn with his machete. “I could have simply cut away the branches.”

“I wanted to practice.”

Yanko walked over, trying to keep the judgment off his face as the flames died out. Dak grumbled something under his breath and cut away the charred branches. Someone had carved geometric images into the rock, a series of overlapping triangles that created other shapes within their lines. Symbols that Yanko recognized as numbers, if not numbers in his own language, marked some of the sides.

“A puzzle?” Arayevo asked, also not mentioning the dying squeals of the rodents.

“It looks like a math problem.” Dak dug into a pocket of his pack and pulled out the journal that Yanko had only briefly seen. “The Kyattese like math.”

Turgonians supposedly liked math, too, those who studied engineering instead of war, anyway.

“Would a Kyattese thief assume pirates or other thieves wouldn’t like math?” Arayevo asked.

“Probably a good assumption,” Lakeo muttered.

“What are we supposed to solve for?” Yanko asked. There wasn’t any other writing on the flat surface, nor did he see any place to input one’s answer.

“It’s not mentioned.” Dak closed the journal and crouched to study the shapes more closely.

Yanko took the opportunity to check on the pirate ships with his mind. They were