A Practical Guide to Dating a Demon, page 15
Still, I was delighted to be home, ready to curl up in bed and sleep forever, happily sated by dinner and family. I collapsed on the sofa, yawning so widely my mouth hurt.
“I have a gift for you,” Daziel said shyly.
This perked me up. Who didn’t love an unexpected gift? “You do?”
Sitting beside me, he handed over a poorly wrapped bundle. I pulled it apart to reveal a teal-and-pink crocheted scarf, the colors familiar from seeing them wound around Daziel’s crochet hook.
There was a strange wrenching in my heart. I smiled at him, my cheeks hurting. “It’s beautiful.”
“You like it?” He sounded hesitant. “It’s not very professional. I tried, but I’m not very good.”
“Yes. Absolutely.” I wrapped the scarf around my neck, feeling as warmed as though it was a giant blanket, then impulsively squeezed Daziel’s hand. He stared down with surprise. Then he smiled, brighter than the moon.
My throat went dry. I didn’t recognize the feeling in me, the strange bubbling sensation fizzing through every part of my body.
Or maybe I did. Like Jelan had said, we’d spent the last several months cooking and laughing and studying, and though I kept reminding him we weren’t really betrothed, we felt like a couple. I wanted us to be a couple. I wanted to lean against him, to curl into his side when we read on the sofa. When we walked to class, I wanted to hold hands.
I wanted to kiss him.
I cleared my throat. “I’m sorry I didn’t get you anything.”
“Maybe later I’ll ask you for a gift,” he said softly.
“Why not now?” I asked just as softly. The space between us felt alive, crackling with energy.
He tilted his head. I was aware of the depth of his eyes, the length of his lashes, the firmness of his mouth. His skin seemed to contain an extra glow, a burnished gold radiating health.
Paz burst out from under a pillow, chirping excitedly as he spied a beetle in the corner of the room and dashed after it.
We burst into laughter, the moment broken. “I should get ready for bed,” I said, pulling back. My heart raced as I brushed my teeth and washed my face, as I undid my braids and combed my hair. Both Daziel and my aunt had been so kind tonight. They felt like family. It made sense my aunt did, but Daziel—
Daziel felt like family in a very different way.
When I came out, he was curled up in his nest of blankets and cushions. It struck me how I’d never seen him in a state of undress—even though he owned a million outfits, I’d never seen him change from one to another. Daziel had always been very careful not to make me uncomfortable inside my own home.
The words burst out quickly, tumbling together. “I’m sorry I haven’t been to one of your knockball games.”
He looked up with unnatural speed. “It’s fine.”
“I don’t think it is. I feel awful.” He did so many nice things for me, I wanted to do something nice for him too. I wanted to show I cared. “Do you…Should I come to your next?”
He stared with obvious surprise. “Do you want to? I know sports aren’t your thing.”
Oh no. I shoved my hands in my pockets. He didn’t want me there. This had been a stupid idea. And he definitely couldn’t be interested in me if he didn’t even want me at his game. “Right. I shouldn’t have suggested it.”
“No, I—Naomi.” He took a deep breath, a hint of vulnerability on his face. “Yes. I’d like you to come.”
“Oh,” I said, more upbeat but still nervous. “Okay. I’ll be there.”
“Okay.”
Feeling giddy and confused and a million other things, I turned toward my door. Daziel’s voice stopped me. “Naomi.”
I paused. “Yes?”
He hesitated. “Your hair looks very beautiful down.”
My breath caught. “Thank you,” I said, before throwing myself into my room, where I lay staring at the ceiling, my heart ramming against my chest with confusion and intensity.
I didn’t sleep for a very long time.
Fifteen
I showed up at the pitch at two on game day, Daziel’s scarf wrapped around my neck. I hadn’t been to these fields before—they weren’t on the Lyceum peninsula but where Issachar Quarter sloped down to the Lersach River. The fields were separated from the water by an abundance of mimosa trees, their bright yellow blossoms swaying under the pale winter sky.
A sparse crowd had gathered on the bleachers. I stood uncertainly on the sidelines, trying to decide if I should grab a seat or find Daziel. I was unaccountably nervous. Though we spent so much time together, it was together, going from one place to another—it felt stranger to separately enter a space he belonged in.
Daziel bounded over from a group of players on the field. He wore a blue uniform I’d never seen before, with white stripes on the shoulders and down the sides—the School of Humanities club knockball team. I’d only ever seen his practice clothes.
“You came! Come meet the team.” Daziel grabbed my hand and towed me toward a loose crew of others. Paz jumped from my shoulder to Daziel’s and chittered excitedly as he ran up and over Daziel’s head.
“Are you sure? I don’t want to get in the way before the game or anything…”
“I want you to meet them.” He bubbled over with excitement, and my shyness increased as we approached his teammates. I knew some of these boys—like Ezra, of course—but most were strangers. For the first time I’d be in the position of being Daziel’s betrothed instead of the other way around.
“This is Naomi,” Daziel proclaimed, interrupting their huddle, beaming proudly. Everyone ignored us, which was about what I’d expected.
Everyone had their residence hall written on the back of their jersey, beneath their team name, the Fiercest Figs. I peeked at Daziel’s. It said Testylier House.
The sweetness of this was so sudden and intense I had to blink very rapidly to maintain my composure.
“Here’s the deal,” Ezra said, in his element as team captain. “The other guys are faster, stronger, and smarter than us.”
“Isn’t this supposed to be a pep talk?” I murmured to Daziel.
“It’s a ‘here’s the deal’ talk,” Ezra said. “But you know what we have that they don’t have?”
“Spirit?” I suggested.
Ezra glared. “Your input is unnecessary. What we do have,” he continued, “is no fear of pain.”
“What,” I said under my breath.
“No pain!” the boys all cried, like (1) this made sense and (2) was something to be proud of. “No pain!”
I looked at Daziel. Like the rest of them, he was pumping his fist in the air, looking delighted. “No pain!”
The corners of my mouth quirked up. Okay. This was kind of cute. Bizarre. But cute.
Ezra delivered a not-very-empowering speech about how they’d win no matter what, even if it meant playing dirty, then backtracked and said they couldn’t play dirty because they already had two strikes, and also the other team played dirtier and one of their front men had a nasty habit of kicking knees, stay away from him. Then, with a final “No pain!” they clapped their hands together and looked toward the other team on the opposite end of the field.
Daziel kept holding on to my hand, even though I suspected the game was about to start. I tugged free. “I think I better go. Have fun, okay?”
“It is not about fun,” Daziel said seriously. “It is about winning.”
We were going to have to have a talk later about Ezra’s speechmaking. “Hm. Good luck, then.”
“Hey,” a voice called from the other team as I started toward the bleachers. “Is that—do you guys have the demon?”
I stiffened and turned.
The opposing team approached en masse, matching scowls to go with their matching red uniforms. The boy wearing the captain’s epaulets stepped forward. “You can’t have a demon play.”
“Whatever,” Ezra said dismissively. “It’s fine.”
“It’s not fine,” the opposing captain said. “That’s cheating.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. He’s not even any good.” Ezra used the same tone as when he decried the Sanhedrin’s ability to do anything. “He gets distracted half the time.”
“I don’t!” Daziel protested.
“Look!” Ezra pointed behind Daziel. “A tabby cat.”
Daziel turned.
This didn’t appease the School of Engineering’s team. The fight snowballed until the umpire made his way over, besieged as each side made their case. He was a slim man with ginger hair and a cleft chin. He took one look at Daziel and shook his head. “It’d be an unfair advantage.”
I’d stayed uninvolved until then, but at this, anger bubbled up. “Oh, come on. This is ridiculous. He’s played in the games within the School of Humanities.”
“Who the hell are you?” one of the boys on the other team asked.
“She’s his betrothed,” Ezra said, “so be nice.”
“He just wants to have fun,” I said. I wanted to hit something. Who were these guys to police who played?
Daziel’s shoulders drooped. “No, I understand.”
“You can stay within human limits!”
“He could be within human limits and still be better than any of us,” someone on the other team retorted. “It’d be like hiring a ringer.”
Daziel stepped back. “You should sub Colin in for me,” he told Ezra. “Good luck, everybody.” Shoulders slumped, he walked off the field.
Sending a fierce glare at everyone, I hurried after his dejected figure. “Come on,” I said, determined to cheer him up. “Let’s get out of here.”
He shook his head. I could practically hear the morose music playing about him. “I should watch the team. Cheer them on.”
Watching other people do something I couldn’t sounded horrible. “Are you sure?”
He nodded. “It’s the right thing to do.”
So I watched the first knockball game of my life, trying to offer support to Daziel supporting his team. He stared intensely at the field, shouting encouragement at his teammates.
“Are you okay?” I asked halfway through.
He mustered up a smile. “Yeah. For sure. Go, Ezra!” He cheered as Ezra slapped at the ball.
I took his hand and squeezed.
I’d never paid much attention to knockball before. Still, I knew the basics. One ball, two teams, nine players on each. Zones where different body parts were allowed in play—heads, feet, hands. Three ways to score and one to lose points. Three goal zones, one decided randomly just before play.
Knowing rules didn’t mean I knew anything about strategy. People had tried to explain it to me before, but I’d always tuned out. It was easier with Daziel. His excitement was infectious, and he shared the plays like he was whispering secrets—“Ah, they must be trying Brown’s Route. It’s a sneaky one…”
Daziel’s team won. Not, as far as I could tell, because they were better than the other team but through pure luck. I turned to Daziel. “Congrats?”
He’d managed to be fairly upbeat through the game, despite the longing on his face. But now, as he watched his friends jump on each other and hug, the depressed creases in his brows deepened. “Are you okay?” I asked again.
“I just really wanted to play,” he said in a small, forlorn voice.
I bit the inside of my cheek, hard, to keep from viciously going after the other team. “You know what? Let’s climb Lyra’s Seat.”
Daziel lifted his head with bewilderment, then spoke as though afraid to hope. “It’s the weekend. You like to spend weekends getting ahead on homework.”
“I’m done already,” I lied.
His eyes widened. “Really?”
“Let’s do it.”
Lyra’s Seat was the highest of Talum’s four hills, on the northmost peak. We took the tram, arriving as the sun started to sink. We climbed it in the cold, and harsh wind kept whipping past us, yet we couldn’t stop laughing. At the top, we could see all of Talum spread out before us, glowing in the twilight.
* * *
~ ~ ~
When we got home, it was pitch black, and we were exhausted. We fell onto the sofa, wrangling the blanket over our legs, letting them fall against each other.
“Thank you for today,” Daziel said.
“I didn’t really do anything.”
His black eyes met mine—so unnerving once, and now so dear. “You wanted me to be happy. That’s something.”
I looked away. I did want him to be happy. It almost hurt, how much it mattered to me.
When had I started caring about him so deeply?
And what was I going to do about it?
Winter was the bleakest time of year, not just in Talum but all of Ena-Cinnai, the days short, the nights long. The temperature dipped below freezing in the night as the season deepened, and we often woke to frost covering the Lyceum lawns. Students exhaled white puffs of air as they hurried across campus.
The Trio Winds intensified. Though the second wind, the Ver, came less often than the Clo, it was far worse. It blazed down from the northeast and tore shingles from rooftops. Then the Den arrived, and when it collided with one of the other winds, it created gales so fierce they howled together like dogs pursuing a wild hunt.
The Maestril was worse, I’d been told by proud locals. Like the Trio Winds, the Maestril was bitter and violent, but it was helpful, too. It dried out the soil for the harvests and churned the river, which improved its ecosystem. When the Maestril left, it carried away the dirt and grit of winter in a golden haze—so beautiful, locals bragged, artists came from all corners of the continent to try to capture it during the two weeks it blew.
“But this year, the Trio Winds are as fierce as the Maestril,” Leah told me one day as we walked to class in the bitterly cold dawn. She sounded stressed; she’d had a letter from her parents describing the wreckage the Trio Winds were causing. “Only, they’re more chaotic. And if the Maestril doesn’t function like usual…I don’t know.”
“When’s it supposed to arrive?” I asked. “Spring?”
She nodded. “You can smell it on the air even earlier. When spring begins, it settles in and really blows.”
The Trio Winds howled as the winter weeks bled into each other. To my disappointment, Daziel and I continued without change as well. I’d hoped we were building toward something, but maybe I’d been mistaken, or maybe neither of us were brave enough to try. Now, though, I was excruciatingly aware of every time our hands brushed, or our eyes held an extra beat, or our legs touched on the sofa.
I spent most of my time in the Keep, trying and failing to make any progress with Language X. “Even if we can make sense of articles and common verbs, how are we going to figure out unique words?” Stefan said mournfully as our cohort gathered one Saturday afternoon. The weekends were often best for working, with no other classes to distract us. Outside, the Ver shrieked down the Lersach, unsettling in its rage, and from the windows we could see violent waves. “They could be adjectives or weird verbs or names—there’s no way to know.”
“Names,” Yael mused, moving her pen in circles on a scrap of paper, as though hoping ideas would spring forth. “That would be useful. If we could find, say, ‘Stefan’ in Language X, then we could pronounce those characters.”
Stefan laughed. We were at the point of exhaustion where everything seemed funny. “It should say ‘Stefan’ in there.”
“Not ‘Stefan,’ ” Gidon said suddenly. He had pulled out a bag of dates, and I was wondering if I could steal one. “But what about—the name of an ancient king? Ena-Cinnai was ruled by royalty twenty-five hundred years ago. Maybe the king’s name is there—or ‘Talum.’ ”
“Talum wasn’t founded yet,” Yael said, but absently, as though correcting a mistake through sheer force of habit rather than because she was focusing on it.
Because she was probably focusing, as I was, on the potential of this idea. This could be a breakthrough. While we could potentially translate words based on frequency—in our language, the most common words were “the,” “be,” “to,” “of,” and “and,” with much of our work so far based on theorizing similar frequencies in Language X—we still wouldn’t know phonetics. If we could match a name from Ena-Cinnaian to Language X, we would be able to pronounce letters.
“It doesn’t have to be a king’s name,” I said slowly. “If we could figure out any word—probably a proper noun—that’s remained unchanged all these years, we could match Language X characters to ours.”
“Are there going to be any?” Stefan asked skeptically. “Pronunciations probably shifted over two thousand years.”
“Do you have a better idea?” I asked.
Stefan shrugged. Apparently not.
For a few minutes, we racked our brains. Stefan took one of Gidon’s dates, so I did too, and we stood around, munching on them and staring at each other. I couldn’t think of a single ancient noun. Surely nouns existed. Probably.
“The tribes,” Gidon said.
Right. Of course. Old things did exist. “Place names,” I added. “I can pull a map from the library, and we can see what’s stayed unchanged.”
“The Great Beasts,” Stefan added. “Other religious stuff, probably? Shedim?”
“Good.” Yael’s pencil stilled, and she ripped off her page of doodles to leave a fresh new page. “Let’s make a list.”
* * *
~ ~ ~
“You’re distracted,” Daziel said a few hours later, probably not for the first time. “What’s going on?”
“Sorry.” I returned to slicing the pears I’d picked from the pear tree in the corner. They weren’t seasonal, but they were very sweet. “We’re trying something new. We’re coming up with words that might have stayed the same for thousands of years—ancient nouns.”
