But tonight he had been silent as the stone around them, and it concerned her for a reason she could not quite identify.
As if anticipating her question, he suddenly turned to her, the low fire dancing in his green eyes.
“Would you tell me just one thing?” he asked softly above the murmur of the waterfall.
“If I am able,” she said carefully, kneeling closer to the fire, and to him.
“When I step into the arena, to face my first Challenge,” he said evenly, “do you hope I will die?”
The question caught her completely by surprise. She opened her mouth, but no words came forth, for she truly did not know at that moment how she might answer him truthfully. She snapped her mouth shut, her face twisting into a mask of concentration.
Is that what I wish? she asked herself. Do I honestly hope that he will die, this creature with whom I have spent so long, this animal with whom I have lived and suffered, to whom I have betrothed myself as a tresh? Despite all the things she had ever imagined or been taught, she had come to feel a sense of pride in Reza, a pride that was more than one should feel for teaching an animal tricks, as the handlers were sometimes wont to do. She knew that he must hate her, must despise her entire race, and she often sought to use that as a weapon against him, to break him down, to make him fail.
But he had only become more determined, rising unfailingly to every test she put before him. His success or failure was, at that stage, immaterial; he consistently made the attempt, and that is what counted, all that mattered. Gradually, his perseverance had paid off. Many of the peers were discreetly jealous of her tresh, if that was possible. She herself had become possessed of a strange fondness for him, despite the revulsion she felt toward his species, despite the continued irrepressible urge to force him to her will, to show her own superiority, a superiority that she knew was fading as he grew stronger, quicker. If only his blood would sing, she often cried to herself. If only his spirit – if he possessed one – would show itself, all could be… different, in a way she was afraid to fully imagine.
If only his blood would sing…
Turning back to meet his glowing eyes, she knew in her heart that he must someday die, that he would – no, that he must – never leave the Homeworld alive. But she could not find it in herself to wish it upon him.
“Reza…” she said, trying to find a way of saying what she felt without exposing the weakness she had developed toward him. “The oath you took when you were brought into the kazha, the oath by which you bound yourself as a tresh, I also have taken, though long before you came to me. It is an oath taken only once in life, but it lasts for as long as the heart beats, as long as two work together as one, as tresh. The one to whom I was bound, cycles ago, died in a… training accident, you might call it. But my obligations to her honor were passed on to you when I was called upon to become your tresh. Your teacher. And in that capacity, I can be nothing but pleased, for you have learned well, animal – human – or no.” She looked away toward the water, struggling to admit what she had to say. “There will come a day, my tresh, when your blood will soak the sands of the arena,” she told him, her claws digging silently into the rock as she willed the words forward, as if her throat was suddenly too small to contain them. “But I shall not rejoice in it.”
She could see relief wash over Reza’s face. She was surprised how well she could interpret his body language, not because she could understand that of the humans, but because the language of his body had become Kreelan.
“Esah-Zhurah…” he said. Then he stopped, not sure how to continue.
She watched as he struggled with himself for a moment, until the strange strength that dwelt within him surfaced, washing away the creases of doubt on his face.
“There is much for which I feel compelled to hate you, to hate your kind,” he explained, his eyes drawn to the fire as if in search of the meaning of his fate. “For the deaths of my parents, at the hands of the priestess herself. For the destruction of the world of my birth, and the many lives that perished there. For the destruction of the planet from which I was taken, a world I often hated, but which I had come to call home. And for all of the death that has been wrought upon my people, on a scale I will never be able to understand, and will never truly be able to feel in my heart.” He looked up at her, his face betraying an open vulnerability that shocked her as strongly as if she had been doused with freezing water. “For all this, I cannot find it in me to truly hate you, my tresh, my teacher. There are many among my kind who would condemn me to death as a traitor for those words, but they are nonetheless true, and to deny them, or leave them unspoken, would be to lie to myself.” He looked back to the fire, helplessly. “There was a time, not so long ago,” he whispered, “when I wanted to beat you, to destroy you, to make you feel pain a thousand times what I felt every time you beat me. But…” he shrugged. “But I found, after a while, that I wanted your respect, your trust, more than anything else.” He fell silent for a moment. “The greatest fear I have,” he went on, “is that I will fail you, will bring shame upon you. And that… you will shun me.”
Esah-Zhurah did not know what to say. Never had she thought such a time as this would come, when this human, so full of fight and anger, would reveal such a thing to her, something that could be exploited as a terrible weakness.
But that was the point, she told herself. He had laid himself open to her, in hopes that she would not turn his words against him, that he could trust her. And, in a decision that shocked the part of her mind that carried the xenophobic character of her race, a race that had exterminated over a dozen sentient species in past millennia, she committed herself to guarding his trust.
“I will not abandon you,” she said simply, openly. “Whatever the Way brings us, we shall share in it together.”
Later, after they had banked the fire and lay down for the night, Reza remained awake. His mind was consumed by thoughts that swirled and circled like wolves around a stricken deer, darting just to the edge of focus before they faded into the shadowy darkness once more. The more he watched them, the more they seemed to carry the faces of people he had once known, some of them of a kind his people called “friends,” a relationship that did not exist among the society that had kidnapped him.
One of the wolf faces, an old man with the eyes of a young warrior, especially troubled him. The eyes did not accuse, but Reza could not help but feel that he had somehow betrayed the being that lay behind the mask that lunged and retreated within his mind.
Wiley, he suddenly thought, wincing at the foreign sound of the name even as he breathed it in his mind, am I a traitor?
“Do whatever you can to stay alive, son,” the old colonel had said that day so long ago, “If anybody can make it, you can…”
Wiley, Reza cried to himself, must I become one of them to make it? Do I have any choice? For just a moment, he bitterly resented the old man’s leaving him, going off to die himself as Reza was taken by the cruel fate that had pursued him since the fall of New Constantinople.
But the moment blinked away into nothingness, just as the wolfish thought-face blurred into oblivion. Wiley had been wise enough to know when it was time to die, and had done so with the dignity of soldiers throughout history who had made one last, hopeless stand against the invaders of their homeland. And, aside from the admission letter he had given Reza for the academy, the old man had left Reza with the only other gift he could give: a chance at life. And Reza knew then that if he chose to trust this alien girl, to allow himself that vital weakness before her, Wiley would understand.