"Are you sure she's not the one cursed to protect you?" Leila slunk over to Naji and wrapped her arms around his shoulders and pressed her nose into the part of his hair. "Oh, don't be like that," she purred. "You know I was only joking."
"No, you weren't," I said. I wanted that knife so bad. It weren't so much cause of Naji but cause I can't stand a bully, and that's all she was. A bully who got away with it cause she was so beautiful.
"Ananna," Naji said. "Stop. She's going to help me."
"If I can," Leila said, her arms still wrapped around Naji's shoulders, her mouth right on the verge of smiling.
That was too much. I stalked out of the house, back out into the sunlight, all the way down the steps leading into the river. Naji's headache be damned. I sat down at the top step and stuck my feet in the water. Fish swam up to me and nibbled on my toes but nobody came out of the house. I didn't expect 'em to.
I stayed out there for a while, until the sun set and my stomach grumbled. I thought about swimming over to the other side of the river and setting up camp. But by now it was too dark to see, and I doubted I'd be able to catch any fish to eat. The air had gotten cold again, and the river was cold, and I kept on shivering out there in my ragged, cut-up dress.
My pride kept me from walking back in the house until it was late enough I figured both of 'em had fallen asleep. I crept back in slowly, pulling up on the door handle so the hinges wouldn't creak. The floors were stone, so my bare feet didn't make too much noise.
"I'm glad to see you came back inside."
I yelped.
Naji was stretched out on a cot in the corner of the room. He pushed up on his arm when he saw me.
"Where's Leila?"
"Asleep, I imagine."
I sat down on the floor beside the cot, drawing my feet up close against me.
"I don't like her," I said, pitching my voice low.
"I'd prefer not to talk about this." A rustle as he rolled over onto his back and pulled the thin woven blanket over his chest.
"She's beautiful," I said.
"I know."
I wanted to slap him for that, but I didn't, cause I knew I didn't have no good reason. "It means she ain't trustworthy."
"What? Because she's beautiful?"
"Yeah. Beautiful people, things are too easy for 'em. They don't know how to survive in this world. Somebody's ugly, or even plain, normal-looking, that means they got to work twice as hard for things. For anything. Just to get people to listen to 'em, or take 'em serious. So yeah. I don't trust beautiful people."
"I see." He dropped his head to the side. I didn't look at him, but down at the floor instead, at the fissures in the stones. "No wonder you were so quick to trust me."
I heard the hard edge in his voice, the crack of bitterness. And so I lifted my head. He was staring up at the ceiling.
"You ain't ugly," I said.
He didn't answer, and I knew my opinion didn't matter none anyway.
CHAPTER TEN
Leila didn't do much to sway me over to trusting her those next few days, mostly cause she toyed with Naji, not giving him a straight answer one way or another with regards to the curse.
"He needs to rest," she told me that first afternoon. "Before I can examine him to see if I can help." She had come out to the river to gather up a jar of silt and a few handfuls of river nettle. I spent as little time inside the house as I could, and it surprised me that she said anything to me. I hadn't asked after him, although I'd been wondering.
"He's a lot more injured than he lets on," she added, scooping the silt up with her hand. It streamed through her fingers and glittered in the sunlight. "I'm surprised he made it as far as he did."
"I took care of him," I snapped, even though I was trying to hold my tongue.
She looked up from the half-filled jar. "Of course you tried, sweetling," she said. "But you aren't used to that sort of magic." One of her vicious half-smiles. "Or any kind of magic at all."
The water glided around my ankles, and I thought about that night the river spoke to me in her babbling soft language, that night she guided me into action.
"By the way," Leila said. "I have some old clothes that might work for you. Men's clothes, of course. You're not going to fit into anything of mine, I'm afraid."
I knew I really wasn't going to hold my tongue against that, so I slipped off the edge of the steps and into the river, the cold shocking the anger right out of me. I kept my eyes open, the way I always do underwater, so I could see the sunlight streaming down from the surface, lighting up the murkiness.
Naji'd told me Leila was some kind of river witch, but the river didn't seem to play favorites, didn't seem to care about the differences between me and her. It wasn't like Naji. And so I stayed under long as I could, cause it was safe down there, everything blurred, the coldness turning me numb.
Naji did seem to get better. I guess I'll give Leila that. He got the color back in his cheeks, and he didn't shake when he shuffled around the house. The wound was slow to heal, though, despite the river nettle Leila pressed against it every evening. Sometimes I watched them, studying the way her long delicate fingers lingered on his chest. When she sang, her voice twinkled like starlight, clear and bright and perfect. That was when I figured out that she and Naji had been lovers before he got the scar. Cause she touched him like she knew how, and he stared at her like all he thought about was her touch.
It left me dizzy and kind of sick to my stomach. At least she never did say nothing about his face again. Not in front of me, anyway.
We'd been there close to a week when Leila announced over dinner that she was ready to talk to Naji about the curse.
"Finally," I said.
Naji kicked me under the table.
"You need to be there too," Leila said.
"Be where?"
"The garden, I imagine," Naji said. He poked at the fish on his plate. All we ate was fish and river reeds, steamed in the hearth in the main room.