For Senora Eva.

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She was nine years old when he came. She thought he was at least a hundred. There was no youth in the haggard lines of his face, which was stretched thin across his bones from hunger and thirst and sorrow. When they first met, she thought his eyes were black, but that was because there was nothing in them but guilt and shame and pain.

His eyes were blue, but it was weeks before she realized it. They were black and black and black, and then one day he laughed at something she said, and inexplicably they flashed blue. They stayed that way for a long time.

She had never seen death before she saw him. Her parents were Tevouins before her, and they had died before she was old enough to realize the difference. But death gripped him like an angry noose. She imagined she could see the knot against his sunburned neck, squeezing all the breath out of his throat until nothing inside of him could get out.

She couldn’t remember what she had said that day his eyes flashed blue. All she could remember was that it wasn’t profound. He didn’t need profound. He needed a family.

As the days passed, his age decreased. One hundred, ninety-nine, ninety-eight, ninety-seven…and on the day his eyes were blue, he was nine years old.

Once, she asked him where he came from. He told her that he came from nowhere.

She knew he was lying because of the peculiar shadow that passed over his face, because things like guilt and shame and pain had to come from somewhere, and because she could taste the lie in the air. It tasted of mildew and disappointment.

She decided then that she would never lie, because if that taste were allowed to fill the world, then everyone would surely die from the sheer repugnance of it.

Once, she asked him what he was running from. He told her that he wasn’t running from anything.

The peculiar shadow reappeared, and she could taste the lie once more. He used to look over his shoulder at every turn, flinch whenever someone called his name, and wake up screaming in the middle of the night.

She knew he was running from something. She also knew, somehow, that she wasn’t supposed to know. So she stopped asking, because fewer lies gave the world a little more time to breathe.

When they were thirteen, a boy told her that the fey didn’t really exist, and that she was stupid for talking to them. Her brother Nathaniel gave him a black eye, and the boy bloodied Nat’s nose. Rowe jumped in and blackened the boy’s other eye before Astra stopped the fight. She told them that families didn’t solve problems this way, and the boy said that Rowe wasn’t family.

Naima never forgot that moment for as long as she lived, because for a brief second Rowe’s eyes were black again, and she knew that whatever he was running from had finally caught up with him.

Nathaniel told the boy that Rowe was his brother, and that made him a Tevouin. Blue replaced black once more, and something tangible grew between the two. It was more than a bond. It was a promise.

Rowe never got into fights with his family after that, even if the other boys tried to start something. Naima knew that Astra’s words had been more than a rebuke to him—they were a rule to live by. The Tevouins were all he had, because he had left everything else behind.

When they were fifteen, he could handle a sword better than most people could handle living. He was speed and grace and liquid fire, kicking up sand until it was hard to see the line between skill and talent.

Naima only liked watching because the fey did. They would dart between sword thrusts, skate along the blade’s edge like sunlight, and twirl through Rowe’s movements in ribbons of boundless energy.

It was pure poetry.

When she told him that she thought he might be a poet, he told her that only a poet would think that. She wasn’t a poet though. She was a storyteller. She knew that like she knew how to breathe.

When they were seventeen, Nat was killed, and she saw Rowe cry for the first time. She thought she could see the years building up inside of him again—eighteen, nineteen, twenty, and on and on. He cried like he fought—so fast and fierce that she couldn’t see the line between anger and sorrow. Maybe there wasn’t one.

Naima cried like she lived—with so much passion that it filled up her insides and never drained out completely. She still carried some of the tears with her, even two years later. She didn’t think of them as burdens. They were more like crystalline memories, refracting her emotions like light inside of her.

A few months later, after they had both stopped crying, she tried to explain this to Rowe. He told her she was a poet, and she told him she was a storyteller.

He told her that he didn’t know there was a difference.

Later, when she thought about it, she decided that she agreed with him.

When she was eighteen, and Rowe was maybe thirty—because he never really shed those years that Nathaniel’s death gave him—they traveled south to the dark lands to help a dying village.

If lying tasted like mildew and disappointment, then death tasted like the world’s last breath—teeming with every lie ever told and every promise ever broken.

Most people did not fear death, though. They feared the inevitability of it.

She decided to not fear either one. Death was a promise in itself. Leana mor’che dros vivte, ea Attu. In death, we return to the true life.

She liked the idea of a promise that wouldn’t be broken. It made the taste of death easier to bear.

She told Rowe about her decision, and he told her that there were worse things in life than death anyway. She asked him what he meant, and that peculiar shadow crossed his features. She changed the subject before his blue eyes could turn black again.

When she was nineteen, and Rowe was maybe thirty-one, she almost got burned as a witch twice in the same year. Rowe grew frustrated with the Inquisitor’s lies, but she just liked to shape it into a story for the children. They needed to know that the truth always won in the end.

Maybe she wasn’t a storyteller at all, but a truthteller.

It was the same year that Rowe spent almost two months in the Asherian dungeons. When he escaped, it was several days before the black in his eyes melted back into blue. In two months, he had gained two years. Now he was maybe thirty-three.

It was the same year that she met a prince who was also nineteen going on thirty-three, though in a different way than Rowe. She liked to tell him the real and honest truth, every chance she had, because every truth chipped away another year—thirty-two, thirty-one, thirty—until one day he was nineteen again, and he had remembered how to smile.

Rowe was different. He was thirty-three one day, and nineteen the next, because there was something about the princess that cut away the years like a sharp knife. His eyes were the bluest that Naima had ever seen them. Not a trace of black.

When she was nineteen and a half, she took a drink of water and knew immediately, before the taste of the desert gold had even left her mouth, that it was time to die. For some reason, this death tasted like old life. It was as if all the years she might have had rushed through her body like a river, and she was twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two—all the way to a hundred, and all in the space of one breath. Living a lifetime in the course of a heartbeat is more than living. It is living, and there is definitely a difference.

Pure poetry.

When Naima was a hundred years old, she died like she lived—with a smile on her lips and so much passion that it filled up her insides and spilled into the world, where the taste of it would linger for the rest of time.