Folio Two, Page Twenty-Eight (svegra mos rokron tal-kot)

That afternoon, I didn’t meet with Sukua, but I sent a message with his cousin.

Matriarch Nikis had called an emergency meeting in the garden — the only place where all of us could gather in relative comfort. My ksibja lesson ended early, so I got there first and climbed up into one of the fruit trees, leaving space low in the branches for the other kids.

Aunt Nikis didn’t seem to comprehend someone was there. She paced up and down the ivy path without even glancing at the tangles of blue and white flowers creeping up the arbors and down the path, and she crushed more than a few underfoot. Every now and then, she took a piece of paper out of her pocket and took out her reading glasses. I watched her practice her bearing in the relative seclusion. Seeing her like this made my stomach tighten, and I almost wished I’d told Domìntar, my music instructor, to take me through one of the pieces again.

This seems as good a place as any to go through a list of the household, and it will provide a starting place for the future additions and subtractions. We had my mom’s sister, Teinar, and her husband Nikoa, both retired. Nikoa spent most of his time in the recreation room yelling at the television. The two of them were responsible for Anumë and Hiret, who were both dysfunctional in radically different ways. Anumë had married a hulk of an athlete, Deimoa, who had family connections in the State Office, and together they’d had Kobeis and Kepus.

Aunt Nikis came from the other half of the maternal family, and she had had two sons. The first, Moha, still lived with us; Karatau had married into one of the families down the street, and we almost never saw him. His daughter Lelais went to school with me.

Other than that, we had three distant relations from the Taltsuya family in residence, along with two orphans that Nikis had adopted, also distant relations of ours — Meihannyi and Khatein. They were several years older than me. We also boarded a paternal relative named Kurannyi, along with my ksibja tutor, Domìntar.

Almost everyone in the family had involved him- or herself in politics. We had a lot of skeletons in the closet, more than any of us kids could have conceived.

Everyone trickled in as slow as the Nara river. Khatein and Meihannyi sat in the low branches of the tree, and Kobeis sat in front of the fountain at the center of the cobblestone labyrinth that went through the gardens. She knew how to climb trees, but Anumë would have freaked.

Nikis stopped pacing as soon as most of the adults had arrived. She stood beneath the arbor with her hands clutching the wrought iron around her. I thought she looked more like someone bracing for a halting train than a matriarch about to give a speech. Dignity had always seemed very easy for her, but not now.

“I have something important and terrible to tell you,” she said.

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