The strongest memory of all was the vision of a pair of wise, ancient sky-colored eyes that burned and knew the truth. The image still made Ezab’s heart thud painfully with cold sorrow. Every day as he closed the bakery, his eyes were drawn like ants to sugarcakes to the placard above the lintel, and every time he read it, the memories returned. They used to come in relentless floods, but now it was only a few images: the taste of a honey-bite on his tongue, a short barked laugh…and others, perhaps a forced laugh of his own, or the dull ache of a supposedly laudatory slap on the back from one of the other men.
Maybe it was because today was the seventh anniversary of her disappearance, but for whatever reason, Ezab walked to the box where he kept the recipes instead of leaving. He rummaged through them for a few seconds and withdrew one card. It was not the original, and he had the recipe committed to memory, but it was enough of a reminder.
Everyone knew Kirutha, the sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued young woman who lived alone in a hovel just inside city limits. The last surviving King’s Spy, it was said; she wanted to leave Bahereh, and most of the city of Bahereh wanted her gone too, but she was not allowed to go lest she leak valuable information to anyone. All of the other King’s Spies had met with untimely deaths and unfortunate accidents, but somehow Kirutha had managed to survive. Some claimed she was a witch. Other rumors whispered the great monarch himself had given up on causing her death because he was terrified of her. As for the question of why such a being had been chosen to be one of his protectors against coups in the first place, no one had an answer.
So when Ezab was dared to go to Kirutha’s shack and make some sort of romantic advance toward her, even some of the other men protested. The dare at age eighteen was a ritual, an unofficial passage into manhood, but it was no good if the dare would almost certainly result in death. But in the end it was decided; Ezab would go to Kirutha and ask her if she wanted an evening out or some such—and she must not know it was a dare.
So naturally Ezab’s heart was throbbing away in his throat like a bird trying to tear loose from its cage as he paced in the direction of Kirutha’s hovel. He had heard stories of what Kirutha could do: how she would dart forward and rip out your jugular with her teeth if she were displeased, or how a single withering glance from her could dry up a woman’s bleeding or make a male’s manhood drop off.
By most beggars’ standards, Kirutha’s shed was not such a dreadful place. But to Ezab, the four walls fashioned of long sticks lashed together and plastered with daub seemed to make a shoddy child’s fort rather than a home. But there was Kirutha, sitting straight-backed on a hand-woven mat before the hovel, a small yellow-furred cat seated beside her, knots of mop-haired peasant children darting about just a few feet away, as if it were her palace. And to think she actually used to live in a palace.
Ezab hung back, watching her, stalling for a few seconds before confronting the woman he sincerely hoped would not tear out his jugular. He sidled surreptitiously behind a large rolled-up carpet leaning against a nearby building, keeping his eyes on Kirutha. She disappeared into the hovel and when she came back into view she was carrying a tray of what looked like fresh, steaming baked honey-bites. Before Ezab had time to be puzzled, his emotions jumped straight to disbelief, for the children flocked from various hiding places to the witch-woman’s side and plucked the honey-bites from the tray. As the children chewed noisily, Kirutha scolded them, “What do you say?” and was answered by chorus of sticky “thank yous.”
Ezab was half-shocked, half-confounded. Kirutha was feeding the capital city’s children? Since she was now eating one of the honey-bites herself, they were likely not poisoned, but how in the white world did the children trust her after all the warnings their parents had surely given?
Swallowing hard, Ezab picked his way around the munching children to reach Kirutha. When he was but a cubit from her, she was bent to one side, stroking another cat that had sidled up beside her, so he nearly jumped out of his skin when she addressed him. “Ezab Abfuya, son of Yarim Abfuya the butcher. What do you want?”
“I…I, uh…” He stuttered. Some of the nearby children eyed him curiously, enjoying the spectacle. One of them, a dirty-faced little girl with lopsided braids, piped up.
“Maybe he likes you, Kiri!”
It was not a good time for speculation, but Ezab wondered why the child chose to call Kirutha by the first syllable of her name followed by an “i,” usually a nickname reserved for the closest of friends.
“Um, yes,” Ezab stammered. “She…she’s right.”
Kirutha turned to face him. It was the first time Ezab had seen her up close. Her skin was the color of dense cinnamon, her stony features large and sharply defined. She was not beautiful, but she certainly held one’s attention. Her eyes were blue, bright burning crystal blue, an intense color rare as rain in desertlike Bahereh. The face was youthful, devoid of lines, but those eyes could have seen a thousand summers. Ezab’s heart squeezed itself into a tight little ball, as if trying to avoid her gaze.
“I’ve been watching you,” Ezab lied. “I’ve heard the things everyone says and I, well, I want you to know I don’t think they’re true. And I want to prove everyone wrong. You want to go out sometime?” He sucked in a gust of air and held it fast, praying it wasn’t the last breath he ever drew.
Her face did not change but for the movement of her mouth when she spoke. “You just turned eighteen. The men dared you to do this.”
Ezab flinched. “How did you know? You…can’t read minds, can you?”
She did not smile—her mouth remained in a firm scowl—but her eyes twinkled. “I can see the facts,” she answered cryptically before adding, “And it’s really quite obvious. You look to be about eighteen years old. There is fear and confusion in your eyes, but no happy anticipation. Also, I would have known if you had been skulking around my home.”
“I guess this is why you were a King’s Spy.” Ezab winced even as the words fell from his lips. Why did he always blurt out whatever was running through his head when he was under pressure?
Much to his surprise, she laughed. It was a short, percussive sound, as if her voice had forgotten how to make it. “Aye. But it didn’t take a spy to figure what you were doing. It was all over your face.”
Ezab scuffed the ground with his foot. “I’ve been told my face is like an open book. Not just an open book, an open child’s book.”
She barked out another laugh, and this one sounded a bit more natural. “Have a honey-bite, Ezab Abfuya.” She offered him the tray, taking one morsel for herself and popping it into her mouth in a very unladylike manner. Ezab followed suit, insisting to himself that if she hadn’t poisoned the children, she wouldn’t poison him. A surprising burst of caramel sweetness shocked his taste buds as he chewed.
“These are good!”
“Of course they’re good. Kiri made them,” noted a small boy critically, glaring at Ezab from his seat in the dirt as if the young man were severely lacking in brains. Ezab flushed.
“You…bake for them?” Ezab wiped his sweaty palms on his trousers, silently uttering prayers that the witch-woman wasn’t toying with him.
“You’re surprised?” Her voice was suddenly deadpan. Being completely unreadable had doubtless made her an excellent espionage expert, but Ezab was certainly no assassin.
“I, er, I hadn’t…heard anything…about you being able to cook…I mean, a King’s Spy…” he was babbling again. Blast it, why couldn’t he act more like the man he had supposedly become?
“I worked in the royal kitchen.” There was a bit less of an edge to her voice now. “And if you tell anyone that, I’m afraid you’ll regret it,” she remarked, the ghost of a smile twitching at the corners of her mouth.
“I won’t tell!” Ezab placed a hand over his heart.
She chuckled loudly, and Ezab flinched, eliciting laughter from many of the nearby urchins. “You amuse me, boy. Feel free to return, if you wish. After all, I can’t have these little ones eating all of my honey-bites, can I?”
Ezab forced out a laugh.
“Tell the men I glared monstrously at you and threatened to curse you when you approached me. And say I threw this after you as you ran away.” She reached behind herself and lifted a heavy, tarnished metal spoon, pressing it into Ezab’s hand.
She did not say goodbye, but he knew he was being dismissed. With a hasty farewell, Ezab turned and skittered away, his ears burning from the catcalls the children shouted after him.
So from then on, every time Ezab saw the spoon nailed above his lintel, he was reminded of the reception the men gave him when he returned from his dare. They had guffawed as they practically dragged him to his home to affix the spoon Kirutha had “thrown after him” to his doorway, clapping him on the back and pronouncing him a man. Now that he was one of them, he spent a great amount of time in the pubs with his new friends—usually Hemi and Fyarlo, two other eighteen-year-olds who were constantly challenging each other to drinking contests. Ezab had spent many a morning sleeping off the profane amounts of alcohol he had imbibed the previous night at the urging of his friends. He particularly remembered the first time Fyarlo had bullied him into a contest against Hemi. That had resulted in all of the men remembering how Ezab Abfuya couldn’t hold liquor to save his life. Naturally he was a prime target for drinking contests now. Afterward, he always boasted emptily that he was holding out on everyone and one day would be able to drink more than any man in Bahereh.
How strange that every time he saw that battered old utensil as he walked, so often still weak and headachy, from his home, made him feel like a small child who had broken a window and blamed it on his smaller brother—certainly it did not make him feel like a man. The dare was a test, a demonstration of a man’s mettle, but he had simply walked up to Kirutha and she had guessed his motivation immediately. Kirutha could read him much more easily than the men with whom he now blustered and joked in the pubs, which was likely why whenever he began to wander absentmindedly, his feet led him to Kirutha’s hovel.
She did not seem surprised when he reappeared in front of her home. Neither did the children; in fact, the little girl with the crooked pigtails sang out to him, “I knew you’d be back!” as he busily chewed one of Kirutha’s peppered pretzels—then proceeded to make a complete fool of himself fanning his tongue at the spiciness.
It was almost a relief, being around someone who could see right through him—even if she still terrified him just a bit. He didn’t have to waste his time pretending to enjoy crude jokes or trying to deepen his voice while laughing hugely. For a former spy, Kirutha was surprisingly willing to converse. Granted, she had divulged only her age (twenty-four, which mortified Ezab even more, as she couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen at the height of her espionage days), but she was much more willing to listen to him ramble than the men. And the men didn’t make such excellent cinnamon cookies. They didn’t occasionally threaten to kill him just to laugh at his reaction either, but he was willing to tolerate that from Kirutha. Most of the death threats came after he ranted about the torture of being forced into drinking challenges; first she would advise him on how to avoid those situations, and then warn him that she might have to kill him for being such a baby.
A good part of their time together was spent silently, with Ezab watching Kirutha make various treats—she didn’t mind as long as he didn’t unduly distract her. He would stand behind her, transfixed, as her long quick fingers measured ingredients and prodded dough. She had built her own small oven of clay, and Ezab swiftly picked up on how to use it. Not only that, he found he had a knack for memorizing her recipes. Every one was delectable, but Ezab’s favorites were the honey-bites, and the day Kirutha allowed him to make a batch of his own, the children pronounced them “nearly as good as Kiri’s.” Though Kirutha encouraged him to introduce his baked goods to the other men, he kept his new interest a secret.
Six months had passed since Ezab’s eighteenth birthday when he finally asked her the question that had been troubling him since they met. By then he had learned that she could not read minds; she was simply astute, and much wiser than he ever had a prayer of being. Which is why he asked her one day: “Why is it that I still don’t feel like a man? The men accept me.”
She seemed surprised at the question, something that rarely happened. “I would have thought you knew by now. The person the men accept is not Ezab Abfuya, but a pretender who acts as one of them in order to gain the false acceptance you have now. Yet you worry they will not accept you if you are yourself.”
“That might be because the Ezab Abfuya I really am is a weakling.”
Kirutha raised and lowered her bony shoulders, which were now covered in a thick wool shawl Ezab had brought her when the nights grew cold. “You have never had a chance to prove that you are anything but a weakling. The dare is an empty, hollow tradition that proves nothing real. One day there will be a chance for you to choose between the two halves you have become. The choice will show your strength, your belief in the person you know as yourself, and then you will know you are a man.”
“So I will feel like a person split in half forever, then.”
Rather than rebuking him for the childish comment, she regarded him somberly with the blazing, ancient-looking azure eyes that Ezab could still barely stand to meet. “Never say that danger cannot find you, Ezab. For the minute you do so, it will.”
At the time, he had shrugged off the advice—he had been hoping for something more like, “You should feel like a man, you’re doing everything right, it will just take time.” But it was barely a month after this conversation that she vanished. Ezab hadn’t visited her for a week, as his father had been keeping him busy—teaching him a “real man’s trade” in the butcher shop. He went to see Kirutha one morning only to find the hovel empty, the children absent. He waited for a few minutes, then left, and returned many hours later. Ezab had been sure she only had gone to run some errands or some such and would return promptly.
But she did not return promptly, and unease began to swell in Ezab’s heart. Surely no harm had befallen her—what earthly force could possibly harm Kirutha? She was simply a constant in his life. But on the third day of her absence, Ezab overheard the men discussing her in one of the smoky pubs.
“I heard the king finally got her,” Fyarlo confided to Hemi.
“What, the same way he got all the other spies?”
“No, not exactly. The others all met with unfortunate accidents; I’d lay odds the king couldn’t arrange that for the witch-woman. Tadul is one of the palace guards. He saw them bring her in.”
“Did they…?”
Fyarlo cut Hemi off. “He doesn’t know. Don’t know if that witch-woman can even die. Who cares, anyway? Oy, Ezab! Up for a drinking contest? Let’s see if you can get through an entire tankard!”
Ezab took the memory of those words and buried them deep in his mind where he would never again find them, telling himself over and over that they must be wrong. But as days became weeks and weeks became months, and the stories of Kirutha’s capture began to circulate, Ezab slowly came to realize that his friend was gone and would never return. He even made several trips to her hovel, took some of her belongings home with him, especially her recipes. Instead of going to the pubs, he made honey-bites, peppered pretzels, and cinnamon cookies to pass the time, ignoring what the men would think if they knew he was baking.
But the news of Kirutha’s fate truly hit home the day the king’s herald made a public announcement. A former King’s Spy had been suspected of foul play against the king, and she had been appropriately dealt with, claimed the herald. And everyone in Bahereh knew that the phrase “appropriately dealt with” meant “executed.”
That night when Ezab went home, he fingered gently through all of Kirutha’s recipes. When he found the one for the honey-bites, the first treat of hers he had sampled, the dessert whose smell always had seemed to cling to her, he took it in his hands and turned it over and over. Then, in a sudden, violent burst of activity, he rent the ragged paper card to shreds, the pieces drifting to the floor like ashes.
Now Ezab replaced the honey-bite recipe card that he had copied from memory in its box. The honey-bites were the signature dessert of the Wise Eye Bakery, and now Hemi and Fyarlo, who once would have mocked him for doing such a womanly thing as cooking, came into the bakery every day after work for a small platter of the sweet morsels. Though they did enjoy honey-bites, Ezab did not speak to them much; a few times, he had had to throw them out for coming in blind drunk and causing a racket. He did not have the same type of popularity he once yearned for, but he was certain that Kirutha would no longer be calling him a “pretender” if she were still alive. She would be proud of him.
As he walked out, he paused before the threshold, glancing up at the placard. It bore an illustration of an all-seeing blue eye, flanked by an inscription: “The wise eye sees through the lies in your lives.”
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