Seek the Traitor's Son, page 12
Rava Vidar on the rooftop, with her hair braided into a crown.
“I received your message,” the woman says to the archer who captured Elegy. “Where’s the tracking device?”
He reaches into the pack at his side and offers it to the woman. She holds it up to her eye like it’s a diamond and she needs to determine its clarity. She weighs it in her palm.
“The Sword of Cedre,” she says.
Elegy comes back to herself abruptly. She’s supposed to be playing a part.
“There’s been a mistake,” she says, in English.
“Speak again, and I will pull out one of your fingernails,” the woman says to her—no heat, just fact, her English clear enough despite a thick accent. She turns to the archer again. “Anything else on her ship?”
“Blank. All the parts seem to be Losani.”
“Okay.” She takes a bag of coin from her back pocket and hands it to the archer. “You did well. The commander is pleased.”
“Pleased enough to reassign me?” the archer says. “I shot the ship down, Nyx, did you tell her that?”
Nyx. She tries to remember the name.
“I gave her your message, and you were quite clear about your many achievements,” Nyx says. “As to what she’ll do with you, I don’t presume to know the mind of our commander, so you’ll have to wait and see.”
The archer sighs. He pockets the coin, turns around, and goes back the way he came. Nyx grabs Elegy by the elbow and pulls her up the stairs. All the rooms in the house are on the right, since the staircase is built into the side of the mountain. After so many steps Elegy loses count, Nyx takes her through the only door on the left. Hanging above the doorframe is a portrait of an older man with a pale, craggy face, a pair of antlers fixed to the wall behind him so it looks like he’s growing them from his shoulders. The emperor, Icar Talus.
Nyx drags her into the stone room and leaves her there, in the cold, for a long time.
13
They take her shoes and her jacket.
In theory, Elegy knows how to do this—how to be cold, and how to be alone, and how to be afraid.
She knows the rhythm of it, how it jerks her mind in different directions, if she’s not careful; how it tells her to do whatever she can to escape, even if it means giving information to the Talusar. She won’t—she knows that, too. She’ll shiver and she’ll sweat and she’ll lose time. Her throat will burn from thirst and her muscles will ache. She’ll remember the real and the fake memories alike. Maybe she’ll suffer, and maybe she’ll die, but she’ll never give them anything useful.
For the crime of helping a child flee Valla, they killed her father. Then they killed Shir. And the Sword.
They won’t take anything else.
After a length of time she can’t measure, her interrogator comes in. She’s short and pale with greasy hair. There’s dirt under her fingernails.
“My name is Satka,” she says, in English. Her voice is higher than Elegy expected, and raspy. She lisps a little on the S in her name. “Do you know why you were brought here, instead of interrogated by police?”
Elegy doesn’t answer. The first lesson of being interrogated is not to say anything, if you can help it.
“Because we have seen quite a few tracking devices in our time, applied by Losani police,” Satka says. “But the Sword . . . well, the Sword only keeps track of people who work for the Sword. Which means you are interesting to Rava Vidar.”
She puts her hands on her knees and leans forward, closer to Elegy’s face.
“Bad things happen to those who are interesting to Rava Vidar. Now I’ve been polite, I’ve introduced myself, but you haven’t reciprocated. So tell me . . . who are you?”
Elegy tastes bile.
“My name is Ella Locke,” she says. “I’m a smuggler. I don’t know how that tracking device got on my ship.”
Satka smiles a little.
“I sincerely doubt that. But fine. It’s a place to start.” She cracks one of her knuckles. “You know, people like to debate the place of pain in memory reading. For me, it’s essential. Pain lays a person bare. It shakes up the order in a well-ordered mind, so I can sort through its contents at my leisure. So let’s get started, shall we?”
Elegy’s training taught her this, too—to endure pain.
Satka was clearly trained in the opposite. She inflicts exactly as much pain as she intends to, without causing too much damage to continue. Every so often she stops, bends down to look Elegy in the eye. Searching her memories, Elegy reasons. That’s what Talusar truthsayers—high-level interrogators—do. It’s strange to her that someone can dig into her brain without her even feeling it.
She cycles through the false memories like a mantra, even though it’s too late for that to be helpful. Satka isn’t a mind reader.
Chaos, Shir says.
Chaos, Elegy answers.
As time wears on—just how much, Elegy doesn’t know—and Elegy says nothing other than her fake name, her fake identity, her fake story, and her mind apparently yields nothing of use . . . Satka gets frustrated. She grabs Elegy’s arm and twists it out of the socket.
Elegy screams like she hasn’t screamed since she was a child. With wild abandon.
She lets her rage stay shapeless. She thinks about what the Cedrae soldiers say—that it’s still better to be captured here, in Rava’s territory, than in her mother’s along the eastern coast. It could be worse. It can always be worse.
Satka stalks out of the room. A servant comes in a moment later to set a glass of water down in front of Elegy. Elegy scrambles to pick it up with her still-functioning hand, pouring water into her mouth. Water drips onto her shirt in her eagerness. The burning in her throat subsides. She sets the glass down and looks around.
The room is beautiful and old. Round, two stories tall, with stone walls carved with grasses and pine needles, flowers and leaves. The ceiling is unfinished rock, showing veins of color, a record of minerals past. The chandelier itself is a tight cluster of tiny lanterns, each lit with a single flame. She wonders how long it takes to light them all.
She’s kneeling. Her knees ache from the gritty floor. The chandelier is right above her, its flames flickering every now and then from the draft. She hears footsteps outside, but that’s nothing new—there’s no insulation in this grand house, and she hears every servant passing by, every change of the guard.
This time, the footsteps stop at her door.
Satka walks in first, followed by a man with a C-shaped scar on his cheek, and after them both: Rava Vidar.
Rage and revulsion scorch Elegy at the sight of her. It’s been four years since this woman killed Elegy’s mother and husband. Until this moment, she believed she was too weighed down by grief to feel anything more than cold fury. She’s pursued information about Rava, piecing together her revenge, but she hasn’t turned bloodthirsty. Shir wouldn’t have liked it.
But right now, she wants nothing more than to wrap her hands around Rava’s throat and squeeze until the light leaves her eyes.
Focus, she tells herself. One of her arms isn’t in its socket. She’s weak and bruised and surrounded by enemies. Now isn’t the time. Now is the time to pay attention. Every moment she spends here is an opportunity to figure out what Rava is planning, to observe her, to find out something about her that Elegy didn’t know before.
Rava looks the same as the last time Elegy saw her. She wears her hair tied in a hasty knot, instead of her distinctive braid, and her clothes—simple, but fine—are rumpled. There’s mud caked on her boots. She has the look of someone who doesn’t have to care about how she looks. Someone who is someone.
Rava squints at Elegy. “Her story?”
Satka picks at her cuticles without looking down. A nervous tic, Elegy observes. She must have failed to find anything useful in Elegy’s mind.
“She won’t say a thing other than what I told you, Commander. Not a single word.”
“I didn’t realize you needed her to say anything. That’s the advantage of a memory reader, isn’t it?”
Elegy remembers the silhouette on the rooftop, and Shir’s weight against her—
And she forces herself back to the present.
“I saw the same things over and over,” Satka says. “Several iterations of what seems to be the same memory, only—the details are switched around, inconsistent. Incompatible with each other.”
“So you’re saying she’s trained to resist a memory reader,” Rava says, looking down at Elegy. “Can’t imagine why a smuggler would require such skills, can you?”
She closes her eyes, and sways a little. It hurts to breathe. She tries not to react to what Rava is saying—it’s useful to pretend not to know Talusar, and she doubts the guards who captured her told Nyx what language she spoke to them.
“No matter,” Rava says. “Fortunately for me, I have a different sort of truthsayer at my disposal.”
“I’ll go get him, Commander,” the man with the scar says.
Him. Like it’s a name.
“Thank you, Ranos.”
The man—Ranos—leaves the room, closing the door behind him. Satka is still picking her cuticles. She watches Rava, and Rava watches Elegy. For just a moment, Elegy is worried Rava will recognize her—but she wore a mask in the Cenobium, at her mother’s insistence.
“My name is Rava Vidar,” she says to Elegy, in English this time. “Do you know how the Cedrae military instructs its soldiers to resist Talusar interrogation?”
She crouches in front of Elegy, balancing her elbows on her knees. There’s ease in her posture, like she does this kind of thing every day.
“They tell them to begin each mission with a tangle of false memories that bewilders the average Talusar memory reader. Even an above-average one, it seems. So the manner in which you have resisted us so far has all but confirmed that you are who we suspect you to be. At this point, whatever story you have cooked up for later on is completely useless to you. So I will offer you a deal.”
She has a knife at her hip—within reach, if Elegy were more physically capable. It’s long enough to scrape the floor. There’s a vine etched into the handle.
“If you tell me who you really are before my other truthsayer gets here, I will let you live out the rest of your days in Talusar prison,” she says. “I’m going to get the information I need either way. My truthsayer is never wrong. So there’s no need for you to die. Surely you want to survive this?”
Her voice is low and urgent.
“Let me tell you something your leaders may not have bothered to share with you. Four years ago, I went to the augurs at the Cenobium, and they told me that my fate is to attain victory for the Talusar over our Cedrae enemies.”
She has such confidence, Elegy thinks. Of course she does. Rava has been a warrior her entire life, and a legendary one for a third of that time. Of course she believes the prophecy. Of course she believes her triumph is inevitable.
“I’ve already begun to fulfill it,” she says. “I’m the one who killed your Sword. And with what’s coming . . . well, you’d be better off in a prison in Valla than in Cedre.”
Elegy’s breath catches.
Something’s brewing. Something big.
And from the recesses of Elegy’s memory, the voice of an augur: She who moves the fulcrum controls the outcome.
“So no matter whose secrets you keep, and how bravely you face what’s ahead of you,” Rava says, her voice low and poisonous, “you will still lose. Unless you accept this deal.”
Elegy stares up at her, helpless with rage. With grief. She isn’t sure she’ll be able to talk without screaming.
“No thanks,” she says, as casually as she can manage.
Rava smiles. “You’d be more convincing as a smuggler if you weren’t quite so brave.”
She comes to her feet just as the door opens again. This time, a man follows Ranos into the interrogation room.
At first, when he’s still in the shadows by the door, all she can see is that he’s tall and imposing. And then he steps into the light cast by the chandelier, and the flames flicker over stern eyebrows and messy dark hair and the two bars tattooed on his right hand, and she recognizes him.
Theren Forint.
He stops at Rava’s shoulder and waits, his hands clasped behind him. For the first time, it occurs to Elegy that he may be here of his own free will. When she imagined him in House Vidar, she thought of him locked in some basement cell subsisting on bread and water—not serving as Rava’s special truthsayer, the one she uses when her other one fails. Maybe Kesia kept Theren’s true loyalties to herself when she talked to Isre. Maybe this was all a trap, and Elegy just fell into it.
Rava turns toward Theren, and he inclines his head to her, respectful. She puts a bent knuckle under his chin and tips his head up so he’s looking at her.
For a moment she just stares at him, and it’s strange, the way her face goes slack, like she’s not looking at anything at all.
Then she blinks, like she’s surfacing from sleep, and says, “Your time belongs to me. Why, then, are you late?”
“It won’t happen again, my lady.”
“No, it won’t.”
She removes her hand. Theren’s next swallow is labored.
“You won’t be able to fool this one with your training, smuggler,” Rava says—to Elegy, even though her eyes are still locked on Theren. “He reads hearts.”
The only Fever gifts Elegy knows about—apart from the augurs’, of course—have to do with memories. Seeing them. Sharing them. Even erasing them. She’s never heard of a “heart reader,” whatever that is. Her best guess is that he can feel the emotions that memories provoke while he reads them, which is bad news for her—her feelings are bound to give her away.
Which means that if Theren Forint has turned traitor, and he realizes who she is . . . she’s dead.
“Get to work,” Rava says to him, in Talusar this time.
He turns to face Elegy as Rava recedes into the darkness near the door. She braces herself for his recognition, not sure if it will benefit her or be her downfall . . . but it doesn’t come. It’s as if he’s never seen her before. Is she that forgettable?
“I hear you’re a smuggler.” His voice is quiet.
“She doesn’t speak Talusar,” Satka says, still plucking at her cuticles.
“Yes she does.” He crouches in front of Elegy, putting them on the same level. “Don’t you.”
It’s not a question. Light shifts across his face, and she realizes that he’s beautiful now. Time has carved out his jawline and cheekbones, and stolen the boyishness from his face. His eyes are dark and focused.
“You’re not a smuggler. I think you’re a soldier.”
She doesn’t know what to do now. She tries to let her mind go blank. Tries not to react, even emotionally, to anything he says. But her heart betrays her. She is a soldier. A part of her always will be.
Theren nods. “A spy, probably. Easy enough to figure out, since you’re certainly not here to fight. I wonder what it is you want to know.”
“She works for the Sword,” Rava says. “What concerns the Sword most in Valla?”
“You do,” Theren says simply.
Elegy has no idea what he’s seeing, what she’s projecting, but she’s had enough of it.
“I’ve never heard of an interrogation without any questions,” she says, in English. She’s not going to confirm that she speaks Talusar, no matter how obvious it now seems.
“A spy for the Sword in Valla. Here to observe Rava Vidar. Alone,” he says, as if she didn’t speak at all, and then he frowns. Shakes his head. “No. Not alone. How many others?”
She feels a thrill in her chest, despite her efforts to remain neutral. She didn’t come with any others. If he believes she did, then he can’t possibly be as good as Rava Vidar thinks he is.
“A partner? No, more than that.”
He shifts closer to her. From here, she can see how spare he is—muscled, but no softness anywhere, the bones in his shoulders showing through his too-large shirt.
“Two?” he asks, and then he nods.
Rava turns to Satka and barks an order: “Lock down the city. Offer a reward for information.”
“Yes, Commander.” Satka leaves the room.
Elegy doesn’t dare move.
“Enough for now,” Rava says. “It’ll be easier once we find her coconspirators. Let them all decide how much they trust each other.” She smiles a little. “Let her wonder what’s become of them.”
Theren looks at Elegy for just a moment longer, his expression unreadable. He’s exhausted, she thinks, and she’s not sure why she thinks it, because he’s Rava Vidar’s truthsayer, and why does she care if a traitor looks worn all the way through, like a scrap of old fabric?
Then he stands. Rava moves into the light again.
“I’ll expect you to be ready once we find them,” she says to him. “Don’t be inattentive again.”
Theren is taller than her, and since he wasn’t that tall the last time Elegy saw him, she supposes the rumors are true—the Fever can regenerate a person larger than they were before. That explains Rava’s extraordinary height. He bows his head to her, and she puts a hand on the back of his neck, briefly. It’s not affectionate—instead, it seems almost threatening. She watches the halting rise and fall of his breath.
Then Rava releases him, and he walks out of the room, leaving Elegy with Rava and Ranos.
“No one surprises him,” Rava says, in a murmur, like she’s talking to herself.
“Your orders, Commander?” Ranos asks.
