Seek the Traitor's Son, page 32
She forces herself to focus on the cut on his arm. It’s still bleeding, but not so deep they need to find a doctor. With unsteady hands, she sprays it with antiseptic, then uses a square of gauze to wipe it clean.
“It’s shallower than I thought,” she says, because the silence has become strange, and she needs to fill it. “Might not even scar.”
“I have so many, one more scar won’t make much of a difference.”
“Trust me. No one who looks at you is going to be thinking about them.”
A moment too late, she realizes what she said, and her cheeks burn.
She sprays the gash with wound sealant, careful with the nozzle. It’s only human to crave contact after so long without it, she reminds herself. For years, she couldn’t stand a body near hers that wasn’t Shir’s. And then, once she could have tried again for some meaningless satisfaction, she was already in the habit of being alone.
Theren lifts his hand, and brushes the lock of wet hair that’s stuck to her cheek back behind her ear. For a moment, his fingertips linger on her earlobe, and that heat is still in his eyes, and God—
She slides a hand behind his head and brings his mouth down to hers.
His response is fervent, almost frantic: his arm wraps around her back to pull her hard against him, and his lips part beneath hers. Desire lights up her body like elixir, and she lets out an embarrassingly eager sound, crowding him against one of the shelves. It creaks, and a bottle of antiseptic spray falls, but she doesn’t care; she doesn’t care; she doesn’t care.
His hand gathers her shirt into a fist, and she does what she’s wanted to do for days, without articulating it even to herself; she runs her fingers along the line of his jaw and down his throat to his collarbone. He kisses her harder, deeper, and she feels like every inch of her is prickling and sparking with desire; it’s too much but she’s not sure how it could ever, ever be enough. Her hand drops to his shoulder, firm with muscle, and her finger brushes the still-sticky wound spray.
Reality floods back in as she remembers the gash, and then how he got it, and then who he is, as in, Theren Forint, breaker of oaths and survivor of Valla and deadly sword-wielding almost-Talusar. Not some man she met at a bar, not some chance encounter on a mission—
Not Shir.
Breathless, she pulls away, her hand hovering over her mouth. She feels too warm. Too unsteady.
“We should find some dry clothes,” she says.
Theren straightens. Runs a hand through his hair.
“Okay,” he says.
* * *
When she wakes, there’s rain drumming on the windows, which is the first sign she’s not at home. It doesn’t rain much in Losan.
Last night, after—well, after, a helpful deputy of General Saetang showed them to the guest apartments, where Elegy and Parekh took one room and Arias and Theren took the one across from them. She thought it would be easy to fall asleep, but of course it wasn’t, not with her body flushed and her thoughts racing. Memories of fighting for her life faded into the background. All she could think about was Shir, and the deep well of grief inside her, and then something new: fear. Fear that the well wasn’t as deep as it should be.
She listens to the rain for a few minutes, now, as Parekh shifts in the bed next to hers. She’s only been lying there for a few minutes when there’s a gentle tap on the door. Then Theren steps into the room, a cup in each hand.
“Felt you wake up,” he says, and she’s too startled by the idea of that to do anything but nod. No one surprises him was Rava’s assessment, and she seems to be right, most of the time.
But Elegy thinks she surprised him last night.
Theren moves on quiet feet to Parekh’s bedside table, and sets a cup down there, then holds one out to Elegy. It’s coffee. And not just the synthetic approximation concocted by a lab in Losan—actual coffee.
She takes the cup with a murmured thank-you, and sits up. Her body aches in odd places, muscles she forgot existed. She leans back against the wall, and cradles the cup against her chest. The blankets fall away from one of her legs, and Theren’s eyes trace it from hip to ankle, once, before he looks away. She feels a line of heat all along that leg, like he ran a hand down it.
She tries to be casual, shifting the blankets back over her body. He leans against the wall.
“I found a coffee machine down the hall,” he says.
“I’ll recommend you for a medal,” she replies. “What’s going on out there?”
If he’s surprised that she’s determined to pretend nothing happened between them, he doesn’t show it.
“Julia’s wrist is sprained, not broken. She’s resting,” he says. “Everyone’s talking about us. Mostly expressing doubt that we just happened upon that ship, given that you’re the former Primary of search and rescue. And . . . there are some wild rumors about the Talusar soldier you made your ally.”
He gestures to himself, and Elegy laughs.
“You did make an entrance,” she points out. She runs a hand through her hair, and very carefully doesn’t look at him as she asks, “Your arm?”
“Well-tended,” he replies, and it doesn’t matter if she looks at him or not—she blushes anyway.
She can’t figure out how to ask him what she really wants to know. Not about his arm, but about whether yesterday damaged him in some other, deeper way. Do you feel okay? seems too intimate for them.
Parekh spares her from having to. She groans, and sits up. “Oh my God, is that coffee?”
“Special delivery,” Elegy says.
“It’s real coffee,” Parekh says, marveling. She’s upright now, sticking her entire nose in the paper cup. “Wonder of wonders.”
“I’ll let you wake up.” He pulls away from the wall, glances at Elegy, and leaves the room.
Elegy swallows the last of her coffee, and sets the cup down next to her. She can feel Parekh staring at her, but she’s not going to break the silence first—not going to give Parekh the satisfaction.
“It’s all right, you know,” Parekh says.
“What?”
Parekh rolls her eyes.
“Come on, I’m not stupid,” she says. “He’s gorgeous, and barely looks at anyone who isn’t you, and you’ve been celibate for four years. It’s biology. Shir would understand.” She tilts her head. “For that matter, Shir would understand if it was more than biology.”
“It’s not,” Elegy says firmly.
Parekh sips her coffee, her expression inscrutable. “I’m just saying, don’t beat yourself up about it.”
Elegy listens to the rain.
“Thanks,” she says, after a while.
* * *
Shir always used to say that walking through Naarm Stronghold made him feel like he was inside a bubble. She understands the comparison—everything here is made of glass. In the sun, it’s hot and bright, every surface reflective, too shiny to touch. In the rain, it’s loud, the drumming echoing throughout the building. All the walls are sharp and angular, coming to points above them. From the air, it looks like someone swept up a pile of broken glass and left it there on the coastline.
At the center of the building is the old fort, an old-fashioned structure made of red brick that no one could bear to tear down, but it serves only as a museum, now. They pass it, roped off for repairs, on the way to meet Saetang.
They were invited here for a reason, and it wasn’t to rescue Julia Martin. It was to review the evidence of the Talusar attack—the one in which the Talusar took nothing, hurt no one, and left a single memory-addled witness.
They meet Saetang on the landing pad, where the general is surveying their ship from a distance. It’s parked right where Parekh left it, next to the entrance, bits of branches still stuck to its wings. Saetang stands under an awning, sheets of rain falling to the pavement right in front of them. Their boots are covered in its splatter.
“Your Grace,” they say. “Interesting detour you took on your way here.”
“Well, you know how it is,” Elegy says. “You train yourself to search and rescue for long enough, and you end up searching and rescuing completely by accident.”
Saetang’s smile is knowing. “And the fact that your sister didn’t approve a mission is, I’m sure, mere happenstance.”
Elegy doesn’t have anything to say to that. She just shrugs.
But Saetang seems content not to linger on the subject. “However you got here, I’m glad you’re here.” They look at Theren, their eyes lingering on his bruised jaw. “All of you. The attack we experienced weeks ago confused me, and I don’t like to be confused by the Talusar. I hope you can help me make sense of it.”
A soldier steps out of the building with a stack of umbrellas on his arms. Saetang thanks him, and distributes them to Elegy, Theren, Arias, and Parekh in turn. Then, shrouded by black fabric, they all walk across the rain-soaked landing pad to the barrier that stretches along the edge of the seawall. It’s a safety barrier, not intended to keep out intruders. The seawall itself is sufficient for that, a sheer, smooth surface with waves battering it at the bottom.
They all stand at the barrier in a line, looking out at the storm-tossed sea. Rain sprays Elegy’s cheeks even with the umbrella up.
“This is where they came in. They scaled the wall to get up here, which we didn’t realize was possible,” Saetang says. “You can see the anchor points.”
They point down at the stone beneath them. Elegy squints through the rain to see a small hole in the stone beneath her, no bigger than a walnut. There are others beneath it, in a zigzag line down to the water.
Saetang turns, and points across the landing pad to the hangar, a huge white building with doors so large Elegy can’t fathom them opening.
“Then they ran across the landing pad to the hangar, where our witness was working as a guard. He let them in, probably against his will. They used a candlesnuffer to knock out the hangar’s electricity, so we don’t have any footage of them inside the building. But we know they spent ten minutes there, then left.”
“A candlesnuffer?” Theren asks.
“It’s a Cedrae relic, from before the Empty Time,” Elegy says. She has to raise her voice to be heard over the drumming rain. The hem of her pants is already soaked. “It emits a suppressive energy field, not unlike the one emitted by a large number of Fevered people, like in a Talusar city. It disables all electricity, all technology. I wonder how they got their hands on it to begin with—there aren’t many.”
“That’s where my mind went first,” Saetang says. “But we can only find out so much from our usual sources. I wondered if you could use more unusual ones.”
“Scout sources, you mean,” Elegy says. “So that’s why you asked me here.”
Saetang taps the side of their nose. “Exactly.”
“I’ll look into it.” A piece of salvage as rare as a candlesnuffer would be memorable, but whoever sold it won’t want to admit to making a deal with a Talusar. “And nothing was missing from the building? They didn’t take anything?”
“I’ll give you a copy of the inventories, if you like. Nothing missing, nothing strange.”
“Please do. Did Julia Martin try to restore your witness’s memory yet?”
“She did. I’m afraid it exhausted her; she’s now resting.” Saetang’s umbrella bumps into Elegy’s. “As we anticipated, the witness seems to be damaged beyond repair. He can’t remember his own name, let alone what happened during the attack. Julia said his memory is like a paint-splattered canvas. No order, just colors. He’s being transferred to a long-term-care facility this afternoon.”
Elegy looks at Theren, remembering something he said to her about his own memory gap. She asked him if someone erased his memory, and he said, No, that work is indelicate. I would show other signs of brain damage. Now she understands what he meant.
“She didn’t see anything interesting in his memory?” Elegy asks. “Even something that seemed like nothing?”
“She said she saw random images from throughout his life. Heard bits of phrases. ‘Where we come from is where we belong,’ that Restorationist motto. You can probably thank the Sword for that one, that speech she gave was broadcast in every news pavilion for days. A song quote, ‘restless love guides my feet,’ something like that. And a few words in Latin. ‘Equo ne credite.’ I had one of our linguists translate it earlier, it just means ‘don’t trust the horse.’ ”
“Don’t trust the horse?” Arias says. “Oh, right. Equo, equine. Horse.”
Saetang nods. “I told you, no order, just colors. Nonsense.”
They all walk back toward the base. Elegy’s hands are cold. She’s desperate for more coffee, or for a hot shower. But there’s a tugging feeling in her fingers that means there’s a message waiting for her.
“Do you have a quill?” Elegy asks.
Saetang nods, and reaches into their sleeve. The feather is short and flared on one side, and the metal the quill is made of is tinted green. Elegy starts writing, and the quill takes over, turning her tidy handwriting loopy and loose. Hela’s handwriting.
MEETING WITH K IS SET FOR TOMORROW. 1300 HOURS.
In all the chaos of rescuing Julia Martin, Elegy almost forgot about what she asked Hela to do: contact Kesia Forint to set up a meeting so they can ask her about the so-called “alien launch” she saw over twenty years ago. It doesn’t feel as urgent as Primary Avka Becken waiting in an interrogation room, or even Julia Martin resting in the hospital ward before she can unearth Theren’s hidden memory. But it’s a reminder: Elegy is needed back at home.
“Unfortunately, I think this has to be a short trip,” Elegy says to Saetang. “Mind if I interrogate your prisoner before I go?”
36
Theren stands outside the interrogation room with Elegy beside him, looking through the mirror glass at Avka Becken. Parekh and Saetang are leaning against the wall right next to the glass, talking about a recent change to Cedrae ship mechanics. Parekh is biting her nails.
“What does she feel like to you?” Elegy asks him.
Sometimes he forgets that Elegy being inside his memories in the erczet meant she was within him. That she knows to talk about his Fever gifts not as seeing or perceiving, but as physical sensations.
He touches his fingertips to the glass and leans closer.
Avka Becken sits in a bare room. It’s small and square, with one window that looks out at the ocean, a table and chairs, a pitcher of water, and an orange. Cedre’s laws are strict about the proper treatment of prisoners. The orange is a sign of compliance with those laws. He stares at it, a smear of color against the faultless white.
Avka’s hair, too, looks almost garish. Orange-red and still wet from the shower she took that morning. Her febra armor and boots are gone, soft Cedre fabrics replacing them.
“She’s brittle,” he tells Elegy. “Hard and consistent. Easy to read.”
Elegy frowns at the glass. She’s wearing a loose gray sweatshirt that keeps slipping off one of her shoulders, baring the defined ridge of her clavicle.
“Will you help me?” she asks him.
He’s put his abilities to use as a truthsayer countless times. Once Rava realized how deeply he could read people, she came to rely on him more than she had ever relied on Satka or even Nyx. But he’s never been asked before. Never felt like he had the right to say no.
“Of course, Your Grace,” he says.
The honorific chafes against her in the same way that the pronouns he selects in Talusar do. She doesn’t like to acknowledge any status differences between her and anyone else. But Theren prefers to be honest with himself about them. If he isn’t, he’ll dwell on how it felt to touch her last night, the way she tasted and sounded and smelled—a momentary lapse, for her; and for him, something unexpected and stolen.
She flips the deadbolt on the interrogation room door and steps into the room. He follows her. Avka’s eyes find him immediately, and there’s something eager in her, almost gleeful.
“You,” she says to him in Talusar, as if it’s his name. And then, to Elegy: “And who are you, exactly?”
“No one in particular,” Elegy replies. Theren pulls the empty chair across from Becken back from the table and offers it to Elegy. A moment too late, he realizes it was a mistake—Becken’s eyes light up, like she’s realized something.
Elegy sits. “Did you wake with a headache? The substance I drugged you with is known for that.”
“I thought the Fever, in its wisdom, devoured all Cedrae substances,” Becken says. “Or is it only your elixir that disintegrates at the touch of our God?”
“Before we restored all of Cedre’s relics, we developed several powerful substances,” Elegy says, sounding like a museum docent. “A sedative, a healing ointment, and a truth serum, among them. They don’t require elixir, and they seem to stand up to your god just fine. Especially the truth serum.”
Fear is an unsteady, fluttering sensation. Panic is electric. Theren searches Becken for either of them, and comes up empty. Which is strange, really, because she’s a prisoner in Naarm Stronghold, with no reason to expect mercy. They could wrench the truth from her by force. They could execute her. They could keep her here for life.
But she’s not afraid.
“I can imagine a truth serum would be effective.” Avka crosses her legs, and leans back in her chair. “If a person actually knows anything of value.”
“You’re assuming, of course, that you’re the only prisoner we have.”
“It took a Talusar to bring me down, and I doubt there are many of him to go around.” She gestures at Theren, carelessly.
“I’m Cedre-born, you know,” he says, curious to know how she’ll react. Not every Talusar feels this level of superiority over Cedre that Becken seems to; her confidence in Talusar supremacy seems to be accompanied by a borderline religious fervor. And perhaps it is religious. The Talusar are the chosen people of the Fever, after all.
