Seek the Traitor's Son, page 33
What he feels, instead of the embarrassment he expects at the revelation that a Cedre-born man beat her in a fight, is a stab of insight, like a ray of light piercing the clouds.
“I forgot about that. You were a Knight, weren’t you?” she says.
He leans back against the wall. Cold seeps through his shirt. “If you know me, then you know you can’t lie to me.”
“The only Knight left alive,” she says, as if he never spoke. “I wonder why that is.”
“You’re not going to provoke me by reminding me of my dead companions.”
“I’m shocked they’re letting you attend this little interview.” Her eyes are wide and wild. “Do they know who I am? Do they know what you spent the last few years doing?”
A cold weight settles on Theren’s chest that has nothing to do with Avka.
“You’re Primary Avka Becken, direct report of Ykev Talus,” Theren says flatly. “They know who you are. And I haven’t hidden anything from them.”
“That can’t be true. I’m sure you kept the most salacious details to yourself.”
Theren hears ringing. Avka Becken has a clenched-teeth smile, like she’s bracing against pain.
“Let’s play a game,” Elegy says to Becken, her voice colder than he’s ever heard it, “where I tell you what I suspect, and he tells me if I’m right.”
Becken says, “I’d rather not.”
“You have no choice.” Elegy sits back. “Recently, a group of Talusar soldiers invaded this base. They left behind a witness with a damaged memory. You kidnapped Julia Martin to keep her from restoring that man’s memory.”
Theren waits for a reaction—any reaction. But Elegy may as well have spoken to Becken in English. She’s unaltered.
Becken presses her palms flat to the table. Her fingers are thicker at the knuckles and calloused, too, from splitting over and over. His own are the same. “Who’s Julia Martin?” she asks.
“Julia Martin” isn’t a Talusar name. It’s the name Julia chose after she came to Cedre, to ease her transition into Cedrae society. Maeve told him the name she was born with, once. He can’t remember it now.
Elegy sits forward, like she’s going to argue with Becken, but Theren sets a hand on her shoulder, stalling her. Becken’s eyes are steady on his. Her hands are steady on the table. The feeling of her is steady, too.
“She doesn’t know anything,” he says. “That’s why she didn’t refuse to drink the vial of sedative. Why she’s not afraid of truth serum. She doesn’t know anything, and it’s by design. Ykev Talus intentionally kept information from you so that we couldn’t force you to share it, didn’t he?”
There’s something there—a little leap in her chest, like he’s wrong about something, but not completely wrong. He breathes in through his nose, and out. He has to stay calm. He has to think.
They all thought the Talusar attack and the kidnapping were planned by Rava Vidar. But Avka Becken doesn’t report to Rava Vidar; she reports to Ykev Talus. He assumed that both of those things couldn’t be true at the same time. But what if he was wrong?
His memory of the meeting between Ykev and Rava, of the rain-spattered windowsill and the warm air, flashes in his mind.
“Rava and Ykev have an alliance,” he says, testing it out. “A temporary alliance to accomplish a particular purpose. That’s what they were discussing the day you and I met.”
He’s still surprised, sometimes, by how obvious it is when the truth is revealed. Avka’s expression is a study in control, mouth a flat line. But she can’t hide the way the declaration slides into her mind without friction.
“But you don’t know what that particular purpose is,” he says.
“No, I don’t.” Becken smiles again, coldly this time. “But I know it will be catastrophic.” And then she bends her head to Elegy, in a mockery of respect. “Your Grace.”
Elegy’s body jerks as if she’s been slapped.
“The Hope of Cedre and her coward Knight.” Becken touches a hand to her chest. “What an honor.”
“I think we’re finished here,” Elegy says. She gets to her feet, the chair squealing on the tile. Parekh is already unlocking the door to the interrogation room and opening it, so that Elegy can walk right out.
He can’t bear to feel whatever it is Elegy feels now, and he can’t bear to look at her, either. It’s one thing for her to know the truth about him and Rava, and another for her to hear someone degrade him for it. I’m sure you kept the most salacious details to yourself.
But all Elegy says is: “All right?”
He nods. Elegy steps closer, and takes his hand—not holding it, exactly, but gripping it to send warmth into his fingers.
“Eyes up,” she says gently, in Talusar, and he forces himself to look at her.
“Parekh and Saetang don’t speak Talusar,” she says. “I’ll only translate what’s relevant. And her petty jabs at you aren’t relevant.” She releases his hand. “No matter what Larke says, I think you need to meet with Julia Martin as soon as we get home. Okay?”
He nods. She turns away to talk to Saetang.
The ringing in his ears is gone.
37
Isre is on the landing pad when Theren steps down from the hatch. He grins, wind from the engine blowing his dark hair back and forth, and throws his arms around Theren. The embrace, brief as it is, is like a warm meal.
“What are you doing here?” Theren says, as he pulls away.
“Her Grace invited me,” Isre replies, and he bobs his head to Elegy. “She thought you might need a friendly face. You know, because of . . .”
Isre nods at something over Theren’s shoulder. Like a fish on a line, his attention is tugged back to Julia Martin, descending the hatch steps with Arias at her side. She was exhausted from trying to heal the witness with the addled memories when they left, and she still looks pale.
Theren’s mouth goes dry. He wants—no, he needs—this gap in his memory to be restored. But he’s also afraid of what’s in it.
“Right,” he says.
Elegy hops down from the hatch without bothering with the stairs, and offers her hand for Isre to shake. “Thank you for coming on short notice.” She turns to Theren. “Julia’s going to rest for an hour or so. It was all the time I could give her—we have that meeting tomorrow afternoon.”
Dread gnaws at Theren’s stomach. The meeting with Kesia—how could he forget? It’s the main reason they need to do this so soon. The last thing he remembers before the gap in his memories is Kesia coming to fetch him from Rava’s chambers. Which means that whatever he was forced to forget, his mother was probably a witness to it.
He’ll have plenty of questions for her.
Theren watches Julia and Arias walking slowly across the landing pad together. He says, “And Specialist Gylle? Didn’t Larke say she needed to approve any meetings between me and Julia?”
There’s something unsteady in Elegy today, a new current. She touches his shoulder. “I’ll take care of it.”
He wants to hold her hand there, again, the way he did after the fight with Becken. But he doesn’t dare. He watches as she hoists her bag over one shoulder, nods to Isre, and walks across the landing pad.
The Sparrow’s engines are powered down now, and silent. A pair of technicians descended as soon as they landed to replace fuel and check everything over; they’re calling back and forth to each other from one wing to another, both in bright red jumpsuits.
“Want some coffee?” Isre says.
“If you want to call it that,” Theren replies, and Isre laughs.
“Two days in Austra and you’ve become a snob?”
Together, they walk toward the cafeteria, on the far side of the barracks building. Unlike the other structures on Losan Stronghold, the cafeteria building is circular—it looks like an old-fashioned drawing of an alien ship, wider than it is tall with huge circular windows studded around its belly.
Theren isn’t sure what prompts him to say it. Maybe he just knows that he can’t go on this way, holding all these memories inside him, weighing him down. Or maybe he wants Isre to know him—actually know him. Regardless, he looks at Isre and says, “I lived in House Vidar.”
Isre looks startled. His steps falter. “You did?”
Theren nods. “For two years.” His throat hurts. “They had real coffee there. That’s where I became a snob.”
“Oh.”
Theren can feel the pressure of Isre’s questions building up at the back of his throat like a sob.
“They had good spices, too.” He feels unbalanced, talking about this with Isre like it’s normal, like any of it is normal. “Is it bad to admit that any of it was good?”
He chokes a little on the question. Isre’s hand touches right between Theren’s shoulders.
“Of course not,” he says. “I’m glad some things were good, Theren.”
They pass a prickly-pear cactus swollen with pink flower buds.
“You can tell me about them, if you want,” Isre says, tentative.
Theren has spent so long refusing to think of House Vidar at all. When he does, these days, it’s because he’s trying to dig useful memories out of his mind to help Cedre, to help Elegy. House Vidar may have been his prison, but it was a grand one.
“The house is built into the side of a cliff, and in the winter, when it snows, all the mountains are white,” Theren says. “It’s blinding, when the sun shines. But there’s real fire in the fireplaces.”
He thinks of crouching in front of the fire in the kitchen, warming his hands.
“There was a library,” Theren says.
“Oh?” Isre’s smile is gentle. “Any poetry in there, nerd?”
They take their time walking to the cafeteria, Isre with his head bent, listening, and Theren with his hands in his pockets, talking.
* * *
Theren is lining up books on the little desk in his quarters when the knock comes.
Isre brought the books. They belonged to Kesia—or to Theren himself, when he was younger—and Isre kept them. I didn’t know what to do with them, he said, when he offered Theren the box. They’re written in Talusar, after all. He thinks Isre just couldn’t bear to get rid of them.
He’s supposed to go to a meeting room in the library for his meeting with Julia Martin, the same one where they did the erczet ritual. But when he opens the door, he finds Julia standing in the hallway.
Someone must have retrieved her bag from the wreckage of the crash that set off her kidnapping, because she’s wearing garments that fit her: a white dress with a belted waist, polished black shoes. Her wrist is in a brace, and a dark bruise stains her left eye. There are others peeking out from her sleeve or her starched collar.
For a moment they stand there staring at each other. He doesn’t remember much about the end of the ritual, but he remembers the pressure of her hands on his head, and her shallow breaths as she touched a kiss to his crown. Despite her neutral expression, he feels grief wrenching her. Wrenching him.
“I’m sorry, was I wrong about the meeting place?” he says.
“No, I . . .” She clears her throat. “I decided it’s better if we do this somewhere you feel comfortable. It can be—difficult. So I asked for your room number.”
“Oh. Well—come in.”
His room isn’t fit for company like Julia Martin’s. Kesia told him, when he was young, that when the exiles first set out from Valla, she laughed at them for their jewelry-laden wrists and necks and fingers—the journey was long and arduous, and they seemed so ridiculous to her. But once they were released from quarantine on Cedre Station and sold all of their finery to the highest bidder, she understood. Jewelry was wealth that could be worn on the body, and they came to Cedre with only the clothes on their backs. They wanted to come rich.
Though all their jewels weren’t enough to guarantee wealth, exactly, Julia Martin is used to fine things, and he has none. At least the room is clean, the sheets tucked in at the corners and all his clothes put away. Apart from the books on his desk, the timeline of his years in Valla on the wall, and a small cactus in a pot on the windowsill—a gift from Arias—there’s nothing of him in this place.
Julia moves toward the books.
“Alinus,” she says, brushing the spine of an older volume with her fingers. “I always liked her work. Funny.”
She’s a Talusar author, and the book is written in Talusar. Theren is about to tell Julia that the book was Kesia’s favorite when he realizes he shouldn’t talk to her about Kesia, the woman who set off the chain of events that got her daughter killed.
“I prefer Volyn,” he says.
“You would.” She taps the spine of the collection of Volyn’s poetry, cracked and worn. “He has more depth of feeling, as you do.”
He stills. It’s a more compassionate assessment of him than he expected. She considers him for a moment.
“Did you think, after that ritual, that I wouldn’t know you?” she says, switching to Talusar. The pronouns she uses for him are authoritative, but warm. She speaks to him like an aunt.
“I . . . didn’t really think about it.”
She folds her hands over her ribs, as if covering a wound there. Her fingernails are painted pale pink.
“That’s one of the ritual’s purposes,” she says. “It’s for grief and mourning, yes, of course. But it’s also intended to create a lasting connection between the one who had to witness the death firsthand, and the ones who bear the loss. It’s impossible for me not to feel for you now.”
“And you still did it?” he says. “Knowing it would . . . tie us together?”
“Child,” she says, with a gentle laugh. “That’s one of the reasons I asked for it.”
He sits on the edge of his bed. She perches on his desk chair, her legs crossed at the ankle and her hands folded in her lap.
“You are one of ours,” she says. “I know it doesn’t seem this way to you, because we all grew distant from your mother in your adolescence, but that journey out of Valla, that harrowing flight to Cedre, that time we spent in quarantine afterward—we became like family. Your recent return should have been an occasion for joy. For one of our children to survive when we thought all five were lost is a miracle. But it was difficult to see that when I was trapped in my own grief.”
Her eyes are Maeve’s eyes, round and gray as stone.
“I wanted to make myself see it,” she says softly.
His throat burns. He looks out the window, at the orchard, the hints of yellow between the branches. At the sky beyond it. Only when the burning starts to subside does he dare look back at her.
“Can I ask you about her?” Julia says.
“Of course.”
“What could she do with the Fever?” Julia asks, and the construction of the sentence is backward, for a Talusar. They always phrase it as What could the Fever do in her? That she chooses otherwise says something about her beliefs, how they’ve changed, or perhaps how they always were.
“She could share her own memories,” he says. “She used it to survive the Crucible. She would watch her opponents in advance, then share the memory with Fenn so they could talk strategy. Two minds were better than one.”
“She didn’t share with you?”
“For the first year, I wasn’t in touch with them,” he says. “I helped them at first, especially with the language, but then . . .” He shakes his head. “I was ashamed, I think.”
“Of what your mother did?”
“That, and I was . . .” He shrugs. “I was excellent. Almost by accident.”
He remembers the first time they met Orda, who had a month to get them all in fighting shape—an impossible task, he said, at the time. Orda invited Theren, who at that time looked like a newborn foal, still freshly Fevered, to spar. He intended it to be an exercise in humility. To show them all how far they had to go. But Theren, sharp with grief and tired of being mocked, had decked him right in the jaw. It got rougher from there.
He remembers how, after that, Maeve looked at him like he was a stranger.
He adds, “She was smart, though. A fast learner.”
“She always was. If she hadn’t been a Knight, I think she would have worked with numbers.” A swell of pride—as if, for a moment, she’s forgotten to grieve what Maeve would never become. “She liked for things to make sense.”
Maeve was the only one who asked questions about the Talusar. Why they did this or that, what they meant by certain things. Curious, always curious.
“Was she a good fighter?” Julia says.
“She was competent,” Theren replies. “Better to be competent than excellent, when it comes to violence, I think.”
Lines frame Julia’s mouth when she frowns—like parentheses, encasing her mouth.
“Are you a good dancer?” she says.
The question comes out of nowhere. Theren blinks at her. “I guess so.”
“Then consider that it isn’t violence you have a talent for, it’s movement,” she says. “You forget, I’ve been in your head. You’re uniquely present in your own body. Perhaps that’s why the Fever manifests in you this way.”
He thinks she smiles. It could be a trick of the light. He fidgets, feeling uncomfortable. He’s never thought of himself like this. It’s easier to believe that he has a natural predilection for violence than to think that he could have become something more benign, if he hadn’t been broken by Rava Vidar instead. He doesn’t want to think of himself as that malleable.
