Seek the Traitor's Son, page 36
He backs up, still kissing her, and sits on the edge of the bed, so she has to trip after him. Breathless, heart racing, she lets him pull her to stand between his knees. She braces herself on his shoulders as he kisses her stomach, over her shirt—and then he lifts the hem just enough to kiss beneath it, right under her belly button.
She reaches down to undo the top button of her pants, and he kisses the skin she bares, right above the band of her underwear—
Then she puts her hands in his hair, and everything stops.
He freezes, breathing against her stomach, and his hands come up to her wrists. They’re so gentle it startles her. He guides her hands away from his head, and looks up at her, apprehension in his eyes.
She doesn’t need to ask about it. She already knows: grabbing his hair like that, it must be something Rava used to do.
She nods, and tries to steady herself. She should step back, button that button, sit in an actual chair for this adult conversation that she is definitely going to force herself to have, but she can’t bring herself to move.
“You could ask me what I’m doing here,” she says. “If you want.”
He leans in, touching his mouth to her stomach again, and speaks against her. “I’d rather just take what’s on offer.”
His teeth graze her skin. She considers peeling her clothes away from her body, piece by piece, so he can do that to every inch of her.
She doesn’t.
“What’s on offer?” she asks quietly.
“You want me, and you trust me, I think,” he says, raising his eyes to hers again. “Seems like plenty.” At her dubious expression, he adds, “I so rarely get anything I want.”
He makes it sound so simple. Like there really doesn’t have to be more. He slips his hands under her shirt, just a little, just enough to brush his fingers over her sides—and she almost believes it. She believes it for now.
He says, “My hair’s growing out. I’ll cut it again.”
She gets the feeling that’s the most he’ll say about his reaction to her hands in his hair, and she doesn’t want to press him. The mood between them has shifted as a result, the desperation gone, so she doesn’t mind, so much, when he slides his hands out from under her shirt and leans back.
“I liked it short,” she says. “Your hair.”
He smiles a little.
“You did come here for a reason,” he says. “What happened? You feel—” He pauses. “Sorry. I know you don’t like that.”
“No, tell me.”
“You feel . . . like you did something important.”
It’s hard, sometimes, not to marvel at him. The Fever reshapes everyone who survives it—she knows that. But the Fever in his blood only gives him more data than other people; it doesn’t teach him what it means. That’s all Theren.
“I might have. I’m not sure yet.” She clears her throat, and puts a few steps between them, enough for her to regain her senses. “I’d like to know about Julia.”
Elegy sits on his desk chair, just the edge of it. She watches his bare toes curling into the cement floor, then looks around the room—dim now, the sun almost set. There’s a line of books on his desk that wasn’t there before. The spines are creased and peeling. She recognizes some of the names, written in Talusar.
He looks out the window. “Fenn Kovek is alive.”
Of all the things she expected him to say, that wasn’t one of them. “You saw him?”
“Him, and an augur. They . . .” He sucks in a breath. “The augur said something about . . . past, present, and future. That the three of us would be sufficient. Actually, she said that to Rava, but—” He shakes his head. “Fenn touched me, and the augur asked him what he saw. He said he saw my father. He said he came from . . . a doorway. In the stars.” He laughs a little. “Does that sound insane?”
Elegy thinks of the box of artifacts in the trailer in Twentynine, her father’s conviction that there were otherworldly visitors on Earth. She thinks of the glowing plant that Hela almost died to protect, and the maybe-hallucination, maybe-visitation she experienced when she touched it.
She swallows hard. She promised herself she would never start to believe in wild things like secret aliens and . . . and world-saving prophecies, would keep her feet on firm ground. But what is she supposed to do when “firm ground” starts to feel like denial?
She who moves the fulcrum controls the outcome.
“I’ve heard quite a few ridiculous revelations in my time,” Elegy says, trying to keep her voice level. “So, not really.”
Softly, he replies, “Yes, you have, haven’t you.”
She clears her throat. “What happened next?”
“I don’t know why, but I think hearing about my father triggered the augur to see something,” he says. “Me, on the Sundial, going through that doorway.”
Elegy grew up hearing about the voice beyond their solar system, beckoning them out to a much greater existence. Faith in it, in the Sundial, feels like faith in the Fever, in a god. The audacity of believing there could be something out there that was better than what they have. The absurdity of thinking there’s meaning somewhere in the chaos of the endless universe.
The madness of believing in a prophecy that declares her to be the Hope of Cedre.
She spent most of her life believing in the Sundial, in the possibility of another world. What’s one more impossible thing, really?
Her heart speeds up.
“The augur told Rava to keep me from going through that doorway. And she told me, at the beginning—that I was mentioned in a prophecy,” he says, a kind of hysteria rising in his voice. “That I was a . . . signpost. On Rava’s path to victory. And she would know me because she would be in—love with me.”
He leans his face into his hands.
Elegy has wondered quite a few times what questions Rava Vidar asked the augurs, and what they said in response. She assumed that given how different she and Rava were, they would ask about different things, receive different guidance. How unsettling, then, to hear that they asked the same thing . . . and received the same answer.
“This is why—all of it,” he says, his voice muffled. “This is why she . . . pursued me to begin with.”
Elegy thinks this isn’t quite what people imagine when they long for their suffering to mean something. There’s something especially cruel about finding out that your tormentor isn’t random, that they selected you, that they designed the shape of your pain in order to fit you into their destiny. Randomness, and chaos, and the indifferent universe . . . they would all be easier to bear.
Rava, the orchestrator of his fate.
Rava, chasing the destiny that Elegy refuses to acknowledge: She who moves the fulcrum controls the outcome.
Elegy feels like she’s standing at the mouth of a cave. She doesn’t know what she’ll find if she walks into it. She only knows that if she stays where she is, life will be what it’s always been. Elegy Ahn. The Sword’s spare daughter, for emergencies only. A soldier with too much rage to get promoted, until Shir helped her heal from it. And even after—grieving, a haze of Scout missions, the struggle to put one foot in front of the other. It’s familiar. It’s safe.
But in this darkness, there’s prophecy. A fate too huge to bear. The great lever with the Cedrae on one side and the Talusar on the other. And the problem from the start: that if she believed she was the Hope of Cedre, she had to also believe that she would love a man who wasn’t Shir. She would have to accept her own inconstant heart.
And while she can’t imagine being the person who controls the outcome—
When she looks into Theren Forint’s dark, focused eyes, she realizes the alternative is handing that control over to Rava Vidar.
Is handing him over to Rava Vidar, in one way or another.
And she may not know what he is to her, not yet . . . but she knows she won’t do that.
She stands, and moves toward Theren, careful of his bare feet. She covers his hands with hers, and tugs them away from his face.
“I need you to read me. Okay?” she says, bending closer.
He laces his fingers with hers, so their palms are pressed together. He looks up at her, waiting.
“When the augurs summoned me to the Cenobium, they also summoned Rava,” she says. “They told us that one of us would triumph over the other. That the questions we asked them that day, and the answers we received, would set things in motion that couldn’t be stopped.”
She’s only ever told Hela and Shir that Rava was there, at the Cenobium, when she heard the prophecy. Her mother insisted it would cause mass panic. It’s making Elegy panic, now.
Elegy doesn’t want her suffering to mean that much.
“The augurs . . . they told me what to look for, but I didn’t want to hear it, and I didn’t know what to do. And after Shir died, I stopped believing in purpose, in meaning, in prophecy,” she says. “But Rava just made a huge mistake: she told you exactly what to do.” Elegy thinks of the young augur touching the points of the triangle in the dirt. The trio of the fulcrum, the three voices in harmony. What did the augur say to Theren? Something about past, present, and future. About the three of them—augur, epocha, and Theren—being sufficient.
“She told us who we need,” Elegy says, and she shivers with the awareness of it. Past, present, and future. One will bear the Vidari name. One knows the taste of Cenobium salt. One . . .
She forces herself to focus. “She gave us a clear mission. If that augur said she has to keep you from going through that doorway in the stars? Well, that’s exactly where you’re going to go.”
She feels the memory of standing in the Cenobium on the scrying mirror close at hand, like if she just reaches out and touches it, it will come flooding back to her. But when she allows herself to brush against it, it’s not the augurs’ voices she hears.
It’s the Sword’s. Trust that you will be what you’re required to be, in this role you didn’t choose.
She leans in closer, speaking against his mouth in a harsh whisper.
“And I will get you there,” she says. “Because I’m the goddamn Hope of Cedre.”
His room is dark, now, the sun disappeared beneath the horizon. His eyes look black. Endless.
“Am I lying?” she asks him, and she’s afraid to hear the answer.
He turns her hand, and kisses her knuckles, slowly, his eyes still on hers. She can’t tell if he does it because he wants to touch her or if he does it like a vassal showing reverence for a queen.
Her hands are trembling. Her breaths are quaking, too.
“No, Elegy.” She thinks it might be the first time he’s ever called her by her name. “You’re not lying.”
She’s relieved. She’s horrified. Because the only thing worse than believing that Rava Vidar is fated to lead the Talusar to triumph . . . is believing that the faltering of her heart was written in the stars.
40
Theren watches Isre’s hands on the navigation panel of the ship, their movements certain, almost automatic.
“Why did you decide against being a pilot?” Theren asks his brother. He’s hesitant to interrupt someone whose consciousness is currently split in half, even though Isre told him when they set out that he could carry on a conversation just fine while flying.
They’re on their way to the middle of nowhere. Right in the middle of a flat plain. Those were the coordinates of the meeting point Kesia set. There was obvious wisdom in it: there was no way for them to hide reinforcements. She could see for miles in every direction.
Her other demands were that no one be armed, and that Isre and Theren both attend. Elegy hadn’t argued. They needed Kesia’s answers too badly.
Isre shrugs. “I went where the need was. Everyone wants to be a pilot—even with only five percent of applicants being accepted into the program, they always have more than they need. It’s a sexier job than ‘technician,’ I guess.”
“And you had no desire to be sexy,” Theren supplies, and he feels, for a moment, like he’s his old self, teasing Isre across the dinner table about some new girlfriend. Once he sent a wax-sealed letter officially welcoming one of Isre’s girlfriends to the family. It was his mission to make Isre’s life a little harder, he used to say. That was an older brother’s duty.
“No, I was already plenty sexy without it,” Isre says, raising an eyebrow over the frames of his sunglasses.
Theren grins.
It’s all wasteland beneath them. Crumbling settlements from a time long before Cedre existed—rubble in the shape of buildings, remnants of half-disintegrated roads. Theren is still amazed by how time eats buildings, how efficiently rust and rot devour.
“Did you ever think about what you would be if you weren’t a Knight?” Isre asks. Theren feels a tremor of nervousness in him as he asks the question, like he isn’t sure it’s all right to talk about what might have been.
But that yearning for something else that he felt so acutely before he took his oath is gone. He shrugs, and says, “I don’t ask for things I know I won’t get.”
“Oh, come on. You were so good at translation. Your old girlfriend even said so.”
“My old girlfriend?”
“Zuzanna. She came to your funeral.” Isre tries to keep his voice light, but Theren can still feel the hollowness in him at the memory. “She seemed nice. Said you had good . . . emotional intelligence.”
Theren laughs a little. She had no way of knowing, of course, that the Fever would give him better “emotional intelligence” than she knew was possible.
Theren asks Isre about his coworkers, then, and Isre talks about his supervisor, who wants him to be more diligent in filling out forms, though he himself doesn’t see the need. Theren lets Isre’s voice wash over him as the land passes beneath the ship. They’re going deeper into the desert, where no one ever bothered to build anything other than a road to cross from one side to the other.
It’s not long before they start their descent. They fly over a small town, and then toward a glint of silver on the horizon that takes the shape of a chrome-plated structure—a trailer.
Isre lands smoothly, like it’s one single motion. As Theren unbuckles his safety straps, the front door to the trailer opens, and a tall, white-haired woman steps out, her arms crossed.
“That’s Hela,” Isre says, before getting out of the ship.
Hela’s face lights up. “Isre!” she says. “Long time no see. And you must be . . .”
Her focus shifts to Theren, and then . . . she goes still. She squints at him, and he feels a ripple of emotions from her—a prickle of shock, and the low simmer of recognition. As if she knows him.
“Have we met?” he says to her.
She seems frozen, for some reason, and he’s not sure that she heard him. Then Elegy steps out onto the landing behind her, and pokes her in the back.
“Ready?” Elegy asks her.
“Yeah,” Hela says, sounding distant. She clears her throat, and comes out of her daze. “Again, I have to ask—no weapons?”
“We won’t need them,” Theren says.
Hela gives him a stern look. “I know she’s your mother, but—”
“I’m not saying that I trust her.” Theren keeps his voice mild. “I’m saying I don’t require a weapon to fight her, as I’m sure she’s well aware.”
Though he knows she can’t read him like he can read her, he still feels exposed by the way Hela looks at him, like she’s taking him apart and examining each piece. But she nods. “Fine. Here’s your Ear, El.”
She takes a small cloth bag out of her pocket and tips its contents into her palm. A metal bead about the size of a pea glints against her skin. Elegy pinches it between two fingers, then presses it behind her ear, where it sticks to her skin. Then she brings her hair forward to cover it.
It’s illegal technology—all personal devices are, in Cedre—but he shouldn’t be surprised. Scouts tend to walk on the line between legal and illegal.
Hela says, “I figured out how far away I need to be before she can spot me. So that’s where I’ll be parked. I’ll follow you until we’re in range, then let me do a sweep before you descend.”
“Let’s go, then.”
They part ways, Hela going to one ship and Isre, Theren, and Elegy going to the other. As they approach the passenger door, Elegy says, “I’ll take the back seat.”
“That’s not necessary.”
Elegy looks him up and down in a way that makes his skin prickle. “You’re taller. Stop arguing.”
He flips the latch that folds the passenger seat forward, and by instinct, holds out a hand for her to take as she climbs into the back. Her fingers are cool against his. He can feel Isre noticing the contact with a little wriggle of curiosity, though he gives no sign of it.
They wait for Hela to take off before following her into the air.
* * *
Up ahead is the desert flat, empty earth and dry brush and boulder, the occasional Joshua tree tricking him into thinking he’s seeing a person standing sentry. He has such strange memories of this landscape, panicked and exhausted with Maeve’s back against his chest. He has to keep forcing his mind back to the present.
He’s about to see Kesia again. He needs to focus.
He doesn’t want to see her again. He never does. She came to watch him in the Crucible once, a year into his imprisonment when he had learned skill without finesse, and took care of his opponents too quickly to be of interest to spectators. She cornered him after the fight, and he felt how impressed she was with him for his brutality, for his survival. It made him sick, that what it took for her to feel proud of him was to watch him endure one of the darkest places on Earth. So even before she had the chance to speak to him, he summoned a guard, and had them escort her out.
