Seek the Traitor's Son, page 48
And standing guard next to Fenn is Kesia.
It’s absurd, really, that Kesia can still disappoint Theren after everything she’s done. Days ago she told him she only ever wanted to help him; now she’s here, guarding the same man Theren came here to rescue.
And in the center of it all, of course, is Rava Vidar, standing in a shaft of moonlight. She looks like a soldier, and she always has, her shoulders back, her feet apart, her hands behind her, ready to draw the weapon at the small of her back. There’s a bruise under her jaw, faded and old, likely from sparring. She’s never bothered to cover bruises or scars, as if she likes the way they look on her.
He’s surprised by how familiar it feels to stand in front of her, despite all that’s happened since the last time he saw her. He was in her bedroom, then, after Elegy’s interrogation, tense to the point of trembling at the thought of what he was about to do—what he had already done. He’d waited, tension humming in his body, for Rava to fall asleep, then got the key to the interrogation room from where it was hidden: inside one of the books on her bookcase. He doubled back to grab the boots she left by the door, too, remembering Elegy’s bare feet. And then he left.
But now he’s different. Well-rested and well-fed; no longer in constant pain; given respect and purpose. It should feel different to face her now. When her pale eyes lock on his, though, he’s exactly the man he was a few months ago, and exactly as terrified.
Rava steps over Orda’s quivering form as if he’s a stone in her path. Her pale eyes glint as they meet his.
“You’re here,” she says, and he’s struck for the hundredth time by how curious she is—always interested even in the midst of her cruelty, like a child who pulls the wings off a fly just to see what it will do.
“I knew that you would come,” she says, “but I confess that I thought you would go to the epocha first, and not the augur.”
Fenn looks like he just tumbled out of bed, his feet bare and his linen pants rumpled from sleep, a silk robe askew across his shoulders.
“You don’t know me that well,” Theren says to Rava. Out of habit, he addresses her the same way he used to, as if he’s still a captive and she’s still the master of his fate. Perhaps she is.
“I know you enough.” She smiles a little. “Still so respectful, even though you’ve clearly forgotten our rules of engagement.”
“If I kneel now, will you spare them?”
“If I told you I would spare one of them, which one would you choose?” That curiosity again. “One of the Cedrae soldiers? The Talusar Scout? Your former lover?”
He can’t help the way his eyes widen at that last one.
“I’m amazed you managed to keep the exact nature of your relationship with him from me for so long,” she says. “I might have sent him to a monastery farther away if I’d known.”
“No. You would have killed him.”
She smiles.
“I almost forgot,” she says softly, “how much you know. Tell me . . .” She reaches out, and clamps her hand around his jaw, squeezing so tightly he winces. Then she leans in close to his face. “What’s in my heart now, truthsayer?”
“What did you do with the augur, Rava?” he says, and he doesn’t think he’s referred to her by her name, in her presence, ever before. He flinches a little at the sound of it, expecting retaliation.
She releases him, but doesn’t back away.
“Your little tricks aren’t going to work on me,” she says. “I know what happens when people answer your questions.”
“I don’t need to ask questions. You killed an augur.”
Rava gives him what appears to be an indulgent smile. “That would be sacrilege.”
“You killed an augur,” he says. “And you know that if anyone finds out, not even Ileth will be able to save you; you’ll be burned alive. You told your people the augur was back at the Cenobium. You told the augurs she was here. But she’s dead, isn’t she?”
Rava looks for all the world like she’s just unimpressed with a particularly bad performance. But he can feel the truth, the rabbit heartbeat that tells him he’s getting close to something real.
“That is a ridiculous accusation,” she says evenly, “designed to turn my people against me—”
He has to push harder. “Did you plan it? Or did you lose control? You never liked the way she talked to you, like she was better than you—”
“Fortunately my people know better than to take you at your word, Forint—”
“Maybe she said something to set you off—”
Rava brings the back of her hand down hard against Theren’s face. His cheek stings. Beside him, Nyx draws a sharp, rattling breath.
Then without a word, she tosses Theren’s sword to him.
He catches it in his right hand and draws with his left. Everything erupts into chaos.
58
Elegy isn’t sure when, exactly, she realized what she has to do.
Maybe it was right when she walked into the room and realized that if the augur wasn’t here, and she wasn’t in the Cenobium, she was probably dead. Or maybe it was when Theren successfully negotiated for Elegy to go free while he walked right back into his own personal hell.
Or when she remembered, like it was something out of a dream, biting her fingernails the day after she first went to the Cenobium. The taste on her tongue.
One who has tasted Cenobium salt. Those fucking augurs.
Either way, when she parts ways with Theren and Nyx, a promise to meet him at the pickup point on her lips, she’s sure he knew she was lying. He always does, doesn’t he? But he lets her go. He trusts her.
She watches him walk away, his shoulders back, his posture so straight it almost looks painful. Trying to steel himself to face Rava, and Elegy has never hated anything more. She has to grip the stone wall to keep herself from going after him. To remind herself that for all the pain she might cause him, Rava Vidar won’t kill Theren. She can’t.
Elegy pauses at the end of an empty hallway to gather herself, and to try to remember Orda’s map. His hand moved in quick, confident strokes as he sketched it, and then the map spread wide on the kitchen table as he pointed out significant points on it: the south entrance, the north entrance, the probable location of the augur, Fenn’s sleeping quarters, the central hallway, the temple.
The temple, she said to him, as if it was a question, and he told her that was where people were infected with Fever. From ritual bath to exposure in a room made to look like a church, and Orda’s long, scarred finger traced the path, careless, as she thought about the fact that he and Theren had both passed through those hallways days before they died.
She starts to walk. Her footsteps are quiet and quick. And as she goes, she remembers the day her father was killed. Tax Day. Their next-door neighbor grumbling about the government as she swept the hallway with her old broom, the strawberry yogurt Elegy ate for breakfast, the way she ran out of faux coffee grounds and her mug was still half-full when she got the news that his body was found. He was killed trying to help a Talusar child flee Vidara so she wouldn’t have to be exposed to Fever. A child just like Hela, in desperate need of help.
Sometimes there are no choices—one of her father’s favorite phrases. She never understood why he said it to himself like a pep talk.
She understands now.
She goes down the steps to the first floor, and then around the corner to a small corridor with a vaulted ceiling. One of the stained-glass windows depicts a woman in a blue robe, her hand over her mouth and a mark on her throat—a priest. Beneath her is a set of stone steps leading down into the basement.
At the bottom of the steps is a heavy wooden door. At eye level is a little window the size of her palm, covered by a decorative screen.
She pounds on the door and waits. This part of the monastery is silent as a tomb. Which seems fitting, given what she’s about to do.
There’s a scraping sound as someone on the other side of the door slides back a shade. She meets the creased eyes of an older woman.
“My name is Elegy Ahn,” Elegy says. “I’m here to meet your god.”
59
Theren almost forgot how impossible it feels to fight Rava Vidar. Her eyes fix on his, and she pokes her tongue into her cheek, the way she does when she plays chess, and steps into a thrust that’s actually a feint. He blocks the slash that follows with his vambrace, but only barely; he still feels the tip of her sword catch on his shirt as she withdraws, pivots, and advances again.
She turns him in tight circles, overwhelming him with speed. She may be smaller and weaker than he is, but in every other respect she has the advantage—speed, experience, technique, strategy.
She cuts again, quick, and he feels blood running down his arm. The pain is lost in the frantic need to press her back again.
She takes apart his skill like she’s disassembling a weapon, making his feet falter and then unbalancing him, so he can’t even muster enough power to threaten her. She cuts him again, this time in the leg, and deeper, so blood runs hot down his calf. He gets lucky and ducks under a blow to get away from the wall—if he lets her corner him, he’s done for.
The only thing he manages to think, as he parries again and again and again, is that she could have won half a dozen times already. But she hasn’t.
“You’re not going to kill me, are you?” he says to her, and maybe he means it as a taunt, but it comes out like a revelation.
“I don’t need to kill you to beat you,” Rava says.
She grits her teeth, and swings so hard that catching the blow against his vambrace sends a painful vibration all the way to his shoulder. She’s warmed up now, ready to batter him into submission, and so he does the thing that feels almost unbearable to him: he buries himself in the feeling of her.
Her vigor fills his chest, her fear gnaws in his stomach, her rage lights up his nerves. And only when he does that, when he loses himself completely in her, can he feel the little flash of insight that precedes every one of her movements.
He steps in time with her, their feet shuffling in unison like they’re partners in a dance. They move through the motions his mother taught him, high guard and low, swords clattering together and pulling apart.
He moves like her, for the first time.
He swings his sword as she withdraws hers, and he can see it, the wide-open stance she just presented to him, as if offering her death to him.
He swings.
60
In the moments just before Theren Forint catches a sword in his outstretched hand, Hela considers her situation. She’s kneeling on the dirt under the watchful eye of two guards: one is the soldier from the hallway with the shaved head and a bleeding ear, and the other is a ragged-looking woman with dirt under her fingernails. Hela is pretty sure that one is Satka—she matches Elegy’s description of the woman who once dislocated her arm.
Hela knows she’s no match for either of them. Scouts aren’t fighters, and she only has enough sopora in her ring to take out one of them . . . and that’s only if she can get her hands free. Someone told her, once, that if your hands are bound behind you, the trick is to get your feet over them so you can shimmy your arms to the front of your body—but with two guards watching her, there’s no way she can do that.
At least, not until they’re distracted.
Then the sword is in the air, and Theren is catching it with his right hand, and both of Hela’s guards are looking the other direction. She leans back to put her bound hands on the ground, then pulls them under her feet. At the same time Arias—either because he sees what she’s doing, or because he’s a real goddamn idiot—gets to his feet and rams his body into Satka, even though his hands are still tied. Hela scrapes her fingers against the stone as she drags her wrists under her ankles, her shins, and finally, her knees.
“Stop them!” Arias screams, and Hela looks up to see Kesia dragging Fenn out of the room with a knife at his throat.
Hela is pretty sure that manhandling an epocha is a good way to get yourself executed by Talusar authorities, but Kesia must have decided that Rava’s wrath is worse than that potentiality.
Behind her, Arias is still trying to fight Satka with his hands tied, and she wants to help him. But this is her window. If Hela loses sight of Kesia and Fenn, they’ll be gone for good.
So she sprints after them.
The hallway beyond the sanctuary is lined with blue stained-glass windows, so the light feels gloomy and unreal. Kesia is moving fast, and the blade is too close to Fenn’s neck for him to do much to fight back. So Hela grabs one of the lanterns hanging from a hook on the wall and hurls it in Kesia’s direction.
The lantern hits Kesia in the back, but instead of basking in her triumph, Hela feels a hand on her shoulder, shoving her hard against the stone wall. The guard with the nicked ear has caught up with her. He grabs her by the hair and slams her head into the wall. Hela’s vision goes black for a second, and a warm trickle of blood runs down the side of her face as she tries to elbow the guard in the—well, wherever.
She hits him, but there’s not much force behind the blow. His hand is on her arm, gripping so tightly she wants to scream. Instead, she turns toward him, leaning into him instead of away—and punches both hands into his chest at the same time.
It feels stupid, and she’s pretty sure it looks stupid, too, but she doesn’t care about finesse. All she cares about is cracking the shield of her ring, the one that contains the puff of sopora that can knock this idiot off his feet.
The shield breaks, and she thrusts her hands into the guard’s face. He staggers back, and topples to the stone right in front of the door to the sanctuary. Behind Hela, Fenn has slipped Kesia’s grasp and he’s holding the lantern like a weapon.
Hela pursues the fallen guard, thinking only of the sword he was holding when she drugged him. She gets both of her hands—still bound—around the sword’s grip, and looks up to see, inside the sanctuary:
Nyx, bleeding from the eyebrow and parrying with another guard.
Arias on the ground, his hands somehow free, about to take a kick to the chest from Satka.
And aglow with moonlight and febra, Theren Forint sparring with Rava Vidar.
People talk about Rava Vidar’s brutality all the time, but they never mention how beautifully she moves, with all the controlled strength of a dancer. For just a moment, Hela is spellbound. She realizes that Theren isn’t just Rava’s captive, or her truthsayer, but her student. Even now, as they’re fighting, he’s imitating her, his movements becoming more fluid, his footfalls more graceful.
The sound of a lantern hitting the floor, its glass shattering, brings Hela back to herself. Kesia has Fenn crowded up against the wall, and she obviously sliced at his arm to get him to release the lantern, because he’s bleeding now. Hela charges at her, sword held high, and swings.
She remembers, too late, that Kesia may be a coward and a traitor, but she’s also a Talusar soldier. Kesia’s hand clamps around Hela’s wrist, so strong Hela has no hope whatsoever of breaking her grip. Kesia wrenches Hela’s arm to the side, straining her shoulder, and punches her hard in the gut.
It knocks the wind out of Hela, and she stumbles back. Kesia pursues, her hand still tight on Hela’s wrist, and pries the sword out of Hela’s grasp.
Fenn swings the broken remnants of the lantern at Kesia from behind, but she’s too quick for him; she turns to hit the lantern with her sword, sending it spinning toward the wall. Then she bashes the side of Fenn’s head with the pommel of the sword.
All Hela can think to do, while she’s unarmed and gasping and desperate, is to hurl her body at Kesia’s as hard as she can.
The two women fall hard.
Out of the corner of Hela’s eye, she sees a blur of blue as Fenn rushes back toward the sanctuary, back toward danger. But then Kesia is hooking a leg over Hela’s to destabilize her, and shoving her to the side so Kesia is on top of her, pinning her to the stone.
Her hands close around Hela’s throat, and she tries to scream, but a strangled sound is all that escapes her. Fenn is gone; she’s alone in the hallway, and this is where she’s going to die. Panic floods her system like electricity. She flails and thrashes beneath Kesia, but Kesia keeps her hold, pressing harder against Hela’s windpipe.
Everything starts to go black at the edges, and all she can think is that it’s not right, it’s not right that Kesia gets to take so much and there are never any consequences—
And then Kesia screams—not a scream of rage, but a scream from deep inside her body, almost unearthly. Her hands slacken around Hela’s throat, and Hela gasps. She feels warm blood gushing over her from a wound in Kesia’s gut, and she sees the blue glint of a blade.
Kesia slumps to the side, and standing over her, face battered and body hunched and bloody sword in hand, is Arias.
61
Elegy waits with held breath for the priest’s response.
The priest’s eyes tighten, as if she’s frowning. There’s a patch of hazel on one of her otherwise-dark irises.
“We are not in the habit of performing this ritual on demand in the middle of the night,” the woman says. “Particularly when the demand is made by one of our enemies.”
“I thought it was your policy to pass the Fever on to the willing,” Elegy says. “That Cedrae are considered untested and unrefined thanks to our avoidance of Fever, a weakness your people seek to correct.”
“Political rhetoric has no place here.”
“Yet you still referred to me as your enemy. Is that not a political distinction? Certainly you don’t think I, personally, mean you any harm.”
