Seek the Traitor's Son, page 6
Elegy stops in the doorway of one of the galleries, and stares up at the statue of Cassandra inside it. It’s the statue’s expression that catches Elegy’s attention. The furrow of her eyebrows—she’s frustrated. No one listens to her.
“She looks a little like you,” Shir says, in her ear.
She does, Elegy thinks. Something in the set of her mouth, maybe. Turned down at the corners.
“Let’s hope that’s just a coincidence,” she replies.
6
Theren is alone. The sun is setting, and the land around the Getty is turning orange, like it’s on fire. He hears footsteps approaching, and he buzzes with fear.
A woman enters the room. She wears a black dress, simple, and her brown hair is pinned back. He barely looks at her face before his posture is straightening, his head bending. He knows this is Elegy Rosyk, Hope of Cedre, daughter of the Sword.
A man follows her in. He wears a formal military uniform—crimson, with sharp shoulders.
“Oh! You must be Forint,” the man says. He’s handsome, his hair dark and curly, his skin tan and freckled across the nose. He smiles, and his teeth are white. He extends a hand. “I’m Shir Alexios. This is Elegy Ahn.”
Theren’s never heard the name “Ahn” before. It must be her father’s name.
Theren shakes Alexios’s hand. He has a good grip. Not too hard.
“Guess we’re all going to be spending a lot of time together,” Alexios says. He must be Elegy’s husband, then. Theren wonders what this will be like—standing in the background while Elegy and her husband build a life together. Silent and watchful.
“Yes,” Theren says. “We will.”
“Interesting choice of ensemble,” Alexios says. “Just something you had lying around?”
All Theren can do is stare at him. He isn’t sure how to answer—how to explain that it’s not like he’s swimming in formal clothing at home, that his mother gave this to him, that she brought nothing with her to Cedre but her memories and the child in her womb, that he wants everyone to remember why he’s swearing this oath—
“Shir.” Elegy’s voice is low and clear. “Can you give us a moment?”
Alexios gives Theren a strange look. “Yeah, all right.” He kisses Elegy’s cheek, nods to Theren, and steps out of the room, closing the door behind him.
Theren’s eyes drop. He doesn’t know how to be around her, this woman he’s about to swear an oath to. This woman who’s supposed to save Cedre, whatever that means.
“Sorry about that. When he’s nervous, he talks,” she says.
She’s fidgeting with her hands. Twisting her fingers together and pulling them apart. She must be nervous, too.
“Hey, eyes up,” she says, and he obeys without thinking. He isn’t expecting the bare terror he sees in her face. It eases some of the tension in his jaw.
“I just thought we should meet before the ceremony,” she says. “I’m not—I’m not someone people swear oaths to. I don’t know how to do this.”
She’s young. Older than him, but still—young, just beginning. And pretty, too. High cheekbones, warm eyes.
“Why is he nervous?” Theren says, just to have something to say.
Elegy’s hands still. “Well, yesterday a bunch of augurs blew up my entire life, so I think he’s afraid of what it will mean. Even though he’s pretending not to be.”
She laughs. An awkward silence falls as her smile fades.
They’re more alike than they are different, he realizes. Yesterday they were both living the lives they chose. Today . . . not so much.
“I’m a soldier. I work in search and rescue,” she says. “I travel a lot. All over, actually. And I don’t really need protection. So this . . . this Knight thing, it can be what we make it.”
He wishes he could think of something to say. She thinks she’s offering him some reassurance that his life won’t be boring, but he doesn’t want her life. He’s not interested in exploring this planet; he never has been. He grew up on Cedre Station, looking toward the Sundial for the future. Hearing about the people from another world who once beckoned them out. And he always wanted to meet them. To go out of the solar system. Away from their destroyed planet.
He wants the life he had.
“I know you didn’t choose this oath,” she says. “But—you’re willing to swear it, right? Nobody’s threatening you with death if you don’t?”
It’s a harder question to answer than he expected. He went through the day without thinking about an alternative—put on the clothes, got on the ship, and walked into the Getty, and nobody held a blade to his back. But of course, they can’t force him to take an oath. All he has to do is refuse to speak.
But he’s lived his life with an unfinished sentence dangling over him. His citizenship. His belonging. His mother risked everything to get him here. This was the cost. And he can hardly fault the cost for being costly.
“Yes,” he says. “I’m willing.”
“Okay,” she says. “I think we have to go now. Are you ready?”
No, he thinks.
“Yes,” he says.
* * *
The room where the ceremony takes place was once the main entrance of the museum. It’s round and three stories high, the walls mostly glass. Skylights in the ceiling let in the orange glow of the harvest moon, now rising.
He’s outside now, alone and waiting to be summoned in. From here he can see that the exiles and their eldest children—the Knights of Cedre—stand around the circumference of the room, in shadow. Among them are Cedre soldiers, there to protect the handful of government officials therein who are witnesses to the proceedings. And of course, there’s the Sword of Cedre herself. It’s a small group, compared to the last ceremony, but the thought of all those eyes on him still makes him itch.
The Knight oath is over a century old. There has always been a Sword of Cedre, and that Sword has always had at least one Knight. Usually the Knight was prepared from childhood, raised alongside the Sword. He wonders what happened to whoever was originally supposed to serve this Sword, then supplanted by the children of exiles. Maybe she absorbed them into her private army.
The wind is cool, now that the sun is gone, but heat still emanates from the concrete beneath him. It occurs to him that he can still run. He’s alone now. He can sprint across the courtyard and tumble down the hill and into the streets of Losan.
But then his mother would be cast out of Cedre. And if the Talusar ever found her . . . well. She wouldn’t survive it.
The door to the building opens, and the augur beckons him in. He doesn’t hesitate.
It’s dark in the cylindrical room, but he can feel the pressure of a dozen sets of eyes staring at him. Standing in the center of the floor is the augur, and just behind her, Elegy Rosyk. No—Elegy Ahn.
He stops in front of the augur, as he was instructed, and waits. Silence falls over the hall. The augur lifts her hands, and speaks loud enough to fill the space:
“People of Cedre. People of the stars, unchanged by Fever and spared of its caprice. For over a century you have stood in opposition to an enemy far more populous and advantaged than yourselves. So often we are defined by what we oppose, and Cedre is no exception—when it took shape, it embraced a pluralistic system of governance, rather than the empire of the Talusar. Leaders would be chosen, not shaped from birth.”
She tucks her hands into her sleeves, and turns to nod at the Sword of Cedre, standing off to her right.
“But Cedre’s need to defend itself against the Talusar became too great,” she says. “Cedre is, above all else, talented at survival. So they designated one woman as Cedre’s defender. Her sole purpose would be to guard it against the Talusar, and that duty would be embedded in her blood, such that her children, and her children’s children, would inherit it. Her name . . . was Rosyk.”
Someone calls out a phrase in a language Theren doesn’t speak. Though he can’t translate it, he knows its meaning: May the Rosyka endure.
“She was called Cedre’s Sword,” the augur continues, “and her twin sister swore that as the Sword kept her eyes on the Talusar, her twin would keep her eyes on the Sword. She became the first Knight of Cedre. And since then, the role of Knight has not been inherited, but compelled by devotion, arising in each generation like a seed breaking through the earth.”
Theren’s hands are starting to tremble. He searches the crowd for his mother’s face. He can’t find her.
“In this generation, the Knight has come from the soil of an impossible choice. His mother chose to forsake home, and country; language, and culture; history, and name . . . for the good of her child and her future.” The augur’s eyes fix on Theren’s. “She and her company turned their backs on the Fever, but the Fever has answered, nonetheless, providing a prophecy, and a new path for Cedre to reclaim more of what it has lost. So it isn’t to the Sword that this Knight will swear himself, but to Hope—the hope that Cedre will endure, and prosper, embodied in a single person with the Sword’s purpose in her blood.”
He can’t see Elegy’s face. Her head is bowed, casting her eyes in shadow.
“Who takes this oath?” the augur says, and just like that, it’s Theren’s turn.
“Theren Forint,” he says, his voice a little too rough, a little too quiet. He swallows hard.
“Kneel, Theren Forint.”
He sinks to his knees on the polished stone, and sits back on his heels. He hopes no one can see the scuffing on the soles of his shoes, which his mother unearthed like buried treasure from a bin in a resale shop a few years ago.
The augur steps back, and Elegy steps forward. She clasps her hands in front of her, and though she doesn’t fidget, he can see how tightly she’s holding herself.
“Theren Forint, are you here of your own free will, taking this oath in full knowledge of the commitment it requires?” the augur asks.
“Yes.”
“Do you swear your loyalty to Elegy Rosyk, daughter of the Sword of Cedre, to hold her interests above those of your friends, your kin, and yourself?”
Hey, eyes up, he hears Elegy say in his memory, and he forces his eyes to hers. She’s staring at him with peculiar intensity.
“Yes,” he says.
“Do you swear your blade to her, to make every effort to protect her, even if the cost is your life?”
“Yes.”
“Do you swear to keep this oath for as long as you draw breath?”
Elegy closes her eyes, her throat working as if she’s trying to swallow, and Theren waits for her to open them again before replying, “Yes.”
“Then you are a Knight of Cedre. May you be a shield for the daughter of the Sword.”
Theren releases a heavy breath. The augur steps to the side and accepts a tray with a knife and a pebble on it. He’d almost forgotten this part—every Knight got a tracker embedded, like the Sword herself and, he assumes, Elegy. He looks at the knife, small and deadly sharp, and his mouth goes dry.
Its purpose is symbolic as much as practical: it will seal his oath with pain. Even the Cedrae, with their pretensions of advancement, understand that pain can be powerful. In this case, a demonstration of commitment—though small—where simple words don’t quite manage it.
He unbuttons the first few buttons of his jacket, and then the shirt beneath it, and pulls the fabric away from his right shoulder. Elegy picks up the knife, and stands in front of him again. She touches the tip of the blade to his chest, just beneath the juncture of collarbone and shoulder. Her eyes flick up to his as if asking a question. He nods.
The pain of the first cut is manageable. But when she uses the knife to press the tracker pebble into the wound, the pain is intense. White-hot, it spreads from the point of the blade and reaches down into muscle and bone and nerve as she presses deeper. He clenches his jaw and breathes through his nose, forcing himself to count to five. Elegy withdraws the knife on “four,” and she holds a square of gauze to the puncture wound she left behind.
It’s done.
He’s on his feet again, accepting a strip of medical tape from the augur, when he sees something outside. A dark shape moves fast across the concrete where Theren was standing a few minutes ago. Then in the distance, a low wail, the sound of the Losani emergency alert system.
The wall that surrounds the city has been breached.
The room erupts into hurried conversations, in a handful of languages. Then the glass doors shatter. Talusar soldiers wearing copper-bright febra armor surge into the room—right toward Elegy.
He’s been afraid before, in his life: when he got lost in the market as a child, when he thought he had failed an exam, when he prepared for this very ceremony . . . but all that fear is meaningless now in the face of this wordless terror.
He’s a Knight. He swore. He swore his heart, his sword, his life. It’s his duty to throw himself in front of Elegy, as the closest one to her, as the only one who can help her now.
Their eyes meet, hers so wide he can see the whites around them.
He turns—
And runs.
7
Elegy lurches back as glass sprays across the floor. An arm wraps around her back, and she knows without looking at him that it’s Shir—knows by the way he feels, warm and strong, his fingers around her rib cage, half dragging her, half carrying her away from the dark figures now filling the room. She hears her mother’s voice shouting commands: “Take her up!” “Summon the shuttle now!”
She’s been on the other end of this so many times. Swooping in at the tail end of an attack to get Cedrae soldiers out. She’s been the one who sees it from above, the one who has a plan, the one who the Talusar didn’t see coming. But none of those skills are translating now. She doesn’t know how to be the focal point, how to be the life that needs saving.
She smells smoke and eucalyptus oil. Shir dabs the oil under his jaw because he knows she likes the smell of it. He shoves open a door and the light of an exit sign reveals they’re in a stairwell. His eyes find hers, reflecting red.
“We need to run,” he says, and finally Elegy is in the present again.
She grabs his hand, and starts up the stairs, hiking up her skirt with her other hand. At the first landing, she kicks her shoes off and looks down to see the Sword not far behind them. The Sword shoves a broom—where did she get that?—through the door handle to slow down anyone who might follow them, and she runs to catch up to them.
“Where’s your fucking Knight?” the Sword demands.
“Don’t know,” Elegy says. She forgot to look for him in the chaos. Maybe he’s dead. “Who are they?”
“Some of Rava’s soldiers, if I had to guess. Seems we were betrayed by one of our own.”
“Shit,” Shir says. “An exile?”
“Seems likely.” The Sword leads them up, past the top floor of the building, to a door with roof access. She throws it open. The roof is hot from the day’s sun. The Sword points to the far edge. “There. The shuttle will arrive soon. Get her on it.”
“What about you?” Elegy says.
“I’ll be right behind you. I need to get some of the others out.”
“But—”
“I,” the Sword interrupts her, her eyes locked on Elegy’s, “am not as important as you are. Go.”
Elegy is about to argue when something hits the rooftop a few feet away and sticks there. An arrow. There’s a figure on the roof of one of the other buildings, illuminated just enough by moonlight that she can see their shape against the night sky. They wear their hair in a crown of braids.
Rava Vidar wore her hair in a crown of braids.
Shir cries out in alarm and moves in front of Elegy, his hand forcing her head down, his chest pressed to her back. She hears an arrow hit him—the impact of it, and then the wet gurgle of pain from his mouth.
She cries out, and his hand presses her head down even harder. Her knees start to buckle under the weight of him, now falling against her.
“Use me as a shield,” he chokes into her ear.
She screams, and falls to her knees, her husband still wrapped around her. Another arrow whistles toward them, and his muscles jerk as it hits him. He makes a strangled sound, and Elegy screams again. Lights flood the rooftop, the shuttle hovering next to it. The ting of metal striking metal—an arrow hitting the side of the shuttle.
“Time to go!” the Sword says, from behind her.
Shir’s body is just a weight, now. She no longer feels his breath crackling against her back.
The Sword grabs her arm and drags her out from under him. Elegy strains against her mother’s hold, strains toward Shir. She makes desperate, wordless sounds, unable to voice her refusal to leave him.
“We’ll come back for him!” the Sword shouts at her, and she’s too strong for Elegy to resist; she drags Elegy toward the edge of the roof. The tile scrapes Elegy’s bare feet.
Shir—
“Grab her!”
Someone wraps their arms around her middle and heaves her into the shuttle. She falls to the floor, and hits her head on the metal grate. The ship is moving, flying away from the Getty. Elegy turns back—
It’s too dark to see anything but the Sword’s silhouette against the rooftop. An arrow hits her mother in the gut, and her body arches around it, and she looks like a dancer, contracting and releasing, limbs long and oddly relaxed, as if this is all a part of the plan.
Then she falls.
A scream freezes in Elegy’s throat.
Rava Vidar, with her crown of braids, just killed the Sword of Cedre.
