Seek the Traitor's Son, page 8
“Fenn . . .” Maeve says.
“You should have just done what she said,” Fenn says roughly. “Then you could have at least found a way to save all of us.”
“And if he had, you would have called him a traitor no matter what he did to help us.” Lisia tips her head back and closes her eyes. “Why do you have such a hard-on for hating him?”
Fenn eyes Theren, but he doesn’t speak again.
Theren tries not to think, but he can’t stop memories from flashing in his mind. Kesia at the dinner table when he was a child, admonishing him for not speaking in Talusar. Kesia pressing a practice sword into his hands that was almost too heavy for him to lift. She was careful to present herself as fully integrated, but when the two of them were alone, she spoke of her home wistfully, she performed the sign of the Fever over her mouth, she read Talusar poetry out loud—
And then, just days ago. The blue-and-copper jacket in its garment bag. Kesia disappearing all day when they got to Losan. Kesia looking uneasy as they landed at the Getty; he thought it was motion sickness. The way she sounded when she said, I’m sorry.
How long has she been planning this? A week, a month, a year? Or was this always the plan, twenty years in the making?
Did she only go to Cedre with the exiles to wait for the right moment to strike?
Two of the Talusar soldiers who dragged them here step into the Sparrow and strap themselves in. One of them is right next to Theren—the woman with her hair in a high knot.
“How many of them do you think will survive the Fever?” the bearded soldier across from her says. “Two? One? We’ve got a pool going.”
“This one can understand you, Ranos,” Hair Knot says, jerking her head toward Theren.
“So?” Ranos says, and he looks at Theren. “You want in? Not sure what you can bet, but I’m sure you’re good for it.”
“Fuck you,” Theren says.
Ranos looks at Theren for a moment, then says, “I mean, skinny and scared isn’t usually my type, but you’re not half bad.”
Hair Knot throws a glove at him, and hits him in the face. He throws it back, hitting her in the knee. The ship buzzes in anticipation of takeoff. A low voice comes through on the ship’s radio, and they lift away from the ground. Theren expects something bumpier than what he gets—the child pilot’s hands are quick on the controls, all the awkwardness of their movements gone as they do the choreography of takeoff.
“He’s too skinny to survive it, I think,” Ranos says, once they’re in the air. The desert spreads out in front of them, orange in the new morning light. It’s flat where they are, but in the distance, there are mountains.
“It has nothing to do with what you look like,” Hair Knot replies. “The Fever sees strength better than we do.” She performs the sign of the Fever—three circles traced with the tip of her thumb—over her mouth as she speaks.
“Ever the zealot, Nyx.”
Maeve nudges Theren with her elbow.
“You understand them?” she says.
Theren nods.
“How do you know it so well?”
“We speak it at home,” Theren says, and with a twinge in his chest, he amends: “We spoke it at home.”
Fenn snorts. “So she raised you like one of them, this whole time.”
Theren wants to argue, but he isn’t sure he can.
“Did you have any idea?” Maeve says, her voice gentle.
“No.”
Theren looks out the window. The desert land is turning green, the mountains rising, rocky and lush, from the plain.
9
The monastery sits at the edge of a green lake, high enough in the mountains that there’s still snow on the ground. It looks like a wooden layered cake, the tiers widening as they descend. The posts around the entrance are carved with flowers and with the sign of the Fever, three interlinked circles, one for the life before infection, one for the life after, and one for the Fever itself.
Ranos and the woman—Nyx—escort the Knights, their hands still bound behind them, into the monastery and down creaking hallways to a wide, bright room. A stove sits in its center, a chimney funneling smoke outside, and arranged around it are colorful cushions. It’s the first comfortable place any of them have been in since the Getty.
Kesia is already standing inside it.
“This is a sacred place,” she says to them. “It houses our most honored citizens: those who see deep into the past, who we call ‘epocha’; and those who can pass the Fever by breath, who we call ‘priests.’ ” Hearing her say “we” with such ease makes Theren feel sick. “The people here are all peaceful. They are also protected by our highest laws. If you attack them, if you so much as move threateningly toward them, you will be burned alive. Understand?”
As she speaks, Ranos moves from one of them to the other, cutting the ropes that bind their wrists.
“They’ll bring food and water,” Kesia says. “This will be the last meal you have before exposure to Fever. This is to give you strength. But there’s no evidence that strength helps you survive the Fever. It just prolongs your death. So if you want a quicker end, don’t eat.”
Ranos and Nyx leave. Lisia chokes on a sob and sinks to the floor, her hand clamped over her mouth. Maeve sits next to her, an arm around her back. Kesia is lingering by the door.
“Theren,” she says to him.
“There’s nothing you can say to me that I want to hear,” he says. “Not anymore.”
He can see that it wounds her, and he feels regret, but only for a moment. He’s here in this place, staring down death, because of her.
“You can’t be angry with me forever,” Kesia says.
“I can be angry with you until I die,” Theren says. “And thanks to you, that’ll be in a few days’ time.”
She stares at him. He doesn’t think she knows what to say. Neither does he. When she walks out of the room and closes the door behind her, it’s a relief.
“These people are insane,” Fenn says. “They bring their own here to get sick and die, and they call it a holy place.”
Theren sits, rubbing his wrists where the skin is raw. He feels strange. Detached, almost. Like he can’t bear to be in his own body, knowing it will soon betray him.
The notion of “surviving” the Fever is a flawed one, a kind of translation error. The Fever is fatal, and the death it brings about is total. No heartbeat, no brain waves, nothing. And then, as if time is running backward, the body puts itself back together again. The heart starts. The lungs fill.
The eyes open.
It’s no wonder they call this place holy. What else do you call a place where people routinely come back to life?
Lisia’s sobs subside. She and Maeve sit clutched together, quiet, as the others stare into the coals of the stove and wait.
* * *
A woman comes that evening to get them. Older, her face lined, wearing a deep blue robe with a heavy hood. The sleeves are stitched with copper thread in a repeating pattern: the three interlinked circles, over and over again, so tiny he doesn’t recognize them at first. She wears a necklace of black stones that creeps all the way up to her jaw.
Nyx follows her in, her hand poised over the knife at her side. But none of the Knights even stand up, let alone move against the—priest. Monk. Whatever she is.
“I am an attendant to priests of the Fever. I will take you one by one to be prepared for the ceremony.” Her English is slow and deliberate, each syllable pronounced. “Which of you would like to go first?”
No one moves.
When he was a child, Theren feared the monster under the bed, the monster in the closet, the monster in the dark. So his stepfather gave him a mechanical flashlight. Better to know what’s there than fear what isn’t, he said, and this sounded like a profound insight to Theren. After a few weeks of shining the flashlight under the bed, into the closet, into the dark apartment . . . he stopped feeling so afraid.
The Fever has been waiting in the dark all his life. It’s time to meet it.
“Let’s get it over with,” he says, and he comes to his feet. He didn’t eat with the others; he doesn’t want a slow decline. The dread of death is probably worse than death itself.
Maeve gets up, too. Hugs him. Furik wraps his arms around them both. Lisia touches Theren’s hand where it rests on Maeve’s arm. Theren lifts his eyes to Fenn.
Fenn nods. It’s more than Theren expected.
The woman ushers him into the hallway, and then falls into step beside him, her hands clasped before her.
“He’s the one who speaks Talusar,” Nyx says to the attendant.
“And he’s the one ready to meet our God,” the attendant says. “How fitting.”
Despite the dark wood that hems them in on all sides, the hallways feel open, their ceilings vaulted. They pass through a narrow, two-story-high space with stained-glass windows on either side. The images are of a fragmented Earth, thrice-encircled; of a woman in a blue robe performing the sign of the Fever over her mouth.
“I thought anyone could pass on the Fever with their blood,” Theren says, as he pauses to look at the windows. “What makes priests different?”
“Their breath is the breath of a god,” the attendant says. “There is no wrong way to meet the Fever, but the ideal is through the air. ‘What a clever-strange thing it is, that life’s deepest mystery is gently adrift, like a seed carried by the wind,’ like the poem from—”
“Volyn,” Theren says quietly. “I know.”
Kesia read him that poem once. She told him that some people shed enough of the Fever virus to transmit it through breath, but she didn’t tell him those people were considered holy, marked and robed and sequestered here in a monastery.
“Then you already know that it’s good to receive the Fever from one who is Fever-blessed to speak it into your body.”
Theren knows no such thing. But he follows the woman down stone steps and into a basement. The air feels moist. Nyx opens the door, and gestures them in.
The room below is long and narrow, with a deep pool in the center, full of dark water. All along the edge of the pool are arches and columns, with lanterns positioned at intervals to fill the space with dim, flickering light. It reminds him of the temple where Isre was Imbued. And maybe the infection is a kind of Imbuing.
Shuffling through the space on light feet, all around the pool, are people in blue robes—deep blue, like the sky after sunset.
“No one here will harm you,” Nyx says to him. “But you must do as they say, or I’ll hurt you.”
The attendant reaches for Theren’s hand. When she touches him, she freezes, and stares up into his eyes. Her own are shadowed and dark. Her hair is the color of ashes.
“I see a man,” she says, and she sounds like she’s far away. Her hood falls away from her head, and he sees a tattoo on the side of her throat, but he doesn’t know what it means. She squeezes him tightly. “A man descending into darkness. Your father, I think. He is not what you think he is, your father.”
His father was a Talusar soldier. His body is buried under a tree outside of Valla.
“You must be mistaken,” he says to her. He stares at the mark on her throat. Does it mark her as an epocha?
Is she looking into his past? Kesia lied about being loyal to Cedre, lied about betraying everything he’d ever known—did she lie to him about his father, too?
“Unmistakable,” the attendant says, and she releases him. “Come.”
He follows her to the edge of the pool, and he stares as she kneels and starts to untie his shoes. He crouches, stilling her hands, and their eyes meet again in the half-light.
“What is this?” he says.
“A ritual of cleansing,” she says. “You can’t stand before a priest without it. Don’t be bashful. You aren’t the first I’ve seen, and you won’t be the last.”
He hears Nyx moving toward him, and he releases the woman’s hands. She keeps at his laces like there was no interruption. The room is hushed, the others busy in the shadows, where he can’t see them.
It helps that she’s quick and businesslike, tugging off his shoes, peeling off his socks—spotted with blood at the heels and toes. She doesn’t object when he unbuttons his own trousers and steps out of them. His face is hot. He tries to ignore it.
“Get in,” she says, leaving him to take off his underwear and undershirt. She walks away, and Theren hurries to undress and get in the water.
It’s warm, and clearer than it looks, only dark because of the deep color of the tiles that line the pool. He stands with water lapping at his rib cage, and waits. One of the other attendants wades in, and then another, and another. They surround him.
He smells smoke. One of them holds a copper bowl with something burning in it. They wave it under Theren’s nose, and by instinct he breathes it in. It burns his lungs. He coughs, and his head swims, his muscles relax. He’s still awake, still aware, but he feels even more distant than before.
It’s easier to submit to their attentions after that. To the hands pressing him down into the water, and guiding him back up again, then working soap into his hair, his shoulders. The sight of them, and the lanterns, is dizzying. He closes his eyes and he’s not sure whether he feels fingers in his hair, along his knuckles, over his legs—or if they’re just phantoms.
They guide him out of the pool, and dry him off. Someone dabs oil on his sternum, on his forehead. Someone else walks around him with a thurible in hand, sending smoke into the air, floral and green, thick enough to choke him. They clothe him in a blue robe and leave his feet bare. They give him a cup of water to drink, and it tastes like mint.
His head is heavy. He expects Nyx to mock him when he has trouble walking, but she doesn’t. She just takes his elbow and guides him toward the door.
“You’re all right,” she says. “One step after another.”
He feels a pulse of fear, but it’s far away, somehow. They walk toward the stairs together, and down a hallway, and another hallway. The lanterns catch his eye, smear together, glitter at the corners. Nyx ushers him through a set of double doors, and then he’s in a church.
It’s not really a church, but it feels like one. Holy. The floor is stone; the walls are wood. A light source glows between the gaps in the wood; he can’t identify it.
In the center of the room are two chairs facing each other. He knows one of them is for him.
He moves toward it, and he’s aware there are other people at the edges of the space, that one of them is Kesia, that another one is Ranos, but that doesn’t seem important anymore. He sits. The fear that was just a prickle a moment before seizes him like a fist.
A man steps forward, into the moonlight, and sits down across from Theren. He wears blue and copper. He takes down his hood, and Theren sees that he’s young, his cheeks rough with a beard, and there’s a tattoo on his throat that looks familiar. His skin is light brown.
“Nisov is my name,” he says to Theren. “And I’m a priest of the Fever.”
There’s movement in the room—people making the sign of the Fever over their mouths. Ranos. Maybe Kesia. Theren clamps his mouth shut, an instinct.
“I know you’re not foolish enough to think you can stop breathing the same air as me,” Nisov says gently. “Your path is set. You can either move along it, or be dragged down it. But time doesn’t run backward, and neither can you.”
Theren fights the haze in his mind, fights to think this through. Surrounded by Talusar. Surrounded by wilderness.
“The Fever is your birthright,” Nisov says. “You are Talusar, and until this day you were a child, untested by the world. After it, you will be an adult, or you will cease to be. It’s not for us to predict.”
Nisov leans forward, so close that his face is just inches away from Theren’s. Theren is too dull-minded to pull away, though he knows Nisov’s closeness is a strategy: get as much of the Fever airborne as possible.
“The Fever always kills,” Nisov says. “To be infected with it is to face death. Some surrender, and some withdraw. But to face death is to change.”
There’s something about this that settles inside Theren like an anchor. He wants to change. He wants to become a person who wouldn’t run away from an oath seconds after swearing it. He wants to be someone who wouldn’t have fled the Talusar.
He wants to be anything other than Rava Vidar’s “Coward Knight.”
“You must welcome this change,” Nisov says, and he puts a hand on Theren’s knee. “There’s no other way.”
All of Theren’s life has been about avoiding this. Cedre Station is a quarantine zone because the Cedrae don’t believe in acceptable losses. They believe all they can do in the face of the Fever is fight to save as many people as possible. Yet here he is, unnecessarily breathing the same air as someone who can pass on this virus, who may already have done so. Nisov is right—he can’t go back. It’s too late now.
“Some people choose a holy kiss,” Nisov says. “Though it’s not a requirement.”
Theren wants to laugh; he wants to scream. But he also wants this to be done, and done thoroughly. So he nods.
He nods, and Nisov angles his mouth over Theren’s and kisses him, gently. A simple press of his lips, but Theren’s fate is now sealed, for better or for worse.
“I believe you can survive this,” Nisov says as he pulls away.
* * *
The descent into fever goes in stages.
First is the warmth. It hits him in the late morning, when the sun is high. The others are back from their own rituals, dressed in blue like him, smelling of anointing oil and smoke like him. They’re all sleeping on their own thin mattresses, which are arranged in a row on the floor in the bare room where they’ll all die.
“You should have just done what she said,” Fenn says roughly. “Then you could have at least found a way to save all of us.”
“And if he had, you would have called him a traitor no matter what he did to help us.” Lisia tips her head back and closes her eyes. “Why do you have such a hard-on for hating him?”
Fenn eyes Theren, but he doesn’t speak again.
Theren tries not to think, but he can’t stop memories from flashing in his mind. Kesia at the dinner table when he was a child, admonishing him for not speaking in Talusar. Kesia pressing a practice sword into his hands that was almost too heavy for him to lift. She was careful to present herself as fully integrated, but when the two of them were alone, she spoke of her home wistfully, she performed the sign of the Fever over her mouth, she read Talusar poetry out loud—
And then, just days ago. The blue-and-copper jacket in its garment bag. Kesia disappearing all day when they got to Losan. Kesia looking uneasy as they landed at the Getty; he thought it was motion sickness. The way she sounded when she said, I’m sorry.
How long has she been planning this? A week, a month, a year? Or was this always the plan, twenty years in the making?
Did she only go to Cedre with the exiles to wait for the right moment to strike?
Two of the Talusar soldiers who dragged them here step into the Sparrow and strap themselves in. One of them is right next to Theren—the woman with her hair in a high knot.
“How many of them do you think will survive the Fever?” the bearded soldier across from her says. “Two? One? We’ve got a pool going.”
“This one can understand you, Ranos,” Hair Knot says, jerking her head toward Theren.
“So?” Ranos says, and he looks at Theren. “You want in? Not sure what you can bet, but I’m sure you’re good for it.”
“Fuck you,” Theren says.
Ranos looks at Theren for a moment, then says, “I mean, skinny and scared isn’t usually my type, but you’re not half bad.”
Hair Knot throws a glove at him, and hits him in the face. He throws it back, hitting her in the knee. The ship buzzes in anticipation of takeoff. A low voice comes through on the ship’s radio, and they lift away from the ground. Theren expects something bumpier than what he gets—the child pilot’s hands are quick on the controls, all the awkwardness of their movements gone as they do the choreography of takeoff.
“He’s too skinny to survive it, I think,” Ranos says, once they’re in the air. The desert spreads out in front of them, orange in the new morning light. It’s flat where they are, but in the distance, there are mountains.
“It has nothing to do with what you look like,” Hair Knot replies. “The Fever sees strength better than we do.” She performs the sign of the Fever—three circles traced with the tip of her thumb—over her mouth as she speaks.
“Ever the zealot, Nyx.”
Maeve nudges Theren with her elbow.
“You understand them?” she says.
Theren nods.
“How do you know it so well?”
“We speak it at home,” Theren says, and with a twinge in his chest, he amends: “We spoke it at home.”
Fenn snorts. “So she raised you like one of them, this whole time.”
Theren wants to argue, but he isn’t sure he can.
“Did you have any idea?” Maeve says, her voice gentle.
“No.”
Theren looks out the window. The desert land is turning green, the mountains rising, rocky and lush, from the plain.
9
The monastery sits at the edge of a green lake, high enough in the mountains that there’s still snow on the ground. It looks like a wooden layered cake, the tiers widening as they descend. The posts around the entrance are carved with flowers and with the sign of the Fever, three interlinked circles, one for the life before infection, one for the life after, and one for the Fever itself.
Ranos and the woman—Nyx—escort the Knights, their hands still bound behind them, into the monastery and down creaking hallways to a wide, bright room. A stove sits in its center, a chimney funneling smoke outside, and arranged around it are colorful cushions. It’s the first comfortable place any of them have been in since the Getty.
Kesia is already standing inside it.
“This is a sacred place,” she says to them. “It houses our most honored citizens: those who see deep into the past, who we call ‘epocha’; and those who can pass the Fever by breath, who we call ‘priests.’ ” Hearing her say “we” with such ease makes Theren feel sick. “The people here are all peaceful. They are also protected by our highest laws. If you attack them, if you so much as move threateningly toward them, you will be burned alive. Understand?”
As she speaks, Ranos moves from one of them to the other, cutting the ropes that bind their wrists.
“They’ll bring food and water,” Kesia says. “This will be the last meal you have before exposure to Fever. This is to give you strength. But there’s no evidence that strength helps you survive the Fever. It just prolongs your death. So if you want a quicker end, don’t eat.”
Ranos and Nyx leave. Lisia chokes on a sob and sinks to the floor, her hand clamped over her mouth. Maeve sits next to her, an arm around her back. Kesia is lingering by the door.
“Theren,” she says to him.
“There’s nothing you can say to me that I want to hear,” he says. “Not anymore.”
He can see that it wounds her, and he feels regret, but only for a moment. He’s here in this place, staring down death, because of her.
“You can’t be angry with me forever,” Kesia says.
“I can be angry with you until I die,” Theren says. “And thanks to you, that’ll be in a few days’ time.”
She stares at him. He doesn’t think she knows what to say. Neither does he. When she walks out of the room and closes the door behind her, it’s a relief.
“These people are insane,” Fenn says. “They bring their own here to get sick and die, and they call it a holy place.”
Theren sits, rubbing his wrists where the skin is raw. He feels strange. Detached, almost. Like he can’t bear to be in his own body, knowing it will soon betray him.
The notion of “surviving” the Fever is a flawed one, a kind of translation error. The Fever is fatal, and the death it brings about is total. No heartbeat, no brain waves, nothing. And then, as if time is running backward, the body puts itself back together again. The heart starts. The lungs fill.
The eyes open.
It’s no wonder they call this place holy. What else do you call a place where people routinely come back to life?
Lisia’s sobs subside. She and Maeve sit clutched together, quiet, as the others stare into the coals of the stove and wait.
* * *
A woman comes that evening to get them. Older, her face lined, wearing a deep blue robe with a heavy hood. The sleeves are stitched with copper thread in a repeating pattern: the three interlinked circles, over and over again, so tiny he doesn’t recognize them at first. She wears a necklace of black stones that creeps all the way up to her jaw.
Nyx follows her in, her hand poised over the knife at her side. But none of the Knights even stand up, let alone move against the—priest. Monk. Whatever she is.
“I am an attendant to priests of the Fever. I will take you one by one to be prepared for the ceremony.” Her English is slow and deliberate, each syllable pronounced. “Which of you would like to go first?”
No one moves.
When he was a child, Theren feared the monster under the bed, the monster in the closet, the monster in the dark. So his stepfather gave him a mechanical flashlight. Better to know what’s there than fear what isn’t, he said, and this sounded like a profound insight to Theren. After a few weeks of shining the flashlight under the bed, into the closet, into the dark apartment . . . he stopped feeling so afraid.
The Fever has been waiting in the dark all his life. It’s time to meet it.
“Let’s get it over with,” he says, and he comes to his feet. He didn’t eat with the others; he doesn’t want a slow decline. The dread of death is probably worse than death itself.
Maeve gets up, too. Hugs him. Furik wraps his arms around them both. Lisia touches Theren’s hand where it rests on Maeve’s arm. Theren lifts his eyes to Fenn.
Fenn nods. It’s more than Theren expected.
The woman ushers him into the hallway, and then falls into step beside him, her hands clasped before her.
“He’s the one who speaks Talusar,” Nyx says to the attendant.
“And he’s the one ready to meet our God,” the attendant says. “How fitting.”
Despite the dark wood that hems them in on all sides, the hallways feel open, their ceilings vaulted. They pass through a narrow, two-story-high space with stained-glass windows on either side. The images are of a fragmented Earth, thrice-encircled; of a woman in a blue robe performing the sign of the Fever over her mouth.
“I thought anyone could pass on the Fever with their blood,” Theren says, as he pauses to look at the windows. “What makes priests different?”
“Their breath is the breath of a god,” the attendant says. “There is no wrong way to meet the Fever, but the ideal is through the air. ‘What a clever-strange thing it is, that life’s deepest mystery is gently adrift, like a seed carried by the wind,’ like the poem from—”
“Volyn,” Theren says quietly. “I know.”
Kesia read him that poem once. She told him that some people shed enough of the Fever virus to transmit it through breath, but she didn’t tell him those people were considered holy, marked and robed and sequestered here in a monastery.
“Then you already know that it’s good to receive the Fever from one who is Fever-blessed to speak it into your body.”
Theren knows no such thing. But he follows the woman down stone steps and into a basement. The air feels moist. Nyx opens the door, and gestures them in.
The room below is long and narrow, with a deep pool in the center, full of dark water. All along the edge of the pool are arches and columns, with lanterns positioned at intervals to fill the space with dim, flickering light. It reminds him of the temple where Isre was Imbued. And maybe the infection is a kind of Imbuing.
Shuffling through the space on light feet, all around the pool, are people in blue robes—deep blue, like the sky after sunset.
“No one here will harm you,” Nyx says to him. “But you must do as they say, or I’ll hurt you.”
The attendant reaches for Theren’s hand. When she touches him, she freezes, and stares up into his eyes. Her own are shadowed and dark. Her hair is the color of ashes.
“I see a man,” she says, and she sounds like she’s far away. Her hood falls away from her head, and he sees a tattoo on the side of her throat, but he doesn’t know what it means. She squeezes him tightly. “A man descending into darkness. Your father, I think. He is not what you think he is, your father.”
His father was a Talusar soldier. His body is buried under a tree outside of Valla.
“You must be mistaken,” he says to her. He stares at the mark on her throat. Does it mark her as an epocha?
Is she looking into his past? Kesia lied about being loyal to Cedre, lied about betraying everything he’d ever known—did she lie to him about his father, too?
“Unmistakable,” the attendant says, and she releases him. “Come.”
He follows her to the edge of the pool, and he stares as she kneels and starts to untie his shoes. He crouches, stilling her hands, and their eyes meet again in the half-light.
“What is this?” he says.
“A ritual of cleansing,” she says. “You can’t stand before a priest without it. Don’t be bashful. You aren’t the first I’ve seen, and you won’t be the last.”
He hears Nyx moving toward him, and he releases the woman’s hands. She keeps at his laces like there was no interruption. The room is hushed, the others busy in the shadows, where he can’t see them.
It helps that she’s quick and businesslike, tugging off his shoes, peeling off his socks—spotted with blood at the heels and toes. She doesn’t object when he unbuttons his own trousers and steps out of them. His face is hot. He tries to ignore it.
“Get in,” she says, leaving him to take off his underwear and undershirt. She walks away, and Theren hurries to undress and get in the water.
It’s warm, and clearer than it looks, only dark because of the deep color of the tiles that line the pool. He stands with water lapping at his rib cage, and waits. One of the other attendants wades in, and then another, and another. They surround him.
He smells smoke. One of them holds a copper bowl with something burning in it. They wave it under Theren’s nose, and by instinct he breathes it in. It burns his lungs. He coughs, and his head swims, his muscles relax. He’s still awake, still aware, but he feels even more distant than before.
It’s easier to submit to their attentions after that. To the hands pressing him down into the water, and guiding him back up again, then working soap into his hair, his shoulders. The sight of them, and the lanterns, is dizzying. He closes his eyes and he’s not sure whether he feels fingers in his hair, along his knuckles, over his legs—or if they’re just phantoms.
They guide him out of the pool, and dry him off. Someone dabs oil on his sternum, on his forehead. Someone else walks around him with a thurible in hand, sending smoke into the air, floral and green, thick enough to choke him. They clothe him in a blue robe and leave his feet bare. They give him a cup of water to drink, and it tastes like mint.
His head is heavy. He expects Nyx to mock him when he has trouble walking, but she doesn’t. She just takes his elbow and guides him toward the door.
“You’re all right,” she says. “One step after another.”
He feels a pulse of fear, but it’s far away, somehow. They walk toward the stairs together, and down a hallway, and another hallway. The lanterns catch his eye, smear together, glitter at the corners. Nyx ushers him through a set of double doors, and then he’s in a church.
It’s not really a church, but it feels like one. Holy. The floor is stone; the walls are wood. A light source glows between the gaps in the wood; he can’t identify it.
In the center of the room are two chairs facing each other. He knows one of them is for him.
He moves toward it, and he’s aware there are other people at the edges of the space, that one of them is Kesia, that another one is Ranos, but that doesn’t seem important anymore. He sits. The fear that was just a prickle a moment before seizes him like a fist.
A man steps forward, into the moonlight, and sits down across from Theren. He wears blue and copper. He takes down his hood, and Theren sees that he’s young, his cheeks rough with a beard, and there’s a tattoo on his throat that looks familiar. His skin is light brown.
“Nisov is my name,” he says to Theren. “And I’m a priest of the Fever.”
There’s movement in the room—people making the sign of the Fever over their mouths. Ranos. Maybe Kesia. Theren clamps his mouth shut, an instinct.
“I know you’re not foolish enough to think you can stop breathing the same air as me,” Nisov says gently. “Your path is set. You can either move along it, or be dragged down it. But time doesn’t run backward, and neither can you.”
Theren fights the haze in his mind, fights to think this through. Surrounded by Talusar. Surrounded by wilderness.
“The Fever is your birthright,” Nisov says. “You are Talusar, and until this day you were a child, untested by the world. After it, you will be an adult, or you will cease to be. It’s not for us to predict.”
Nisov leans forward, so close that his face is just inches away from Theren’s. Theren is too dull-minded to pull away, though he knows Nisov’s closeness is a strategy: get as much of the Fever airborne as possible.
“The Fever always kills,” Nisov says. “To be infected with it is to face death. Some surrender, and some withdraw. But to face death is to change.”
There’s something about this that settles inside Theren like an anchor. He wants to change. He wants to become a person who wouldn’t run away from an oath seconds after swearing it. He wants to be someone who wouldn’t have fled the Talusar.
He wants to be anything other than Rava Vidar’s “Coward Knight.”
“You must welcome this change,” Nisov says, and he puts a hand on Theren’s knee. “There’s no other way.”
All of Theren’s life has been about avoiding this. Cedre Station is a quarantine zone because the Cedrae don’t believe in acceptable losses. They believe all they can do in the face of the Fever is fight to save as many people as possible. Yet here he is, unnecessarily breathing the same air as someone who can pass on this virus, who may already have done so. Nisov is right—he can’t go back. It’s too late now.
“Some people choose a holy kiss,” Nisov says. “Though it’s not a requirement.”
Theren wants to laugh; he wants to scream. But he also wants this to be done, and done thoroughly. So he nods.
He nods, and Nisov angles his mouth over Theren’s and kisses him, gently. A simple press of his lips, but Theren’s fate is now sealed, for better or for worse.
“I believe you can survive this,” Nisov says as he pulls away.
* * *
The descent into fever goes in stages.
First is the warmth. It hits him in the late morning, when the sun is high. The others are back from their own rituals, dressed in blue like him, smelling of anointing oil and smoke like him. They’re all sleeping on their own thin mattresses, which are arranged in a row on the floor in the bare room where they’ll all die.
