Chapter 2 #2
“That’s not an answer! I’m married. I’m happy. I’m . . .” She takes a slow, tremulous breath, and begins again: “That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the last one we’ll give,” the oldest augur says. “The prophecy has settled. The paths are laid. It’s time for you to leave, Elegy Rosyk.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Elegy says. “You unload this . . . thing on me, and that’s it, those are the only questions I can ask?”
“Rava Vidar asked as many, we’re told,” the youngest augur says. “Different questions, with different answers, perhaps—-but she left unworried.”
“Good for her,” Elegy says. “But I don’t worship you just because a virus stuffed your head with the future.”
The youngest augur’s cheeks get impossibly redder. The oldest augur only shrugs.
“Tumult and rupture,” she says, as if that’s an explanation.
Elegy sees Rava Vidar only once more.
She marches out of the sanctuary, startling the Sword, and stuffs her feet into her boots without taking out the socks that are rolled up in the toes.
“Slow down,” the Sword says, and Elegy shrugs off the woman’s hand, yanks her shoelaces tight, and walks out of the antechamber, into the hot afternoon sun.
The salt flat is blinding. She squints into it: the white, shimmering hexagons of salt; the hazy mountains beyond them; the pale blue sky; the glow of Cedre Station, a small white barrel above them even during the day, with the Sundial just a speck at its side.
When she turns back to the Cenobium, toward Shir, she feels the wind on her cheeks and realizes she’s crying.
“What is it?” he asks, and she remembers the first time she saw him, how annoyed she was with how charming he was, how desperately she wanted to hate him.
And then, years later, in the forest just outside of Nusanta, how his dark, gentle eyes called her back to herself.
She hears the hollow strike of horse hooves.
Waiting at the edge of the Cenobium is a line of Talusar soldiers with Rava Vidar at their head.
The wind tosses her black cloak to the side and blows her blond hair over her face.
Their eyes meet, and it occurs to Elegy that the fate she just heard—-that she’s the hope of her people, and that she heralds the destruction of her enemies—-might belong to Rava, instead.
Whatever the outcome of their twin destiny, their collision is inevitable.
“We have to wait for them to leave,” the Sword says to her. “Part of the deal we both made with the augurs.”
Elegy’s enemies have always been Talusar.
The Talusar have taken over most of the planet.
Talusar soldiers killed her father for helping a child flee Talusar country, and then, after Elegy joined the military, they killed her friends and colleagues, too.
She’s picked through the aftermaths of a dozen skirmishes in search of survivors; she’s seen, up close, just how deadly their army can be.
And Rava Vidar is the worst of them, a monster that lurks in the dark, a mythical thing.
Rava Vidar points at her, her arm straight even as she nudges her horse into motion with her heels. Her body twists as she rides away, her finger still locked on Elegy, until she can’t hold the posture anymore, or until she’s too far away to see.
The message is clear: Rava Vidar wants her dead.
“I need help,” Elegy says, into the wind.
“You’ll get it,” the Sword replies.
Later that night, Elegy and Shir lie side by side in the double bed of their small apartment in Losan. The air smells like pancakes from the dinner Shir pieced together for them with pantry staples and a pat of butter from their next--door neighbor.
Every time Elegy opened her mouth to tell him what the augurs told her, she felt so choked she couldn’t breathe.
Finally Shir told her, Tomorrow. They would talk about it tomorrow.
In the semidarkness of their second--floor apartment, she stares at the back of his neck, at the chain he wears there.
On the end of it is a silver ring—-his wedding ring.
She touches her own ring, which hangs in the hollow of her throat, sticky with sweat.
Outside, the late--night patrons of the tavern below break out into a chorus of laughter.
They got married in the courthouse. Shir wore white, because it glowed against his skin.
Elegy wore a red dress. Their reception was in the hangukskie diner around the corner from his parents’ house, and all their friends and neighbors came, as well as every last one of Shir’s cousins.
Elegy had only her adopted sister, Hela, and an old photograph of her father.
They ate until they were about to burst, and drank twice as much, and then spilled out into the street, laughing.
Hela sang an old folk song at the top of her lungs just to give them something to dance to.
Then they stumbled home, stumbled out of their shoes, stumbled into bed.
Shir woke up a few hours later to vomit and make oatmeal.
Worth it, he said to her in the morning, with a sleepy smile.
She touches the chain that stretches across the back of his neck with just her fingertips.
She’s loved him for five years, ever since he stopped her from killing a young Talusar soldier in the forests north of Nusanta.
How we fight them matters, Elegy. I know you believe that.
She wasn’t sure, at the time, that she did. But she came to.
And now, the hope of Cedre’s victory—-not just survival, but victory—-will be preceded by a betrayal she can’t even imagine. I saw a man. You have never said his name. You will fall in love with him. It’s a reminder that she’s never touched a rose without being pricked by a thorn.
“Shir,” she says. “Are you awake?”
He turns, and she can see the freckles dusting his nose, the curl of his eyelashes, the lines in his forehead that weren’t there when they first met. And oh . . . she loves him.
She loves him, so she tells him the truth.