Chapter 10
Elegy leans back in the chair, her spear across her knees. The house smells like mildew and cigarettes, and there’s a pile of knitting on the side table.
The back door opens. Elegy feels like a wire that’s gone live, but she forces herself to stay still.
She hears the man—-Robbie, and any man who chooses the name “Robbie” for himself is suspect, in her opinion—-pouring himself a glass of water in the kitchen.
She hears the gurgle of his swallow. When he steps into the study to find Elegy sitting there, spear at the ready, he freezes.
“Hello, Robert,” she says, and she picks up the ball of yarn with her free hand. “I didn’t think a man like you would have an interest in the fiber arts.”
“It’s very soothing,” Robbie says. “Who are you?”
“I’m a Scout. People hire me to find things. Someone hired me to find you.”
Robbie’s eyes dart toward the door and back again. He obviously doesn’t have a talent for subterfuge. Elegy picks up her spear and points it at him.
“Whatever you’re thinking about doing is dumb,” she says. “So don’t do it. It’ll just be exhausting for both of us.”
“I haven’t committed any crimes.”
“And I’m not a Peacekeeper, so I don’t really care whether you’ve committed a crime or not.” Elegy sits forward. “Though in your case, you absolutely have.”
That Robbie Meacham is a criminal makes this job easier, but even if he wasn’t, she would have had trouble turning it down. The person who hired her has information she needs. Information about the Talusar. Robbie Meacham’s freedom is a small price to pay for that.
She can tell he’s about to run. In fact, she’s counting on it.
Within seconds she’s proven correct, as Robbie hurls his water glass at her and takes off.
The glass hits the wall next to Elegy’s head and shatters, spraying water everywhere.
Robbie doesn’t move toward the front door, since that would mean running toward her—-he goes for the back, which is perfect, just as planned.
Elegy gets up, spear in hand, and walks toward the exit. By the time she makes it outside, her sister Hela has Robbie pinned to the pavement.
“You—-fucking—-!” Robbie says, his mouth full of pavement.
Hela, still holding him down, punches her own leg in a move that would have struck Elegy as odd if she didn’t know what it was for.
Hela wears a bulbous ring on her middle finger, and the blow triggers a puff of sopora from it, which she points at Robbie Meacham’s face. He inhales it and slumps.
“We’ve got five minutes until he starts wriggling again,” Hela says, checking her watch. “Again, I have to question the fairness of this team dynamic. All you do is talk to him, and I’m the one who has to tackle him? I thought I was the senior partner.”
“We can trade places if you’d like. But we both know I’m no good at tackling.”
“I could use a drink,” Hela says. “You?”
“Yes.”
Together they haul a heavily sedated Robbie to his feet and walk toward Hela’s Finch, which is parked at the end of the alley.
They take a bound and gagged Robbie Meacham to a tavern called the Dustbowl in the middle of nowhere.
Really—-nothing around it for miles in every direction.
It’s in the Barrens, which is the stretch of land between Talusar country and Cedrae country, where citizens of both—-and neither—-intermingle.
They don’t love Scouts there. They don’t love Scouts anywhere, really.
Elegy’s father was a Scout. He was an improbable choice for the father of the Sword’s second child, and a downright scandalous one, at the time.
Scouts didn’t exactly have a stellar reputation.
In the past, they partnered with the Cedre military to bring in criminals who fled Losan, but then Scouts started taking bribes from said criminals, and Cedre soldiers started coming up with any excuse not to pay Scouts for their work, and now, most Scouts want nothing to do with the military, including its Peacekeeping division.
Instead, Scouts now pursue justice—-or vengeance—-for other people, like bringing in Robbie Meacham; or they find salvage that’s too deep in Talusar country for anyone else to dare seek it out; or, on some rare occasions, they help Talusar refugees find safety.
That was her father’s specialty. And it’s her father who got her this Talusar contact, from beyond the grave.
Hela stays in the car with Robbie while the exchange takes place. She tries not to talk to Talusar, as a rule. So Elegy is alone when she sits down across from the man, a glass of whiskey in hand.
“I held up my end,” she says, as a greeting. “Now it’s your turn.”
His name is Deji—-short for something, probably, but he never said—-and he’s maybe forty years old, his face carved up with scars. She thinks he might have been Talusar military in another life, but she’s not sure. He responds well to directness.
“What do you want to know?” he says.
“You said you saw some movement,” she says. “Close associates of Rava Vidar.”
“I did,” Deji confirms. “They passed through a little outpost called Duchess. Months ago.”
“And this is notable . . . why?”
“Well, Rava wasn’t with them, for one thing. And she’s always with them.” He sips from his glass, which has some clear liquor in it, no ice. There’s never any ice at the Dustbowl. “And for another thing, there’s only one place they could possibly have been going.”
Elegy knows the area around Valla, the nearest Talusar city, pretty well, but it still takes her a second to picture it.
Duchess is three hundred miles away from the city, and it barely even has a tavern.
But it serves an important function: it’s where people stop when they’re on their way to the Cenobium.
“Rava’s lessers were going to visit the augurs,” she says.
“Now I gotta wonder why Rava Vidar sent her nearest and dearest to the Cenobium without her,” he says, leaning closer to her. “I asked around—-discreetly, of course—-and I keep hearing the same damn thing.”
“Which is?”
“That she’s planning something. Something catastrophically big.” He sits back, and drains the rest of his glass. “The last time Rava Vidar was cooking up something big, the Sword of Cedre died. So that’s the caliber of shitstorm we’re talking about.”
That’s what most people remember about that day, the day of the Getty attack: the Sword of Cedre died. Not many people know that a little--known primary by the name of Shir Alexios died, too. But his face is all Elegy sees when she thinks of Rava’s big plans.
Shir thought Elegy was the Hope of Cedre, and he died to save her. After that day, she pretty much decided never to be the Hope of Cedre again. Fuck prophecy. All she cares about now is stopping whatever Rava Vidar is doing.
“I’m sorry I don’t have more specifics,” Deji says.
“That’s all right,” she replies distantly. “You’ll owe me one.”
After putting a still--woozy Robbie Meacham on the back of Deji’s horse, Hela and Elegy get back in the Finch and fly out to their house in the desert.
“House” still doesn’t seem like the right word for it.
It’s a chrome--plated structure, long and narrow, with a ramshackle addition hanging on one side, and a showerhead fixed to the back.
There’s no reason to worry about privacy out here—-other than a few cacti and a small grove of Joshua trees, it’s rocks, rocks, rocks for miles.
She likes the emptiness of it, and even the heat. But more than either, she likes that it doesn’t resemble anything about her old life.
Four years ago, after the ceremony at the Getty, she was supposed to fly to Cedre Station with her mother and announce herself as the Hope of Cedre, the focal point of prophecy, the future savior of their people.
But when Shir died, and the Sword with him, Elegy fled, instead.
Now there are rumors about a prophecy, rumors about the Hope of Cedre, but no confirmation.
Come back when you’ve got your head on straight is what the new Sword of Cedre, her half sister, said to her then. And we’ll pick up where you left off.
Never gonna happen was Elegy’s reply. She had no interest in being the subject of prophecy, and she doesn’t believe in a single “savior of Cedre,” no matter what the augurs said.
So now she’s here. Working as a Scout, living with Hela in the desert.
She may not be happy, exactly, but she can get out of bed again, which feels like an achievement.
“Do I want to know what your meeting was about?” Hela asks her as she parks the Finch.
“Big storm coming,” Elegy says. “Courtesy of Rava Vidar.”
“Fantastic,” Hela says, and they get out of the Finch.
Elegy climbs the rickety front steps, then props up the screen door with her toe as she unlocks the front door.
“You think it has to do with that fulcrum thing?” Hela asks her. “Like she’s trying to figure out who the fulcrum people are?”
Hela is the only person alive—-aside from the Sword—-who knows all the details of what the augurs told Elegy. And they only talk about it when they have to.
“Probably,” Elegy says. “I can’t think of another reason Rava would send someone to the Cenobium on her behalf. But I don’t know what they told her—-she asked different questions than I did, so who knows if they even talked to her about a ‘fulcrum’?”
She who moves the fulcrum controls the outcome. The augur’s voice haunts her still.
“You haven’t seen any of the signs?” Hela asks. “The storm. Someone who can see the past. The—-”
“No.” Elegy cuts her off before she can continue. Fuck prophecy, she reminds herself. “And I’m not looking. I’m focusing on Rava, not the cryptic shit the augurs said to me four years ago.”
The augurs may have declared themselves to be politically neutral, but they’re still people—-and they’re Talusar people. The Sword may trust them, but that doesn’t mean Elegy has to.
“You want dinner?” Hela asks her. “I’m heating up yesterday’s.”
Elegy sets her bag down by the door, and says, “Sure.”