Chapter 15
Theren’s memories of waking up after the Fever killed him are dreamlike. Coming back to life felt like . . . surfacing.
His mouth tasted like rot. His feet twitched, and he blinked, but he couldn’t see anything but light. He heard conversation somewhere nearby, but it was garbled.
He moved his fingers, his toes. Something came to mind—-his mother, digging her thumb into his shoulder. Fenn moaning in pain. The priest of the Fever touching his chin.
Rava Vidar saying, You have a choice to make.
The memories felt far from him.
He sat upright. He was in a dim room with a blue tile floor. The windows were covered, giving the place a close feeling.
“Easy,” someone said.
He startled. He’d forgotten he wasn’t alone.
A second voice said, “Fifty--three hours from death to rebirth.”
Hands touched his shoulders. In front of him was a blue blur. He heard someone pouring liquid into a cup, and then the cup was against his lips, and he drank. It was water, flavored with mint and orange peel. The cup disappeared, and someone dabbed at his face and throat with a cloth.
His vision sharpened a little, and he could see it was a woman tending him. The same older woman who took off his shoes in the baths.
“Welcome to the next life,” she said to him.
He felt odd. A moment ago he had been confused and exhausted. But at her touch, the haze lifted, and he was . . . sharper. Brisk. Like he was about to finish a task.
“You’ve been dead for about two days,” the woman said to him. “You’re the first of your people to wake—-or not wake. Here. Drink it slowly. You’ll feel weak for some time.”
She put a cup in his hands, and he clutched it to his chest. When her hands left his, the haze returned.
He drank from the cup. Time was slippery. It felt like only minutes later that she checked on him again, but the water in his cup was gone.
“I’m bigger,” he said, and he wasn’t sure where that observation came from. But it was true. He felt bigger. Broader. His legs were longer.
“That can happen,” she said. “The Fever regenerates your body after days of deterioration, and sometimes it does so enthusiastically. Your joints may ache for a while, but you’ll adjust.”
She handed him a bowl of dried fruit to eat. His hands shook as he picked up a fig.
He’d been dead for two days.
When the fruit was gone, the old woman returned, and held out her hands to help him stand. When he touched her, he felt it again, that sharpness. Wakeful. His muscles shook when he got to his feet, but after a moment of leaning on her—-she was stronger than she looked—-he stabilized.
“You’ve been summoned by Commander Rava Vidar,” she said.
She draped a blanket over his shoulders, which he clasped over his chest, already shivering.
Then she led him down the hallway. They were in another part of the monastery now, moving in a different direction—-deeper into the maze of rooms. They turned a corner and she knocked on a heavy wooden door.
“Come in,” a voice called from the next room.
He entered a sitting room. In it, Rava Vidar sat beside a lively fire. Behind her, on a sofa, were two others—-fierce--looking people with incongruously turned--up noses. One of them was the soldier who had bet on the Knights dying. Ranos. The other looked like his sister.
And of course, standing off to the side was Theren’s mother.
Kesia rushed toward him, and a feeling of relief suffused every part of him—-but that wasn’t right, was it? He didn’t feel relieved to see her. He felt sick. If he focused on it, he could feel that, too, the two contradictory emotions taking up equal space inside him.
It was as if there was a new layer to him that hadn’t been there before. Skin, then muscle, then this.
It occurred to him, as he noted her expression, that he might be feeling her relief.
But that was nonsense. People who woke from the Fever saw the past, saw the future. Not . . . this.
Kesia reached for him, and he backed away, almost losing his balance before his back hit the wall.
“It seems the new version of him doesn’t forgive you, either, Kesia,” Rava said, drawing his attention back to her. She wore a green sweater. He’d only ever seen her in armor, before; it was unsettling to see her as a person instead of a soldier.
“You lived,” she said to him, and she picked up a glass from the table in front of her, and sipped from it.
“I did.” His voice came out rough. He’d barely spoken since resurrecting.
I resurrected, he thought, deliriously.
“The others died a day after you,” Rava said. “We’ll know tomorrow whether they’ll return or not.”
He remembered Kesia—-a hallucination, or maybe not—-lying beside him on the pallet where he died, telling him that Rava had no intention of freeing any of them. Instead, she had just come up with a more creative way of killing them: the Talusar prison. The Crucible.
“And then, when they do wake, you’ll put them in your Crucible,” he said. “Where they’ll probably die anyway.”
Rava raised an eyebrow at Kesia, then set her glass down and stood.
She wore a ring on her left hand, febra shaped into a single continuous vine.
“Your mother negotiated for you all to be infected, and it’s against our most sacred laws to hold a person accountable post--resurrection for crimes they committed before it.
So I had to come up with a way to contain you all without killing you. ”
The Talusar faith insisted that a person resurrected by Fever was a new person. And the ruling family—-Rava’s family—-was supposedly devout. But Rava looked like she wanted to roll her eyes when she said the words “sacred laws.”
“It’s not against your ‘sacred laws’ to imprison someone for no reason?” he asked.
“Oh, I’ll give plenty of reasons,” Rava said solemnly.
“Regardless, my point is—-you are alone, for now, unobserved by your fellow Knights, and free to make your own choice. So will you go with them to the Crucible, to fight and suffer and probably die? Or will you renounce Cedre and go with your mother to become a free citizen of Valla?”
He felt something strange. A flickering. Like there was a candle lit behind his breastbone, and its flame was fluttering in the wind.
“You won’t let me be a free citizen of Valla,” he said distantly.
She laughed. “Are you doubting my word?”
“Yes,” he said. “You’re offering me a choice to fulfill your end of the bargain you made with her.” He gestured to his mother. “But you’re only willing to do it because you think you know my choice already.”
Rava Vidar was never going to let a Knight of Cedre move freely in Valla. Only a fool would believe otherwise.
“Let’s see if I’m right,” he said. “I choose freedom. I forsake Cedre, I forsake the Knights. I choose Valla, instead.”
He felt the candle flame sputter out. The faint smile she wore as she played with him disappeared. He was right. Of course he was right.
She was never going to free him.
He looked at Kesia. “This is why you don’t make deals with devils.”
Kesia looked stricken. She hadn’t seen this coming; that much was clear. But Theren only nodded and started toward the door.
“I look forward to seeing you fight,” Rava said to his retreating back.
Now, in the forest outside of Valla, Theren shudders at the sound of the Cedrae rescue ship descending: the gears shifting, the pulse of the engine. Warm blood gushes over his hand, even through the sweater Elegy gave him to stanch the bleeding.
The word “why” waits on his tongue. Why—-why would the Hope of Cedre, the sister of the Sword, the person he abandoned in her hour of greatest need, ever risk her life to get someone like him out of Valla?
He’s desperate to know. But Elegy’s already turning away, waving her uninjured arm to get the pilot’s attention.
Wind rages around them both as the ship dips down to hover over the water.
The hatch opens, and standing just inside it is a soldier in bright crimson, his black hair tied back.
He jumps down before the craft has come to rest, and runs up to Elegy—-now halfway across the river—-to throw his arms around her.
“Fuck you for scaring me that bad, Ahn,” he says, into her hair. Her answering laugh is muffled by his jacket.
Theren feels the forest at his back, quiet and dark. He considers disappearing into it. He could stumble into the trees and find some still place to take his last breaths. It would be a more peaceful end than he’s dared to imagine for himself in a long time.
As if she heard his thoughts, Elegy breaks away from the soldier and turns back. Her eyes lock on his.
“I’ll chase you,” she says, in Talusar. Talusar’s pronouns all carry some indication of status, and she addresses him like a perfect equal. That form of address is archaic. Unfamiliar. Perfect equality is nearly impossible—-and even if it wasn’t, it certainly wouldn’t apply to him and her.
When he replies, he selects pronouns that acknowledge the gulf of status between them. Her, the fated savior of the whole goddamn planet. Him, the disgraced son of a traitor, practically a traitor himself.
“If you knew what I’d done,” he says, “you might let me die instead.”
“You aren’t dying here.” She feels heavy—-with exhaustion, with sadness, with decision. The combined weight almost brings him to his knees.
He looks at her, her bruised jaw set. At the blue--white lights coming from the ship’s hatch. At the soldier’s bright uniform. At the dark smudge of trees all around them.
He already knows he’ll do as she says.
The soldier who greeted her prickles with alarm. Theren feels it crackling in his temples.
“I’m assuming he can’t infect me,” the soldier says to Elegy, in English.
“Of course not, Arias; I’m not stupid,” she says. “And I should be clear of any other exposures. Not that it really works that way.”
“I know, I know. But we still have to take precautions. It’s protocol.”
“I remember.”