Chapter 17
Hela sits at the rickety table in the trailer in Twentynine and watches a drop of water clinging to the faucet. It’ll fall any second.
Elegy has been off “doing something stupid” for twenty--four hours now, and even though she warned Hela she’d be gone for a few days, Hela has been a wreck since she read that note over the sink. She can’t focus on anything, and her teeth are gritted so hard they keep squeaking.
After the water drop falls to the sink, she gets up and fumbles in the desk drawer for one of the headache tinctures she keeps stashed everywhere she goes.
She finds one rolling around in the back of the drawer, uncorks it, and looks at the plant she retrieved for Dr. Canterbury.
She hasn’t told him, yet, that she found it in that cave.
She keeps almost doing it . . . and then forgetting.
The sun is setting, so the plant’s leaves are starting to unfurl. She’s only had it for a day, but she’ll miss its gentle glow when it’s gone. It feels almost like company.
Hela downs the vial.
“I hate it when she does this,” Hela says to the plant. People say it’s good to talk things out—-does it still help if the thing you’re talking to doesn’t have ears? It’s worth a try.
“She leaves a note when she wants to avoid a conversation,” Hela says. “And she avoids a conversation when she knows it would be easy to talk her out of whatever she’s planning on doing.”
Hela pulls the chair out from under the desk and sits. She pokes the tip of her finger into the earth at the base of the plant, to see if it’s dry.
“Do I water you?” she says. “You don’t like light, so maybe you don’t like water, either.” She frowns. “But that’s not how plants work, is it?”
It’s been a while since her secondary school biology class—-the one she nearly failed—-but she thinks all plants need sunlight to live. It’s part of that whole photosynthesis thing. So why does this one shudder away from the sun?
She frowns. One of the plant’s leaves seems to be moving.
She sits up, sure that her eyes are playing tricks on her, but no—-the leaf is slowly shifting to the side, toward Hela.
Her mind goes blank as she watches it turning toward her.
Just one leaf, with its vein of green light, questing like an outstretched hand.
Maybe it’s just instinct. Maybe she’s losing her mind. But she reaches back, pinching the leaf delicately between her thumb and forefinger.
And then everything gets weird.
It’s almost like falling asleep, the way the new surroundings unfurl around her.
Wherever this is, it’s dense with plants, and strange ones.
Purple vines spill across a stone walkway; blue--tinted leaves the size of her head dangle from the ceiling.
Under faint lights in the corner is a cluster of orange flowers that pinch closed and burst open seemingly at random, like winking eyes.
Hela reaches out to brush her hand over the lightly furred branches of a nearby sapling. She can’t feel anything.
She’s in some kind of greenhouse, that much is clear. Above her, between the vines that cling to the glass, she can see the night sky, dotted with stars. But there’s a strange white band across it, like a rainbow without color, like a bridge over the planet itself.
She’s so focused on it that she doesn’t see the woman until she’s right in front of her. She startles, stepping back into the dirt behind her.
The woman is beautiful in a harsh way, her brow dark and straight, her mouth spare. Her eyes are what strike Hela most, big and haunted, as if she sees more than she wants to. They fix on Hela, wide with alarm.
Then the woman says, in Talusar, “Fuck.”
The woman, the night sky, the greenhouse—-they all disappear at once, and Hela finds herself back in the trailer in Twentynine with her hand hovering over the plant.
She laughs a little. She must be stressed if she’s hallucinating beautiful women in otherworldly greenhouses. She sits back and contemplates the empty vial of headache tincture she just opened—-maybe it was contaminated, or maybe Keen indulged in more illicit drugs than she was aware of.
She gets up and goes into the tiny bathroom to wash her face. She needs to go to sleep—-she’ll sleep, and she’ll wake up to a new day, and Elegy will come home and she’ll forget all about the strange, cursing woman standing among the leaves.
It’s the following evening when she hears the Hummingbird arrive. It’s an unmistakable sound out here in the silence of the desert. It pulls Hela’s focus from the book she’s reading, and she crosses the trailer to nudge the front door open with her knee.
The Hummingbird isn’t Elegy’s, and Hela considers ducking back into the house to get a weapon before she sees the driver through the windshield—-definitely Elegy.
Relief makes her body weak. She slumps against the doorframe, arms crossed, feeling wobbly. The Hummingbird touches down on the dirt behind Hela’s old Finch, and Hela can tell it’s military--issue just by the shape of it, though the emblem of the Cedre army stamped on its side is a dead giveaway.
Elegy climbs out of the ship with difficulty. For the first time, Hela notices the sling her arm is in, and the bruising around her face—-already faded thanks to one potion or another. Her hair is limp and greasy, like she hasn’t washed it since she left.
Hela’s throat feels tight. Without saying anything, she steps back into the trailer to put the kettle on.
She’s busying herself in the kitchen: two mugs, two tea bags stuffed with dried chamomile and lavender—-courtesy of Agatha, the older woman who delivers their water tanks every week—-and two spoons with honey still clinging to them.
Elegy steps into the trailer and Hela wants nothing more than to punch her, like she would have done when they were a lot younger.
Instead she says, “Well if it isn’t the Hope of Cedre, come to bless me with her presence.”
She pours the now--boiling water over one of the tea bags and sets it down on the table behind her, trying not to slam it. It would be a shame to waste tea just because she wants to murder her sister.
“You’re pissed,” Elegy says.
“Yeah, I’m pissed.” Hela slams the other spoon down on the counter and gives Elegy an incredulous look. “You left a note? And you come back two days later looking like someone beat you with a shovel—-”
“It’s not that bad—-”
“—-and I didn’t even know where you were going, but I’m guessing, based on context clues, that it was fucking Valla—-and you were alone—-”
“Dad told me Talusar territory is best navigated solo,” Elegy says. “No smuggler would travel with a buddy. And it would have gone just fine, but Larke put a tracker on my ship and they found it—-”
“Don’t blame the Sword for this.” Hela points the spoon at Elegy. Honey drips from the end of it onto the floor. “If she put a tracker on your ship, it’s because it’s her job to keep the Hope of Cedre from dying, and you’re not making it any easier.”
“Please don’t call me that.”
“Why not? ‘Lies serve neither the speaker nor the listener,’ ” Hela says, quoting an old Talusar saying that her mother used to love. And if that’s not a measure of how upset she is, nothing is. She tries not to think about her mother.
Elegy sits at the table behind the mug that Hela prepared for her. Her grimace of pain makes Hela soften a little.
“It’s not what I am,” Elegy says. “That’s why not.”
Hela sits down across from her. She’s had this argument with Elegy a thousand times, and she’s not going to have it again.
As far as she knows, she’s the only one who knows all the details of what the augurs told Elegy—-the only one apart from the Sword, that is.
Elegy insists the augurs must be wrong, or lying, or manipulating her.
She’s determined to approach Rava Vidar like a soldier, not like the subject of prophecy—-probably because she thinks being the subject of prophecy is what got Shir killed.
Hela, meanwhile, waits and watches for the signs the augurs told Elegy to look for. A storm and the trio of the fulcrum: a Vidar, an augur, a man.
“Where did you go?” she asks. “And why?”
Elegy clears her throat, and tells the story: Isre Din telling her that her Knight is alive, the journey to Valla, the tracker that gave her away, the interrogation that somehow didn’t, and the escape that she recounts in so little detail that Hela assumes it was a lot more traumatic than she’s letting on.
When she finishes, Hela sits for a while, stirring her spoon.
She never met the Knight. She found the whole “compulsory oath swearing” thing to be about as backward as infecting your child with Fever to give them magical powers.
But she knows that Elegy has felt the weight of that oath for the last four years, unreasonable as that is.
“It’s not your fault he was kidnapped by Talusar,” Hela says. “Do you know that?”
Elegy sighs a little, and stares into her teacup.
“It’s not that I felt responsible for him being taken,” she says. “It’s that . . . they took a lot of my people that day. And then Isre told me I could get one of them back, and . . .” Her voice falters a little, and she stops, letting the unfinished sentence hang between them.
“I get it,” Hela says, even though she’s not sure she does, or can. “How is he?”
“Stable. Well--adjusted. A real peach.”
Hela snorts. The light above the sink buzzes. In the corner, the plant is starting to unfurl again, its leaves creaking a little as they pull away from each other.
Elegy says, “He bolted during the Getty attack, did you know that? I didn’t remember—-it was too chaotic. But Larke reminded me.”
“I didn’t know that, no.”
Elegy nods. “He was twenty. He was scared, and it was never his choice to be my Knight to begin with.”
“Right,” Hela says.
“So I don’t blame him.”
“All right.”
Elegy glances at her. Hela keeps her face as neutral as possible.
“Should I?” Elegy asks. “Blame him?”
“El . . . that’s not something I can have an opinion about.”
Hela never watched the footage of the attack, though it played in news pavilions for months after. Every time she saw it, she looked away, not wanting to see Shir’s last moments play in front of her—-not wanting to see Elegy’s greatest horror, either.
She’d liked Shir. Sure, he was a soldier, and soldiers and Scouts didn’t get along well.
But Shir seemed different from other soldiers, less concerned with hierarchy and law and protocol and more interested in getting things done.
In getting people saved. When he found out Hela was Talusar, he just grinned and started speaking that language instead, his accent atrocious and his vocabulary full of holes.
What? he said to Elegy, when she sighed with embarrassment.
I gotta practice or I’ll never get better.
It was hard not to like Shir, really.
So she understands why Elegy might blame anyone and everyone who contributed to his death. Blame isn’t a precious resource, to be stored up and given to the one person who really deserves it. It’s a thrashing many--headed monster, big and mean and sprawling.
“What’s that?” Elegy says, pointing at the plant in the back of the trailer.
“Some weird goddamn salvage I can’t bear to turn in,” Hela says.
Elegy raises an eyebrow, and she’s about to ask more when she stops and frowns down at her hands.
“Sorry,” she says. “Urgent message.”
Hela sips her tea as Elegy goes to the desk to pick up the quill. Delicate lines of light, like seams, trace their way down Elegy’s fingers and arms, ending at her elbows. Her eyes go unfocused. She starts writing in handwriting that isn’t her own, prompted by the elixir in her veins.
Only she can see the message she’s writing. When she finishes writing, she looks irritated. “Footage of a little stunt I just pulled leaked to the news pavilions, and Larke is probably going to kill me.”
“Well,” Hela says, and she drains the last of her tea from its cup. “She’ll have to get in line.”