Chapter 18 #2
“Now why don’t you tell me how you found yourself arrested in Valla with a stack of pornographic magazines in your backseat?” he says. “Or is that just a wild rumor?”
Dread weighs in her stomach like a bad meal as she finishes recounting her time in Valla. She knows where she has to go next: to see Theren Forint. And it’s the last place she wants to go.
She crosses the courtyard, packed with cacti, to the barracks.
Few soldiers live in Losan Stronghold, usually the ones recovering from an injury, like Parekh, or the ones whose work takes them all over the planet, like Arias.
And there’s a short hallway of empty rooms reserved for “special guests”—-those who require more security.
That’s where she finds Arias, leaning against a doorframe at the end of that hallway. He turns at the sound of her footsteps, always alert, and smiles, his eyes crinkling at the corners.
It’s hard to remember, now, how he looked the first time she met him.
Covered in blood, his face ashen, his eyes blank.
He was the sole survivor of a mission gone awry, and when she and Shir responded to his distress call, he was barely able to give his name.
But after months of healing, he’d asked to join search and rescue, and it was where he still served.
Over his shoulder, Elegy can see Theren Forint facing one of the walls of his new room, staring up at a grid of paper—-little squares tacked in place with pins. Talusar characters all over them.
“Never thought I’d see you at the Stronghold again,” Arias says.
“Never thought I’d be here again.”
Arias glances over his shoulder at Theren, then touches Elegy’s elbow to steer her away from the door.
“This isn’t good, El,” he says to her, his voice quiet. “He needs to unclench, and they’re just putting him under more and more pressure.”
“I know. I’m working on it.”
“He asked to talk to you yesterday, but apparently the office of the Sword wasn’t keen to pass along that message.”
“Of course they weren’t. What does he want to talk about, do you know?”
Arias shakes his head.
“Well, I can take it from here,” she says. “Thanks.”
She takes Arias’s place in Theren’s doorway as Arias walks away. She looks at Theren’s broad shoulders, squared off with the wall.
The room around him is sparse and small.
The bed—-made with sharp corners—-looks too short for him, but that’s probably unavoidable, given his height.
There’s a neat stack of clothes on top of the dresser, all military--issued casual, like the white--on--black ensemble he’s currently wearing.
A door on the opposite wall leads to a tiny bathroom.
His wall of paper is right next to a small desk.
She thinks of him in his blue--and--copper suit, kneeling in front of her in the Getty, and then Shir’s weight against her back—-
He turns, fast, like he heard a sharp sound. When he sees her, he freezes, and she wonders if he even knew Arias was gone, or that she was there.
“Your Grace.” His voice is rough. She assumed, when she first met him, that he was coming down with something, but it’s just the way he speaks, like each word has to fight its way out.
“I sent your brother a message yesterday.” It was the one task she completed yesterday, in fact. “He knows you’re here. I’ll try to set up a visit.”
He looks surprised. “That’s—- Thank you.”
“You should know, he’s the one who told me you were still alive. Your mother contacted him to tell him.” She watches his reaction carefully. “Did she know you were alive all those years?”
But there’s no need to measure his reaction. He admits it readily. “Yes.”
“So why did she contact Isre only recently?”
“I don’t know.”
“You have no ideas?” She’s aware that she’s interrogating him now, and it’s probably the last thing he needs, but she can’t stop herself.
“I assume it’s not a good sign, whatever her reasons,” Theren says. Something’s coming. Something big, a voice in Elegy’s head whispers. “But I have no greater insight into Kesia Forint’s mind than you do, Your Grace. We saw each other only rarely in Valla, and our interactions weren’t friendly.”
“Really.” She frowns a little. “Your own mother? The only person you knew in Valla?”
“Everything I endured in Valla was a result of her betrayal.” Bitterness creeps into his voice. “So no. We were not—-are not—-friendly.”
She wants to press harder. To make sure. She even wants to see what happens when she makes him angry—-if pushing him too hard makes him reveal something new.
Instead, she gestures to the wall of paper. “What’s that?”
“A timeline. Of my years in House Vidar. I thought it might help me remember things more clearly.”
“You’re having trouble?”
“According to Specialist Gylle, my intelligence has been useless.”
Elegy knows Gylle, Theren’s interrogator. The late Sword talked about her with a sour twist to her mouth. Larke, however, seems to have no qualms with her. It’s that, maybe, that prompts Elegy to ask, “She’s been all right to you?”
“Yes.”
The answer is too quick. The silence that follows is tense as drawn wire. The sun emerges from behind a cloud, and casts a shadow of leaves across the floor. She watches as they turn over in the wind. The branches of the lemon trees outside are heavy with fruit.
“A reliable source told me Rava Vidar is planning something,” she says. “Do you know anything about that?”
“Yes and no,” he says. “For the past few months she’s been .
. . under strain. More volatile. More secretive.
But there was never anything concrete, except maybe .
. .” He turns back to the grid of paper and taps one of the squares.
It’s almost blank, just a scrawl at the top and the bottom.
Summer—-Kesia visit, and Hallway—-Rava. Hurt?
“I have a gap,” he says. “In my memory.”
Kesia visit, she reads again. He doesn’t call her “Mom” even in his own notes.
“A gap. I assume you mean more than just forgetting something.”
Theren nods. He plucks the paper off the wall, crumples it into a ball, and tosses it on the desk.
His sleeves are pulled up to his elbows, showing thin scars that crisscross his forearms. She doesn’t think they’re self--inflicted—-too haphazard for that—-but she can’t think of where else he could have gotten them.
“Are you familiar with the categories of Fever gifts among the Talusar?” he says.
She steps back to lean against the wall, arms folded. Some of the pages on his wall are dense with writing. She can’t read all of it from where she stands, but what she does read veers into the abstract. Night meeting is certain enough, but dry, porous rock is nonsensical. So is swarm of insects.
She runs a hand through her hair, and considers his question.
“I know most of the Talusar can see recent memories. That they particularly honor the epocha, who see distant ones. And there are some who can project other people’s memories. Rumors of some other variants, too. What am I missing?”
He sits on the edge of the bed, and his hand reaches for his side, automatically, as if it’s still tender and he feels the need to protect it. His skin is still dark along his jaw and at the corner of his eye, lingering bruises.
“A few. Among them—-those who erase memory, and those who alter it.”
She looks at the paper crumpled on his desk. The gap, the space he can’t remember. “You think someone erased your memory?”
“No, that work is—-indelicate. I would show other signs of brain damage.” He speaks of it so casually, this cruelty, and maybe cruelty is casual to him, after the life he’s led for the past four years.
“I think someone buried my memory. And no one would have dared to do that unless it was at Rava Vidar’s behest.”
“No one would have dared,” Elegy says, dubious. “Are you that scary?”
He rubs his thumb along the vine tattoo on his left hand, as if he’s trying to erase it. His eyes skirt hers. “No one touches Rava’s things.”
His next swallow is labored enough to be noticeable.
“What you’re implying is that if Rava thought a memory was important enough to bury, it’s probably something we want to know about,” Elegy says.
“What Ranos said. About . . . how he couldn’t let me leave, with ‘everything I know.’ ” He frowns. “I must have found out something significant. Something she knows is still accessible to me. So it’s important that I retrieve it.”
“Is there a way to do that?”
He nods. “One of the exiles. Julia Martin.”
Elegy remembers the woman from the interrogation, giving an elegant bow to Larke after Theren was escorted from the room. All buttoned up. She reminded Elegy that most of the exiles had been high--status in Valla, and they had brought as much of their wealth with them as possible.
She says, “Larke is the one who actually knows Julia Martin. You should have told her about this, not me.”
He meets her eyes with peculiar focus, unblinking. In this light, his eyes look black as space. She feels disassembled by them.
“While I’m aware that you and your sister both hate me,” he says, “I thought that of the two of you, you were more likely to listen to me.”
If he’d asked her, she wouldn’t have used the word “hate.” But he didn’t ask. He didn’t think he needed to. “I don’t hate you.”
He comes to his feet, and she steps back, automatically, her shoulders hitting the wall. It’s as if she keeps forgetting how tall he is, over and over again.
“You do, though,” he says.
The bright greens and yellows of the orchard, showing through the window, frame his face.
“Is this what you do?” she snaps, suddenly annoyed. “You just . . . tell people what they’re feeling, like you know them better than they know themselves? Bet you’re a real hoot at parties.”
“What I am is someone who left you exposed to Talusar violence without a second thought. Someone who betrayed you.”
He says it like it’s a blow. As if she could possibly forget that he’d turned on her in a fraction of a second.
She says, unsteady: “You were—-”
“Young?” he says. “Does my age change how much the Talusar took from you?”
She doesn’t understand why he’s doing this. Why he seems to want to make whatever anger she feels toward him worse.
“Does my youthful inexperience bring your husband back to life?” he asks, and her reaction is sudden, a step toward him, a hand raised to point a finger in his face—-
He flinches, but doesn’t move, and she thinks of the way Rava Vidar put a hand on his neck right after the interrogation, how it made his breath stutter, but he still didn’t pull away; she thinks of how he snorted when she assured him no one at Losan Stronghold would hurt him.
Suddenly, him reminding her of Shir seems like he’s feeling for the edges of her anger, just so he knows where they are.
“You’re trying to provoke me.” She steps closer to him, and tips her head up to look him in the eye. “Congratulations. You succeeded.”
She grabs his chin, lifts his head a little. He freezes. She’s well aware that he could hurt her if he wanted to. She thinks he could probably leave the Stronghold, and Losan itself, if he wanted to. He could clear a path for himself in blood, as he did in Valla.
But here he stands. Perfectly still, and letting her grab him, even though his chest is rising and falling faster by the second.
“What do you expect me to do now?” she says, quiet, her hand squeezing tighter. “What was Rava Vidar’s approach—-would she hit you? Or just insult and degrade you? Maybe both at once?” She can feel the scratch of his stubble under her fingers. “What would you do if I did—-just let me?”
His breaths are uneven. He still doesn’t move.
“Yes,” he admits.
She looks up into his eyes, which are dark and full of trouble. “Do you think letting me hurt you would absolve you of what you’ve done?”
He doesn’t answer.
She releases him. Her fingertips, her cheeks, her eyes—-they all burn. She turns away, but doesn’t leave—-not yet.
“I’ll speak to Julia Martin about your missing memory,” she says. “You’re right—-it seems important that we know what Rava was so desperate to hide.”
She walks out of the room, and she’s just past the threshold when his voice stops her, rough as always.
“Thank you.”