Chapter 22
Theren is starting to remember certain things, though not the thing he most wants to—-no, needs to—-remember: the gap that Rava Vidar left him with.
Instead he can recall the day he moved from the Crucible to House Vidar.
Nyx, Rava’s right--hand woman, escorted him.
She wore her hair in a long braid that brushed back and forth across her spine as she walked.
All of his possessions—-two changes of clothes, a clay bowl that belonged to Fenn, a silk scarf that belonged to Maeve—-fit in one bag.
At the last second before he left his cell, he doubled back to retrieve a book of poetry from beneath his mattress. Orda—-first his instructor, then his friend—-gave it to him before he was released from the Crucible.
Then Theren followed Nyx in silence through the streets of Valla.
It was the most he had seen of Valla since his arrival, but he still couldn’t be bothered to look at it. Maeve Martin had just died, and he was dizzy with grief. It didn’t occur to him to run, or fight back, or ask questions.
When they arrived at House Vidar, she took him to the room he would share with three others, and according to Talusar custom, Nyx told him, he would get five days to grieve.
Then he would be expected to work. Just what he would be doing, she didn’t say, and he didn’t ask.
He hoisted himself into the top bunk and turned toward the wall.
He remembers that there was a portrait of the emperor, Icar Talus, hanging over the door, so he felt like the man’s cold blue eyes were watching him as he slept.
And he remembers that later, one of the others—-a maid—-took pity on him, and brought him food, and showed him where to bathe and wash his clothes, and told him who among the staff was lenient and who wasn’t.
Then he remembers five days later, when Nyx came back.
“Put on your shoes and come with me,” she said.
He did as he was told, almost out of habit.
In the Crucible, he knew the consequences for disobeying orders, and they were painful.
When you were a Crucible fighter, you couldn’t afford to get hurt unless it was in a fight—-if you got hurt in a fight, you were allowed to take time to heal, but if you got hurt outside of a fight, you had to face your opponent anyway, at a disadvantage.
So there were no brawls in the Crucible, there was no defiance. It was too costly.
But when he stepped outside into daylight—-dark clouds covered the sun, so it wasn’t bright, but it was brighter than the windowless room where he had spent the past five days—-he realized he was in House Vidar now, where he didn’t know the rules, and he wouldn’t be obeying some prison guard who just wanted him to stop lingering in the hallway. He would be obeying Rava Vidar.
Nyx brought him to a clearing of sorts, a circle of bare, packed earth that reminded him of the arena.
Standing in the center of it was Rava, boots laced, hair tied back, arms folded.
At the edge of the circle were Ranos and Satka, her other two closest subordinates.
Each of them felt, to him, like biting into a lemon, only Ranos seemed a little less tart than his sister.
“Your friend Orda is at the monastery now,” Rava said, without preamble. She wasn’t lying; he would have known. “A position of honor, per our bargain.”
He was the one who had guaranteed Orda’s release from the Crucible, and he was relieved that Rava had done as she promised. She didn’t always, as he well knew.
“Good,” he said.
The feeling of her was like set teeth, the uneasy tension of two powerful things held just so.
“Ranos was confused as to why you didn’t even try to ask for freedom for yourself,” Rava said. She set a hand on Ranos’s shoulder. “And I told him—-”
Here she paused, and her eyes went blank, in the same way that Fenn’s used to every time he saw a vision of the past. It lasted for just a few seconds, and then she snapped back to attention, removing her hand and continuing as if there was no gap at all.
“—-that you don’t ask for things you know you won’t get. That the Fever gives you certainty where others can only guess. It’s that certainty that brings you here.”
She tilted her head. Her eyes looked paler in this gray light, almost unearthly. Just like the emperor’s eyes in the portraits that hang all over House Vidar and all over Valla.
“Your capacity to know people makes you a potentially useful instrument. I frequently encounter the untrustworthy, the deceptive, and the cunning, and I don’t have the time to put my trust where it doesn’t belong,” she said.
“I say that you’re ‘potentially’ useful because for as long as you persist in pointless defiance of me, I can’t trust your assessments of others.
And I must be able to trust your assessments of others. ”
Once she said it out loud, his purpose in House Vidar seemed obvious. Any leader, especially one who made so many deals with the scum of the earth, would relish the ability to know when people were lying. He offered her that. As long as she could figure out how to control him.
And her certainty—-it meant she had a plan for that already.
“To that end.” She tipped her chin up to look into his eyes. “We find ourselves here. You want to hurt me, and you need to see what will happen if you try.” She spread her arms wide. “So go ahead, Forint. Hit me.”
He didn’t have to ask if she meant it. He was sure that she did.
And judging by the total lack of surprise in any of the others, they were as sure of her as she was of herself.
That rattled him. He was a good fighter, these days, but he wasn’t an idiot.
The Crucible had taught him to assess people right away, and he could tell by how Rava moved—-quiet, graceful—-that she was a good fighter, too. Too good.
“No,” he said.
“No?” She grinned. “I offer you the opportunity to cause me physical harm without any repercussions, and you say ‘no’?”
“I don’t ask for things I know I won’t get, and I don’t get into fights I know I won’t win.”
“Admirable. But I think you’re underestimating how badly you want to punch me even if you don’t win.”
She had a point there.
There was no tentative dance as he decided on a strategy. Instead, he charged at her with all the strength and speed he could muster.
She slipped from his grasp like water.
Usually, when people decided to move, there was a change in them just before—-like a spark.
In the arena, he had learned to pay attention to that spark, to move just a split second faster than everyone else.
But Rava did things without even a moment of forethought, her reflexes and instincts so well--honed that he couldn’t feel a goddamn thing.
She fought without emotion, and without planning, and without a single trace of fear.
He doesn’t remember much after that. He knows that he tried again and again to hit her, and only succeeded once, his fist connecting with her jaw so hard she spat blood on the dirt. The pain didn’t seem to faze her; she just grabbed his arm, wrenched it until he saw stars, and knocked him down.
She hit him over and over. Until he could barely see, barely move. Until the others started to feel impatient, uneasy.
Eventually his legs were shaking too badly to support his weight. He knelt on the dirt, blood running down his chin, and she crouched in front of him. She had a swollen jaw, but she was otherwise untouched.
“You know, you take punishment like no one I’ve ever seen.” Her pale eyes searched his. “I don’t actually think that pain will be instructive to you. But there are other ways to break a man’s resolve.”
She touched his face. He couldn’t move.
“And I assure you,” she said, “I will find them.”
In the training room at Losan Stronghold, he squares off with Arias again, his hands up, palms bare. Arias bats at him with a glove, grinning, a teasing blow. Theren shifts back to avoid. It’s always this way, with them. Arias rarely makes contact. But he’s getting better.
Theren sees a hole in his guard. He reaches out, quick, and taps Arias’s jaw, just to show him that he could have hit him, if he wanted to. “Hands up.”
“Hands up, hands up,” Arias repeats. “Will you ever say anything else?”
“When you remember to keep your hands up, maybe.” Theren ducks under a punch, and slips past Arias, poking him hard in the rib cage.
When he looks up at the clock on the far wall, he sees Elegy beneath it, her arms crossed, leaning into the doorframe. He doesn’t know how long she’s been standing there, but he thinks it’s more than a few minutes. He drops his hands.
Her hair is loose over her shoulders, and with her round face and full cheeks, it makes her look younger. Like a girl he would have gone to university with, in another life. But it’s her eyes that betray her, so sharp they whittle him down every time she looks at him.
That could have something to do with how she feels when she looks at him, bitter and angry and curious, all tangled together.
“Ahn!” Arias says, grinning, easy—-everything seems easy for Arias, though Theren knows that’s not the case. Arias walks up to her and opens his arms like he’s going to embrace her; she cringes, her nose wrinkling, and smacks his chest.
“Gross. No, thank you,” she says.
“Ouch. Rejected. Just coming to say hey, or . . . ?”
“Sadly, no,” she says. “Can we go somewhere to talk?” She looks over Arias’s shoulder at Theren, and raises an eyebrow. “All of us?”
Theren walks in their wake down the hallway and out, through the orchard to the barracks. She’s talking to Arias about the Evacuation Day banquet, and Theren isn’t listening so much as he’s watching her long fingers flutter through big gestures as she talks.