Chapter 23
White is the Talusar color of mourning, so for the erczet ritual, Elegy wears white: white pants and a white jacket with a collar high enough to frame her face, and boning in the midsection that makes it look like old--fashioned corsetry. One of her only nice outfits.
Standing at the dock, watching the Sparrow that carries the exiles grow larger as it descends, she doubts the choice.
The wind is blowing up dust. But beside her, Theren Forint is also in a white shirt—-collared, tucked into his pants.
It’s not his shirt; the sleeves are too short for him, so he rolled them up as soon as they spotted the ship above them.
He must have borrowed it from Arias. It fits him through the middle, but it’s tight around his shoulders.
He doesn’t have his own clothes, she realizes. He came here with nothing, and he still has nothing.
“How was your brother?” she asks him, just to fill the silence.
“Isre had to go to Cedre Station for a few days. He’ll be back soon.”
It’s not really an answer.
He raises a hand to shield his eyes from the sun. The Sparrow is the size of an apple now, descending. It’s cloudy, hazy, but it’s always bright in Losan. She looks at the scars on his forearm. Faded, crisscrossing.
“What are those from?” she says.
“What?”
Without thinking, she touches his arm, and runs her thumb across one of the faded lines on the back of his wrist. He goes still, staring down at her fingers, tan against his light skin.
“Those,” she says, and she releases him, quick, like he burned her.
“I trained with a vambrace.” It’s an old word, only vaguely familiar. He clamps his right hand around his left forearm, to show her. “It’s a piece of armor. Sometimes in practice I forgot when I wasn’t wearing one, so the blade . . .”
He drags a fingertip sharply along one of the scars, mimicking the cut of a sword.
“Oh,” she says.
They both turn back to the landing pad, where the Sparrow is so close that a cloud of dust is lifting to meet it. She can feel the vibrations of its engine in her skull. She’s relieved when it touches down and the hatch opens, so the engine can gentle.
The erczet ceremony has to be small, Julia told her, because a memory projection can reach only a few people at once.
So each Knight has one representative. Julia Martin is the first off the ship.
She wears a knee--length white dress, stiff and professional.
Elegy researched the exile families that morning, and she thinks it’s Ivy Amalka, Lisia’s mother, who comes next.
She looks wan, like she might have gotten sick on the plane.
Tor Kovek, Fenn’s father, comes next. He’s tall, and his coloring is lighter than his son’s, his hair as gold as Rava Vidar’s and his skin only a little darker than Theren’s.
At his side is Jiro Heather, Furik’s father.
His white trousers are rumpled from the flight.
Elegy sent him a bouquet of paper flowers when his wife died, two years ago.
Julia looks confused when she sees Elegy, but she recovers quickly, giving her a quick bow. “Your Grace. What an unexpected honor.”
“Hello,” Elegy says. “I’m here—-”
“Her Grace is here as my guest,” Theren says, and judging by the way Julia takes that in, it must be explanation enough.
She can’t sense emotions, but if she had to guess, she would say the exiles all feel about Theren the same way she does: they would trade his life for the ones they lost in an instant.
Here he is, among so many people for whom his survival is a wound unto itself .
. . and thanks to the Fever, he’s cursed with knowing it.
“I reserved a room for us in the library,” Elegy says. “Follow me.”
Losan Stronghold has a beautiful library.
From the outside, it matches all the other buildings in the stronghold: concrete.
Inside, though, the concrete is arranged in a series of hollow triangles with panes of glass nestled inside them to let in sunlight.
All the bookshelves are warm orange wood, and there are rugs everywhere, salvaged from times when such beautiful things weren’t seen as an unnecessary extravagance.
They’re colorful and worn in places from the foot traffic, unraveling at the ends—-at odds with the neatness of the rest of the space.
She leads them through the hush of the now--empty library and into one of the meeting rooms. The wall opposite the door is all windows that look out into a lush green courtyard—-evergreens grow there, their needle--laden branches pressing up against the glass.
The courtyard is in an artificial winter now, so there’s frost on the windowpane.
A row of chairs is arranged in a semicircle in the middle of the space.
Facing the semicircle is another chair, standing on its own, for Theren.
Once inside, Tor turns to Julia.
“Well, do you want me to do the whole song and dance?” he says, running his hand through his hair. It stands up where his fingers were.
“If you’re going to do a thing, do it properly.”
“All right.” Tor looks like he would very much like to roll his eyes.
Ivy Amalka takes her seat, with Julia Martin at her side, and then Jiro Heather. Elegy sits in the chair on the end. She’s so tense her shoulders already ache.
Theren settles across from them all, the heels of his hands balanced on his knees. His fingers are trembling.
Tor takes a vial of dark liquid from his pocket. It looks like the water left over from painting watercolor, murky and opaque.
“Do you know what this is?” Tor asks Theren. Elegy notices the pronouns he chose, which indicate a disparity of status between them. If he wanted to, it would be within Theren’s rights to argue it now—-those negotiations are common, she’s given to understand. But he doesn’t.
“It’s sovallan,” Theren says. “It will slow my perception of time, to make the projection less chaotic, and cause memories to surface.”
“Good.”
Elegy wonders where Tor got it. There’s no way he smuggled vials of a Talusar memory drug into Cedre as a refugee. Maybe it’s better she doesn’t ask.
Tor takes a small copper bowl from the bag at his side. He passes the bowl to Theren, who cups it in both hands as Tor pours the vial’s contents into it. Then Theren drinks it in a single swallow, and passes the bowl back to Tor.
As he takes it, Tor says, “Loss is a burden.”
“It’s my honor to share it,” Theren replies flatly.
She wonders how he knows this ritual so well. Has he done it before? Sat on the other side of it? Studied it?
Tor sets the bowl aside. Theren stares into middle distance, looking dazed. The drug must be taking effect.
Tor stands behind him, and puts both hands on Theren’s head, fingers spread wide to frame his ears. He raises Theren’s head, slightly, so he has no choice but to stare directly at Julia Martin.
“Tell us, Theren Forint,” Tor says, “what became of the Knights of Cedre.”