Chapter 28
The sun is setting, and she leaves the Losan Stronghold cafeteria at a sedate pace, so it doesn’t look like she’s fleeing. Which is exactly what she’s doing.
News of her Scout history has leaked from the meeting.
One of the secretaries, maybe. If Elegy had to guess, she’d say Larke didn’t count on this outcome—-she wanted to compromise Elegy’s authority with the other generals, but she didn’t want the reputation of Cedre’s prophesied beacon of hope to be widely tarnished.
But there’s no going back now. News is like a virus; once it starts spreading, it’s almost impossible to contain.
Elegy just had a dinner meeting with Arias to discuss Specialist Gylle and the damage she’ll inevitably do when she interrogates Theren next.
All around them, soldiers stared at her and whispered.
She felt like she was in primary school with the other kids spreading rumors about her father, all over again.
“You think the general would mind if I used the training room?” she asked Arias, as they returned their trays. She wasn’t ready for the quiet trip back to Twentynine yet. She had energy to burn.
“El, he’s the one insisting you step up, remember? I don’t think he would mind if you started living in one of the rooms here.”
He has a point. If anything, Thompson has seemed annoyed that Elegy wasn’t demanding more power. But he might be angry with her now that he knows she conducted the erczet ritual on his base without telling him what it really was. He hasn’t kicked her out yet, though.
They part ways at the archway of bougainvillea that separates the barracks from the training rooms. The sun is behind the mountains now, casting everything in moody blue light.
A squirrel darts out of her path and disappears into a bird--of--paradise plant, which fills the air with the smell of pollen.
The training facility is empty during mealtimes, as usual. She goes to the end of the hallway to the biggest room—-always her favorite, when she was a soldier—-and a flash of movement catches her attention.
Theren is in the middle of the floor, alone.
Instead of the oversized shirts he usually prefers, he’s wearing a T--shirt with the sleeves bunched up around his shoulders, so his arms are bare.
His feet are bare, too, his boots at the edge of the empty space with socks and laces tucked neatly into them.
He holds a practice sword, a longsword made of synthetic material meant to imitate a real weapon’s weight.
She watches as he shifts from one defensive posture to another, bringing the sword up with both hands into high guard.
He doesn’t pause there, just turns and shifts into another, bringing the sword down and to the side.
His movements are fluid and controlled, the muscles in his arms standing at attention, his feet light and careful.
It’s almost like watching a dancer. Low guard turns to back right, which Theren turns into hanging right, fast, like he’s flipping a knife in his palm.
She has barely enough time to observe the angle of his elbow—-perfect, of course—-before he’s moving again, just as quickly as before, abandoning fluidity for sharp, sudden movement.
Inside left, the bottom of the sword tucked right under his armpit as if it’s settled there a thousand times.
And it has, obviously.
She forgets about training—-forgets about the whispers at dinner and the argument with Larke. All she can do is watch Theren Forint move.
But as he turns, he spots Elegy through the window, and drops the posture. Her stomach twists and she pushes the door open.
She hasn’t seen him since the ritual. Since they argued about what his relationship with Rava really was.
There’s so much she wants to know about what she saw, about what happened to Fenn and Orda, about how Theren came to be a truthsayer in House Vidar, about what happened at the end of the Tournament.
Instead, she says, “Will you fight me?”
His eyes search hers. “If that’s what you want.”
She walks into the room, crouching next to his boots to untie her own. He puts the longsword away in the rack at the back wall, and stands facing it, considering his options.
She strips off her socks and pulls her hair back. By the time she’s on her feet again, he’s chosen two quarterstaffs. He offers one to her.
She takes it, and squares off with him. There’s no reason to fear him. He’s more likely to let her hurt him than the other way around. But standing across from him, she finds herself a little nervous. She’s seen him fight. Not just in memory—-in the flesh, blade in hand.
She pushes her trepidation aside and takes a swing at his arm. He’s ready, blocking her blow just as soon as it lands, and then pressing her back with surprising force. She twists away with a grunt, and the fight is on.
She likes the quarterstaff. Always has. Her father taught her when she was a child, before moving on to the spear.
He said a good Scout—-and a good daughter of the Sword—-is competent with at least one weapon, and she likes that a staff can become so many things.
A shield and a sword. A lever and a trip wire. Another limb.
She lets it transform into all those things, sinking deep into instinct, so that she couldn’t have formed a sentence if she tried. She’s too busy watching Theren’s feet, his hands, the shifting of his weight.
She’s warm now, a trickle of sweat rolling down the back of her neck.
She attacks with more force, testing him, teeth gritted.
He sidesteps her, and she tries to catch him with his back turned away; he spins and blocks her, then swings hard at her staff so it goes flying across the room.
She chases after it, bent, and picks it up in one motion; then she’s on him again.
He swings at her legs, and she jumps, just barely clearing the staff. When she lands, she brings a blow down on his shoulder, but he’s too quick, batting her aside. He seems to be getting better as they go, like a revving engine—-driving her harder, faster, as he discovers how much she can handle.
Maybe that’s exactly what he’s doing.
“You’re going easy on me,” she says, breathless.
“Thought you wanted to let out some aggression.”
“I did—-” She swings; he blocks. She swings again; he blocks again. “I’m just wondering what would happen if you stopped going easy on me.”
The next time she swings—-fast—-he blocks her and twists so she loses her grip on her staff. Then he brings his own staff behind her knee and flips her, hard, so she falls flat on her back.
She lays there for a few seconds, catching her breath.
“Well,” she says. “I did ask.”
He offers her his hand, and she lets him pull her to her feet. She drags an arm across her sweaty forehead.
She says, “Larke found out about the erczet, so she sent Julia Martin to Austra. She’s insisting we get Specialist Gylle’s approval before you can get your memory restored.”
Theren stiffens, so Elegy adds, “I’ll find a way out of it. I promise.”
“You don’t have to do that. I can find a way to—-” His breath catches a little. “Make it work.”
“No,” she says.
She means to say something else. Maybe to explain why she won’t put Theren in that situation again.
Something about decency, about efficacy, about her experience with trauma recall—-something reasonable.
But she finds that the actual reason she won’t let Specialist Gylle drill into Theren Forint’s mind again is because of Arias’s description of the aftermath.
Theren dissociating. Bloody knuckles, empty eyes.
The little tremor in his hands. She didn’t even see it herself, and she still hates the thought of it.
So she just leaves it at that. No. It’s explanation enough.
“Something else happened to you,” he says, and God, he always knows everything, doesn’t he?
She shrugs. “Larke told everyone I was a Scout.”
“Is that a problem?”
“The military looks down on Scouts. Thinks they’re not trustworthy, not ethical, not . . . not people you give respect to.”
He plants his staff on the ground and leans into it, one arm stretched high over his head. His shirt pulls up, too, showing a line of skin above his hip.
She tries to look away, but it’s like a magnet, drawing her eyes to it no matter how hard she fights its pull.
“She did it because she’s afraid of you,” he says.
Elegy snorts. It’s as much as Hela said the other day, as much as any news outlet has said—-that Larke Rosyk fears the hold that Elegy could have, if she chose to. But Theren’s dark eyes are steady on hers. That same brown that she looked so closely at in his memories.
“You forget who you’re talking to,” he says. “I’m neither guessing nor speculating.”
Elegy replies, “Well, I’m not scary.”
“To someone who enjoys their power, you are.”
She scowls at him. “You think I’m making a play for Sword?”
“I think you don’t have to.” He nudges her staff, now rolling on the floor, away from them with his foot. “I think if you want it, it’s yours. You’re the Hope of Cedre, and your destiny gives you consequence.”
She stares at him. She thinks of Shir telling her that what the augurs told her was a miracle. That he believed in her. There was awe in his eyes, and wonder, and it got him killed.
This isn’t that. Theren isn’t in awe. He’s matter--of--fact and certain. She feels rattled, to be assessed so frankly by a man who sees too much.
“Don’t call me that,” she says.
“It’s what you are, isn’t it?”
Then he looks at her like he’s peering into her, like he’s staring into a microscope to see what she’s made of.
“You don’t believe it, do you?” he says.
“Stop doing that.”
He demands, “You don’t think you’re the Hope of Cedre?”
“Just because you can invade my privacy doesn’t mean you should.”
He laughs, bitterly. “If you don’t believe in the prophecy, what’s the fucking point of anything?”
“It’s my life, it’s my identity, it’s not your goddamn business—-”
“It’s everyone’s business!” he says. “Because I’ve met the people who will be in charge if you fail, and I . . .” He laughs again, and it sounds more like a gasp, faintly hysterical. “I would rather die than live in that world, I would rather die.”
“Then why didn’t you?” she says, without thinking. She regrets it right away, her cheeks burning. But he only looks at her.
Stricken. He looks stricken.
“Forget it,” she says. “Forget I asked, forget I came here—-”
“No. No, I’ll tell you.”
He moves toward her, too quickly for her to pull away, and she’s not sure she would have anyway. He touches her arms, just above her elbows. He’s gentle, for a man so capable of violence, and then he’s right there, warm and strong and bending to meet her eyes.
“When I met you, I was twenty and I had never been tested, I had never been afraid.” His voice is rough, as usual, but quiet, like he’s telling her a secret. “It tore through me like nothing I’d ever felt before, and I reacted to it like a child—-no, even worse than that, like an animal.”
She’s transfixed by those dark eyes of his, which are fearful even now, the moment of his betrayal still as alive in him as Shir’s death is in her.
“Since then, I have known much worse fear,” he says. “I know that surviving as a coward is worse than dying.”
He releases her arms, but doesn’t back away, and neither does she, even though she knows she should.
“You hate me, and I’m glad you do, because I don’t know what I would do with your forgiveness if you offered it,” he says. “I’m not your Knight, because you won’t have me, and I’m not bound by any oath, because the Fever swallows oaths, but neither of those things matters.”
He touches his forehead to hers, the movement so sudden and so strangely intimate that she goes still.
“My life is still forfeit to you,” he says. “My life is still yours.”
The scent of him washes over her, sweat and lemon soap and mint, and then he pulls away, and picks up his boots, and walks out of the room without another word.
Elegy stands there, barefoot and silent, until the heat in her body subsides.