Chapter 38
In the memory, he sits on the edge of Rava’s bed, his heels propped on the frame.
His back aches, and he still feels things crawling on him, as he does most mornings.
On the bad days, he sits for an hour, waiting for the feeling to subside enough for him to take a shower. Today is one of the bad days.
He hears the door to the office open. He tenses, ready, but it’s not Rava. Whoever it is feels too nervous, too eager. He forces himself to get up and grab his shirt from the window seat. It’s only half--buttoned by the time he steps into the office.
The next room is colder, the fireplace dark and wind wheezing through the cracks between windows and wall. It chases the smell of paper away. There are so many books here. It would be his favorite room in House Vidar, if it didn’t contain so many bad memories.
Kesia stands just a few feet from the doorway, in leather trousers, a white shirt, same old boots. There’s a knife in a sheath at her hip. She stares at him, and her emotions crowd into him for a moment before he pushes them out, like he’s slamming a door.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” he says to her.
“You’ve lost weight,” she says.
He’s surprised by how bitter he still feels toward her. How the sight of her is still poison. “And?”
“What are you . . .” She frowns at him. “Do you live here?”
“You haven’t answered my question.”
“Do you?”
It’s her tone of voice, quiet and soft, that makes him answer her.
“Yes,” he says. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m here to escort you to a meeting. Rava’s orders.”
“Fine. I’ll get my shoes.”
He turns away, about to walk through the door to the bedroom.
She says, “I thought you would be harder to persuade.”
He pauses with his hand on the doorframe, and looks at the wrinkled sheets where he sat a few minutes ago, trying to get himself to move.
“She calls, I answer,” he says. “Same as you.”
Julia Martin’s hands are on his, cool and strict. There’s a pounding behind one of his eyes.
“Good,” she says. “Now take me to the next thing you remember.”
Rock scrapes the skin of his palms. He’s standing in the hallway in House Vidar, braced against the wall.
He’s sweaty, like he was just running—-only he can’t remember where he came from, or where he was going.
He wipes the back of his neck with his free hand, and then his forehead. He blinks tears from his eyes.
He recognizes the door he’s standing near as Rava’s office door. It has a brass handle, and there are scratches at the bottom from the cat that used to live here. He straightens, his hand slipping down as the door opens, and Rava stands in the doorway.
Her hair is loose over her shoulders, golden and wavy in places, straight in others. She’s not wearing shoes.
“Forint?” she says.
He blinks at her. His throat is raw. He has questions, but the words feel out of reach to him. She stretches out a hand, and he tenses, but doesn’t pull away as she lays her palm on his cheek. Checking his temperature, he thinks.
“You don’t look well,” she says. “Come.”
He follows her into the office.
“Prepare yourself,” Julia Martin says.
But there’s no preparing for this. He feels like someone put a chisel in his eye socket and pounded it deep into his brain. He screams into his teeth, unable to stop himself, and Julia’s hands tighten over his.
“Focus,” she says, and he hears Satka—-
“Focus, idiot.”
Satka grabs him by the hair, and leans in close.
“As my teacher once said . . . let pain be the whetstone that sharpens the blade of you.”
She slams his head back into the ground.
“Focus!”
A hand presses into his shoulder, forcing him to his knees.
Dazed, he doesn’t resist. The journey here, to Ileth Vidar’s estate, passed in a blur of sound, Rava talking to Ranos and Satka about the Battle of Calgara where she made a name for herself as a butcher, and in their mouths it’s just the reminiscence of soldiers, but he knows it was a slaughter.
But now he’s here, Rava standing behind him, and she’s terrified, something he would have sworn up until that moment was impossible. Could a woman like Rava fear anything? Apparently she could.
He sees Ileth’s shoes, first, and they’re black boots, unscuffed, polished to shine.
She wears black fitted clothes. Her wrists and her throat are draped in stones—-deep blue opals, left jagged and unpolished.
Her hair is as pale as Rava’s, and she has Rava’s aquiline nose.
But her eyes are brown, close--set, like a bird.
She looks down at him, and smiles. Her voice is pleasant, almost unctuous.
“At last we meet,” she says. “I have heard so much about you, Mr. Forint.”
Theren tries to yank his hands away from Julia Martin, and she holds on tighter.
“Go back to the last thing you remember before the gap,” she commands. “I will bring out the rest.”
His head burns—-
“She calls, I answer,” he says to Kesia. “Same as you.”
He puts on his boots, changes his shirt into one that’s not as creased, and checks his hair in the bathroom mirror.
He catches Kesia peering through the crack in the door, trying to see into the bedroom.
When he emerges, she looks startled by how close he is, or perhaps how big he is now, Fever--changed and far deadlier than the child she trained on Cedre Station.
“Lead the way.” He gestures toward the door.
She tucks her hair behind both ears, and turns away from him.
She used to make him feel like a slip of a person; now she looks spare to him, and small.
He wonders if time has taken some of her sturdiness from her, if she’s found a harder life here than she expected to, or if he’s just changed that much.
He tries not to give a damn either way, but it’s a hard habit to break, caring about your own mother.
“I’m stationed at the monastery now,” she says, as they climb the steps.
They pass one of the cooks, who nods to Theren, and the sitting room with the blue rug that Ranos uses for his morning stretches.
They walk beneath a portrait of the emperor, and Theren feels his eyes following them down the hallway.
“Sometimes I work with your friend Orda,” she adds.
She’s baiting him. Trying to pique his curiosity, make him ask a question. He’s silent as they climb. She leads him down a short corridor where an unfamiliar soldier stands guard. He wears the seal of the Vidari on his sleeve, a halo of vines.
“He’s unarmed?” the soldier says to Kesia.
“Yes,” she replies, and the soldier opens the door for Theren.
He steps into one of the guest suites. This part of the house is on top of the peak, rather than built into the face of it, so it’s all made of wood, polished and carved into organic shapes, leaves and flowers and branches.
There’s a low stove in the corner, and sitting in a chair beside it, her head turned toward the window, is an augur.
Not just an augur. The augur. The one he met at the Getty.
Rava isn’t there. Not yet, anyway. Just the augur, and Kesia at Theren’s back.
“Come here, boy,” the augur says to him.
He’s afraid to read her. He’s never read anyone who could see the future before. But what he finds is nothing new. She’s afraid. Angry. He suspects she’s not here because she wants to be; this guest suite is an elegant prison for her.
He stayed upright when he met her before, in the Getty.
This time when he draws closer to her, he bows with the reverence of the Talusar.
She leans forward and studies his face, as he studies hers.
She looks the same as he remembers, her nose dotted with freckles, her skin crinkled around the eyes but otherwise smooth.
“I saw this moment when we met before,” she says. “It was fresh in my mind when I looked at your younger self. You’ve changed so much.”
He knows he looks different now, but he can’t imagine what it was like for her to see two versions of him layered over each other like a screen over a window.
“Why . . . why do you see me?” he says, not sure he wants the answer.
She tilts her head. “Some people I see once, and never again. Some people, though, keep showing up again and again, and it’s hard to understand why.
That was true of you, at first. As far as I could tell, the only remarkable thing about you was what the Fever did through you.
” Her voice lowers, softens. “And then I realized . . . that’s exactly it.
Nine people on this planet can do what I do, and that’s rare enough.
But only one person can do what you do.”
The door opens behind him, and he turns to see Rava, her blond hair braided in its usual crown, her gray sweater neatly tucked, her worn boots tied tightly at her ankles.
“My lady,” he says, and he inclines his head to her.
She pulls the door closed behind her, and stands with her back against it. Her eyes skirt his, and he realizes: she’s nervous.
The augur folds her spotted hands over her belly and studies Rava. Theren has never seen someone look at her that way, with derision instead of fear. And he’s never seen Rava tolerate it before, either.
“You haven’t told him,” the augur says.
“That’s not your concern.”
“It is if you want my help.”
“You may be misunderstanding the situation you’re in,” Rava says.
“I assure you, I understand it perfectly,” the augur replies.
“This is a negotiation. You kidnapped me, and then offered me my release in exchange for my help. That was your initial offer. And now I’m telling you that I’ll only accept that offer if you give me something else in return: you must face reality.
I think you’ll accept my terms because you want my assistance ever so slightly more than I want my freedom.
So.” The augur leans back in her chair. “Am I right, Rava?”
Rava’s eyes are not cold, exactly, but flat. Fear prickles down his spine at the sight. It usually precedes violence, but he can’t imagine even Rava Vidar, secret Talusar apostate, hurting an augur.
“Tell him, then,” Rava says.