Chapter 38 #2
“Coward,” the augur says, with a harsh laugh.
The collective anger in the room is thick enough to choke on.
The augur leans forward in her chair and looks up at him.
When the sun hits her face directly, he sees little hints of the past everywhere: a pockmark in her cheek, a piercing in her earlobe, a scar beneath her chin.
“Three years ago the augurs offered Rava Vidar a path to Talusar victory,” the augur says.
“One of the signposts along that path was a man. When asked how she would be able to identify that man, we told her she would be in love with him.” The augur’s brow furrows.
“By whatever definition of love makes sense to her, that is. We do not all love equally well.”
At first, Theren only hears the words passing over him like a wind ruffling his hair. He wonders why she’s telling him this, and he feels dread of the answer, almost in the same moment. But he can’t stop his mind from piecing it together. Rava’s averted eyes. The vine symbol inked on his hand.
He feels like he’s going to vomit.
He thought his presence in Rava’s house was mere happenstance. That her greed, her paranoia, had driven her to acquire him like a new weapon, eager to use his gift. But to hear that he’s here because of her pursuit of destiny, that his presence is in any way fated—-it makes him feel sick.
She’s in love with him.
“I’m sorry to do this to you,” the augur says to him. “But I wanted her to have to see your reaction to this, in the hope that it will help her come to terms with who she is and what she’s done. A feeble hope, perhaps, but . . .”
“Stop,” he says. “Stop, please.”
He’s hunched over a little, like an animal protecting its soft belly. He brings a hand up to his mouth—-he can feel a scream rising in his throat, or maybe that’s bile. Either way, he needs to keep it in, needs to stay contained, needs to—-
“Have I met your requirements?” Rava says. “Can we stop wasting time?”
He doesn’t want to read her. He can’t. But even without the depth that the Fever gave to his perceptions, he knows her well enough to hear the unsteadiness in her voice.
Nothing has changed, he tells himself. However Rava feels, whatever reason she had for bringing him to House Vidar—-the outcome is the same. He’s here. He’s enduring his time in this house the same way he was yesterday and the day before. Nothing has changed, nothing has changed.
“Very well,” the augur says. “We can begin, then.”
Rava nods, and pulls away from the door just enough to open it. “Bring him in,” she says to the guard in the hallway.
“I told you all that was required for this was the meeting of past, present, and future,” the augur says, sounding confused. “The three of us meet those requirements.” The augur tilts her head. “Or are we still pretending that you’re not an epocha?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Rava says, and Theren expected no different. Rava Vidar knows better than most that the best way to pass off a lie is to never admit it’s a lie, not even for a moment.
The augur sighs. Theren is too busy trying to breathe to react to this confirmation of what he’s always suspected: that Rava’s gifts aren’t as singular as the Talusar think.
That she belongs locked up in a monastery with all the other epocha, and only enjoys the freedom she now has because her mother is Ileth Vidar.
It seems the least of the secrets she’s kept.
“Kneel,” Rava says to Theren, and in the last year, he’s noticed that she gives this order when she’s concerned that he’ll react badly to something and she’ll lose control over him, that his size and strength will suddenly become a problem.
So he obeys, but with a hammer for a heart, anticipating what’s coming.
A man walks into the room. He’s wearing a blue robe embroidered, not with the interlinked circles of the Fever, as a priest’s robe would be, but with the twin silver lines of an epocha.
Theren doesn’t have the Talusar’s reverence for the epocha, but he understands what’s expected of him. He bows his head when the epocha lowers his hood, but not before he recognizes the epocha’s face.
“Theren,” the epocha says.
Theren closes his eyes.
It’s Fenn.
The ache he feels is so intense he has to press a hand to his gut to steady himself. He feels the brush of Rava’s fear against him, but she shouldn’t have worried—-lying to him about Fenn’s death is just one in a long line of painful things she’s done to him. It hardly registers.
What registers instead is Fenn himself. Fenn alive. Fenn, elated at the sight of him, even though Theren betrayed him to save his life. Fenn drops to his knees and puts his hands on Theren’s shoulders.
“You’re alive,” Theren says weakly.
“I’m sorry,” Fenn says. “I’m so sorry, I asked them to tell you I was dead in case I was the reason you hadn’t run away yet.”
Fenn looks older than he did the last time Theren saw him, thinner and sterner, his eyes carrying far too much history. Yet the way he talks, the way his smile looks hard--won, like it was carved from a frown—-it’s the same.
“It doesn’t matter.” And it doesn’t, it can’t matter, because Theren is sure they only have a few minutes with each other, because he can feel the thread of Rava’s patience pulling taut. “I’m the one who’s sorry, anyway.”
Their dalliance was short--lived. Two Crucible fighters desperate for comfort, finding it where they could.
It ended before Fenn’s arrest, when Theren noticed, as only he could have, that Fenn’s feelings were getting deeper and his own weren’t.
Fenn took the end of it in stride. Ah, well.
We’ll be dead soon anyway. A phrase that couldn’t quite disguise his hurt—-but it was a hurt that would pass.
But betraying him to Rava, telling everyone that he was an epocha? That was a hurt that would linger.
“I told you I’ve never hated you,” Fenn says, with a breathy laugh. “I still mean it. I always will.”
It’s a kind of benediction. Something in Theren eases. Fenn doesn’t hate him.
“How very touching,” Rava says, the thread snapping. “Let’s get on with it. Augur?”
Fenn’s eyes search his, and Theren gets lost in the tangle of what he feels. Just as he used to, Fenn feels like wind that’s blowing in all different directions, gentle but scattered.
“I was trying to explain to Mr. Forint before your arrival that his gift is what makes him exceptional,” the augur says. “What we have in this room is a meeting of the past—-” The augur nods to Fenn. “And the future.” She touches her own chest.
Theren stares at Fenn. His serious expression. The silver embroidery along his collar. The lines at the corners of his eyes.
He shakes back his sleeve and holds his hand over Theren’s cheek, without touching him.
“This would not be the first time an augur and an epocha have helped each other,” the augur says.
“An augur’s vision is limited, you see, by what is available to us.
But visions can be prompted. Encouraged.
Unearthed. Sometimes a more profound knowledge of a person yields new revelations. New visions.”
Fenn touches Theren’s face, not gentle but firm, his thumb framing Theren’s mouth. His eyes close. Theren tries to pull away, by instinct, but the augur’s hand clamps over his shoulder and holds him in place.
“Tell me,” the augur says.
“Down the line of his progenitor,” Fenn says, voice low. “His father comes through a doorway.”
“What kind of doorway?” the augur asks.
“One hidden among the stars,” Fenn says. “Distant but not unreachable. He brings with him a seedling.”
“A seedling.”
“A creature. A plant. A destroyer,” Fenn says. “He crashes, but he survives. His name is Sevik.”
“Sevik.” The word hisses between the augur’s teeth. “I see Sevik now. I see the Sundial passing through the doorway. He waits on the other side for his son. He has waited a long time. Yes.”
“What must I do?” Rava demands. “Should I facilitate this meeting?”
The augur looks down at Theren, and he gets the sudden urge to beg her not to say anything. To ask her for a strength she hasn’t shown before, to make a choice she and the other augurs pretend never to make. He wants her to choose the Cedrae over the Talusar.
“No,” the augur says, her voice flat. “There is no victory for you that results from his death, so you must keep him alive. But you must also keep him from passing through the doorway in the stars. You must keep him from meeting his father.”
Fenn takes his hand from Theren’s face. His eyes open. They’re wet with tears.
“He waits for you,” Fenn says softly.
The augur takes her hand from Theren’s shoulder. He feels the same way he felt after fights in the Crucible, like something was taken from him, something big, and he can’t get it back.
Fenn stands, shakes his sleeve back down over his hand, and steps back. Theren is trembling.
His father’s name. Sevik. His father is waiting.
And Rava Vidar is standing in the way.