Chapter 40
Theren watches Isre’s hands on the navigation panel of the ship, their movements certain, almost automatic.
“Why did you decide against being a pilot?” Theren asks his brother. He’s hesitant to interrupt someone whose consciousness is currently split in half, even though Isre told him when they set out that he could carry on a conversation just fine while flying.
They’re on their way to the middle of nowhere. Right in the middle of a flat plain. Those were the coordinates of the meeting point Kesia set. There was obvious wisdom in it: there was no way for them to hide reinforcements. She could see for miles in every direction.
Her other demands were that no one be armed, and that Isre and Theren both attend. Elegy hadn’t argued. They needed Kesia’s answers too badly.
Isre shrugs. “I went where the need was. Everyone wants to be a pilot—-even with only five percent of applicants being accepted into the program, they always have more than they need. It’s a sexier job than ‘technician,’ I guess.”
“And you had no desire to be sexy,” Theren supplies, and he feels, for a moment, like he’s his old self, teasing Isre across the dinner table about some new girlfriend.
Once he sent a wax--sealed letter officially welcoming one of Isre’s girlfriends to the family.
It was his mission to make Isre’s life a little harder, he used to say. That was an older brother’s duty.
“No, I was already plenty sexy without it,” Isre says, raising an eyebrow over the frames of his sunglasses.
Theren grins.
It’s all wasteland beneath them. Crumbling settlements from a time long before Cedre existed—-rubble in the shape of buildings, remnants of half--disintegrated roads. Theren is still amazed by how time eats buildings, how efficiently rust and rot devour.
“Did you ever think about what you would be if you weren’t a Knight?” Isre asks. Theren feels a tremor of nervousness in him as he asks the question, like he isn’t sure it’s all right to talk about what might have been.
But that yearning for something else that he felt so acutely before he took his oath is gone. He shrugs, and says, “I don’t ask for things I know I won’t get.”
“Oh, come on. You were so good at translation. Your old girlfriend even said so.”
“My old girlfriend?”
“Zuzanna. She came to your funeral.” Isre tries to keep his voice light, but Theren can still feel the hollowness in him at the memory. “She seemed nice. Said you had good . . . emotional intelligence.”
Theren laughs a little. She had no way of knowing, of course, that the Fever would give him better “emotional intelligence” than she knew was possible.
Theren asks Isre about his coworkers, then, and Isre talks about his supervisor, who wants him to be more diligent in filling out forms, though he himself doesn’t see the need.
Theren lets Isre’s voice wash over him as the land passes beneath the ship.
They’re going deeper into the desert, where no one ever bothered to build anything other than a road to cross from one side to the other.
It’s not long before they start their descent. They fly over a small town, and then toward a glint of silver on the horizon that takes the shape of a chrome--plated structure—-a trailer.
Isre lands smoothly, like it’s one single motion. As Theren unbuckles his safety straps, the front door to the trailer opens, and a tall, white--haired woman steps out, her arms crossed.
“That’s Hela,” Isre says, before getting out of the ship.
Hela’s face lights up. “Isre!” she says. “Long time no see. And you must be . . .”
Her focus shifts to Theren, and then . . . she goes still. She squints at him, and he feels a ripple of emotions from her—-a prickle of shock, and the low simmer of recognition. As if she knows him.
“Have we met?” he says to her.
She seems frozen, for some reason, and he’s not sure that she heard him. Then Elegy steps out onto the landing behind her, and pokes her in the back.
“Ready?” Elegy asks her.
“Yeah,” Hela says, sounding distant. She clears her throat, and comes out of her daze. “Again, I have to ask—-no weapons?”
“We won’t need them,” Theren says.
Hela gives him a stern look. “I know she’s your mother, but—-”
“I’m not saying that I trust her.” Theren keeps his voice mild. “I’m saying I don’t require a weapon to fight her, as I’m sure she’s well aware.”
Though he knows she can’t read him like he can read her, he still feels exposed by the way Hela looks at him, like she’s taking him apart and examining each piece. But she nods. “Fine. Here’s your Ear, El.”
She takes a small cloth bag out of her pocket and tips its contents into her palm. A metal bead about the size of a pea glints against her skin. Elegy pinches it between two fingers, then presses it behind her ear, where it sticks to her skin. Then she brings her hair forward to cover it.
It’s illegal technology—-all personal devices are, in Cedre—-but he shouldn’t be surprised. Scouts tend to walk on the line between legal and illegal.
Hela says, “I figured out how far away I need to be before she can spot me. So that’s where I’ll be parked. I’ll follow you until we’re in range, then let me do a sweep before you descend.”
“Let’s go, then.”
They part ways, Hela going to one ship and Isre, Theren, and Elegy going to the other. As they approach the passenger door, Elegy says, “I’ll take the back seat.”
“That’s not necessary.”
Elegy looks him up and down in a way that makes his skin prickle. “You’re taller. Stop arguing.”
He flips the latch that folds the passenger seat forward, and by instinct, holds out a hand for her to take as she climbs into the back. Her fingers are cool against his. He can feel Isre noticing the contact with a little wriggle of curiosity, though he gives no sign of it.
They wait for Hela to take off before following her into the air.
Up ahead is the desert flat, empty earth and dry brush and boulder, the occasional Joshua tree tricking him into thinking he’s seeing a person standing sentry.
He has such strange memories of this landscape, panicked and exhausted with Maeve’s back against his chest. He has to keep forcing his mind back to the present.
He’s about to see Kesia again. He needs to focus.
He doesn’t want to see her again. He never does.
She came to watch him in the Crucible once, a year into his imprisonment when he had learned skill without finesse, and took care of his opponents too quickly to be of interest to spectators.
She cornered him after the fight, and he felt how impressed she was with him for his brutality, for his survival.
It made him sick, that what it took for her to feel proud of him was to watch him endure one of the darkest places on Earth.
So even before she had the chance to speak to him, he summoned a guard, and had them escort her out.
He saw her again soon after his relocation to House Vidar.
She brought a prisoner to the interrogation chamber there for Nyx to handle, and he passed her in the hallway.
Her eyes went straight to the vine freshly tattooed on his hand.
She stopped him and tried to ask him about it.
He couldn’t even speak, just pulled away and ducked into the kitchen to catch his breath.
And then there she was in his lost memory, asking him if he lived in Rava Vidar’s chambers.
He sees her horse first, a gray--white smudge on the land. As they draw closer, he spots a piece of canvas stretched between a few poles, dug deep into the sand so the structure can withstand the wind. Kesia sits on a rock beneath it, dressed in pale Talusar linen. Waiting.
They wait for Hela to do her sweep of the area, and then Isre guides them down to the rocky earth. They park, and climb out of the ship, and Theren doesn’t read Kesia—-doesn’t care to.
When she sees them, she stands up, her sand--colored clothes blown to the side by the strong desert wind, so they swell away from her body. Isre rushes toward her, and then stops when he’s within reach, like he realizes that he shouldn’t be so eager to embrace the woman who abandoned him.
She reaches for Isre, and he lets her take his hands and squeeze them.
“Look at you,” she says, eyes sparkling.
“You all right?” he says.
“Never better.” She looks over Isre’s shoulder, and finally notices Elegy. Theren may not be reading Kesia, but he can’t ignore the cold flare of Elegy’s rage.
Kesia’s hand goes to the knife in her sleeve. He can see the handle, dark against her skin.
“I thought we agreed no weapons,” Elegy says.
“I requested that you have no weapons,” Kesia says. “Since I’m outnumbered three to one, and one of you is him.”
She meets Theren’s eyes. For a moment he just stares back at her, his jaw set, and he’s glad she can’t read the chaos of contradictory emotions in him. She might believe it means more than it does, that he still loves her—-but loving her is just an old habit he can’t break.
“If I’d known I would be hosting the Hope of Cedre, I might have made my accommodations finer,” Kesia says, gesturing to the canopy above her. “Please, come into the shade, Miss Rosyk.”
“That’s not my name, as you’re well aware,” Elegy says, but she does move closer, and Theren goes with her.
Their eyes meet, and they can’t speak Talusar here, with Kesia listening in, but he tilts his head, and she gives him what he assumes to be an encouraging nod.
It’s his memory Rava buried, it’s his father Kesia lied about . . . so this has to be his conversation.
When Kesia sits back down on her rock, he sits on the one across from her.
“I hope you’ll indulge me,” Kesia says to Isre, smiling again. She pats the space beside her, and Isre sits, letting her hold his hand. “Do you still know your Talusar?”
“Enough. Don’t speak English on my account.”
“Very well.” Kesia arranges the bottom of her robe around her legs. “You live in Losan now?”