by Anne Wheeler
“It’s not difficult, nor is everything dead. It was just desperate for a bit of care.”
“Yes.” He cleared his throat. “Now what?”
She edged by him toward the door, trying to work a thorn out of her thumb. Her muscles were screaming for a hot bath and she was desperate for a drink of water, but asking the prince for anything was out of the question.
“I start weeding, I suppose,” she said.
The prince grinned. “I was hoping you’d say that. Let’s, shall we?”
Chapter Seventeen
No one had ever told him the hallucinations precipitated by the thing in his brain were so real. Blind yet again, Kresten writhed on the floor, trying to recover from the latest chip-induced seizure, but the vision in his mind didn’t go away like his tremors were beginning to. Right there, just in front of him, stood a graceful yet soft figure. He reached for her with shaking arms; she laughed and took a step backward.
I need you, he called out.
I need you, too, Ryllis’s figure mouthed at him. Her laugh stopped, and she stood there, gazing down at him, thoughtful. But you know it’s not going to happen.
“Ryl—” He slammed his mouth shut before he could call out her name. This could be a test for all he knew. They could be trying to find out how he felt about her.
Ryllis, he said in his mind instead. Speaking to her like this was so comfortable, so natural, so sensual. The seductiveness of speaking to her telepathically like this coursed through his veins, and for a moment, he forgot where he was and what he meant to say. It took feeling around the wound at the back of his neck to remind himself, ground himself in reality again. Why isn’t it going to happen?
You know. You’ve always known, since you brought me here. Her expression grew sad, and he swore in his mind. It was so real. So real. They’re going to kill me. I’m sorry, Kresten. I know you wanted more, and I did, too. But you’ll get over me. You’ll be happy again. I promise.
Kresten was beginning to formulate an argument in his head when the black figures approached behind her. He wanted to scream at her to turn around and defend herself, but something told him she already knew what was about to happen—and was going to allow it.
Arms, dozens of them, grabbed hold of her, at her arms, at waist, at her neck, at her legs. Ryllis flinched as they pulled her toward the shadows, then began to struggle and scream, but it was too late. The hands multiplied, clutching at her, until he could scarcely see her devastated eyes any longer.
I love you. Ryllis—I love you.
She couldn’t hear him, even though he screamed the words inside his head. Something deep in his soul told him she couldn’t hear him anymore. Still, if he said it over and over, maybe he could stop them.
Don’t go. Don’t do this. Don’t let them take you. They’ll do things—listen in—get off her!
As if in reply to his order, the hands vanished. Ryllis collapsed on her side, her bare skin wraithlike in the dark of his cell. He watched her chest move up and down, rapidly at first, and then too slowly. She didn’t speak to him as she lay there, even though he repeated her name over and over in his head.
The gurney appeared in the corner of his vision as he called to her, and he vomited, though it didn’t make a noticeable difference in the already rank and filthy cell. Was it still a hallucination or was it a memory? He knew, intellectually, that it was nothing more than a vision, but it felt like both, because he’d done this very thing to others. He’d sat next to prisoners strapped to a gurney just like this, sometimes listening to them scream for mercy, sometimes simply watching as they stared at the ceiling with eyes that had given up.
And now the same hands were reaching for Ryllis again. They lifted her up, stretched her on to the gurney, then attached leads to her head. Kresten pushed himself up from the ground, but something clicked audibly in his head, and his legs went immobile. He crashed to the ground, landing on his shoulder, and screamed—not from the pain, because this was mild, but out of rage and frustration. The guards were controlling him from somewhere close by, with the knowledge that they were keeping him from someone he loved.
He bit his tongue enough to draw blood and dragged himself toward the gurney with shaking arms. Another click. He almost vomited at the sound, but his head fell straight down before he could, landing on his nose that time. Metallic-tasting fluid filled his mouth, and as it pooled under his face, warm and sticky, he idly realized that he’d broken his own nose with his weight.
Idiot. It’s not real. It’s not real. She’s safe, somewhere out in the mountains, trying to find her way back to Cereth.
He lifted his head off the concrete just enough. Hallucination or not, he would watch. If he didn’t, they’d do much worse, and there wasn’t much point in entertaining them with his pain for no reason. As if she was truly there, Ryllis turned toward him as the tattoo needles began to dance across her skin. The smell of burning flesh, acrid and strong, filled his nose.
I love you, too, she said. And when I’m gone, you need to remember that. I need you to remember me.
Stay with me. Just stay with me. I can talk you through it. I can help you keep them out.
It was a lie. He knew it, and she knew it. Her mouth opened in a grotesque reproduction of a shriek, then her eyes rolled back in her head. Frozen from head to toe, he could do nothing but stare while she convulsed from the nanobiotes that began to flow through her bloodstream. He called her name over and over again, silently and then out loud, but she never responded again.
The black circle, when it finally bloomed across her side, made him scream.
They hauled him, stiff and shaking, from the cell. Kresten didn’t think he’d been able to see for over a lunar quarter, but in this place, who could tell? The hallucinations of Ryllis’s treatment had been the worst by far, but the rest wasn’t pleasant—physically, if not emotionally. They shocked him from a distance through the chip in his neck whenever he closed his eyes for longer than they felt appropriate, and when they weren’t doing that or trying to convince him of his own insanity, he was blind. It made eating difficult and finding the hole that passed for his toilet almost impossible. No, they hadn’t forced him to piss all over himself yet, but that was about all he could say for them.
He wondered about his temporary release from the cage as they dumped him in a chair and restrained his hands. It couldn’t be anything good—or it could just be a break. Dahl not wanting to see the outcome of his work. There was no room for squeamishness within Shadow Force, but even so, some handled the work better than others. Sure enough, his ears picked up the unmistakable sound of Dahl’s footsteps and annoyed breathing outside. When the door hissed shut, Kresten forced the stress from his shoulders. It didn’t work.
“This would be a lot more comfortable if you’d let me see,” he said, as Dahl’s chair screeched across the floor.
There was a long pause, like Dahl didn’t know what to do with him speaking first. A small click echoed in his brain, and the blackness became gray, then the interview room appeared in his vision, hazy and dark. Kresten tried to blink the rest of the fog away, but it hung around him like mountain fog on an autumn morning.
“What do you say?” Dahl asked.
Ass. “Thank you, sir.”
“You’re welcome. I can’t promise how long it’ll last, but watching you stare at nothing gets to me. It’s unnatural.”
“Yeah. I bet it really bothers you. My heart is breaking for you and the discomfort seeing me like this must cause you.” The very last shred of politeness he’d been holding onto had gone out the window when they’d stimulated the chip and sent painful spasms up his calves a few days ago. The treatment had lasted longer than he’d thought he could survive; it was surprising he could still walk.
“You can believe me or not, but I don’t relish this, Lieutenant. It guilts me, to be honest. Not that you’re going through a punishment that’s so richly deserved, naturally, but that I have to do it to one of my own peopl
e. Without His Majesty knowing, as well. Keeping that kind of secret makes everyone here anxious.”
“And you can believe it or not,” Kresten said, as the room finally sharpened, “I don’t much care how anxious you are.”
Dahl chuckled. “No, I wouldn’t think you would.”
“Then why am I here?”
Expected me to change my mind so soon?
“I’d like to go through all the information from Governor Camden with you. I understand that you’d rather believe his daughter is innocent, and I can’t say I blame you for that. But regardless”—Dahl put his hand on a stack of paper and pushed it slightly toward him—“she’s not, and his hours of voluntary interviews and the documentation he provided will prove it. Just take a look.”
Kresten glared.
“Oh,” Dahl said lightly. “That’s right. Perhaps I’ll need to read some of the more interesting bits to you. Here’s a good one. Interviewer: When your daughter didn’t arrive in the office that morning as scheduled, did you try to contact her? Camden: Yes. Interviewer: Were you able to reach her? Camden: No. Her comm was off. Interviewer: Did she often leave her comm off? Camden: Never.”
“That’s your proof? You’re reaching.”
“It’s proof she didn’t want to be tracked.”
“Or that she didn’t want to be bothered.”
“Know her that well, do you? I suppose that’s no surprise.” Dahl smiled. “Interviewer: When you came home that evening, what was she doing? Camden: Throwing a bunch of herbs in the garbage disposal. When she saw me, she tossed a few data drives in behind them. Interviewer: Did you recognize the drives? Camden: No. Everything I use at home is in the network. Ryllis as well. Interviewer: You don’t even own any? Camden: They’re a security risk. I don’t allow them in the house.”
Kresten closed his mind against the memory of the most recent hallucination. “So she trashed some disks and plants. So what?” The answer was building in his head, but the chip must have slowed down his thought process.
“Disks her father said weren’t allowed in the house. Why would she have any portable data, unless she meant to hide it from him—and by extension, us?”
“Possibly because she’s an attractive young woman? They have secrets.”
“The governor says their relationship was fine.”
Dahl couldn’t possibly be this dense. “She’s an adult, forced to live with her father and stepmother because we denied her a work permit. I would assume that drove a wedge in between them.”
“Sure,” Dahl said. “Maybe enough of one that she decided to take out her frustrations on the people who put her in that position.”
“None of this proves a thing.” He was shaking now, but it was cold. Dahl wouldn’t think anything of it.
Kresten was thinking, though. The answer spun around and around in his head, the ban on reading the minds of members of the imperial family took on a new importance. His thoughts were safe, and now that was crucial. Because this one, right on the surface, bubbling like seafoam, the first thing any telepath would see if they cared to take a look—there it was.
Ryllis had a secret, yes. He hadn’t been entirely sure of the extent of her secret, not before, but he knew now.
Those beady-eyed, hostile chickens that had listened to her.
His garden. It’d been a late spring, but you’d never know by looking at the flowers.
The way she’d panicked when he’d told the story of Carl Hellquist. When he’d told her Hellquist deserved to die for using his powers.
How she’d refused to let Shadow Force into her mind, even to clear herself.
The flower in her cell back on Cereth. It hadn’t died.
Ever.
Even pruned and without light.
Ryllis had an innate power.
What it was, he didn’t know. There were so many gifts in the history books and the Vilarian aristocracy now, and most couldn’t be identified by any kind of name or even skill: some could cure disease by the laying of hands, some like himself received telepathy, others ‘saw’ through wormholes, allowing the Star Realm to conquer new worlds. Ryllis, it appeared, talked to nature.
Harmless, and yet, the Star Realm didn’t care anything about that. They only cared that through some genetic accident—for Governor Camden wouldn’t have been able to hide anything like this—she’d been gifted with a power rare yet feared.
And Dahl couldn’t know. Kresten would die here before he let anyone know. No one would touch her, no one would harm her.
“It proves enough.” Dahl arranged the paper in a clean stack and folded his hands on top of it. “But just for you, when we find her and bring her here, we’ll read her mind. Just to make sure.”
Like the hallucinations the chip prompted over and over. But they couldn’t. Ryllis wouldn’t be able to hide it. She’d been hiding it from him, and that meant it was right on the top of her mind. It wouldn’t take thirty seconds for them to find out, and then they would kill her, just like she’d told him in his hallucination. She had known, from the very first day, that it would end like this. Even when he’d brought her to the lodge, even when he’d carried her and healed her ankle, even when he’d kissed her and she’d cried afterwards.
She’d known.
And beyond protecting herself, she’d been protecting him.
A blast of pain shot through his head, but it wasn’t from the chip this time. Love hurt. Fear was physically painful. No one had ever told him that. Not until Elise had died, anyway, and he’d hated everyone for a very long time for not warning him how much he would mourn her.
But he’d survived, as most who suffered such a loss did. What else had there been to do but push forward and let each morning arrive like its own gift? The pain waned after a time, and he’d forgotten—they said women forget their labor pains, and maybe the same was true of the death of a spouse. He doubted it, but perhaps.
Then he’d met Ryllis. Heedless of the hurt she might one day cause him, he’d gone after her, certain he’d never experienced pain like Elise’s loss ever again.
And now it was happening. The worst thing he could imagine.
Kresten opened his mouth to argue, and his vision went black.
Chapter Eighteen
Ryllis woke sore and sunburned. The small room was hot, and she dreaded heading out to the garden for another sweltering afternoon. Spring here was nothing like the cool spring of the mountains. No servants escorted her anymore, and even the prince had taken to watching her from a distance—though he did still watch. Her skin had stopped crawling though, almost as if it realized there was nothing to be done about his lecherous stare.
She downed the cup of tea she’d made the evening before and gave the biscuit a short look before stashing it under her mattress. It was an automatic movement learned in her last days on Cereth, and she hated herself for reverting to such idiosyncrasies of scarcity, but even if she wasn’t hungry now, she might be later. Bothering the estate’s few servants for food when they didn’t provide enough was uncomfortable, so she avoided it.
Prince Vidar wasn’t around as she crept through the silent house toward the garden. One thing she’d learned over the past few days was the prince slept in late most mornings, and if she woke early, she would have a few hours to just sit. It was still work, after all. The plants responded to the quiet time in a way they didn’t when she was bustling about, pulling weeds, moving pavers, and feeding the younger plants.
This morning dew still glistened on the greening lawn, and she sat cross-legged on it just off the brick path, ignoring how the dewdrops turned her uniform damp. Nothing but the singing of early rising birds disturbed her solitude; streaks of emerald appeared in the grass as she ran her fingers through it. There was a certain peace about it—tinged with anticipation and dread, naturally, but the tranquility almost overwhelmed those.
“And who are you?”
Ryllis started and jumped to her feet at the feminine voice.
The
woman who’d surprised her was elderly, almost as much as the prince’s half-blind housekeeper. But unlike the housekeeper, she was dressed in finery that put the clothes Ryllis had worn on the mountain to shame. Gauzy fabric draped her body, the bodice embroidered in vines and flowers. It wasn’t a design Ryllis could have ever imagined on anyone over ten, but the woman wore it well—the only concession to her age was the color, a deep wine edged in gold that matched the locket around her neck. Fine lines traversed her face, though the delicate scarf she’d wrapped over her shoulders shielded the rest of her exposed skin from the sun.
And—Ryllis’s breath caught—and it was Kresten’s brilliant and intelligent eyes that peered out from her face.
“Your Majesty.” Ryllis sunk to one knee into the damp grass, though it was more from the fear of the prince seeing her do anything else than what this woman could do to her. “I—”
“Vidar’s servants aren’t allowed to sit.” Her gaze grew sharper.
“No, my lady. I apologize. I was only—”
The empress laughed out loud, then raised her hand. “Stand up. And don’t look so frightened. I was merely surprised you were brave enough to do it. My son is still lazing about in bed on this beautiful morning, then?”
“I’m sorry—I don’t know the prince’s whereabouts. I only work in the garden, my lady.”
“The garden. Yes. But Vidar hasn’t had a gardener in . . .” Her forehead scrunched together. “At least five solar cycles, I believe.”
Five? By the state of the place, Ryllis believed it. “He has one now, my lady.”
For a time.
“However did he convince you to do it?” Her eyes narrowed at Ryllis’s hair. “Are you a slave?”
Ryllis grasped her hands in front of her to keep from picking at her nails. “I volunteered.”
Those eyes of Kresten’s narrowed. “No one volunteers to work at Vidar’s estate.”
