“Princess,” Symeon said, holding her gaze. “I would never blackmail you. You’re in this horrid position because of forces far outside your control. It isn’t fair, and I don’t envy you the pain nor the tough choices you’ve had to make. I’ll help you if I can.”
Kavya’s face fell. Tears welled in at the corners of her eyes and ran down her cheeks.
“My Lady, I’m sorry. I—” Symeon made to rise, but Kavya shooed him back to his seat.
She withdrew a box of tissues from a drawer and used one to dab at her eyes and nose. “Czarina says always keep your gun drawer separate from your tissue drawer.”
“Your gun drawer?” Symeon couldn’t fathom her words. Why would a princess need a gun drawer and, even stranger, why would her Luxing slave be advising her on it?
Kavya chuckled and waved her damp tissue like a flag. “A skill I learned from my father’s guards as a girl—mostly sidearm drills. I’ve kept up the practice here on Yaya. It helps me pass the time. But never mind all that. I want you to know, you’re a kind man, Symeon. I value your trust and loyalty.”
“May I ask a further question?” Symeon hoped the princess’ nerves weren’t too frayed to answer. Curiosity gnawed at his insides about every aspect of this intriguing situation and, truth told, this intriguing woman. There was more to the princess than he had ever imagined.
“Ask away. I think we’re past the point of secrets now.”
“If your plan works—”
“And it doesn’t cause utter chaos as you fear,” Kavya interjected.
“And that. What happens once things have settled and Grand Duke Alexei reacquires his fleet? That’s bound to happen eventually.”
Kavya shrugged one shoulder. “Maybe. Maybe not. Perhaps the Bith problem will keep the commonwealth fleet together for the next hundred years. If it doesn’t, I’ll devise a new plan to circumvent my father. Perhaps I can dredge up some inter-dimensional travelers for my next trick.”
It felt good to laugh. Symeon let his anxiety and fear flow out with his chuckle.
Kavya watched him closely, smiling. “I want to tell you. I haven’t told anyone else on the island, except Czarina, of course.”
“Tell me?”
“Why my father exiled me here. Why I’m alone with no one but Luxing. I want to trust you, Seneschal. Can I?”
“Tell it if you will, Princess. Keep it if you must. I’ll not pressure you.”
Kavya eyed him a moment longer before nodding. “If you mean to betray me, you will, and there’s nothing I can do to stop you.” She gathered herself, leaning back in her high seat, dexterous fingers steepled under her chin. “You looked through my files?”
“I apologize for that, Princess. It was necessary—”
“To fulfill your orders. I understand. After poor Uri was unable to break our new codes, I thought my files safe from prying stewards.” Kavya favored him with a wan smile.
“Uri was my immediate predecessor? The one who took his own life?”
Kavya wiped at her eyes again. “I don’t know what Ivan might have promised him, or what threats he might have made, but after six months struggling to break my codes in silence, Uri accused me of sedition against my father in a bid to force my hand. He wanted me to openly show him what he couldn’t dig out for himself. I refused, and called for Ivan.”
Symeon could well imagine what happened next. A Luxing, even a seneschal, couldn’t accuse a Shorvex of a crime without irrefutable evidence, and even then the courts might well side with the defendant. With nothing to show for his claim of sedition, Ivan must have summarily dismissed Uri from his post.
“And Uri committed suicide?” Symeon asked, his voice soft.
Kavya nodded. “He jumped from the castle wall before Ivan ever arrived to deal with him. I struggle with that every day, knowing my actions brought that man’s death.”
An urge to take Kavya’s hand, to comfort her, nearly sent Symeon out of his chair, but he fought it. He couldn’t let his sympathy trump his station. “I am sorry, Princess, but your actions had nothing to do with the seneschal’s choices. He sought to damage you, not the other way around.”
“My point in bringing up the files was to ask, did you read them all?”
He shook his head, embarrassed to be speaking about looking through the lady’s private data.
“Obviously, you saw the Bith recordings, but I’ve stored older things there as well. If you had searched further back, you would have discovered a set of reports about ancient Shorvexan and Luxing history.”
“I saw some of that,” Symeon said. “Seemed odd housed next to top secret documents.”
“I suppose, but those history files have more bearing on my life here and now than anything I’ve pilfered from my father’s government. They mean more to me than the Bith, the emperor, and my father’s stupid power all rolled into one. They were the catalyst that brought me at odds with him, and heated his ire towards me.”
She made connections—forbidden connections.
Symeon swallowed, unsure if he wanted Kavya to go on, and yet incapable of asking her to stop. “What did you discover?”
“Are you certain you want to hear this?” Kavya tilted her head to one side. “You look...trepidatious. Perhaps I should tell you why I sought the records in the first place. Then you may decide if you want to hear more.”
No. Hear it all.
“Yes, please. Tell me.”
“When I was a girl, I was the most vapid, careless, egotistical creature ever born on this planet, and knowing some of my cousins, that’s saying something.” Kavya shook her head in disgust. “All of life was a game to me, one where I held the winning hand, because my father was the grand duke of our entire krais. Only the emperor wielded more power. I took everything for granted, and that included the many Luxing slaves who labored to make my life a pampered utopia.
“When I turned fifteen, Father told me I could arrange the biggest, most extravagant party the world had ever seen. And I did my best to make that happen. Symeon, I bought an entire village of your people. Everything they owned, meager as it might have been, I owned, including their bodies, their minds, even their children.”
“I’ve heard about his, Princess,” Symeon said, mindful of her growing distress. “If recounting this is too painful, you needn’t go on for my sake.”
“I want to tell it. I deserve to tell it every day. I invited a thousand of my equally self-indulgent friends to that village—it was called Borenyetz —and for three days we treated it, and the people who lived there, like our own personal virtual game.” Kavya covered her face with a fresh tissue for several seconds before she continued in a rough voice. “Debauchery isn’t a fit word for the way we used that village. I won’t horrify you with the details, but understand I am only lucky no Luxing was killed during our rave. By the time it ended—let me be honest here—by the time I sobered up from a drug-addled stupor, I found myself in hell.
“We had burned most of the houses. The women and girls—Shorvexan men used them. I wasn’t aware at the time, but I make no excuse for it. I should have known. I should have protected them. Old men and women, retired from long years of faithful service to their masters, found themselves homeless and destitute because of me.”
“You were young.”
She closed her eyes, tears streaming down her already wet cheeks. “I was a monster. I didn’t think of your people as...people.”
“We aren’t people in the same way as the Shorvex,” Symeon said, misquoting an oft repeated saying from time immemorial. “We’re young and wayward. Yes, bad things have happened to us from time to time, but on the whole we are grateful for Shorvexan condescension.”
Fool! Weakling! The Luxing are people every bit as much as the Shorvex. More so perhaps.
“I’m sorry, Symeon.”
“You have nothing to apologize to me for, Princess.”
Kavya shook her head impatiently. “You misunderstand me. I’m sorry that you’ve been so brainwashed
you think of your own people that way. You’re wrong, because you’ve been lied to about the past—lied to by my kind for more than a millennium.
Yes! You know this is true. You’ve always known.
An image flashed inside Symeon’s mind. He saw soldiers dressed in unfamiliar armor like space suits, their faces covered in black rebreathers. Rifles held ready before them, they ran in pairs across an airlock into a barren ship. And though Symeon didn’t see it in the mental flash, he somehow knew these fighting men had entered a ship whose defenders all slumbered and would never waken.
Symeon jerked upright in his chair, breathing hard.
“What is it?” Kavya eyed him with concern.
“I’m sorry, Princess. I was, imagining, I think.”
She nodded slowly. “Then I am sorry to have brought you those images. But I want you to understand how I felt once I realized what damage I had caused the Luxing of Borenyetz. I ruined their lives. Many of them would have died in the coming months either of starvation or exposure, if I hadn’t changed my ways. The realization of what I had done pierced me through. It taught me that the Luxing aren’t machines or dull beasts, they’re people.”
“Thank you for that.”
“From that time onward, I devoted myself to helping not just the Luxing of Borenyetz, which thrived once I paid to rebuild the village, but every slave I encountered. I studied them, their history, to make myself a better caregiver, and in studying, I discovered the truth.”
Symeon felt cemented in place, crystallized, fossilized, and as incapable of escaping the spot as a three thousand year old tree. “What truth, Princess?”
You already know!
Kavya held his gaze, her silver-blue eyes bright with tears. “We aren’t separate species, the Shorvex and the Luxing. We’re one and the same. Like the Shorvex, your people didn’t originate on Phoenix, you came here from the stars. You were first; we usurped you.”
“You have evidence of this claim?”
“In the files. Read them; you’ll see.”
Part of Symeon wanted to argue, to never view those files again, but a larger part hungered to know the truth. He would read them, he knew, but with caution. Kavya’s claims could not be real. Her contacts must have fed her lies for some reason.
Symeon straightened his back. “You confronted your father with this evidence? That’s why he banished you here?”
“He called it ‘juvenile conspiracy tripe,’ and said if I could get fooled into believing the Luxing were anything more than tamed animals, I couldn’t be trusted with my own freedom.”
“If you believe it, why not release what you knew to the planetary sphere?”
“Oh, I tried.” Kavya waved one hand in the air as if to clear away his question. “But my access here is limited. The duchy’s best network specialists keep a tight lock on what I can and cannot reach on the sphere.”
“Hence you bought information from hidden brokers at Saddle Horn Enterprises—purchases they made appear legitimate—and that led you to Grand Duke Alexei’s plans for a coup.”
“I simply want what’s best for both our peoples, Symeon, and to keep my father from losing his head. He didn’t create the flawed system that tells him conquest and power are all that matters in this life. He is a byproduct of it. I want to save him, and every life his rebellion might cost, and I want you to help me.”
Symeon met her gaze, his face hot, his muscles tight with fear, worry, and excitement. He nodded. “I will.”
* * * * *
Chapter 9
Though Symeon lay in bed for several hours, he found it impossible to sleep that night. He couldn’t stop thinking about the revelations Kavya had disclosed. At last he gave up, dressed, and climbed to the top of what the house slaves called the wine tower. Why the name, he did not know. It seemed arbitrary, since the tower held no wine stores and looked nothing like a bottle. It did possess a high balcony overlooking a spit of land as white as bone in the moonlight, and that was good enough for Symeon.
By some trick of architectural magic, wind whistled along the balcony’s stout railing but never touched the inner platform that held a bench upholstered with plush cushions. Symeon bypassed the bench in hopes the gusting sea breeze might cleanse his thoughts. He rested his elbows on the stone railing to gaze at the night dark ocean, black as the space between stars. Its roar lay at the edge of his hearing. He leaned still further, cocking his head this way and that to catch the sound, though the wind’s howl kept it at bay.
You can’t ignore troubles.
Symeon bit the inside of his cheek almost to the point of blood. In a long-ago class on the active brain, one of his professors had described the unconscious mind as a glacier slowly breaking up the land that is life. The waking mind—that tiny portion people thought of as sel f— was like a butterfly flapping its wings furiously to change the glacier’s course. Back then, Symeon had scoffed at the professor’s analogy. Anyone could master their mind and body with enough determination, or so he thought.
Now his thoughts seemed at war with one another. His entire life to this point revolved around his place as a Luxing slave, a lesser being than his Shorvexan masters. Yet the things Kavya had shared called that estimation into question. His life from birth to this very moment might well be a lie.
It is. You know it.
No. He didn’t want to believe that. The Shorvex had uplifted his people, brought them society and all the blessings that came with it. Millions of Luxing had been born, lived, and died knowing nothing else. Could so many be wrong for so long?
Yes!
Treacherous thoughts, and foolish! Which was more likely, that Kavya had managed to discover a thousand-year-old world-shattering conspiracy, or that hidden figures had sold her a bushel of lies for reasons Symeon couldn’t fathom? Or perhaps he could fathom them, after all. What better way to bring shame upon Princess Kavya Rurikid and thus her father, the grand duke, than to convince them the Shorvex had usurped the Luxing? Hadn’t it already succeeded in having Alexei exile his daughter to Yaya Island? What if he too had fallen for the scam? What sort of calamity might have ensued?
How can you doubt? You read the files.
Yes, Symeon had read and reread the documents that supposedly revealed his people’s origins. But files could be fabricated. Besides, much of what they supposedly disclosed was fragmented. According to whatever anonymous source pieced them together, more than eighty percent of the evidence had been lost due to changes in programming and storage technology. That, and a government-sanctioned campaign to obscure the past starting from the earliest days of colonization on Phoenix. Like most conspiracy theories, the facts seemed to favor the wildest of ideas while ignoring the simplest—the common belief more easily fit the evidence. Organizing a massive cover up required too much gerrymandering to be believable.
You told the princess you would aid her.
Symeon pounded a fist on the stone balustrade. What if everything Princess Kavya had told him was true? What would it change about this world, the Luxing, or the Shorvex? Symeon’s place remained the same: seneschal to a banished princess. What good did knowing the supposed truth do him or her or any of the Luxing in the entire system?
That’s slave talk.
Failing to inform on Kavya made Symeon a co-conspirator in her theft of duchy secrets and their subsequent release. The longer he waited to inform on her, the more guilty he looked. He should have gone straight to the senior seneschal the instant he discovered her wrongdoing. With the money and power of the entire duchy at his disposal, how long would it be before some clever hacker in the grand duke’s employ traced the Bith video release back to Kavya? She had claimed her secretive hackers, they of the Saddle Horn Enterprises Corporation, could obscure their trail from all tracking. But Symeon had found them by buying something from them. If he could do it that easily…
The airtight door behind Symeon hissed open. He spun, caught completely off guard, to gawk at his uninvited guest. He sta
rted to order them away. Whatever slave spent their time on the high balcony, they could forego a night for their seneschal. The sight of Czarina backlit by gallery lights stopped Symeon’s voice in his throat.
“You weren’t in your room, Seneschal.” Czarina stepped onto the platform and shut the door behind her. Dressed in warm woolen pajamas and a pair of thick socks, she looked like a slave who had lost her way in a new house. She wore her black hair in a tight bun at the back of her head, revealing the delicate sweep of her neck and slender jawline.
Symeon watched her warily. She had come to his room again? Anger tried to boil up inside him. Hadn’t he made his desires known the last time she tried that? He had no interest in becoming Princess Kavya’s latest disgraced steward. But then, maybe Czarina had come for a different purpose. She certainly wasn’t dressed to entice, though with her body it didn’t much matter what she wore.
“I couldn’t sleep,” he said simply.
Czarina nodded as she joined him at the railing. “I always like the wind up here. The tower’s only eighty meters, nothing like the skyscrapers in Kolpinev, but it feels so much higher for some reason.”
Symeon nodded, mollified. She hadn’t come to seduce him. Was he a rake for feeling a twinge of disappointment over that?
Yes.
“Maybe it’s the open view of the sea,” Symeon said, resuming his place next to her to watch the black ocean where it met the nearly black sky. “I’ve rarely been inside a skyscraper without others surrounding it. Here we’re isolated.”
“That we are.”
Something about Czarina’s words made the flesh on Symeon’s back tighten. He hadn’t felt that since facing a particularly tough boxer from a rival school in his fourth year.
“Were you unable to sleep either?” He turned to look at her profile.
“I slept, but I woke early because I wanted to speak with you.”
“About?”
“You and the princess spoke at length this morning.”
Symeon nodded, curious where the handmaid was going with her questions. If she dared ask about his talk with Kavya, he would have to put her in her place. Senior handmaid to the princess or not, Czarina had no business interrogating her seneschal. Granted, she was likely showing loyalty to her beloved mistress, an act Symeon could respect, but that didn’t give her the right to overstep her station.
Salvage Mind (Salvage Race Book 1) Page 7
