“She’ll be by, alet,” Malia said. “Give her time.”
“She and Val have been in there a long time already. We’re almost all back by now! How long can it possibly take to kill one person?”
“They might have needed to wait until the halls were clear to make their way to him.” The Tam-illee sounded unperturbed. “The priest was further into the palace than the hostages, Irine… no convenient windows or anything. Give them time. Trust them.”
Irine eyed her. “You wouldn’t say anything like that if you knew the things we’ve been through in the past year or so. Pirates, slavers, drug lords, firefights in space, firefights on the ground, firefights in palaces, broken arms, broken insteps, dead aliens…”
Malia’s ears sagged.
“I’m not exaggerating any of it.” Irine chafed her arms. “If we’re working up to this as a finale, then I think I have the right to be nervous.”
“It will be well,” Beronaeth said from his position alongside the Pad. “Everything has gone as planned thus far. You and the Captain killed the enemy aliens—”
“And he’s still back there too, and Belinor,” Irine said. “How long can it possibly take to get all the hostages out?”
“It takes the time it takes,” Beronaeth said. “Surela has few guards. They can’t be everywhere.”
But the night wore on, and the flood of hostages slowed to a trickle, until one of them said, “They caught us at the last. The seal-bearer remained behind and sent us on; we are your last group.”
Beronaeth was stiff. “And the Queen’s White Sword? And the acolyte accompanying him?”
“Still in Ontine, as far as I know.”
“Go on through, please.”
“Is that it?” Irine hissed once the last of the hostages had passed over the Pad. “Your captain’s missing, so’s mine, along with both our priests—” She remembered Val’s mouth forming a smile against her lips as they kissed. “They’re just… missing in action, and that’s fine?”
“Of course it’s not fine,” Malia said. “But we can’t charge in there after them.”
“Then what can we do?”
Beronaeth looked troubled. “We cannot go back in now. They would be expecting us.”
“But we can go back in at some point, right? And rescue them?” Irine looked from him to Malia, agitated. “Well? We rescued some of the hostages. But we can’t let them keep Reese! Do you know what Hirianthial will do if he comes back and finds her dead? You think Corel was bad the first time around? You just wait until you see Hirianthial mad. He set fire to a slaver’s house, and that was before he was a mind-mage. There’s not going to be anything left of that palace!”
Malia rubbed her knees, causing the data tablet on her lap to shift. “Irine, we haven’t heard anything from the Farthest Wing in a while. That means we’ve lost our window. The pirates are probably back.”
“Probably?”
“I can’t see anything in orbit without help from the outpost, and it’s not responding.” The Tam-illee grimaced. “Look, we don’t know who’s out there, what kind of sensors they’ve got, whether they can find us or not. We have to play this carefully—”
“We don’t have time!” Irine glanced at Beronaeth. “Well?”
“It would be a significant risk to return to the palace now,” he said. “Without intelligence, we have no idea how things fare inside, and this is a different situation now than the one we built our plan upon. We knew then how many men the usurper queen had, and how many pirates. Now we know neither of those things, nor the disposition of our people.”
“And how are we going to get that intelligence if we don’t go look?”
“We will have that intelligence,” the Sword said firmly, his accent growing heavier. She hoped that meant he was finally as agitated as she was. “But we must choose our methods with care. And right now, what we needs must do is retreat. They’ll be looking for us, and we must give them no clues as to where we have gone.”
Irine helped the Tams with the comm equipment, though the rolled-up Pad went to one of Beronaeth’s aides. There weren’t many of them left to head back through the woods toward their original campsite, but each of them had been given a different route to take, and instructions for the clueless, like her, on how to minimize her tracks in the snow, or erase them with fallen branches from evergreens. She had her own trail, and her own frond, and as the faint sounds of her compatriots faded into the trees, she glanced over her shoulder at Ontine.
Soldiers were expensive in a culture with little food. Malia had explained it; how there wasn’t an army on this world, because people who did nothing but learn how to fight well had to be fed and maintained by people who farmed and hunted and gathered, and there just wasn’t enough food to go around. Surela had been able to draw her own levy to Ontine, and perhaps that of her allies, but it didn’t amount to a lot of soldiers. And most of them had to be somewhere south of here, playing at war with Jisiensire.
Irine glanced at the trail she was supposed to follow… and turned her back on it. Hell if she’d let Reese die there alone. Or Val. A man shouldn’t die after only having had one kiss.
The cell they’d thrown Reese into had absolutely no furniture, no windows, and only one door, which meant (to her startlement) that when that door shut it was too dark to see. And it was made of stone and damned cold, and she couldn’t help the feeling that she’d been imprisoned in a closet. Weren’t cells supposed to have drains? Or places to chain people up? There should be bars, too, so that her keepers could torment her with verbal abuse. And there should be Blood-damned light so she could see it all and figure out how to use all the bits and pieces to come up with a plan to get out. That’s how it was supposed to go. It would have been easier than being shoved in a room alone with no idea who was out there or what they were going to do with her. It gave her no distraction from the catastrophe that got her put here in the first place, and from her fears for Irine and the others.
And Val—Reese paced, tried to control her breathing. He’d died so quickly…! She’d been staring into his eyes when the light had gone out of them.
What had gone wrong? Baniel shouldn’t have been able to control them the way he had. Val had been expecting some power, though Reese had never seen Hirianthial’s brother using it, but that much?
She couldn’t imagine Val making that big a mistake. He didn’t seem the mistake-making kind.
And now… now she was stuck here until someone opened that door and gave her the chance to escape. She absolutely had to escape because the alternative—letting Hirianthial walk into a trap to rescue her—was unthinkable.
Reese had thought she’d had some sense of what it felt to need rescue the way she’d always accused Hirianthial of needing. When Baniel had dragged her off the Ontine balcony, she’d found the powerlessness infuriating and the realization that she’d done exactly what he wanted her to even worse. But she’d never been in a cell before, at least, not by herself. She looked up at the ceiling, wishing she could see it, and shivered.
It wasn’t until she sat down and scooted backward, hoping to set her back against a wall, that she felt the stickiness on the floor. Visceral memories assailed her—the heat of her own tears, the puddle under his head, the light spilling from the door at exactly that angle—
Baniel had thrown her into the cell he’d put Hirianthial.
Reese dropped her head on her knees and didn’t cry. But she did start shaking, and once she started it took a long time for her to stop.
How long she spent in the dark, fighting with her own terror, she didn’t know, but it was long enough that when the door finally did open, her cold-stiffened joints dumped her to the floor on her first attempt to lunge for the exit. Her second attempt brought her to the door where the guard smashed her down.
No one said a word. They just dropped a body in the room with her, and left a candle: no candle-holder, just the wax pillar, as thin around as her littlest finger. She couldn’t
imagine it lasting long. The door shut on her and the newest inhabitant of her domain, and she stepped closer to see what unfortunate had joined her.
“You!”
Surela looked up and scrambled back until she reached a corner.
Reese stared at her, shocked… for all of a heartbeat, before anger in all its welcome familiarity crested and swept all the other emotions away. “You! You’re responsible for all this!”
Before Reese could work toward the fullness of her tirade, Surela surprised her by saying in accented but competent Universal, “I am. And here I reap the harvest of my error.”
“What?”
“And an error I have made. Does it please you to hear it, human?” Surela looked up at her with remorse that also seemed resentful. Reese congratulated her for pulling that combination off.
“My name isn’t ‘human,’” Reese said finally.
“I thought it would be kinder than ‘mortal.’”
“It’s not,” Reese said. “But at least it’s not a lie you’re telling yourself.”
Surela began to speak, then looked away. Bleakly, she said, “No. We are as mortal as you. And I will discover that soon enough.”
“What are you doing here, anyway?” Reese asked, folding her arms over her chest. “Did Baniel get bored of you? Decide he wanted the throne himself?”
“No,” Surela said. “I tried to arrest him, and he decided to take issue with it.”
Reese paused. “Wait. You? Decided to arrest him? Didn’t he put you in power?”
“He did, yes.” Surela shifted, then settled and began spreading her skirts around herself and neatening the folds. Her hands were trembling; Reese wasn’t glad to have noticed it, and the fear it betrayed. “But I discovered he was plotting to replace me with Athanesin who, I suppose, is more amenable to mortal technology and mortal ideas. Baniel also apparently intended to sell us all into mortal slavery. Though how he thinks Athanesin will agree to that, I have no notion.”
“Unless your Athanesin is more depraved than you thought, I doubt he will and I doubt Baniel cares,” Reese said, watching Surela warily. “This is a man who conspired to have his own brother given to Chatcaavan slavers.”
Surela shuddered. “His brother was a mind-mage.”
“He’s a man.” Reese welcomed the anger back. “A man worth a thousand of you.”
“He can kill people from a distance, without touch!”
“You killed actual people, and none of them were attacking you!”
That made Surela sway, touch her hands to her face. Surprised by the strength of the other woman’s reaction, Reese finished, a little less aggressively, “So tell me which of you is the real murderer.”
Surela turned into the wall and said nothing.
Reese sighed and retreated, sitting in her own corner. If the situation hadn’t been so harrowing, it would almost have been funny, ending up trapped in a room with the author of all this mess. Though she guessed she had to be fair. It was Baniel who was pulling all the strings. Surela was just one more tool, and she hadn’t known it until he’d tossed her in here with one of the ‘mortals’ Surela found so revolting. The mighty did fall, after all, and how they fell when they did.
After what felt like hours, Surela said, “I did not mean for any of this to happen.”
Reese discarded several possible responses to that, most of them bitter or cruel. What she chose instead was, “Don’t you people say that how you begin a thing dictates how it ends? So how are you surprised that something you started with betrayal ends with it?”
Surela looked up from her folded arms, eyes wide.
“Don’t tell me you didn’t think of that.”
“I….”
Reese sighed and hugged her knees. “Let me guess. The rules apply to everyone but the righteous.”
Surela was silent. Then said, low, “You have a tongue like a whip.”
“Yeah. I’ve been told.” She thought of Hirianthial and the twins and tried not to notice the prickle in her eyes. She’d see them again. She had to.
Surela wasn’t done. “I regret putting us in this situation.”
“Do you really?”
“As much as I regret admitting it to a human.”
That… she laughed. She didn’t expect to. “Yes. I bet you do.”
“Do you know… what they plan…?”
“For us?” Reese shrugged. “Your guess is better than mine; you were the one out there most recently.”
“So they have not come for you.”
“No.” Reese thought of Baniel’s words and shivered. “No, I think they’re going to keep me here until all this is resolved, either way.”
Surela glanced at her sharply. “You know something…?”
Reese said, “Even if I did, I wouldn’t tell you. Being cellmates with you doesn’t make you my ally, Eldritch.” At Surela’s flinch, she said, “Doesn’t feel any better from the other end, does it.”
“I….”
When the other woman trailed off, Reese said, “But we can agree to try to fight our way out if they open the door again, can’t we?”
Shoulders tightening, Surela said, “Yes.”
“Good. That’s one thing, then. But I’ll make this clear now: when Liolesa gets back and beheads you, or whatever barbaric thing you people do here to execute criminals, I’m going to be in the front row. For what you did to Hirianthial, and to her, and most of all this world.”
“What do you care what happens to this world?” Surela muttered.
“If you think I want to see anyone given over to slavers….” Reese shook her head. “Maybe you can afford to live in your little bubble where terrible things happen to other people and that’s not your business. The rest of us don’t work that way. We’re a community. We protect one another from people who prey on us. We’ve got one another’s backs. Because anything else leaves us all easy pickings for pirates and murderers and criminals.”
“So you do this out of selfishness,” Surela said.
“We do it because we’ve seen what’s left of the people taken by slavers,” Reese replied, voice hard. “And we wouldn’t wish it on anyone. And that includes terminally stupid, stuck up bigots like you and all your people, and by that I mean your people, Surela. Because people like Liolesa and Araelis aren’t stupid enough to think the slavers are going to come for only their enemies. They’ve spent their lives defending you along with all the more worthy and grateful people, because they knew that they couldn’t keep half the world safe. It’s everyone or no one.”
“It was never my plan to involve aliens,” Surela whispered.
“Except as tools to your own end,” Reese said. “Even now, you’re trying to talk yourself into believing in a universe where you had some noble reason for what you did. Just admit it, Surela. You were selfish and willfully ignorant, and you brought the doom the Eldritch have been trying to hold off for centuries before you were even born right on their heads. You invited it in the bleeding door! And here you are in a cell for it. Did you really expect any differently?” Reese hugged herself against the cold and rubbed her running nose against her shoulder.
“All I wanted for us,” Surela said, voice trembling, “was for us to be left alone.”
“And I’m sure you expected to be, because you are born to wealth and privilege and it never occurred to you that being left alone is something only the powerful can have, because it takes power to defend yourself against all the people who want a piece of you, no matter how trivial that piece. The rest of us know that freedom has to be paid for in fresh blood, eternally, over and over.” Her anger ran out, left her feeling hollow and tired. “I just wish you’d known that before you started all this… but I guess everyone has to learn that the hard way.”
Surela said nothing for so long Reese assumed their conversation was over. She was glad; her sides ached as if she’d run a race, and she felt heartsore, and she missed her crew terribly. Allacazam would have been a great comfort r
ight about now. Hirianthial, she was sorry to admit, even more so.
But Surela did speak. “Tongue like a whip.”
“You’d better hope that’s the sharpest thing you get hit with. I wouldn’t get your hopes up though.” Reese thought of Hirianthial. “I’ve seen what pirates like to do with Eldritch.”
Surela shuddered. “I know,” she whispered. At Reese’s sharp glance, the woman finished, “I saw what they did to my liege-woman.”
There seemed no good answer to that, so Reese said nothing.
CHAPTER 14
On the way to the armory, Hirianthial fell back to pace the Faulfenzair navigator. Her aura had a texture, like smoke against the fingers, warm and pricked through with unexpected embers. He would have thought such an impression would distress, but he found it strangely appropriate to her.
“The God’s Gift,” he murmured to her as they followed Soly down another of the enormous vessel’s many corridors.
She had an accent… a lovely one, breathy and musical, somehow evocative of her aura. “Your ability, yes? A gift from the God. I assume you have your own name for Him.”
“Does your god give gifts, then?”
“Of course,” Lune said, unruffled. “To defend ourselves when we were new, Faulza granted us the mindfire.” She held out her hand and the air rippled around it, waves of heat visible to both his natural sight and his finer senses where it lit her aura with licking flames.
Startled, he said, “Is that as hot as it looks?”
“It will burn flesh, but not metal.”
“Not your flesh.”
“It would be a curse and not a gift if so.” Lune glanced at him as they jogged. “You have some confusion?”
“We do not call my abilities a gift from any god, where I’m from,” Hirianthial said.
She flicked her ears. “If not from the God, from where does such a gift arise?”
A good question. “I suspect,” he said slowly, “we believe it arises from ourselves.”
Lune huffed, a sound that dimmed her smoke-drawn aura. “Forgive me. That sounds delusional. Hubris… that is the right word. Yes? To believe all good things come from oneself?”
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