To make matters worse, a hail pops up from the Torrent. I ignore it, forcing Esperza to reach across me from the pilot’s seat and open the line. I expect a voice, and startle a little when instead a frenetic drumbeat blasts out of the cockpit speakers.
I’ve spent months living in the Archon rebellion. In that time, I thought I’d grown familiar enough with the standard rudiments they use, from the triumphant rhythms pounded out on massive skin drums to the gentle pulse of the morning rounds. But this beat is completely unfamiliar—a thought my pilot, who’s slumping back in her seat with a hand over her mouth, clearly doesn’t share.
“I don’t know this one,” I say, pitching it halfway to a question.
“It’s been ten years since anyone had reason to play it,” Esperza replies, scrubbing her knuckles over her cheeks. She leans over me and patches the line through to Wen. “This rudiment is the herald of a suited knight.”
All we get in return is a slight hitch of breath from her end of the line, but in that hitch I hear everything. Wen’s hearing herself recognized for the first time in this administration—and recognized for something she did independent of Ettian emp-Archon. In that little intake of breath, I learn a truth that pile-drives me into my seat with the force of a Viper engine. Outside, Wen throws a pirouette into her vector, and I swear the drums beat louder for her.
Nothing I say or do, nothing I could ever offer her, could possibly get her out of that suit. This is the belonging Wen’s been searching for. The spot she feels she’s meant to fill in the rebellion. She wanted to be big—the biggest thing in the galaxy.
But all I can think of is how small she looks against the Torrent. How little that suit is going to protect her from the battle to come. And if Wen goes down, there’s no one left who can keep me alive.
The dread inside me builds to a feverish pitch until the hammering of my heart matches the frantic rhythm of the Archon drums.
CHAPTER 21
“We’re rutted,” I announce, blowing into Ettian’s hospital room like a ship dropping from superluminal. “We’re completely and utterly—why are you up?”
He’s not just up. He’s up up, standing on two feet, braced against his hospital bed with one hand as he hastily tries to wrestle his robe shut with his other. Through it, I catch the brilliant white flash of a fresh bandage that encircles his midsection.
“The painkillers must be making you extra stupid,” I snap, lunging across the room and grabbing him by the shoulder as gently as I can manage. He lets me pivot him so he can lean back on the bed, but only perches himself on the edge of it. “The rut are you thinking, trying to stand?”
I expect the glare he fixes me with to be glazed by medication, but it’s sharp enough to cut. “Like you said, we’re rutted. I’m not going to take that lying down.”
“Yes, you rutting are,” I reply with a steady but insistent push. Ettian cants back onto his elbows and raises his eyebrows. “You’ve got a goddamn hole in your gut.”
He tries to sit up again, but the motion isn’t kind to his wound. I can all but feel the spasm of pain that contorts his face. “I don’t need you nannying me. I was up,” he groans, slumping back on the bed. A furious sigh wheezes out of his nostrils.
“You were about to kill yourself.”
“I can’t sit by. I can’t wait and watch my empire go to war without me.”
“Well, you’re gonna have to, thanks to Hanji.”
“Thanks to you,” he hisses venomously, hands flapping as if to illustrate his helpless state. His eyes pinch shut in frustration. “I’m missing it. I’m missing…her.”
“You’re missing Wen, who is also trying to kill herself on behalf of this rutting empire,” I correct. “And you’re not missing much. She’s just doing loop-de-loops outside the Torrent and people are losing their minds.”
“I saw the footage,” he murmurs, holy reverence in his voice.
Briefly, I consider his perspective. He would have been seven years old at Knightfall—an all-too-impressionable age for that sort of thing. The fall of the Archon Empire was the greatest galactic tragedy of his lifetime, but Knightfall must have been the first to scar, the first he remembers in vivid detail. Combine that with the fact that Archon children seem to have been raised on a steady diet of ridiculous knight stories, and it’s understandable how worked up he is over all of this.
Is it sympathetic?
Not in the slightest.
“Iral showed me the powersuit, you know,” Ettian continues, relaxing more thoroughly into the hospital bed. “Back on Delos. He thought there wasn’t enough faith in Archon heroes to ever field a suited knight again. And there was his personal history with that particular suit on top of that. I thought he’d never give it away—and especially never give it to Wen.”
“Well, your orders went and made her enough of a nuisance that he decided to dupe her into painting the biggest target in the galaxy on her back.”
“That’s not what it—”
“And ruttin’ Esperza’s endorsed it too—she all but primed her for it, telling her all those stupid knight stories. I’ve never seen the general and the commodore agree on something so painlessly, and it’s offering Wen Iffan up for my mother to shred, and you’re fine with that?”
Ettian sighs, his lips pursing as he stares up at the ceiling.
“You wanted this for her?” I press.
“I wanted to be there for her when this happened,” he murmurs at last, his eyes starting to glimmer softly in the low light. “We both knew it was the path she was on. I never told her about the suit, because I didn’t want Iral to be her enemy and I didn’t want him to feel like she was trying to wheedle the suit out of him.”
I stop short of tearing my hair out, but only just barely. “Fine, setting aside the whole goddamn knight thing, you know why Iral gave her the powersuit, right? He did it to take away your voice at the table so he can advance this campaign on his terms alone. And you’re just going to let him have that?”
“I was going to return to the table myself, but you seem oddly against that for someone so concerned about my capacity to run my empire adeptly.”
“I’m…” I feel myself swerve abruptly away from the truth I was about to blurt out loud. It’s a truth I’ve already expressed, a truth my broken finger’s more than enough to testify. But still, speaking it—saying it to his face, these words I’ve expressed too well with actions—is too much for me.
I’m concerned about you. And now, with the Imperial Fleet almost certainly on its vector, I’m terrified of what’s about to happen to this rebellion. If I can just get clear of the Archon fleet, get Ettian clear, let Iral burn like he should have years ago—
“I’m almost one hundred percent certain you wouldn’t even make it to the table,” I finish flatly.
“So then what? You want to run? Because as I’m sure you’ve observed, I’m in no shape to do that either.” Ettian makes a low groaning noise, one hand drifting up to the edge of his bandages and fussing with it. It’s only been three weeks since the doctors patched his insides back together. If he pushes himself too far in this stage of his recovery, he might set himself back even further. “I’ve seen the news cycle. There were plenty of cameras in that square. Everyone knows I’m weak—”
“Well, they knew that before,” I mutter, forgetting for a second that the point is to calm him down, not rile him up again.
“Rut off—everyone knows I’m weak after the attempt, which means they won’t be expecting me to return to the front with a show of force. If I can make that my image—”
“Not likely.”
“Gal.” He sighs.
“Which one of us has been trained from birth to lead an empire?” I ask. If I can’t jab him in his physical wound, I’ll lance right through the emotional one. Ettian started out on the same path as me. Though we’ve never
sat down and hashed out exactly where our childhoods aligned, it’s a fair assumption that his secret upbringing was shaped by the same sort of education. But where mine ran its course successfully—at least for the first seventeen and a half years of it—Ettian’s was cut short at ten. “As far as the galaxy knows, you’re a puppet Iral’s trotting out to give his rebellion some legitimacy. You’re not essential. Did your people even mourn you?”
“I…” I can see him grasping, eyes blinking rapidly as he recalls the newsfeeds he ingested. Of course his people mourned him. Of course they despaired to see their young emperor gunned down.
But I need him doubtful.
“What difference do you make when you sit at that table?” I press, leaning forward to loom over him.
His brows knit. For a brief, optimistic moment I think I’ve finally gotten through to him. Gotten him to start actually thinking about what he’s doing.
“Ever since I revealed that signet ring to the galaxy, I’ve had a little voice in the back of my head,” Ettian mutters. “It whispers all my worst thoughts. It only ever tells me that I’m doing this all wrong, and it never actually helps me figure out how to do it right.”
His eyes slip over to mine, and my chest tightens in anticipation.
“You always say the same things.”
His gaze pins me like a vibrosword through the chest. I can hear my own little voice—my mother’s voice—daring me to stand my ground. Don’t give him an inch, she urges me. He should have seen through you ages ago, and the fact that he didn’t means he was never a fit ruler. He gave me nothing to fight back with, and I figured out a way to fight back anyway. Deidra con-Silon clocked me from the get-go, and he never listened to her. I’m an enemy prisoner. My goals were never his. It’s his own damn fault he never saw it.
And yet the words “I’m sorry” linger in the back of my throat, burning with acidity. But I don’t let them out because I know—know all too well—what I’d get in return.
What I get anyway.
“No apologies, huh?” Ettian says coldly.
“Look—” I start.
“There’s no line, is there? Between you looking out for me and you manipulating me?”
“That’s ruttin’ rich, coming from the guy who literally took me prisoner to save my life.”
Ettian shoves himself upright, his robe slipping drunkenly from one shoulder. The move looked painful, but I think he’s too enraged to feel it. His eyes smolder like starship engines on the verge of a hard burn. He’s wounded and fierce and furious, and a part of me is loath to admit it’s the most imperial he’s ever looked. He heaves, pivoting himself off the edge of the bed as he clutches his bandages with one hand. Ettian lets out a long, shaky breath as he settles onto his feet, but his hand snaps out in a flash when I take a step forward. “If you try to stop me again, I’ll call in the guards and make sure you get a taste of real imprisonment.”
“Oh come on,” I scoff. Like he’s going to start doing anything genuinely effective where I’m concerned. I take another slow step, eyes locked on his. There’s a thread pulled taut between us, a dare neither of us will back down from. I’ve stopped breathing. He’s trying desperately to steady his lungs after the effort of getting out of bed.
I extend my hand like I’m reaching out to a street dog, waiting for him to shy away. But Ettian holds still with what seems like enormous effort, his body tensing with every inch that closes between us.
My fingers slip around his robe’s errant shoulder. A horrible gut urge pulls me to yank it lower, shove him back—but I have no illusions about how awfully that would go. Instead I slowly pull it up into place, dragging my fingers carefully over the feverish heat of his skin as I smooth the collar down.
Now Ettian has stopped breathing too.
I pull the ties of his robe taut around his stomach, reading only the barest flicker of the pain it causes him in his expression. “Go on,” I murmur softly. “Prove me wrong then.”
And there it is. That stiff-lipped imperial sneer he could never bring himself to make. That furious purpose burning in his eyes. Ettian may drive himself into the ground plunging recklessly into this war, but at least he’ll die an emperor.
It’s the only consolation he leaves me with as he shuffles past me out of the room and the last thought I cling to before the panic attack takes over.
CHAPTER 22
The fleet moves toward its annihilation, and I do nothing.
I should be speaking up. Screaming. Yelling until I get kicked off the bridge again, trying to get it through someone’s skull that Archon doesn’t have a hope against what’s waiting for them at Imre.
But I have no foothold. Once again, I’ve been shoved back down the stairs to where I started, and this time it’s hitting different. Maybe it’s the one-two punch of losing my advantage with Wen and then Ettian in such quick succession. Maybe I’m just tired of losing. Maybe there’s never been a winning move in the first place, so what’s the point of trying? Some combination of that depressing cocktail has turned me into a ghost. The object of my haunting varies from day to day, hour to hour, but I can’t stand to be alone while I feel so helpless.
I lurk in the back of the gym, watching Wen furiously swat back the three armored men attempting to take her down. She’s swathed in the horrific might of the powersuit, all but consumed by it. I’ve seen her in it more than out of it in the past couple days. On the one hand, I understand the impulse. Iral gave her the suit with the implicit understanding that she’d take to the field in it, and with the fleet in the process of mobilizing, that day will be soon. She’s adept and a fast learner, but she’s nowhere near where she’d need to be to survive her first day of combat. But I do nothing—even though as I watch her trainers dogpile her, I can think of several helpful suggestions—because there’s no ruttin’ point anyway. If she flies combat in that suit, she’s dead.
I sit quietly at Ettian’s side on the bridge, trying not to visibly react every time I hear him hiss a long, shaky sigh and notice him pressing a hand over his wound out of the corner of my eye. It’s clear he can barely concentrate on the orbital maneuvers being plotted out on the bridge’s screens, but he’s trying his damnedest anyway. I could intervene. I’ve been sketching out the details myself, practicing holding the data in my head. Our approach to the planet is predicated on several factors, not the least of which is the fact that its orbit has it positioned on the opposite side of the solar system. If we use our superluminal jump to catch them unprepared, we don’t have another to get us out again. But if we stay subluminal to get there, they’ll have time to prepare. The debate raging across the bridge is exactly how we’re going to deploy against the forces our scouts have spotted. Ettian means to pull weight for a conservative approach, sacrificing a single dreadnought to draw fire and then sending the rest in the slow way. Mostly he’s just showing off how dark the bags under his eyes can get.
I watch with my heart in my throat as Commodore Esperza presents Wen with what looks like a sawn-off control stick at first glance—until she thumbs a tab on the edge of it and the unmistakable rigid blade of a vibrosword whips out of one end.
Wen weighs it in her hand, her expression frozen in incredulous joy. Esperza’s leans more toward a bitter sort of sweetness, and I swear there’s a glimmer of a tear welling in one of the ex-pirate’s eyes. “The blade itself is a reinforced alloy that can do some serious damage,” Esperza says, swallowing back what sounds like a massive lump in her throat. “But the real show is the resonance. If you hit that tab, the blade will start quaking. You’ve got limited reserves of juice before it goes back to being a hunk of absurdly sharp metal, so make it count.”
I’ve never seen Wen so nervous about something. She adjusts her grip carefully on the sword as if double-checking that she’s not about to let it slip and lose a limb. I suppress the urge to shove my hands over my ears. In the
dramatizations I’ve seen, a vibrosword makes a chainsaw snarl, heralding a knight’s terrifying approach.
But the noise that rings out when she jams down that trigger is cold and clean—almost musical, like the toll of a bell. Every head in the lab swivels like an electromagnet’s been turned on, drawn to the sight of a sword activating in a knight’s hand for the first time in a decade. The vibration is only visible in the slight shimmer of the blade’s reflection, and I feel myself getting lost in its depths.
I remember the nightmares traded between kids at my pre-military school on Naberrie. No doubt they were inherently distorted by the fact that they were whispered back and forth between a bunch of ten-year-olds, but the lasting fear they left is all too real. There were stories of knights who used their vibroswords to cleave a fighter straight down the middle. Stories where a knight ripped the engines clean off a ship and then rode it through an atmospheric burn, laughing all the way down. The stories about a knight beheading ten babies with a single swat of a vibrosword stretch the limits of believability, but the fact Umber kids were whispering tales like that tells you everything you might need to know about what the suited knights meant to us.
When she donned the powersuit, Wen was just a kid in too-big armor. When she went on her first flight around the Torrent, she was a reckless test pilot playing with a new ship. But with the vibrosword singing in her hands—even in plain fatigues—Wen is unquestionably a suited knight.
It’s not ruttin’ fair. I did everything I possibly could. I fought like hell to save both of them, to get them clear of this incoming debacle, and instead they’ve both dug in their heels and dragged me headlong into the line of fire.
Oaths of Legacy Page 22