by K. Eason
The Vizier began to suspect how the assassination of two kings on Thorne had been managed via the body-man, and perhaps by whom. It took every scrap of skill and experience to keep his face and voice diplomatically bland. “You made no error with the hexwork in this cell, and you’ve missed no secret transmissions. You may assure the Regent that I am secure and that, whatever prompted you to come here, I am not responsible for it.”
Ashtet-Sun stared at him, two parts withering, one part anxious, and pressed his thin lips to bloodless invisibility.
Rupert felt a small surge of hope. “The Regent doesn’t know you’re here, does he? He doesn’t know about whatever it is that has you so disturbed. And you don’t want to tell him. You’re afraid of what he’ll say. Or of what he’ll do?”
Ashtet-Sun did not bother with a response. He simply turned on his heel and departed, which was eloquent confirmation enough.
The Vizier stared for a full minute at the closed door. Then, when he was certain the ’bot would be recording again, he began to laugh: not the raggedy gasps of a man halfway to breaking, which he had been half an hour before, but deeply satisfied chuckles which were out of place in solitary confinement, and which Rupert hoped would spark unease in his captors. (Which they did. The guards observing him were in fact so disturbed that they filed a report, flagged for the Regent’s immediate attention, the delivery of which spoiled Moss’s dinner.)
Then the Vizier returned to his meditation, only this time, it was interrupted by imagining what it was Rory was doing, and taking pride, and hope, from that.
* * *
• • •
Ashtet-Sun was a careful man, bordering on paranoid. He performed a second, third, and fourth extensive review of his hexes in Rupert’s cell, none of which revealed any weakness or possible way that the Vizier could have wormed his arithmantic way through them. Perhaps that reassured Ashtet-Sun, or perhaps it further inflamed his paranoia and dread of the Regent’s displeasure. Regardless, it is not recorded that he ever reported his visit with the Vizier to Regent Moss, nor alerted Moss to his suspicions.
There are two things we might conclude from this encounter. First, that skill with arithmancy is in no way connected to good judgment; whatever the Vizier’s errors in overlooking Ashtet-Sun’s clever hex in the turing, Ashtet-Sun committed a much greater error in visiting the Vizier. For although Rupert gained no physical advantage from the visit, nor any new information, he did acquire hope, and that sustained him through the long, lonely days that followed.
The second is that the multiverse does have a sense of humor after all.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Brothers
Jaed had, as a child, believed that the multiverse, embodied in the persons of father and brother, bore him a particular grudge. This certainty had only been cemented by the Arboretum Incident, in which his budding arithmantic aspirations (which, ironically, might have eradicated his belief in personal multiversal malice entirely with further study) had been pruned. If there was luck, and it was his, it would be bad.
Thus we see the dangers of superstition, which can prevent a man from examining the details of an unfortunate situation by causing him to imagine instead himself a victim, helpless to change his circumstances.
In his defense, Jaed had had little opportunity to exercise independence. But today, during his negotiations with Rory, he decided that his bad luck might be related to the heretofore unsubstantiated suspicion that there were hexes on his pass-string and not to a universal bias. She had suggested the possibility, this foreign princess, before revealing, in the subsequent conversation, that she was also an arithmancer. Not particularly accomplished, she said, certainly not an expert. But she had been taught, and so, to Jaed’s thinking, must also be capable of teaching.
He revised his terms for their alliance, which he had not—fortunately—yet uttered. The Princess accepted, after a moment’s hesitation, and after repeating, and being sure that he understood, her level of expertise.
For the first time since the arboretum’s single, unfortunate autumn, Jaed had experienced a surge of—well, hope might be too strong a sentiment. Optimism, then. Let us call it that.
“Jaed! I want to talk to you.”
It sounded very much like the Regent’s voice; and, like the Regent’s, its tone suggested that its content should be obeyed. But of course it wasn’t the Regent. It was Merrick, and his voice had preceded him around the corner, as if he had known Jaed was in the passage. He did not wait for a response—Merrick never waited for anything—and he rounded the corner at a brisk, angry pace.
That he wanted a confrontation was obvious.
Jaed was accustomed to doing what Merrick wanted. It was a habit to which he gave little thought, having seen no particular alternative that did not come with painful consequences, and Jaed was not fond of pain. They had not come to blows since their early teens, when Jaed had been much smaller, but the habit had stuck.
And still. The day’s events had been unexpected, and he was not ready to set aside that strange, fluttering sensation in his chest. Rory was right about the hexes on his pass-string. He hadn’t thought of it—hadn’t thought to think of it—but how else, when he had done his very best to be unpredictable in his timing, coming in well past the dinner hour, and coming through the servants’ entrance, would his brother know to find him here? It did not occur to him that Merrick might have been waiting (his brother was not that patient), nor that he might have spies among the servants (any spies on the staff belonged to his father). It was, without doubt, the pass-string, which he had used both in the restaurant where he’d had his dinner, and on the lock at the servants’ door.
If the Princess of Thorne kept her word (and possessed sufficient skill), this particular vexation would not trouble him much longer. Jaed clung to that thought in the same way that a man cornered by bear-cats clings to a convenient stick. Unlike that stick, however, he could make no use of the thought as defense or as weapon.
Jaed leaned his forearm on the bulkhead, between a pair of plexi-sheeted 2D portraits of himself and his brother, formally attired, taken on their respective eighteenth birthdays. Visitors remarked, invariably, on the brothers’ similarity. Like mirrors of each other, they said. The same cool eyes. The same strong jaw.
Looks, Jaed thought, were not everything.
He sighed, loudly, and ran his tongue over his teeth, which served to loosen both the organ and his jaw, which had clamped at the sound of Merrick’s voice. Then he took a firm mental grip on his metaphorical stick, and attacked.
“What do you want, Merrick?”
His brother stopped a scant meter away. His hair, his clothing, were entirely in order. Only the two spots of pale pink on his cheekbones indicated his level of agitation.
“I think you owe me an explanation.”
Jaed waited a beat too long, and took small satisfaction as the pink deepened to crimson and slunk down into Merrick’s collar.
“About what?” he asked finally, in his best bored voice.
“Do you have any idea what a spectacle you’ve made of yourself? And don’t you dare act like you don’t know what I mean.”
Jaed pretended great interest in the patch of carpet just under his left foot. He pivoted the heel back and forth, examining the pattern. It was some expensive imported thing, from outside the Free Worlds. Kreshti, perhaps, from before the War and the various embargoes, and somehow overlooked in the general purge of all things non-Tadeshi. More proof, he thought, that the Regent couldn’t know everything.
“I’m sorry. Who elected you our father?”
Merrick leaned forward and hissed, “You be grateful he’s not down here himself.”
“I’m surprised he isn’t. Did he send you to do the interrogation, or is this your own idea?”
Merrick’s mouth bent in disapproval. “He thinks it’s a stunt on her part
, and that you’re playing along to embarrass him.”
“If Father doesn’t think it’s that important, I’m not sure why you do.”
“I think.” Merrick clipped his teeth together in front of what he’d meant to say next. Jaed watched him considering his next words. Plotting them.
Jaed had played enough chess—with Merrick, with the Regent—to know the look. To know that he was likely going to lose a major piece on the board, very soon. He reminded himself that his queen (oh, the joke there) was her own agent, and smarter than his father or Merrick suspected. That was his secret.
“You think Father is wrong?” he prompted gently, as though coaxing a reluctant child to tell the truth about the drawings on the wall. “Is that it? You think Father made a mistake?”
Merrick let that pass. His temper was receding, somewhat, restoring his skin to its typical, glacial shade.
As within, thought Jaed, so without.
Merrick’s voice, too, had dropped several degrees. “I think you’re playing along to embarrass me.”
“Seems like it’s working. You’re embarrassed.”
Merrick arched an eyebrow. Irritation and impatience vied for supremacy in his narrow, pale eyes. “She wants something. What is it?”
“My company.”
“This isn’t a game, Jaed.”
Of course it is, Jaed thought. That’s exactly what this is.
And it was one in which he was not assumed to be a player. He was accustomed to being a pawn. He was not accustomed to being entirely discounted. He understood that Merrick fully expected to end up with the victory—the Princess, the Free Worlds, the sum of their father’s ambition. That didn’t surprise Jaed. What did was Merrick’s apparent distress over the contents of a conversation to which he had not been privy, and over which half of Urse was amusing itself with speculation.
Jaed tried on his own smirk. It felt small and crooked. It felt like a failure.
Merrick stared at him for a moment. Then he said with the inerrant aim of an older brother, “She doesn’t like you, you know that, right? She’s using you. So just tell me what she wants.”
Jaed felt the warmth bloom in his cheeks. He felt a much more intense heat in his chest, pushing against his heart, his lungs, his ribs. He knew that the reason he played chess so poorly had less to do with his failure in strategy than it did with the skill with which his brother could provoke him, and his own inability to counter that provocation, particularly when that taunting rang true.
He tried. He took a deep breath and held it, and counted to five. He thought about the pass-string, and about the Princess, who had been very angry, he was sure—but who had not lost her temper. He envied that discipline. He wondered if it was natural to her, or a product of the arithmantic teaching. He wondered what he might have been like, by now, if the horticulturalist had stayed.
He wouldn’t need Rory Thorne to teach him arithmancy, that was certain, or to un-hex his pass-string, but she could give him that freedom. If he was patient.
A second breath came and went. Jaed watched the muscles flex in his brother’s jaw. Merrick possessed their father’s restraint, most times. Something had shaken it. It wasn’t that Merrick was afraid to lose, Jaed realized then. It wasn’t even that he was afraid to look like he was losing. He was afraid he had lost something, and that something was Rory Thorne.
Jaed turned that thought over and over, like a gift whose wrapping is so exquisite that you don’t want to destroy it in the opening, so lovely that it seems better than the gift itself.
Then Merrick committed what would prove to be a small, and ultimately significant, long-reaching mistake. He tipped his head back and laughed. “I’m not stupid. Neither is Father. Neither is the Princess. The only stupid one here is the one who believes her. So I’m asking you again, what does she want?”
Or rather, he would have said, what does she want, except that Jaed’s right fist interrupted him.
It was not an elegant move, nor particularly adept; Jaed lacked his own personal Grytt, and his martial education had been limited to his year of compulsory service (which he had served, but on Urse in the local garrison), in which the finer skills of hand-to-hand combat are not emphasized as much as obedience and conformity.
Merrick had undergone the same service experience; but unlike his brother (whose attendance in the gym was a solitary endeavor), he had pursued the martial arts, enlisting several of his father’s security in private training sessions. It was a small matter for him to elude Jaed’s strike: a simple slide of the foot, a shift of weight. He could have remained out of reach, and continued to retreat, thus avoiding an actual conflict. But he’d had a difficult day. Bad enough that he was (entirely) certain that to a good portion of Urse, he looked like the losing suitor. But there was the (small, miniscule, tiny, ridiculous) chance that he really was. And to Jaed.
It was intolerable.
So Merrick handled his outrage and insecurity in the time-honored way of young men, and determined that, whatever the object of his desire’s preferences, he would settle the matter with violence, here and now, with his rival. He grabbed Jaed’s outstretched arm at the wrist, stepped in close, and folded it the elbow, wrenching it up and behind Jaed’s back. Then he nudged Jaed in the back of the knee and guided him, at rather unsafe speeds, face-first into the deck.
Jaed had a new opportunity to study the carpet from a closer perspective. It smelled a bit dusty. It was softer than it looked, grinding against his cheek. And the orange was really alternating threads of yellow, crimson, and a disturbingly iridescent pink.
If pain had a color, he thought his shoulder might be exactly that hue, with bright filaments spreading toward his elbow, across his back, and up his neck with each heartbeat.
Merrick leaned on his shoulder, which transformed the bright pink into waves of garnet, magenta, vermillion. Jaed bit down on the instinctive yell. His eyes squeezed closed, hot with tears that were more physiological than psychological, and no less shameful for that.
“I want,” said Merrick, “You. To tell me. What. She. Said.”
Jaed collected several tiny bites of air and spent them all at once. “She doesn’t like you, Merrick. That’s what she said. She said, I don’t like your brother, Jaed, he’s a bully.”
“You’re lying.” Merrick rearranged his grip on Jaed’s wrist, pulling it higher between his shoulder blades, leaning a little more heavily across his brother’s back.
The pain burst into seven shades of blinding white. Jaed slammed his cheek into the carpet, trying to gain enough leverage to dislodge his older, heavier sibling. When that failed, he spent the remainder of his breath suggesting that Merrick attempt an anatomically unlikely pursuit.
And shortly after that, when Merrick readjusted his grip a third time, Jaed’s howl ricocheted off the carpets and the framed art, finding every exposed metal surface and echoing. It sounded as if someone were tearing his arm off.
* * *
• • •
It was not very much later—the noise of the conflict having alerted municipal section security, whose arrival and intervention Jaed credited with his shoulder’s continued presence in its socket—that Jaed arrived back at his quarters.
His terminal was flashing. He stared at it, caught between his desire for a handful of painkillers and his curiosity. It might be a blistering missive from his father or a terse summons to which he could not plead exhaustion or ignorance. Although why the Regent would concern himself at this hour with the private violence of his sons—now, after a childhood filled with it—Jaed could not figure.
The strange fluttering reappeared in his chest. He had never seen a living bird, but if he had, he would have imagined the sensation feeling very much like wings. He held his right arm very carefully against his ribs—perhaps he should have seen the chirurgeon, but it moved, didn’t it? That must mean it was a
ll right—and crossed to his desk.
He stared at the green light. It blinked back. Then he tapped the keypad, one quick, left-handed strike.
The message appeared, from—he blinked, and squinted, and leaned forward. From himself.
He opened it.
This message is secure. So is your pass-string. My code is below, if you care to reply. -RT
Jaed grinned. Then he sat down at the turing. It took him some effort, one-handed, but he was determined. He copied his pass-string from Rory’s message, and used it to open another screen on the turing. He input the code. He had no way of knowing whether or not she’d done what she said. No way of confirming the absence of hexes that would, if still present, alert his brother and his father to his sudden, uncharacteristic interest in their schedules and appointments.
He then acquired that which he had promised Rory. And having done so, he employed his clean pass-string one further time, and sent her a message.
Meet me in the plaza dining area at thirteen hundred. My treat. -JM
Then he turned off the turing and sat alone and in the dark, and, for the first time in his life, imagined his future.
* * *
• • •
There is some debate, among those to whom etiquette is an art, whether it is proper to inquire after obvious injury and blemish, or to maintain the fiction of not noticing. The Tadeshi custom, particularly acute on Urse, is to pretend not to notice. On Thorne, the matter is more open to debate. Rory was a skilled political performer, and the damage to Jaed so apparent—even across the dining plaza—that she had ample time to consider the merits of each. On the one hand, Jaed was a prickly sort, who might not appreciate someone noticing what was, in Rory’s Grytt-honed experience, the fruits of a round of fisticuffs. He didn’t look like he’d won, but then, as Grytt was fond of saying, Rory had not yet seen his opponent. And on the other hand, he might welcome solicitation and sympathy from . . . well, her, Princess and ally and young woman.