There Before the Chaos

by K. B. Wagers

  “You’re a smart woman, Jo, don’t try to pretend otherwise.”

  “If you need to know how to cut limbs off and keep a guy from dying of shock in the process, I’m your girl. But I know jack about running an empire,” she replied.

  “You asked good questions, though.”

  “Eh, someone else would have. Don’t dodge the point, Hail. We’re still here for you, we always will be. But you’ve got a different life now, time to start living it.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She shoved me, grinning at Emmory when I squawked in protest.

  “When you’re done laughing at me,” I said, “please stop Sybil and ask her if she’d go down to the beach with me. I’d like to speak with her in private.”

  Emmory’s chuckle followed him out of the room.

  “I appreciate you taking the time to speak with me, Sybil—” I frowned. “Is there a title I should be calling you?”

  “No.” Sybil smiled and shook her head. “It is nice to hear my name after so long, Your Majesty. And of course, I have the time. It is the least I could do after all you are doing for us.” She gestured with a gloved hand at the beach stretching in front of us and the quiet waves lapping at the shoreline. “This is lovely and a welcome peace.”

  We walked along in silence, Zin and Indula behind us, Iza and Emmory a meter in front. I put my feet into the prints Emmory left behind for several steps before I realized I looked a bit like a child trailing after her father.

  Sybil’s laughter ghosted through the air. “Fasé often spoke of you with a great deal of delight, Majesty, and now I see why.”

  “I’m afraid she probably exaggerated. I am new at this empress business. Most of the time I seem to be managing it, but sometimes I am more the gunrunner than the royal.” I offered up a wry smile before I stared up at the pale shadow of Dasra, where it hovered above the water. The second sun in our system was closer to Ashva than Pashati but moved on an elliptic that sent it past us during its eighty-year orbit.

  “If it eases your worry, I can tell you that you are one of the better ones,” Sybil replied. “And will remain one of the most loved not only in Indrana but throughout the galaxy for a very long time.”

  I caught my boot in the hem of my sari and stumbled, swearing. Sybil, mindful of my Guards, did not try to stop me from falling.

  “Majesty?” Zin reached me first, helping me back to my feet and brushing the sand from the green silk.

  “I’m fine,” I replied with a sigh, squeezing his hand and inspecting the torn hem with a second sigh. “That’s the third one this month, and Stasia wonders why I’d rather wear pants.” I pointed a finger at Sybil. “I’m blaming this one on you.”

  “You can. Stasia likes me.” She lifted a shoulder and started walking again. “What was it you wanted to talk to me about, Your Majesty?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “Why would I—oh.” Smiling, she looked out over the water and then shook her head. “I have learned to quiet things. Also, it’s rude to poke like that. Fasé has a tendency to be too interested. In time she’ll learn.” Sybil laughed softly. “Maybe.”

  “Can you answer some questions for me?”

  “I might be able to. I confess I’m curious why you’re asking me instead of Fasé.” She tipped her head back to me, pale eyes searching.

  “We did not part on the best of terms, and though I am trying to overcome that past,” I said, swallowing, “I feel like a different perspective is important here.”

  “What do you want to know, Your Majesty?”

  “The civil war, how bad is it?”

  “At the moment it’s more like a rebellion, but it is growing. Our escape will have fueled the fire even more,” Sybil replied. “Honestly, I don’t know which way it will go in the end. There are too many variables. Too many important players whose lives are wrapped up in it for the path to be clear even to someone like myself.”

  “So it’s bad?”

  Sybil laughed. “Any war is bad, Your Majesty, you know that. Unless you’re on the winning side.” She gave me a sideways look. “And even then? To give you the answer you seek: Things are not good at home. Faria will be divided and it will weaken us further in the fight with the Shen and the danger coming.”

  “What danger?”

  Sybil shook her head. “I can’t tell you that. Not only because I don’t know, but I think even if I did I couldn’t tell you for fear of impacting your choices. You need a clear head, Majesty, for the days ahead of you. They are going to be tough and filled with pain. I am sorry for that. You deserve happiness and peace.”

  I worked my jaw for a moment before replying. The feelings rolling around in me were a mess of resigned acceptance and sorrow. It seemed no matter what I did, I wasn’t going to get a moment’s rest. Not as Cressen Stone. Not as Empress Hail Bristol. “Why did you help Fasé escape?”

  “Because it was necessary.” Sybil laughed softly, as though she hadn’t considered anything other than the outcome that had happened. “To leave her where she was would have killed her eventually, possibly killed all of us. There are things I can’t see. I am not omniscient. All I can do is read the possibilities and hope that the choice I make is the right one.” A smile flickered across her face before she sobered. “I just happen to have a little more information about it than you do, is all.”

  “Why did you say I would be remembered?”

  “You are the great peacemaker.” Sybil stared into the distance. “Or the one who brings about the destruction of so many lives.”

  “No pressure,” I muttered.

  “No more than this life, or the one you had before. I know it sounds dire, Your Majesty, but you won’t be presented with the choice in such an obvious fashion. It won’t be as simple as choose peace or choose war.” She smiled. “Fasé told you to pay attention to the little things, didn’t she? Every single choice we make is important. Every single choice changes the trajectory of our lives in ways we can’t even fathom. But we make the choices, because to do otherwise is an even worse fate—that of letting the universe drag us along like a swimmer caught in a riptide.”

  20

  The expected angry com link came from Adora the next morning.

  “Is she mad?” I asked Alba.

  “Very much so, ma’am.”

  “All right, put her through to my desk screen.” I was reasonably sure Adora was going to be yelling and I didn’t need the accompanying headache that answering her com in my smati would offer. “Itegas Notaras, good morning,” I said.

  “Your Majesty. I demand you return the fugitive Fasé Terass and her kidnapping victim immediately.”

  Bolstered by Sybil’s promise that nothing bad would happen to Indrana, I was possibly a tad more flippant than I should have been. “Kidnapping? I spoke with Sybil myself and she assured me that she was here of her own free will.”

  “You spoke with her?” Adora’s eyes were saucers in her pale face.

  “At great length.” I smiled. “As for Fasé, she and Sybil both have requested and been granted political asylum. I’m afraid I couldn’t turn them over even if I wanted to.”

  “You wouldn’t dare.”

  “I have dared. Though it wasn’t me. Both councils approved the request unanimously.”

  “You’d dissolve Indrana’s treaty with Faria? Wipe away thousands of years of friendship and peace for this?”

  “I’m not wiping away anything, Itegas, and I’d like you to mind your tone. Nowhere does our treaty prevent either side from welcoming any requests for asylum except by proven criminals.”

  Adora smiled triumphantly. “There you have it. Fasé is a criminal. You will return them both at once. I will have a ship sent and Colonel Morri can accompany them back to Faria.”

  “When I first met you, you told me specifically that Fasé wasn’t a criminal and I had that conversation entered into the record,” I replied, and watched Adora’s mouth thin. “Were you lying to me then or now, I
tegas?”

  There was a sharply indrawn breath from somewhere off-screen and Adora’s mouth tightened even further.

  “I’m going to be blunt and say it doesn’t matter,” I said, not waiting for an answer. “My side of things has been duly processed and is legally binding. If you’d like to try to explain to the rest of the galaxy in detail why you dissolved our treaty, you go right ahead.” I pinned her with a don’t-fuck-with-me look. “But I’ll warn you now, Itegas Notaras, if you put my empire at risk over this, I’ll happily accept the Shen’s very gracious offer to join them in their fight against you.”

  “You wouldn’t dare.”

  “You said that already, and yes, I would. Try me.” I disconnected the com link and leaned back in my chair with a muttered curse.

  If Fasé and Sybil were wrong about that, I’d just royally fucked over my empire in the space of two minutes.

  They’ve yet to be wrong about anything, though, haven’t they? Cas whispered in my ear and I frowned. But he wasn’t wrong.

  “Damn you, Cas.” I got to my feet with an exasperated exhalation and paced the room for a minute before returning to my chair. Spread across the desk were a handful of paper books and a tablet that had half a dozen more opened on it.

  I’d been reading from A History of Indranan/Farian Relations when Adora commed, and I picked up the book again only to set it down with a sigh. “This is all cowshit.”

  I knew the information in all our history was suspect. The Farians had fed us whatever stories worked to further their goal of ingratiating themselves with my ancestors. I couldn’t blame them; had I been in my ancestor-grandmother’s place when an advanced alien race came calling I probably would have made the same call.

  There was a knock on the door, and at my “come in,” Jagana stuck her head into the room.

  “Morning, Majesty.”

  “Morning.” I got up from my seat. “How did your brother’s baller game go?”

  “They did really well, ma’am. Made it to the semis but lost in the final quarter. I think they’ll take the championship next year.”

  “Tell him I’ll come watch if they make it all the way to the championship next year,” I replied with a grin. “What do you need?”

  “Oh he’d love that. They’d all love that.” Jagana beamed. “Fasé is here to see you, ma’am. I didn’t know if you were busy.”

  “Send her in.”

  Jagana opened the door the rest of the way and came into the room, closing the door behind Fasé and stationing herself beside it. I briefly considered and then rejected telling her to leave. Emmory would fuss at her if she left me alone. Fasé was technically no longer ITS, no longer subject to the empire—and by extension me—and not entirely back in my good graces.

  Though I was working on it.

  “Good morning, Your Majesty.”

  “I’ve been wrestling with a problem,” I said by way of greeting. “Which I suspect is why you’re here. All this is crap.” Gesturing at the books strewn across my desk, I sat down in my chair and watched her as she leaned over and grabbed the history I’d just tossed down moments before.

  Fasé read for a moment, laughing softly as she put the book back down. “It is, Majesty, though you obviously don’t need me to tell you that.”

  “I—” I exhaled and shoved a hand into my hair. “Indrana knows next to nothing about a race we’ve been allies with for hundreds of years.”

  “Everything you know was fed through specifically chosen channels.” Fasé nodded as she sat in the chair across from me. “You, and the rest of humanity, have seen of the Farians what we wanted you to see. No more, no less.”

  “Tell me the rest of it.”

  Fasé shook her head. “You’ll see it first person, Majesty, and I think it’s best if you learn some things on your own.”

  “Firsthand? You’re telling me I’ll end up on Faria despite all I’m doing to avoid that.”

  “It’s a possibility, Majesty.” Fasé bit her lower lip and sighed, staring at a point past my left shoulder. “I try—Sybil cautions me to be careful, and I know I should be. It is so hard to know and not be able to speak. Especially, to keep those I care about from pain.” She shook her head and focused on me, and again I was struck with just how much she’d changed in the last six months. “The Shen think you will be unbiased against them because of your history in the black and that your distrust of the Farians will grow the longer this plays out. The Farians want to nudge you in the direction of the outcome that best suits them. The one future they have seen and have worked so hard to make true all these years. They think it means their victory over the Shen, but they are only focused on the outcome, not the choice, and every push at you has the opposite of their intended effect.”

  “You mean I dig my heels in and resist the more they try to manipulate me?” I asked with a laugh that Fasé didn’t echo.

  “Yes, Majesty, but the Farians don’t know subtlety. If they cannot convince you, they will force you.”

  “Aiz and Mia said something very similar, you know?”

  Fasé lifted a shoulder in a noncommittal gesture. “They know what the Farians are capable of doing, Majesty. My goals may not be aligned exactly with theirs, but they are certainly closer than that of the Pedalion’s. I would be lying if I said otherwise. But Aiz is lost in his hate and at the moment would see all that I love destroyed. I won’t stand by and let him do that, even as I cannot remain silent about the Pedalion’s continued abuse of our faith. He and I want the war over, but we have very different ideas of how to accomplish that. I want a shift from the Pedalion’s religious rule over my people to something much more open and secular.”

  “Fasé?” I tapped a finger on the desktop while I searched for the words to the question I wanted to ask, even knowing she’d likely refuse to answer. “Tell me one thing, if you can? Sybil said I would be remembered; does that mean Indrana will survive?”

  “Of all the questions you could ask me,” Fasé said with a smile. “It’s never about you, about what happens to you, but always about Indrana. Yes, Majesty. Indrana will survive.”

  I leaned back in my chair and released the breath I’d been holding. “Good. That’s good,” I murmured.

  Fasé smiled as she got to her feet. “I’ll get going,” she said. “You’ve got another visitor on the way.” As soon as the words had left her mouth, Jagana answered the knock at the door and spoke quietly with Kisah before turning back to us.

  “Majesty, Matriarch Saito is here to see you.”

  “Let her in, Fasé was just leaving,” I replied, waving a hand to Fasé as she headed for the door. “Caterina, good morning.”

  “Does Johar know how to skin someone alive?” Caterina asked, and I couldn’t stop my surprised laugh. “I’m serious, Hail, that seems like the sort of thing she’d know how to do.”

  “I have never asked her, and I’d advise against you doing it unless you want an extremely detailed story. Sit down and tell me what’s wrong.”

  “Shivali,” Caterina replied, her jaw tight.

  “Ah.” I laughed. “Last night’s news interview with our esteemed prime minister?”

  “You saw it. How are you not angry? Did you already talk to Jo?” Her dark eyes went wide and she held up her hands. “I was kidding about the skinning alive. Mostly kidding.”

  I laughed again. “I can’t stop her from going on interviews, Caterina, and if she doesn’t think I made the right call allowing asylum to ‘renegade Farians’ and feels my judgment is clouded by my friendship with Fasé?” I lifted my hands in the air. “That’s her opinion.”

  “She cited your friendship with Taz as a further example of your personal feelings for people crowding out your duty to Indrana.”

  “I know. I watched the whole thing.” I shook my head. “So did Matriarch Maxwell, who called me in the middle of the interview to apologize for bringing Shivali to the meeting about the Farians because, and I quote, ‘if I’d known she’d pop her
mouth off on imperial TV about sensitive information, I’d never have given her the time of day.’”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No.” I shook my head. “Shivali misjudged the people’s feelings about me, about Taz, and about the reforms. Never mind managing to piss off Heela. You didn’t see the morning shows, did you? Three different shows called her out for ‘crossing a line.’” I didn’t bother to stop the grin that spread across my face, and Caterina chuckled in response. “We haven’t heard the last of it from the prime minister, but she may have been forced to rethink her strategy.”

  Caterina sobered and was silent for a minute. “Did we make a mistake here, Hail? Did we push too hard and too fast with the reforms?”

  I shook my head. “Traditions aren’t meant to be stagnant. They always change. People try to convince themselves otherwise, but nothing stays the same indefinitely. Taz and the other men aren’t the problem. We’re the problem. Stuck in our ways, comfortable in our power. If we don’t speak up, who will?”

  My own words stuck with me throughout the day and as I sat in a meeting next to Taz later that afternoon, listening to him patiently explain for what felt like the fourth time why we needed to do more than just encourage young men to enter certain woman-dominated fields, but that it was also necessary to look into the attrition rates and make plans for ways to keep them in those fields.

  “If you look at the studies, Prime Minister—”

  “I have read the studies,” Shivali replied.

  I looked up from the tabletop, raising a single eyebrow at the tone of her voice. Several people around the table swallowed, but Taz didn’t miss a beat.

  “The primary dropout points happen the further along students get into their studies. It’s not hard to see an equal split among, say first-year astrophysicists at all the major universities, but by the time they hit graduate student level or even first-year interns? The numbers of male versus female candidates are drastically different.”

  “Possibly because they can’t keep up with the pressure; studies have also shown men just aren’t able to handle that kind of environment.” Shivali’s smile was so smug it took all of my self-control to keep my expression unchanged.