by Lucia Ashta
“You behaved as one, Your Majesty. That’s what matters,” he said.
Ilara looked uncomfortable for a fleeting moment. But this wasn’t a woman who felt uncomfortable for long. “Will their heads really explode if they tell our secrets?”
“Nah,” Dolpheus said and smiled. “Well, probably not. Something unpleasant will happen though, that’s for sure. You don’t want to be the one to break a binding.”
“True,” Kai chimed in. “Never agree to a binding unless you mean to keep it.” His expression turned serious. “I know you all intend to transport out of here, but remember that I don’t know how to. If you tell me where you’re going, I’ll join you as soon as I can, and I can bring the horses to you.”
“Kai, man,” I said, “how many times do we have to tell you? We’re not leaving you behind unless we really have to, and we don’t really have to right now. At the moment, we’re a team.” I risked a look at Lila, wondering how she’d take to being grouped in with the rest of us. Her expression revealed little, but at least she didn’t look discontented.
Kai, however, appeared to be struggling between his desire to beam his relief and to succumb to chagrin. The result was a red coloring to his face and eyes that darted from all of us, too flighty to land on any one of us.
“Besides,” I said, to take some of the pressure off him, “the princess isn’t yet recovered enough for us to consider her transporting. It’s far safer for us to travel by ordinary means.”
“So, Dolpheus lied about that?” Kai asked, seeming a bit shocked that one of his heroes might do such a thing.
Dolpheus threw his head back and laughed at Kai’s flushed face and orange eyebrows arched in mild alarm. He nudged his horse close to the younger man, still in the uniform of the Guard. “A man’s word is more important than many other things in life, Kai. But sometimes, to protect others, a soldier has to lie. When it’s necessary and for the greater good, we lie. But only then.”
“Thankfully,” I added, “we don’t have to often.” Our reputations were usually enough to spare us additional inconveniences such as lying when neither one of us enjoyed it.
“I see,” Kai said.
“Don’t be such a goody good, Kai,” Lila said. “Everybody lies.”
Dolpheus and I exchanged a quick look. Now we knew how little we could trust Lila, something we’d already suspected.
“I don’t,” Kai said, and Dolpheus and I exchanged another look. My gut had told me I could trust Kai from the start. It was good to see that my instincts were still right on most of the time.
“Nor do I,” Ilara added, and now Dolpheus and I turned to look at her. The princess we’d known lied to suit her needs. Her truths were malleable, and she adjusted them when it was to her benefit. She was a spy in the King’s command. Spies could never abide by the truth for long.
I liked this Ilara better already.
My choice as to what to do with this Ilara was becoming more challenging with each passing revelation. Dolpheus offered me a sympathetic smile. He knew me. He knew what I was thinking. And he’d already told me he wouldn’t blame me—in fact, he encouraged me—to embrace this woman as the princess.
She did make a fine one. Perhaps this truly was enough. I wanted it to be.
For once, I could choose to simplify my life instead of complicate it.
12
“Where are we really going then?” Lila asked. “I assume we’re not going to the palace, because nothing good ever comes from a visit to the palace.”
Lila’s comment was candid—too candid for the majority of Oers, who were careful not to say the wrong thing in the company of royals or in fact anyone who might turn them into the Crown’s Court for their traitorous statements. But I couldn’t help but agree with her statement, although I did so silently. The Royal Palace was beautiful with its many fortunes in clear, sparkling glass. It was the most refined and spectacular of buildings across all of O, and Dolpheus and I’d traveled to most of it, as far as the Koal desert, which few Oers ever saw. Even Brachius’ lucrative estates couldn’t boast the extravagance of glass the Palace did.
And yet too little of beauty came from the Royal Palace. It was filled with courtiers as dangerous as any Vikas viper, and they were the deadliest of all vipers on O. I’d been within King Oderon’s memories and witnessed enough to see him for what he was, the worst of them all. He’d used his only daughter to seduce and manipulate others. Ilara was the only true good thing to come out of that place, and he’d tried to corrupt her beyond repair, an irony I despised. It was the royals’ insistence that the princess be pure until such time as she married someone of a noble line sufficiently worthy to marry into the Andaron Dynasty. It was the main reason Ilara and I’d had to keep our love affair secret. Yet it was her father, the very head of the Andaron Dynasty, who ordered her to perform acts that would sully a spirit weaker than hers.
Lila was right, or mostly right. Little good ever came from the palace. So why should we go there? It’s where Brachius’ assassins almost managed to kill Ilara, and it’s the reason the King sent her off planet to begin with. The Royal Palace housed the seeds of all my problems.
“We can’t go to the palace anyway,” Dolpheus said. “Tanus has an execution order out on him, and we can’t bring the princess there until we’re sure it’s safe for her.” He turned to me, “But we’ll probably have to soon.”
He was right.
“We should go to the splicing laboratory,” Lila said.
“Oh? Because if you say nothing good ever comes from a visit to the palace, then that can be said doubly about the splicing lab,” Dolpheus said.
“We might find something that will help us there though, where I can’t think of anything at the palace that would help us, especially with the King unwaking and he the only one who might provide us with useful information.”
“If he were so inclined,” I muttered. “But the reality is that not even the King would be able to offer us anything helpful at this point, and the oasis knows what he’d want in exchange for any more help. All he seemed to know was which planet he ordered Ilara transported to. That was it.”
“I can’t see the King, when he wakes that is,” Dolpheus added, “helping us at all once he discovers Ilara’s here. He’ll want her there with him.”
“He’ll want to control her,” I agreed.
“And it’s too big of a risk to go to the palace with the secret of Ilara. The King’s fierce. If he suspects, he’d have no qualms about extracting the truth. By any means.”
“Precisely,” Lila said. “So let’s go to the splicing lab.”
Dolpheus huffed. “Why on O would we do that, Lila? Just because you keep saying it doesn’t make it any better of an option.”
“It’s a good option, and you know it.”
“No, I don’t know it. It’s dangerous, triply so now that Aletox knows Ilara’s here and that you’re somehow involved with us. There’s no good reason to take the risk.”
“The lab might be the most secure working environment on O, but it houses secrets, lots of them. Secrets about splicing, secrets about who knows what? I know for a fact that Brachius hides everything about splicing the eternalities. I want to know why, and I think you should too. Do you think it’s an accident that Aletox knows of these alternate worlds that are holograms of one another? Or that multiple, identical versions of one person exist? Why do you think he knows that? Have you paused to consider?”
“Aletox is nefarious, through and through. He could have all sorts of reasons, that are none of our concern, for knowing all these things,” Dolpheus said, but I doubted he believed it.
As much as I hated to admit it, Lila was right.
“No,” she said, “Aletox does everything for a good reason. I know that much. He knows more than we do. He’s the only one who knew about these hologram worlds to begin with. If we want to learn more about where this princess came from, and who she really is, then we’d better find out what Alet
ox knows.”
Silence.
“Come on. You have a better plan? Aletox is our best bet, on the entire planet. If he knows about parallel mirror existences, then you’d better believe he knows a bit more than that. And have you asked yourself, what does any of this have to do with splicing, which I’ve already told you is evil? Because you can be fucking sure it has something to do with it. Aletox does nothing without a reason. And Brachius is just as bad. The splicing lab is our best bet.”
Why did we always end up having to go to the splicing lab? Nothing good ever came out of there. Ever.
Nevertheless, Lila had a better idea than any one of us.
“You said we’d just ride until something showed up and opened up the way,” Ilara said. “It sounds to me like that’s what’s happening.” She shrugged. “What do we have to lose? How bad can it possibly be?”
I had everything to lose, and I knew precisely how bad it could be.
I looked at Dolpheus. He scowled. He knew how bad it could be too. Not enough time had passed to erase the memory of how bad it had been the last time we were there.
“Fine,” he said, tersely. “But at the first sign of trouble, we’re out of there. Got it?”
Lila smiled her victory. “Got it.”
“What do you say, Tan?” he said. “Should we prove just how crazy we are?”
“Why not?” I said, as reluctant as he. “It’s the perfect opportunity to do it. Because we’ll be crazy fuckers for sure to try this.”
“The guards just slipped behind the hill,” Kai said.
I confirmed they were out of sight. “Let’s take a short break, stretch our legs, give them more of a chance to disappear. Then we ride at a measured pace. We don’t want to catch up with them or let them catch sight of us at any of the bends. And Lila, you better hope we don’t regret this.”
“And if you do, what? You’ll kidnap me? Drag me kicking and screaming? Or maybe hit me in the back of the head with a knife and gag me and tie me to a tree?”
I didn’t say anything and neither did Dolpheus. She had a point. We’d already done all these things to her, and she was still here, asking us to do just one thing. All she wanted from us was to break into the splicing lab again, and incidentally try to destroy the evil splicing empire.
Maybe we owe her this, even if it’s crazy, Dolpheus said in my head, echoing my thoughts.
As long as this settles our debt with her, I said.
It will. If we survive it.
Dolpheus said, “If we do this, we’re even, Lila.”
“Even if it’s as much for your benefit as mine? You stand to gain by any new information we discover more than me.”
I doubted this. Lila watched out for Lila. But I couldn’t blame her for that. So far, she’d seemed to be alone in the world. She didn’t have anyone to watch her back, so was it that wrong that she looked out for herself above everyone else?
But she was right that we did stand to gain by any new discovery, even if it was slim that we’d make one with Brachius’ extreme security measures.
Dolpheus said, “Even so, Lila. Breaking into the splicing lab again will be supremely dangerous. We break in, we’re even, whether we destroy the ‘evil’ splicing empire or not.”
She didn’t like his terms. It was obvious.
“Do we have a deal, Lila?” he persisted.
“We have a deal,” she said, her words clipped and tight.
She dismounted from her horse in clumsy fashion, but she managed, then she stalked away into the forest on one side of the path.
An angry she-dragon had somehow become the least of our worries.
“This is going to be a crazy day, I have the feeling,” Kai said.
I hated it, but I had to agree. But crazy or not, we had to find a way to survive it.
13
Since most Oers lacked the imagination to transport, from necessity, the splicing laboratory had to be close enough to the royal city and its sprawling residential areas for its employees to commute to and from work. Even though it was on the farthest edge possible of these residential areas, remote and isolated, we reached its general proximity far too quickly. I wasn’t ready to do the hard work of breaking through its force field again, or whatever it was we’d have to do with Lila along with us. After all, she was an employee of the splicing facility—or at least, she had been—before Dolpheus and I came along. If she was unemployed, a likely conclusion given that Aletox spotted her with us, then Dolpheus and I were to blame.
We did owe her. And she wanted us to break into the splicing lab. Again.
Ilara interrupted my thoughts. “If breaking into this splicing place is such a terrible prospect, why not try to find this Aletox guy outside of the lab? He must live somewhere, right? Or do people here live where they work? Why not go see him at his home or wherever else makes sense on this planet?”
I was ready to respond when Lila spoke. “Because we don’t actually want to see Aletox, or Brachius for that matter. We want to discover their secrets, and it’s unlikely we’re going to do that through them.”
“Are they really that bad?” Ilara asked.
I said, “You saw Aletox. You see what he’s like.”
“Yes,” she said, “he seemed like a prick, without a doubt. But it sounds like we’re really going to be putting ourselves at risk going to this splicing place. Surely talking with a man can’t be as dangerous as breaking into this facility that has the two of you so worried.” Ilara looked at Dolpheus and me.
Again, I was ready to answer when Dolpheus beat me to it. “The reason the splicing lab is such a dangerous place to break into is because Brachius and Aletox are so dangerous. Just because one of them might be Tan’s father doesn’t mean they’d hesitate to kill him for his treachery. Well, maybe they’d hesitate a few seconds, but that’d be it. They’re ruthless, deadlier than a Vikas viper. Brachius controls much of O behind the scenes, and now it seems as if Aletox does too, even more than we’d realized.”
“I’ve worked at the splicing lab for years,” Lila added. “I went there straight after my training period. I’ve never met anyone more ruthless than Brachius and Aletox, and trust me, I’ve met most of the worst of O. Every single powerful courtier has been under my care at some point, and those are vicious fuckers. But no one’s as bad as the other two. They won’t give up any of their secrets willingly. They don’t help anyone but themselves.”
My opinion of my potential fathers was no better, and it saddened me to hear the truths of my patrimony. I wasn’t yet a man I could be certain any future son of mine would be proud of, but I was trying, and I didn’t think I’d ever done anything as terrible as what Aletox and Brachius had undoubtedly done, even though I’d done plenty of things I wished I hadn’t.
“Wow,” Ilara said. “It’s really that bad then, huh?”
“It’s worse than you think,” Dolpheus said.
“Yeah,” Lila added. “These guys don’t believe me when I say the splicing process is evil, but it is. People change after they’ve been spliced. I’ve seen it too many times. Whoa.” Lila slid on her saddle and lunged forward to keep herself from falling.
Dolpheus chuckled. “Hang on, Lila. You’re riding the gentlest of mares from Tanus’ stables. She’ll never throw you, but you still have to stay on her.”
Lila’s knuckles were white from the death grip she had on her saddle’s pommel.
“You were saying?” Ilara prompted. Whether she was the princess or not, she rode gracefully.
Sweat broke out at Lila’s hairline. Her entire body was rigid, her butt hovering above the saddle.
“You know,” Ilara said, “the best way to ride is just to relax. If this is a gentle horse, then she won’t throw you. She knows what she’s doing. Just let her do her thing.”
“You saw! I almost just fell!”
“Yeah, but that wasn’t because of the horse. Just sit normally, hold her reins loosely, and enjoy the ride.”
“Tha
t’s easy for you to say,” Lila snapped. “You didn’t just nearly fall. You’ve been riding the best horses there are, with the best trainers, since you were a girl. Always the best for the princess who gets everything she wants, every advantage in the world while her subjects suffer.”
I resisted my instinct to defend Ilara. I knew how the princess would react to Lila’s attitude and insubordination. I wanted to see how this Ilara would. I caught Dolpheus sneaking a look at Ilara. It seemed he was waiting too.
Ilara didn’t reply for a long time, so long that I worried that rage might be brewing. The princess had a fiery temper, and while she could be kind, she wasn’t always compassionate if she felt slighted.
Lila was oblivious, fidgeting on her mare as if she hadn’t just insulted the most powerful person on the planet.
When Ilara finally did give her retort, Lila didn’t even look at her, unaware of the tension the rest of us, even Kai, sensed.
“It’s been my experience in life,” Ilara began with surprising gentleness, “that little is as it seems. You can never really understand what another person has gone through, what they’ve suffered, what they’ve lived. Appearances deceive, all day long, in every which way. It’s only a fool who presumes she knows how another views life.”
Ilara was effectively calling Lila a fool, but Lila was too preoccupied with staying on a horse that made the task easy.
But Dolpheus looked at me meaningfully. While Ilara had put Lila in her place—somewhat—she had done so with an approach I’d never witnessed in the princess. The princess of O wielded her words like weapons. I couldn’t remember a time I’d seen her be gentle with anyone other than me, and even with me, it wasn’t the norm.
Dolpheus arched his eyebrows to punctuate how strange the exchange had been, as if I could have missed it. Even Kai looked pleasantly surprised. As a guard, even if a lowly one, I was sure he’d seen enough of the royalty and nobility to have a realistic sense of their temperament and sense of self-importance.
Only Lila, who’d already proven herself an intelligent woman, was clueless of the visible struggle within Ilara to calm herself and not feed a situation that could serve no good end.