by Jayne Faith
I’d thought often of Lord Toric’s role in the Return but had not truly considered my own role in the same light. Since I was a child, I’d known what every Calistan child was taught—that the High Priestess and the Lord of Calisto and Earth would lead the Return—but it wasn’t until recently that I’d considered the possibility the stars had chosen me as they’d chosen Toric. And perhaps they hadn’t. Perhaps any High Priestess, as far as the stars were concerned, would suffice in facilitating the Return.
In any case, I was the one who sat with Lord Toric in his study, our untouched cups of tea growing cold on the table in front of us.
I’d shown him the emblem and explained Novia’s discoveries. Then I’d tucked away my tablet and clasped my hands in my lap.
“I realize this is a topic you’d prefer not to revisit in detail,” I said gently, feeling a sudden maternal swell of sympathy. “Please know that I wouldn’t ask if it were not extremely important. And know that I will do my best to keep what you say in confidence, as much as my duties to the Temple and to Calisto allow me. Anything from our conversation that I must repeat will be with a strong admonition that it must be kept within the Temple.”
“No, I understand,” he said. His voice was even, but his chiseled face had grown more troubled with every passing minute. “It just . . . shocks me, for lack of a better term, that the Pirros could figure into our lives in any way after so many years.”
His eyes unfocused and his gaze grew distant.
“Do you recognize the symbol?” I asked. I knew he would have said so when I’d first shown it to him if he recognized it, but I wanted to get him talking.
He shook his head. “It’s possible I may have seen it at some point. I’m not able to recall all of my time with the Pirros, and not just because it’s been so many years. Even back when I first returned to Calisto, there were large blanks in my memory.”
“Your mind was trying to protect you from the trauma. It still is.”
His shoulders lifted slightly as he drew in a long breath, and he settled back into his chair with a heavy sigh. He crossed one ankle over the other knee and slouched into the chair with his cheek propped on his fist. Turning his aquamarine gaze onto me, I sensed that he was settling in, readying himself to exhume things he’d no doubt worked very hard to keep buried.
“I suppose you know the gist of what happened right before my abduction,” he said.
“Yes, I do. The media was filled with nothing else right after you were taken. But it might help if you recounted the details, as we will see everything in a different light now that we are hunting for new information.” The image of a young Prince Toric, the one who’d come back to Calisto with blue-green eyes that were haunted and hollow, drifted into my mind’s eye.
Lord Toric folded his hands in front of his stomach and focused on a point on the floor between us.
“You probably recall that my father was much more involved in the military during his reign than I have been during mine.” He glanced up only long enough to see me nod. “He did more than the required two years of service. He spent nearly ten years in the forces, only leaving when he had to take the throne. If not for that, he most certainly would have been a career military man. As Lord, he followed the battles very closely and often advised the Master of War. He occasionally took trips to outposts and, a few times, even surveyed the spoils after particularly important victories.”
When Lord Toric paused again, I recalled where I was when I’d learned he’d been abducted. Every Calistan old enough to remember that day knew exactly what he or she was doing at the moment the news arrived. In an odd way, it was an event that tied us together as a nation.
It was before I took the office of High Priestess. That day I’d gone with half a dozen priestesses to one of the poorer sectors on the outskirts of the kingdom to distribute food and blankets to the people living in the thin-walled tract housing. The weather had turned colder than usual for a few weeks, and we’d put in a long day going door-to-door to offer assistance and supplies.
Some of the peddlers in the outskirts owned tablets, and they’d spread the news to their neighbors. We’d been too busy to keep up with the days’ news, only using our tablets to log the supplies we’d distributed and make notes about citizens who needed other types of assistance. When a young woman with two small sons, a girl who looked barely old enough to leave home, answered her door at one of our last stops of the night, her face was a dazed, wide-eyed mask.
“Did you hear? The Pirros, they got the prince,” she said.
She invited us in, and we all powered on our tablets and switched them to the news streams.
When we finally left, it seemed much colder outside. I’d stood in the still night air and looked up at the stars, watching my breath puff faint clouds up at the sky. I’d wondered if young Prince Toric was cold. Or if he was dead already.
“I’d just turned eleven,” Lord Toric continued. “And my father had promised me that when I was eleven I’d be old enough to accompany him on some official trips. I remember hoping that I’d get to see a battle. Not close up—I was never much for fighting and violence, even before my abduction—but I imagined it would be very exciting to observe a space battle. In my mind, I expected it would be like watching the biggest fireworks and lights show in the universe.”
“So was it your idea to go on this particular outing?” I asked.
He squinted and tilted his head, his eyes on the floor. “No, actually. I wasn’t my idea, nor was that trip my father’s idea,” he said slowly. His gaze elevated until his eyes found mine. “I’d completely forgotten this detail, but it . . . it was my mother who was so adamant about that particular trip.”
Silence seemed to thicken the air in the room for several seconds.
A heart-aching vulnerability took over his face, the look of a child seeking reassurance.
“Do you think . . . do you think my mother actually . . . ?” It was not the voice of the Lord who asked the terrible question, but the voice of the boy he’d been. The boy who’d never received the maternal attention and approval he’d longed for.
“Do I think your mother arranged for your abduction?” I hated to say it aloud, but I had the sense that he needed to hear it, needed to face it. “I suppose anything is possible, my Lord, but I cannot imagine your mother ever truly wished you harm.”
He swallowed and I looked toward the window to give him a moment to regain his composure. I had an almost palpable sense of Lord Toric distancing himself from the emotions of those long-ago events, pulling back into his adult self.
“It was a very remote outpost,” he said. “And it was not a place for viewing a space battle as I’d hoped it would be. We reached it by first passing through a portal to a space port. There, we boarded a small transporter that took us to the outpost. I remember asking my father why we couldn’t just open the portal right at our destination, and he said it was too deep in enemy territory for portals. A portal is a doorway directly to Calisto, and we had to protect Calisto by making it very difficult for our enemies to reach it.”
“But it probably wasn’t the Pirros’ intention to breach Calisto,” I said.
“I doubt it. I think I was their target all along. Their military was no match for our forces, especially on our home ground, and they knew it. Their Pirros are—were—primitive in some ways, but not stupid.”
“Could you tell me more about the outpost?”
“I didn’t know much at the time, I was just a child and not well-informed, but it was supposed to be top secret. They used no bright lights there; I do remember that. Everyone carried tiny red pen lights and wore special glasses that allowed them to see in the dark. My father said it was so enemies couldn’t spot us. They even kept the interior of the outpost chilly to prevent heat radiation that might be detected by enemy probes. The outpost was not much more than a huge metal pill lodged in a crevice on a remote dead moon. I think it was actually a ship that had been parked there semi-pe
rmanently.” He shook his head slowly a couple of times. “Now that I’m describing it, it does sound like an odd choice for a place to take a child, doesn’t it?”
I raised my brows once in acknowledgement. “I admit it does. Especially when that child was the future Lord. But your father must have believed it was safe, or he wouldn’t have taken you.”
“We weren’t there long—maybe an hour or two—before the Pirros attacked. I don’t know how they managed it, but they somehow blasted their way into the facility.”
“There was no warning before the attack?”
“There may have been, but none that was communicated or visible to me. I was sitting at a vacant desk playing with the controls. One of the soldiers had put them into simulation mode so I wouldn’t accidentally do something I shouldn’t. One moment all was quiet and dark, and the next moment an alarm filled the air and soldiers were running every which way.”
“Where was your father during this time?”
“Always within sight,” he said.
“And how did he react when the alarm went off?”
“He grabbed two soldiers, hollered at them, and then pushed them toward me. The soldiers each took me by an arm and lifted me clear off the ground. They rushed me into a tiny room. I don’t know if it was an escape pod or a safe room, but they seemed to believe it was a good place to hide.”
“Lord Alec didn’t come with you?”
One side of his mouth stretched in a wry look that wasn’t quite a grim smile. “My father was a soldier. He wouldn’t hide away from a battle. Even back then, I understood that’s who he was. I didn’t feel abandoned, I actually felt safer knowing my father would be out there fighting.”
Lord Toric’s voice was more sure than it had been during the entire conversation. For the first time, I caught a glimpse of what appeared to be a bit of hero worship for his father. Lord Alec had been a king of kings in many ways, very much the type of man a boy would look up to.
Why had the stars not chosen Lord Alec, an archetype of a great ruler, to lead the Return? Perhaps, somehow, Lord Toric’s trials, his psychological scars, and the fact that he wasn’t a military man were precisely what the stars had awaited. A leader for a spiritual path. The more I thought about it, the more fitting it seemed. The Return would need a man of very strong faith and deep spirit, not a war hero.
It simultaneously comforted me and terrified me that the Return could require a man who had been as tortured and broken as Lord Toric had. There was a time when I believed the Return would be simple and straightforward. A ritualized trip from one place to another. We’d pack up all our belongings, perform some ceremonies and recite some prayers, and then we’d step through a portal and there we’d be. Home. But the secret volume of the sacred texts, with its sequence of steps for the Return, indicated that it would not be so simple.
“It must have crushed him, his failure to protect you,” I said.
“I’m sure it did, though the thought did not occur to me until much later in my life. By the time I escaped and made it back to Calisto, I was too angry and traumatized to care about how my abduction had affected anyone else, and I remained so for a long time.” Lord Toric’s brows drew low, shadowing his eyes, and he pressed his lips into a thin line for a long moment. “You know, after I came back home I always thought my father avoided me because he was ashamed of me.”
“No,” I cut in sharply. “He was not ashamed of you. I’m positive of that. He was broken, absolutely devastated, over your suffering and his inability to keep you safe.”
“I think . . . I think I can see that now.” Lord Toric said the words so softly I barely caught them.
Of course I did not know for sure what had been in Lord Alec’s heart and mind, but I did not think he’d been the type of man to be ashamed of a son who had suffered so undeservedly. I found I could not honestly say the same about Lord Toric’s mother, however.
“When the Pirros broke into the room where the two soldiers hid with me, I remember thinking that surely my father must be dead. In my eleven-year-old mind he was invincible, and I couldn’t imagine he would let anyone get to me. The soldiers shot and killed two or three of the Pirro men, but they kept coming and overpowered the soldiers, stabbing them with knives and hacking at them with machetes. The Pirros seemed like half men and half wild animals to me. They wore furs, and one thing I remember most was the smell. It was wild . . . musky. A mix of smoke, roasted meat, unwashed bodies, and violence. They were fierce. Fearless. If they’d had more advanced technology, I bet they would’ve been a very formidable foe.”
He blew out a slow breath, puffing his cheeks. It was obvious that recalling the memories in such detail was rattling his nerves, and I felt a stab of guilt at asking him to relive the trauma.
“It sounds as though they knew you were there,” I said. “They could have gone after your father instead of you, but for some reason they wanted you.” My voice lifted slightly in question. I was hoping that he’d have some insight into the Pirros’ intentions, something, anything, that might illuminate the mystery of the emblem I’d found in the margins of the sacred texts.
“I asked them many times.” Lord Toric’s blue-green gaze pierced my eyes. “In the first few days I asked them over and over why they took me.”
“Did they ever give you any explanation?”
“Yes.” His gaze grew distant and unfocused again. “The woman who would become my main tormentor said, ‘We break you now so that you will be too strong to break later.’”
I blinked a few times, and my mouth fell open in surprise. A chill ran up and down my spine and scalp. “Lord Toric, do you think they believed they were performing some sort of—I don’t know . . . service to you? Subjecting you to some rite of passage, perhaps?”
I’d always assumed that young Toric’s kidnapping was political, one nation striking out against another. But suddenly I was no longer sure.
I leaned forward. “Lord Toric, have you ever told this to anyone else? What the woman said to you?”
One of his shoulders twitched up in a stiff half-shrug. “Possibly. I don’t know. I don’t remember everything I said when I returned home. It was a blur, literally everything seemed confused and distorted. For weeks my nightmares seemed more real than my waking hours. I would black out, sometimes for an entire day.”
My chest tightened at the prospect of asking him about the people he’d interacted with, the torture he’d endured.
“Did it begin right away?” I asked, hating that I had to do it.
“More or less as soon as we reached our destination. The Pirros’ transporter was rudimentary compared to what I was used to. The entire way, I was convinced that Calistan forces would catch up with us and rescue me. But once we reached the Pirros’ caves, I knew I was in trouble.”
I squinted, knitting my brow. Why hadn’t Calistan ships set out after the Pirro transporter and overtaken it? I made a mental note to read all reports about the incident.
“The Pirros set me up in a chamber by myself. It seemed hollowed out of a jagged rocky cliff from what little I could see out the small window,” Lord Toric continued. “They fed me two meals a day, and they allowed me to sleep every night, but in between . . .”
He went silent, his mouth working as he regarded me.
I wanted to offer him some gesture of comfort, but I didn’t. There was no comfort to be offered, so many years later. Nothing could soften or erase the terrible things he’d endured. I looked steadily back at him, hoping he saw in my eyes how much it pained me that he was reliving his childhood horrors. And I waited.
“At first, I didn’t understand what was happening,” he finally said. “I didn’t understand what they were doing to me. I was just a boy. I’d never even kissed a girl, and I knew only in the most rudimentary sense what sex was. I think the Pirros were surprised by that. They rarely said anything to me, but I could tell somehow that they’d expected me to know . . . more.”
“You mentioned
a woman before,” I said. “Were there others you came to know?”
“There were a few different men and women on a rotation who delivered my food. Maybe they were something like prison guards, I never really knew. They never spoke to me. The woman, the one who spent the most time with me, I never learned her name. I nicknamed her Jade for the green color of her eyes. At times early on, there was occasionally a man, too. He and Jade were both adults, but younger than my parents. They were both very, well . . . attractive, as odd as it sounds to say that. He was very masculine. Handsome. She was quite beautiful.”
“When they did speak to you, they did so in Calistan?” I asked.
Lord Toric nodded. “They had heavy accents and their vocabularies seemed limited, but they knew enough to be able to communicate with me when they needed to. Their own language was completely unfamiliar to me. It sounded guttural and lyrical at the same time. It’s hard to describe. I picked up some words and phrases, but I don’t remember much of that now.”
I didn’t think Lord Toric realized it, but in the course of the past few minutes, he’d wrapped his arms tightly around his middle. When he wasn’t looking at me, he tucked his chin against his chest. Every few seconds he rocked forward and back slightly. I couldn’t help worrying about the effects of this discussion, and I vowed to keep a close eye on him and set aside time to pray with him in his small prayer chamber, which I knew was an important place of sanctuary for him.
“They didn’t hurt me at first,” he continued. “In the very beginning, they didn’t really even touch me. Jade and the young man only touched each other.”
With my hands hidden in the folds of my robes, I curled my fingers into fists. It was all I could do to contain my anger and outrage that young Prince Toric, an innocent boy, had been exposed to such things. And what happened at first, what he described, was only the beginning. Tame compared to what came later.