Armistice

by Lara Elena Donnelly

  “And off the record?” asked Sofie, who had caught her sarcasm a moment late.

  “Off the record,” said Lillian, “whoever told you Memmediv could free your wife was incorrect.”

  What little color there was in Sofie’s peaked face drained away below the collar of her dress. She opened her mouth, but the waitress arrived with their plates before she could speak and set down first one charger, then the other. She poured the wine as well, which neither woman had touched.

  It took Sofie a moment to recover from the interruption, and when she did, she had collapsed from within. She looked hollowed out, without an armature to hold her head up or keep her shoulders back.

  “I could tell you,” said Sofie, “that I will only say this once. But that would be a lie. I will say it as many times as I need to, until I am hoarse. Please. If you know anything. Mab and I—we have a child. A daughter. She asks me every morning when her mumma is coming back. She has already lost her father. I cannot bear for her to lose another one of us.”

  Lillian laced her fingers together over her plate and put the smooth tips of her manicured first fingers to her lips. “And you aren’t afraid that leaking this story will lead to retribution? Leave your daughter an orphan, or a ward of the Porachin state?”

  In truth, if both the Cattayims were here illegally, even the success of Sofie’s plan might lead to deportation for the parents, and a foster family or orphanage for the girl. Or laurels and residency. Maybe citizenship. It would depend on how useful the queen thought they could be.

  But Sofie was already shaking her head. “I swore to spin Mab into my life, like plies in a woolen thread. Those vows are not just breath, Ms. DePaul. Not to her, and not to me. I’ll do whatever I must to keep our family together.”

  Lillian did not bring up the broken puzzle ring, the absent husband. She wasn’t trying to talk Sofie out of this scheme, though personally she thought it ill-conceived. It only had to serve her needs.

  She hated herself for thinking that, but self-hatred was an emotion with which she had long ago made peace. She was glad she could still feel it.

  She wished she didn’t have cause to feel it quite so often.

  “What should I do?” asked Sofie, face turned down toward her squab. Hope and anger had both fled from her face, leaving her limp. She didn’t sound like she expected an answer, and she certainly looked surprised when Lillian gave her one.

  “Ask me who can.” Lillian’s fork hovered over her curry. It was true that the dish was one of her favorites, and that seafood was never quite as fresh in Myazbah as it was on the coast. But her appetite had retreated in the face of the step she was about to take.

  “What?”

  Lillian set the fork beside her plate. “I said, ask me who can free your wife.”

  Sofie looked like she was waiting for rocks to fall, or a trap to close its teeth on her leg. “All right. Who?”

  Once she said it, she was committed. Her heart beat hard beneath her lapel, under the folded paper of Stephen’s last letter.

  “Me,” she said. “Or, I’m nearly certain that I can. But I need your friend at the Call to hold off on the story for a little while.”

  “How long, exactly?”

  “A week,” she said, “maybe two.” Term would be over then. If Memmediv could do what he promised—get her Stephen—it wouldn’t matter what happened after that.

  “Two weeks?” If Sofie hadn’t come from Keeler stock, been raised by boarding schools and business tycoons, Lillian imagined her mouth might have fallen open. As it was, her nostrils flared and the skin around her lips turned white beneath the freckles. “Do you understand what they might do to her in that time?”

  “More than I would like to.” Hands hidden below the tablecloth, Lillian made a fist. Her nails bit into the skin of her palm. “But trust me. Please.”

  Sofie narrowed her bloodshot eyes. “Why should I?”

  Lillian took a breath, met Sofie’s stare, and said, “I am not asking as the Geddan press attaché. Not as someone associated with the … the administration. I’m asking as a mother trying to help her son. Someone who made a different decision than you did, a long time ago, who regrets it now.”

  Sofie stared at her for too long, and Lillian almost looked away. What she had said was the truth, but not the whole of it. Lillian pretended she was at the podium, facing down a difficult journalist, and the panicked itch between her eyes that made her desperate to glance down became a challenge not to.

  “You aren’t lying,” said Sofie. It had the air of a question but not the intonation.

  Lillian shook her head once, with the stiffness of certainty. “No.”

  “Two weeks?” Sofie’s fingertips were pale where they pressed against the tablecloth.

  “Probably less. Is there an exchange where I can reach you?”

  “We don’t have a telephone,” said Sofie. Her voice had lost its edge and become tremulous, deeply tired. “But you could leave a message, with the shop downstairs.”

  Lillian handed over a pen and one of her cards. Sofie scribbled an exchange and handed it back, smutching the ink in her haste.

  “Promise me,” she said, “that this isn’t some kind of setup.”

  “If it was,” said Lillian, “I would still make that promise.”

  Sofie grimaced. “I know. But I just want to hear the words.”

  * * *

  Lillian gave her driver the afternoon free to avoid him finding out where she was headed. The omnibus took its dear time in arriving, and in picking its way through traffic. She got off at a random stop and walked in circles until she found a lunch counter tucked between a telegraph office and a dry cleaner’s. Arriving an hour or so before the after-work rush, she sat at the counter to order coffee and some flatbread. She sipped the former and asked for the pot to be refilled twice, but only picked at the bread and chutney.

  As she sat and fiddled with scraps of soggy dough, biding her time, the flow of customers ticked up markedly. She watched women on their way home drop in to eat a quick meal of lamb kebab and spicy peas, or just to down a coffee: half-standing at the counter and chatting with the staff. Husbands, sometimes with children in tow, picked up orders wrapped in greasy paper, tied with twine. A few families piled into chairs around the woven reed tables and ate an early dinner from communal platters.

  It was all so domestic, cheerful, pleasant even in its tenser moments: crying babies, squabbling spouses. Lillian granted herself a moment’s respite, to imagine what it might be like if this was her neighborhood. If her largest concern was dabbing at a turmeric stain on her blouse, or settling an argument between two cranky children. The scenario was almost inconceivable, which she found horrible and gratifying in equal measure.

  She had just pulled the runner from beneath her own career: a career she had spent her life building up, for which she had sacrificed so many things. Or, looked at from another angle, a career that had allowed her to avoid the things that frightened her. What would she do with herself, when she ran? Because she would need to run.

  A fence to jump when she came to it, but worth keeping in the back of her mind. At least she was practiced at balancing a thousand anxious calculations simultaneously.

  When the commuter hubbub died down, she paid and asked if she might use the telephone. The grill-boy shrugged and waved her back behind the register.

  The receiver clattered on the other end as it was raised from its cradle. “Hello?”

  “Vasily Memmediv?” she asked.

  Paper crackled in the background. “Yes.”

  “I’d like to speak to your supervisor. And the rest of your team, if they’re available.”

  This time in the pause she heard nothing. “I am afraid you’ve used my home exchange.”

  “I’m aware of that,” she said, willing him to recognize her voice. “It’s just that I’ve been thinking about our conversation last week, about your generous offer.”

  As if her urging had t
raveled through the cables, he said, “Oh.” And then, “You haven’t reconsidered, have you?” The calm with which he asked impressed her.

  “I told you. I’d like to speak to the person in charge of your operation.” She didn’t mean Flagg, or Regional Affairs, and was fairly certain that he knew it.

  “I’m afraid that won’t be possible.”

  “Make it possible,” she said. “It’s now a condition of the agreement.”

  “But I—”

  She hung up on him before he could go on.

  CHAPTER

  SIXTEEN

  Memmediv came through for Lillian. It took him two days, during which she must have lost half a stone sweating, but he got her a memo through interdepartmental mail. Its origin in Regional Affairs excused its vagueness to prying eyes, but Lillian read it and knew she was in.

  “Rinda,” she said, and her secretary appeared. “I’ll be leaving early tomorrow afternoon. Mr. Odell will be acting as my deputy. Will you send him in, please, so that I can brief him?”

  Odell was competent enough she wouldn’t have to worry about anything but the worst public relations disaster. And she suspected, with Tzietan peace negotiations stalled and most of Porachis flat on its back at the dragging end of the dry season, that it would be a slow weekend for news.

  She could have simply sent Odell a memo of his own. But a little show had been necessary, to draw Flagg’s eyes, and Rinda was prompt in her reporting. Less than an hour later Flagg called her to his office. Memmediv was conspicuously absent.

  “I’ve sent him on an errand,” Flagg said, when Lillian’s eyes strayed to his empty desk. “The rewards of caution may not always be obvious, but they can certainly be vital at times like these.” He held his office door for her, and she reluctantly stepped into the stuffy inner sanctum of the foxes’ den.

  “Memmediv has asked for some time off. Apparently he’s taking a long weekend. With a mistress, he implied. It was a rather vulgar conversation, so I didn’t ask too many questions.”

  “That seems counter to your profession,” said Lillian.

  “Rest assured that I would have pried, if I hadn’t already heard that you are also leaving at the end of the week, and that you won’t be in at all over the weekend, or even available by phone. I had a hunch that your holiday plans might intersect.”

  “How astute of you,” she said. “Almost as if this is your job, and not Regional Affairs at all, whatever that might be.”

  Flagg’s eyes narrowed, and she regretted her piquancy. She needed to play along for a little while yet.

  “Where is he taking you?” Flagg asked.

  Her regret evaporated at the expression on his face when she told him, replaced by an ember’s glow of satisfaction behind her ribs. Not because she had exceeded his expectations for her, wiling her way into Memmediv’s confidence and Pulan’s inner sanctum, but because now, it was all for her, and he had no idea.

  “Into the heart of the bramble,” he said. Lillian could very easily imagine him rubbing his hands together, a melodramatic stage villain, but he kept them laced in front of him on his desk. “Very good. I take it this means things have been cleared up with Sofie Keeler?”

  “For the time being. She wouldn’t give me much information, but I bought us a week or two. Then we’ll have to do something more drastic.” Likely more drastic than he conceived of.

  “Well,” he said, unlacing his hands to straighten a stack of papers that had not needed it. “One problem at a time. Have you had any word from your … associate? The one who got us those photographs? Has he been back to Hadhariti? It might be good to know what to expect when you arrive.”

  “You mean Jinadh.”

  His nod was almost imperceptible.

  “That connection,” she said carefully, “has been severed. Rather finally, I think.” Jinadh’s face flickered briefly behind her eyes, an old reel of film over a faint projector bulb. In her memory, he wore the expression of betrayal from that conversation by the river, and she felt regret douse the glow her successful deception had kindled.

  “A pity.” He did not sound as if he meant it. He sounded as if he wanted to crush something. “But not, in the end, a crippling loss. Not with you in Satri’s stronghold.”

  “It is only a weekend,” she said.

  “Well, do whatever you have to, to get yourself invited back.” He laced his fingers again, but she saw his eyes stray—so briefly—to the stack of papers he had just needlessly straightened. The fan had blown one of the sheaves slightly out of alignment. “Where have you told your office that you’re going?”

  “Cruising up the river to the spa at Rainab.” She and Jinadh had done that once. It had been a lovely trip.

  “Ah,” said Flagg, “what a funny coincidence. Memmediv is supposed to be on a boat as well. He’s told me he’s taking the steamer down to Charasoor. Had a pair of tickets and everything.”

  He was trying to lay a false trail for Flagg to follow, and doing a good job of it. She didn’t look forward to peeling back her layers of deception for him. It would be rather more like flaying than it would be a burlesque.

  * * *

  At the end of the week, Lillian found herself at the rail of the Yaima II, watching the casino town of Charasoor draw closer to the prow. Coastal golden-hour light burnished the fort battlements and turned the water into bronze.

  Memmediv, returning from the bar, brought her something pale and sparkling, poured over ice and scented with anise.

  “Arrack spritz,” he said. “I didn’t want to opt for anything stronger, on an empty stomach. Our hostess has said she’ll feed us.”

  She sipped at it, and sweetness coated the inside of her mouth. She hoped it would honey the words she needed to say. Words she’d been tiptoeing around since they boarded the Yaima early in the afternoon.

  “How do we proceed from here?” she asked, nodding to the city ahead and its sprawling harbor. Charasoor was miles down the coast from Hadhariti, and Satri’s estate wasn’t convenient to any rail line. They had overshot on purpose, and now would wend their way back, she assumed, by some untraceable means yet to be revealed.

  “Someone will be waiting,” he said unhelpfully. A few days ago, she would have cursed the lack of detail for the sake of her obligation to Flagg. Now she cursed it because it did not provide a distraction, a separate conversation to the one she knew they needed to have.

  “Mr. Memmediv,” she said, stepping away from him so he would follow her to the rail. The deck was far from empty, but no one would pay them attention if they didn’t look like it ought to be paid, and the churn of engines and shriek of gulls would cover stray words snatched by the wind.

  He came after her, wearing an expression of intrigue above the rim of his glass.

  She put her forearms on the rail. The cold flute hanging between her fingers threatened to slip from her hand and fall into the water sliding past the hull. She imagined the small splash it would make before disappearing into the sea. “I need to discuss something with you before we arrive at our destination.”

  The intrigue took on a distinct shade of alarm. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong. I only … damnation, you aren’t going to like this.”

  “I already don’t like it.” His voice dropped into a growl, and she would have been frightened if she hadn’t reached her capacity for fear some time ago and pushed past it. “Put me out of my misery.”

  “You’ve been under the impression that I’m on your side, in this.” She freed one hand from the lattice around her flute to pass palm up in front of her, indicating the nebulous constellation of conspiracies that “this” encompassed.

  “And aren’t you?” He said it lightly, but she heard the quaver.

  “I am,” she said. “Now. But Flagg knows more than either of us might like him to, and I had to tell him where we were going or he would have been suspicious at our little vacations coinciding.”

  There was a beat in which he di
d not move. Molten sunlight caught in his eyes, so they turned to narrow burning slits like the vents in a hot stove. If she touched him, she half-imagined she might be burnt. She felt her heart seize.

  Then his somber expression broke and he began to laugh. “You think I didn’t know?”

  “But you’re … you’re bringing me to Satri’s house. With her permission, I assume. And you knew all the time I was Flagg’s informant?”

  “She wouldn’t have invited you if she didn’t think you were a string she could pull. We knew you were passing information, and we wanted you to pass the information we wanted him to hear. If you have well and truly turned you will be even more useful to us.”

  “How long have you known?”

  “Since you pinned Addas. He came straight to Hadhariti, poured all your secrets onto the table. Once Satri knew, she told me I could use you to solve my problem with Sofie Cattayim. I haven’t heard from her again, or seen the story run, so I assume you did.”

  “I bought us a week or two,” she said, defeated even in victory; she had been doubly used and now felt limp and helpless.

  Memmediv, however, smiled. “That should be enough time.”

  “So close to finishing up?”

  The smile stayed, but he said nothing. Smart. He didn’t trust her, still.

  She sipped her drink. The bubbles burnt her nose.

  “Tell me why you changed your mind,” he said.

  She thought of Sofie’s broken wedding ring, her dusty shoes. The distance she had walked and the danger she had courted, so that her daughter might feel her mother’s arms around her shoulders, so that her wife might kiss the top of their little girl’s head.

  “There is one thing in the world that matters to me more than any other,” she said. “And I got tired of waiting for other people to give it to me.”

  The cruel humor faded from his face, and the lines around his deep-set eyes grew deeper still. The flattering light of sunset made his expression cinematic. “I know the feeling.”

  The ship shuddered to a halt and they both grasped the rail to keep from stumbling. Lillian recovered first, smoothed a loose strand of hair behind her ear, and said, “Well, don’t I feel like a fool.”