Armistice

by Lara Elena Donnelly

  “Why?” Cordelia asked. “I mean, Cyril turned to save himself, and try for Ari, but why were you with them? The Ospies, I mean. ’Cause I figure if you’re here now, it wasn’t ’cause you were on their wagon.”

  He lifted his chin long enough to throw a chagrined look at Lillian, then lowered it again, wincing. “As Ms. DePaul said to me not too long ago, ‘There is one thing in the world that matters to me more than any other.’ Unlike her, I had not yet ceased to believe that I could win it through alliances, or toadying.”

  “He means Dastya,” said Lillian, though she addressed him rather than Cordelia. “You betrayed my brother for a harbor town.”

  “I betrayed your brother for my brother,” he said. “For my father and my mother, my sister, my nieces and nephew. For my entire family and what we lost.” He paused abruptly, looking a little green, and for a moment Cordelia wondered if he’d be sick. Then he reined it in and added, more softly, “For the thousands of other families who have lost as much, or more.”

  Cordelia wanted to hate him. But she thought of the trains derailed, the depots and government offices burned. Practical and symbolic targets, but trains had conductors, coal-folk. People worked in those offices, and would have gone home to their families.

  So instead of hate, she had to understand, and that put a bitter taste at the back of her throat.

  “Your Highness,” said Jinadh, a little more softly than he’d been breaking in so far. “Perhaps now you can tell us what you know?”

  Asiyah had been translating for Inaz, murmuring beneath the conversation, half a beat behind. Now he cleared his throat and took a long drink of wine. An expectant hush fell.

  Hang ’em all. Cordelia felt right back on the stage, and for once, didn’t want to. Couldn’t these folk just say outright what they meant without making it into a show nobody was paying to see?

  “Maybe six months after Acherby took power,” said Asiyah, “one of my case officers got a call from her contact in the police. They had arrested a man for drunk and disorderly conduct in a slum on the edge of Orriba. Not unusual, except that he was Geddan, without a visa.”

  “I thought you were just a playboy,” said Aristide, so bristlingly snide Cordelia pinned him for uncertain, probably embarrassed, maybe scared. “But mother’s tits, they’ve really put you in charge of people.”

  Asiyah’s tight little smile said more than any cruel comeback might have.

  “She went to question him, in jail. He called himself Paul Darling. He had no papers. He would not say how he arrived in Liso, let alone harassing strangers on the street in Orriba. But when she asked if he had fled the Ospies, he laughed, and said that they had thrown him out.

  “That made her interested. She alerted her superiors. Darling was very useful; he told us everything he knew about their methods, ideologies. But never anything about himself. And we needed to verify that what he said was true.”

  “And how did you find out?” asked Jinadh, wineglass cradled delicately in his fingers.

  “Mm,” said the prince, hastily swallowing a mouthful of rice. He was one of the few of them who had made inroads on his food. Cordelia certainly hadn’t touched a bite. “In fact, an old friend of Makricosta’s. Merrilee Cross. We had rumors she fled the Ospies after, um … she pulled too many runners from them? Diwe, she used to sell our secrets to old Gedda, so we decided to collect a debt. She recognized the photo, and after some … strong encouragement, she said he was Cyril DePaul.”

  “She knew?” Aristide looked like he wanted to spit. “That sculler knew he was alive and she said nothing?”

  “He didn’t die?” Lillian, who had been quiet, finally lowered her hands from her mouth. There were pale marks on her cheeks where her fingers had pressed, starting to fill in pink. “They said he died. How could he not have died?”

  “At a guess,” said Memmediv, “somebody didn’t want to get in trouble.”

  Prince Asiyah shrugged. “He never told us how he escaped, or how he got to Liso. He started to run a network for us, right on the border. He was painfully careful with his agents—he hated to leave any of them … oh, how do you say … on a rock in the rising tide? But with himself? Never so much. He had a few near escapes, and then, we stopped hearing from him. Many people wanted him dead, I am sure, and no doubt one of them succeeded. There was evidence of a break-in at his home, a disturbance. No body, but there are bad stories about what the militants in the north do with the corpses of their enemies. Not fit for the dinner table.”

  Cordelia waited for the next part of the story, but Asiyah only wrapped a bite of curry in flatbread and pushed it into his mouth.

  “That’s it?” she asked.

  He looked down at her, still chewing, and shrugged.

  “Nobody’s gonna say it?” she asked. “But everybody’s thinking it, right?”

  “Cordelia,” said Aristide, and the o was too cramped, the r edging into furry, back-of-the-teeth territory. Like Tory, when he was pinned, talking like he’d never left the hills.

  “Ari,” she said. “Disappeared ain’t dead.”

  Before she got the last word out, he shoved his chair back from the table and turned tail.

  * * *

  Aristide wrote his resignation the minute he had the door locked behind him.

  Well, not strictly true. He locked the door, uncorked a bottle of sorghum whiskey from the bar, and drank too much straight from the neck. He left the bottle open as he wrote.

  His handwriting scrawled across the page—he had no patience for a typewriter—and the ink blotted hideously wherever his anger got the better of him. He tore the embossed peacock stationery from its pad and stuck it to his desk with a letter opener, then hauled his small valise from where he’d flung it earlier and started to throw in whatever came to hand.

  Cross had known for ages. She had written to him and said nothing. But why should she have told him? Maybe Asiyah hadn’t approached her yet. And he’d certainly clipped the threads that connected them. Torn them apart with his teeth, more like. Just as he had every avenue that might have brought this news to him much sooner, in some less sensational way.

  A pot of cold cream popped open on impact and spattered the inside of his case. He swore, tossed it out, and then sat down heavily on the chaise, head in his hands.

  Someone knocked, very softly. He didn’t answer, or even call out to them to go away. He was too busy holding in his breath, crushing the heels of his palms to his eyes.

  Stupid. He was so, so stupid.

  Another knock. He hardly even heard it.

  What finally got him to look up, stand up, was the gentle rasp of metal in the keyhole, and the click of the latch. He was halfway across the room, stumbling in a fury, when Daoud opened the door.

  “You have the key to my rooms?”

  “I have the keys to every room,” he said, pocketing the offending objects.

  In some way, Aristide had known he had no true privacy at Hadhariti. He was in someone else’s home, living largely on forbearance. Until lately, he had not minded; it had been numb surrender, almost pleasant. Now it all caught up with him. It cost him mightily not to break something.

  “Did you come to console me?” he snarled, catching on the s like an angry snake. “I don’t want a piece of it. Leave.”

  “I will not,” said Daoud. He looked around at the spilled cold cream staining the carpet, the letter opener stabbed through Aristide’s hastily tendered resignation. The pill bottles and spectacles case resting crookedly at the bottom of an otherwise empty valise. “You are too drunk to drive anywhere, and besides, you will forget your toothbrush and underthings if someone does not calm you down.” Neatly, he corked the whiskey bottle and set it back among its fellows.

  “I said leave.” Aristide’s voice sounded thick to his own ears, but he couldn’t tell if it was drink or emotion.

  “No. Do not make me bully you.”

  “You,” said Aristide, pointing a vicious finger at him, �
��overstep yourself. If you tried to bully me in earnest I would—”

  “Kill me with your hands?” It wasn’t mocking, but it carried too much pity.

  Aristide made fists that put spasms in his forearms, then collapsed in despair onto the chaise beside his pathetic half-filled bag. “What do you want?”

  “To see if you are well,” he said, sitting down beside Aristide.

  “I’m not. Will you go now?”

  “And to ask you when you planned to leave.”

  He gauged his balance, his bravado. “As soon as I’m sober.”

  “In that case,” Daoud said, “I am also here to ask you to postpone.”

  “Never.”

  “We will talk about it in the morning.”

  “I’ll be gone by then.”

  Daoud’s eyebrows quirked in poorly concealed amusement. “You will be hungover then.”

  “Why stay?” demanded Aristide. The liquor was settling in by now, and he hardly cared what he said or did. “I’m superfluous to Pulan’s real business.” “Superfluous” did not come out quite as he meant it to.

  “You are not. The studio cannot afford to draw publicity now. If you resign so suddenly the tabloids will get ahold of it, and all eyes will turn to us. For the next week, things must run very smoothly.”

  “I will not make this easy for her,” he said. “And especially not for him. I’m going, and they can’t tell me when.”

  Daoud sighed. “You really think that he is still alive?”

  “I know that I need to see for myself,” said Aristide, staring at the white blots of cold cream on the carpet between his shoes. “Or I will live the rest of my life like a man with a toothache he cannot leave alone, and I will poke at it until it grows into an abscess, bursts, and kills me.”

  CHAPTER

  NINETEEN

  Lillian excused herself shortly after Makricosta made his exit, though she parted company less dramatically. She felt eyes linger on her as she left, and even without turning she knew whose they were. She was not surprised when, shortly after she fled to the upper terrace, she heard footsteps on the flagstone stairs.

  “Not particularly subtle,” she said. “How long did you wait before you followed me?”

  «We don’t need to be subtle anymore,» he said, and took her hand.

  She had reached her capacity of shock for the day, so the impact of this blow was muted, diffuse. She pulled her hand away and curled it against her chest as if that might protect her heart from any further abuse. “You told them?”

  He hung his head. «Pulan knows. And Ms. Lehane.»

  “You shouldn’t have.” It came out as a sigh.

  «How else could I explain myself, showing up here and demanding your son?»

  She shook her head. “And if I hadn’t changed my mind, what were you planning to do? Take my child from me?”

  «He is my child too. Better he should have one parent than none.»

  She had thought the evening’s events had inured her to emotion, or emptied her reserves, but the deep volcanic well of her fury spat up a surge of magma. Her own growling voice surprised her. “He did have me. Just because he’s at school doesn’t mean I’m not his mother.”

  Jinadh’s anger cracked back at her. «You aren’t his mother, you’re a pawn. He isn’t just at school, Lillian, he’s … dangling from a string in front of your face. You were never going to get him back.»

  “So you were going to get him for yourself instead? That isn’t your decision.”

  «More mine than most people’s. I’m his father. Who is Maddox Flagg to Stephen?»

  “He doesn’t even know you!”

  «And whose fault is that?»

  It wasn’t until the echo reached her, bouncing from the walls and windows, that Lillian realized he was shouting. They both were. A light flicked on inside the house, silhouetting a curious head. Lillian took a steadying breath and let it out in time with the rush of the receding tide.

  «Walk with me,» she said, tilting her head toward the window. Saying it in Porashtu leant her poise, a ghost of diplomacy.

  Jinadh gave a fractional nod, and motioned for her to descend the stairs ahead of him.

  «I will not apologize for that,» he said to her back.

  “Did I ask you to?”

  They proceeded in silence to the lower terrace, at which point Lillian looked around helplessly for an exit. She felt backed against the cliff, trapped by the walls of Pulan’s house.

  Abandoning the Geddan that had so far only been a vent for her frustration, she asked, «Is there some way to get down to the beach? It will be quiet.»

  «There’s a lift,» he said. «Here.»

  It was tucked into an alcove on the lower terrace, and they stood beside each other in silence as it fell. It let out into a dark antechamber, and when Jinadh opened the door, the room flooded with moonlight, reflected from the sand and water so it struck mirrors set into the walls. As the tide moved, the light moved, wavering across the tile floor, across the pale skin of Lillian’s arms, across the white cambric of Jinadh’s tunic and dhoti.

  The soles of her pumps scraped; a fine layer of sand dusted the floor. She bent to remove her shoes, and left them by the door. Jinadh was already barefoot.

  Between her toes, the dunes were still hot with the remains of the day’s sunlight. The breeze off the water was warm, too, but it cooled sweat on Lillian’s skin and she shivered.

  «Here.» Jinadh took the fine white scarf from his shoulders and offered it to her.

  «No, thank you.»

  «At least allow me to be kind.» It almost came out a snap. If he had been any less strangled by societal convention, it would have.

  Lillian gritted her teeth and held her hand out for the shawl, rather than let him wrap it around her. The fabric fell softly, almost imperceptible. Cashmere, still warm from his body heat. It smelled of him, too: sweat, of course, and his cologne of leather, figs, and sandalwood. Under it all, the particular smell that was just … Jinadh.

  She did not raise the fabric to her face, but it was a very near thing.

  «I told you I would go to prison,» she said, as much to remind herself as him. «That I would face retribution if Memmediv miscalculated. And you still went to him.» She should have been shocked, or angry. Instead, a chasm of sadness cracked open in her chest. «Did that mean nothing to you?»

  «It meant everything to me,» he said. «But in the end, Stephen meant more. As I’m sure he does to you.»

  The truth of it settled onto her shoulders, and she wondered she didn’t sink into the sand. She felt as heavy and exhausted as she had late in her pregnancy, with so many of the same dreads she had carried then and none of the anticipatory joy.

  There was a flat stone at the high-tide mark, seaweed caught around its base. Breaking away from Jinadh, she lowered herself to its warm surface. Grit and salt clung to her palms, and the tense ache in the large muscles along her spine settled into a steady gentle pain that was almost comforting in its familiarity. The only familiar thing she had, tonight, and she clung to it.

  Jinadh picked a stone from the sand and pitched it out to sea. He stared after it for a long time, as if searching in vain for ripples.

  «Can I trust you?»

  He spoke softly, but in the stillness filled only with waves and night birds and soughing dune grass, the sound of his voice still jarred her. She had been, she realized, half asleep. «What?»

  «Casting in with Memmediv,» he said. «Are you in earnest? Or is it just another ruse?»

  «It isn’t a ruse,» she said. «I just can’t manage it anymore.»

  «You can’t manage it? I have had to manage it.»

  She closed her eyes. On the backs of her lids she could still see the long rollers spreading into white foam. The water rose to her ankles at the foot of the rock, and receded. «I’m sorry.»

  The warmth of him was her first indication he had sat beside her, not quite touching. «Lillian,» he said. «May I
ask you something?»

  She snorted, clinging too precariously to composure for polish. «As if I could stop you.»

  «Did you begin this affair because … because a handler asked you to? Am I a target? Was I some kind of bargaining chip?»

  It turned out she was quite able to feel shock, after all. Only this time there was no anger: just a deep, aching sorrow. «Oh, Jinadh. How long have you been wondering about that?»

  He was angry, though. «It doesn’t seem so implausible, now that I’ve seen what you’re capable of.»

  That stung, especially since he hadn’t been privy to Flagg’s original plans for her, and that she had been prepared to undertake them. Perversely, she wanted to tell him. Instead, she said, «If our affair had been some kind of operation, I would not have kept the baby. You never would have known. They never would have known. I would never have had Stephen with the intention of using him like he’s being used now. Even if I … »

  He tried to wait her out. She saw him try. But he broke a moment too soon and said, «Even if what?»

  Damnation. She should have stopped before she let out that ellipsis.

  «Lillian,» he said, and she felt him move on the rock but couldn’t look at him if she had to say the thing he wanted her to. She stared at the tops of the cliffs, instead—first at the scattered lights still burning in the studio buildings to the south, and then the lights in the upper floors of the house: other people with other awful secrets. She wondered how many of them would sleep peacefully tonight.

  He said her name again, this time not so steadily.

  “I wouldn’t have done it,” she said, in her native tongue for certainty of meaning, speaking to the walls of sandstone, the echoing crash of the surf. “Even if I hadn’t felt the way I did, about you.”

  Rage had been leaking from him since she said she had never intended their affair to yield assets. The last of it trickled away now. “Did?” he asked, also in Geddan. He was too fluent to question the tense, which meant the question was weightier than that.

  Here she had to laugh, to keep back tears. Her body demanded one or the other, and the first gave less ground. “Things are a little different now, aren’t they? Than when we started, I mean.” As she said it, she realized that it wasn’t true as she intended, but in a much more frightening way: Now, she had every reason to leave with him, and—fate willing—the ability to do so. She had no excuses left. She wasn’t sure she wanted them.