“They do not have to be,” he said. “Not now.”
She felt his palm over the back of her hand. This time she let him take it, and did not pull away. Some reticence lingered in her wrist, her elbow, but he was patient.
«This is our chance,» said Jinadh. «I believe Ms. Lehane can do what she says—snatch Stephen from Gedda. We can take him and go somewhere new. We can make a life without all this, without politics and intrigue.»
“I wouldn’t know what to do with myself,” she said, lingering in jocular territory to save herself a cliff dive into something more significant. “I’ve spent my entire life dedicated to precisely that. I’m a very specialized piece of machinery.” She had never shared her workload, shared her worries, shared herself.
He cradled her face and she let the urge to flinch pass through her and shatter on her will. It wasn’t that his touch repelled her; she had simply spent too long afraid someone might see him do this and draw the correct conclusions. Too long afraid that if she let her weight fall into his arms, she would not be able to stand again under her own strength.
The pads of his fingers were warm against her skin. “You are not a machine. And you will kill yourself if you continue to act like one.”
“Like my father,” she said, and laughed. “How many times did Mother say that to me? ‘You’re just like your father.’”
“You do not have to be.”
She lifted her cheek from his hand, and finally looked him fully in the face. “But I would like to be. That’s what you didn’t understand, when I wouldn’t leave with you.” She meant it professionally, but as the words came out she remembered her father’s cursory kisses on the top of her mother’s head, the way their marriage seemed to function like a business or alliance between foreign powers. In her memory, there was no instance in which they leaned on each other.
Now she wondered if they had only hid it from her, and the world. Holding up under strain alone took a steep toll; in a geopolitical alliance, didn’t one power support another in a crisis?
He lifted her knuckles to his lips. When he spoke, she felt his lips move, saw his jaw shift beneath his closely trimmed beard. “You so rarely spoke about your family. I knew you had a brother, but…”
Her fingers twitched, unbidden, and he smoothed them with his own. “I wish you hadn’t heard all that. It was…” She squeezed his hand. “Thank you, for getting them all in order like you did. I couldn’t have stood the scramble much longer.”
“I am glad I did hear it,” he said. “I want to share these things with you. I want to help you bear them.” She could feel his breath on the sensitive skin.
Her breath hitched, but she steadied it.
“Jinadh,” she said, putting one foot over the precipice.
He made a small noise of assent, mouth opening against the divot between her knuckles so she felt the warm inner edge of his lips.
“If we run—”
The movement of his breath ceased against her hand. She imagined she could feel even his blood pause in its beating.
“If we run,” she repeated, leaping into open water from the crumbling headland of her certainty, “we have to think about money. I won’t have anything beyond what I can carry—they aren’t going to let me access any of my accounts once they realize what I’ve done.” She should pull her hand away from him; he had turned it over and laid his face in her palm, rubbing his beard against it like a cat, and kissing the pulse point on her wrist. Then she realized that she didn’t have to; that she could take small comfort in his touch and still forge ahead. “And forgive me, but you are a very charming sponge. You live on your aunt’s generosity, and that won’t last if—Are you even listening to me?”
His laughter was almost too low to hear, but she felt his body move and the exhalation against her skin. When he spoke, it was in Porashtu, and the sensuality of the language in his mouth caught her by surprise. She had forgotten how it could sound, when it wasn’t being used as a tool of diplomacy, a lever against an opponent.
«Enough to know you should put it all aside for now,» he said. «Tonight, my love, have faith.»
* * *
After that dinner, Cordelia was ready to walk back to the city and start auditioning for any other studio that would have her, with or without references or an understanding of the local language.
But that wouldn’t get guns for her scrappers, so she took herself in hand and dragged her rear out of the dining room. Asiyah invited her to smoke hookah with him, and she knew she ought to do it to build some kind of fellow feeling, but she just couldn’t face another minute of conversation.
Out the back door the terrace was quiet and shadowy. Cordelia sank into one of the woven divans and put her face in her hands.
Cyril had been alive this whole time. Mother’s tits. And now he was … well. Who knew? Ari’s face hung in her mind’s eyes, slack as a death mask.
And Vasily Memmediv had done it all. Or at least, enough of it to get eyeball-deep in rancid shit with Ari.
And her? Well, she was wading in there, too, if she was honest with herself. And it was too late to get out, even if she wanted to.
Under the sound of the waves, she heard the sharp ring of hard leather shoes on marble. Faint light from the inner rooms of the house showed the edge of a silhouette against a darkened archway.
Geddan shoes, and not tall enough to be Ari or small enough to be Daoud. Asiyah had been wearing slippers.
“You can find somewhere else to feel sorry for yourself,” she told Memmediv. “I don’t want to watch.”
He didn’t quite laugh—it was a sort of loud sigh, pushed out at speed. “Are you going to knock me down if I don’t go?”
“Nah,” she said. “Too easy.”
“Indeed.” He struck a match, startling her, and held it to the straight between his lips. “From what I hear, you like your tasks impossible.”
“Yeah?” She cocked her head, inviting more despite herself.
“Pulan says you’re going back to Gedda. I don’t like your chances.”
“What else you hear? And where from?”
“Where do you think?” he asked. “I know what I look like, but the CIS doesn’t just push papers.”
“I listen to the wireless,” she said. “And read the papers when I can. I know what you’ve been doing to my people.”
“Not me,” he said, and she was surprised by the softness of it.
“That pity I hear?”
“I was aiming for sympathy.”
She shook her head. “I don’t want it from you.”
“Too late,” he said. “I admire what the Catwalk has done, with so little.”
“You calling us cheap?”
“Thrifty. Inventive. Determined.”
“Yeah, well.” She pulled her feet up off the tile and tucked them under her rear. “Look what all it’s done for us. Acherby’s still sitting in the Cliff House and parliament ain’t sitting anywhere. Decent folk are getting drug in to inform on their neighbors, and their neighbors are getting penned up under armed guard to die of dysentery.”
“Your people aren’t decent folk,” he said. “They’re soldiers.”
“They’re idiots,” she said, meaning it hard when the word came out and feeling sorry about it before she took her next breath. “I’m an idiot.” He didn’t try to reassure her. She was grateful for that, but a little pinned, too. “Inaz asked me what I thought I was doing, and I got to admit, I ain’t fighting a war right now. I’m spitting at a fire.”
He finally left the doorway and came to the patio furniture, walking slow, putting down one foot before he picked up the next. When he sat, he took a shaky breath and hung his head before he spoke.
“Since we’re sharing,” he said, “I will admit that on our own, we have little hope of making a dent. Popular opinion has turned from us; not because Tatiens don’t want their land, but because they have given up hope of ever taking it back. These peace talks with Tzieta? Would not
have happened five years ago, when our pride was starving and savage.”
“Why now, then? The Ospies lifted the state tariffs, and you all felt grateful for the bone?”
He snorted. “What they gave us was a mercy killing. There is no more desperation now, because there is no more pride. A fight like mine, pride is the only thing that will keep you bleeding. Now Dastya is becoming a tired cause; if Tatié is not roused soon, it will swallow this armistice without complaint.”
Tired. That was for sure. We need more phosphorus, more copper pipes, more food. We can’t afford that and still pay bribes. Can we hold out another week, another month, another year?
Victory had never seemed like a possibility. Only spiteful, grinding opposition.
She stared into Memmediv’s dark eyes, caught in a web of pained lines and tired shadows. He stared back from deep beneath hard eyebrows; he had bones you could bruise yourself on if you got too close.
But getting in with him might be worth the black and blue, if they could offer each other something. She hated to think of throwing in with the man who’d done for Cyril, but a lot of the bitter things she’d swallowed in the last few years had helped her on her way.
“Sounds to me like we got similar problems,” she said.
Memmediv cocked his head, and the ember on his straight flared before he pulled it from his lips to say, all smoky, “And?”
“You think this might be one of those times when two left turns’ll take you right?”
He squinted at her through his cigarette haze, and she could feel him hesitating at the edge of a cliff, casing a narrow bridge across, no railings. Gauging what might be worth the risk of crossing to the other side.
She knew the feeling.
There was a hard irony in fighting back against the Ospies: It required blind trust on an order Cordelia would not have countenanced before. You had to trust everyone to do their jobs, to look one way while you looked the other. But on the flip side of the coin, you couldn’t really trust anyone, not all the way.
The Catwalk was good at what it did, or had been until this latest spate of roundups. Still, you couldn’t trust every board of it; there were paths she didn’t care to walk for fear of dry rot that still did their job enough she left them alone.
Hammering down another moldy board, holding her breath when she stepped across it—if it would get her where she wanted to be, she’d take the risk.
“You got money, right?” she asked. “And old soldiers. Folk who know their way around real war. And you got some way to get your guns over the border from the drop point in Tzieta.”
That got her a grudging nod: hardly more than a dip of his chin and the gleam of changing light across his eye.
“All right. So we got folk inside Gedda proper. Not just Tatié. We got ’em in all four states, but they’re hanging on by their little fingers and they’re scared because they don’t know from beans. We made up most of what we did as we went along.”
“I think that we have very different goals,” he said. “My people want to break away from Gedda—federal policy has never aligned with the needs of Tatié. It has made us check our blows for too long. Even under the Ospies, who promised otherwise.”
“Well, there you go,” said Cordelia. “We want the Ospies gone. After that, I don’t care what you do.”
“You misunderstand me,” he said. “I don’t care about the Ospies. They can keep the rest of Gedda if they want, as long as they cede my state to its own independent government.”
Cordelia closed her eyes and blew out a breath. She was ready to hit him, but it might put him under, or do worse, the state he was in. Maybe he’d forget the whole thing that way. But those bright black eyes were a pitch trap and she knew he wouldn’t. Which meant she had to convince him now, or he’d be laughing at her as long as they both breathed above the dirt.
“Look, you rotten cockle.” She let her feet down, put her elbows on her knees, and leaned in close to his face. Bruising distance. He winced as he tried to focus. “I didn’t open up this line of conversation so we could argue over millet seeds. You’re losing ground to folk who don’t see an end in this for them. They’re ready to sign away the thing you’ve been chewing your own leg off for because they think you chewed it off for nothing.”
“You think I don’t dwell on that every night before I go to sleep?” he said, weary as a cart horse.
She put a hand up to stop him. “I say, you’re on the eastern front of this and we’re on all the others. The Ospies won’t let you go ’cause you poke them with a stick; you’ve got to land a mortar where it hurts them. Throw in with me, this won’t be the same old worn-out scrabble about Dastya. It’ll be civil war. The Ospies ain’t ready for that, and they’ll crumble like dried-up swineshit. Plus, you show a little strength, flex your muscles, prove yourselves. Give your people’s pride a meal. Do this with me, you get what you want, we get what we want, and then we shake hands and get back to our own business. Do you clock me or are you still standing there blowing air up your own asshole?”
He looked a little shocked. Good. If she was going to swallow all the hate she felt toward him and shake his hand, she needed him to look a little less like he knew better than her. Even if it might be true.
CHAPTER
TWENTY
The sheet was cool on Lillian’s skin when she woke up and stretched, sore as if from vigorous exercise. But she hadn’t—
Her flexing foot struck a calf, slipped to a hairy ankle.
That pulled her fully out of sleep, into a bedroom that was not hers, nor even the bedroom Satri had given her. This one was larger, airier, with a balcony at the southwest corner, open onto an ocean view and the cliffs marching down the coast. Royal falcons stooped from every curl of the bed frame, burned in the brightly painted frescos, glittered in the mosaic of the floor. Somewhere on the grounds, outside the open window, a peacock bawled.
She craned her neck to look above her head, and sure enough: the royal crest hung above, vaguely threatening with its curved scimitar and flail, its growling hyena and screaming bird of prey.
Reflexive anxiety spread through her body like a fever, making her flush. She used to have dreams like this: waking up in a room like this one, next to Jinadh. She would open her eyes, convinced everything was real, and then the door would burst open and—
But it didn’t. Distantly, she heard someone else open theirs, the rattle of a tray, the murmur of voices. No one disturbed the peace of the royal suite.
Still shaken, Lillian turned carefully onto her side. She had never made it this far, in her dreams. She had known he was beside her but never seen his face.
In sleep his lips parted slightly, and the permanent small furrow between his eyebrows smoothed flat. Someone breathing more easily, without so many misgivings, would have leaned in to kiss that small patch of skin, dusted with fine, dark hair. She used to wake him like that.
This morning she only ghosted the tips of her fingers across it, barely touching, and then pressed them to her lips. She did not want to rouse him, though she wasn’t sure why. Some combination of rational fears—they would have to talk, to make decisions—and irrational. If he opened his eyes, perhaps she would find they were in his dream, and might still be disturbed, discovered.
He must have sensed her wakefulness. Though he did not quite open his eyes or speak, he made a sound that was half a word and moved closer, curling into the line of her body. The touch of his skin felt like a vivid memory, but it was in the present and very real: dry and cool like the coarse back side of charmeuse. When she—cautiously—put her nose into the tangle of his hair, she smelled nutty argan oil, stale tobacco smoke, and the last heart notes of his cologne.
“Lillian?” This time he was awake, and she had to gather herself before she could afford to pull her head back and face him. Her eyes stung and her heart fought to escape its cage.
«Are you well?» he asked, blinking sleepily. The divot between his eyebrows returned.<
br />
«No,» she said, which made him laugh until he woke fully and got a look at her face.
«You’re frightened,» he said. «About what?»
She laughed, then. “Reach in the hat and choose one.”
Sliding one arm through the space between the mattress and her ribs, he put the other in the divot of her waist and pulled them closer together.
“I’m a traitor to my government—a crime for which my brother was killed.”
“Or not,” said Jinadh, into the crease of her neck.
“Might as well have been,” she amended. “And the man who drew him into treachery has drawn me just as surely, using my son as bait. Not to mention that a secret I’ve rigorously kept for a decade has abruptly come into the open.”
He moved away, so she could see his face if she worked to focus on it. “The last one. Why does that frighten you?”
“I don’t—” She closed her eyes and caught the raw inside of her lip in her teeth, trying to sort out the strands of thought snarled in her skull. “No, I do know. It’s … I worry if I let this one thing go, if I give myself that much leave … that it will feel so good that I forget to—oh.”
His hand had slipped between her thighs.
«Moon-eyes,» he said, «fire of my heart. Please breathe.»
She did, shuddering.
His next words were spoken against the curve of her throat, barely audible, more felt than heard. «You will not forget, because of who you are.»
“Wound tight?” she gasped. Sweat prickled between her breasts.
He smiled against her skin, then licked the place beneath her jaw that always ached with tension. «As a watch spring. But, too, you are careful, and patient, and circumspect.» He licked the other side of her neck, nipped her earlobe. «Graceful, poised. A diplomat.»
By now she could not speak, only bite down on whimpers and wrap her fingers in Jinadh’s hair until he hissed with pain. But when she tried to let him go he pressed the curve of his skull into her palm and said, «It’s fine, it’s fine,» so she tore at him, put her teeth into the meat of his shoulder to stifle a cry.
Armistice Page 23