Armistice

by Lara Elena Donnelly

  She had her back to him, face turned toward the view. The edges of her silhouette blurred in the gloaming, but her carriage was unmistakable: the lift of the chin, the insolence in the crooked line of her shoulders.

  “Do you often have trouble sleeping?” he asked, softly, so she would not startle.

  He thought, for a moment, that he had succeeded. She did not jump or gasp. But it took her several seconds too long to turn and face him, and her reticence spoke of alarm: a need to collect herself before she spoke.

  When she did look away from the black sea and fading sky, she crushed the air from his chest. Dawn made her features indistinct, enough that he forgot, again, and stepped toward her. When he remembered himself, he curled his hands into fists and froze, halfway across the parlor.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  He had to take a breath before he answered. “Certainly not.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, as if she had any reason to be. Ducking her head, she scrubbed at goosebumps on her arms.

  Aristide crossed the rest of the room slowly, until he stood beside her in the doorway. The breeze off the water was cool, this early. It plucked at the silk of Lillian’s nightdress, raising ripples across her belly and breasts.

  “You’re leaving today,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Back to Myazbah?”

  “Unfortunately.”

  “… And Memmediv?”

  She only looked at him. Her eyes were blue like Cyril’s, but her gaze was cold and anemic as thin air. He had never been so asphyxiated, staring into Cyril’s eyes; Lillian’s stare made him short of breath and dizzy.

  “I apologize,” he said. “You shouldn’t have found out like that.”

  She lifted one shoulder, attempting to shrug. But as if the movement had broken some hold she held over her body, a shiver passed up her spine. “No one would have told me, otherwise.”

  Outside, a gull cried. In the potted plants on the terrace, a nightingale sang a few sweet notes. After some time in silence, listening to the birds, Aristide asked, “What are you going to do?”

  She tilted her head and considered him peripherally, so that those blue eyes caught the growing light like chips of ice. Not tame ice, either: not the kind that sat politely in a cocktail glass. Not even the kind that coated branches in the winter, or crept across a pond. This was glacier ice, mountain ice. Remote. Forbidding. The kind of ice that turned sunlight into fire. He had heard stories of mountaineers gone blind from glare.

  “You don’t need to tell me,” he said, ashamed of the way her sideways stare stirred fear in him.

  “No,” she said, and softened. “It’s all right. I can’t … I need to learn I cannot do this on my own. I’ve done so much on my own, for so long.”

  “Admirably,” he said, for though he did not have a full understanding of the arc of her career, she was terrifying and she had survived. “Admirable” likely did not do her justice.

  “I … we. We are going to Liso, I think.”

  That startled him. “Really?” He wasn’t sure he wanted her to. Though she certainly had a right, it felt so much like his path to pursue.

  She surprised him, though. “Not for long,” she said. “And not far: just to Dadang. Only until … It’s just that Asiyah can smooth things over for us there, and Pulan would like us out of Porachis. Away from … her, I suppose. Understandably. Mother and sons. This whole thing is such a mess.”

  “After Liso,” he said, “what then?”

  She shook her head, eyes closed, then opened them and looked out, searchingly, across the water. The diamond hardness had gone from her gaze and now, tear-shining, her eyes looked more like snowmelt. “Oh, how I wish I knew.” She shivered again, and he wanted to offer her his robe, but had nothing underneath, and could not imagine the agony of seeing another DePaul in the early morning, wrapped in another one of his dressing gowns.

  “Money is going to be a problem, I expect.” She said it briskly, with the same sharp pain as a sticking plaster swiftly pulled. “And where we’ll live I haven’t a clue. All Jinadh’s properties are entailed, and anyway, they’re in Porachis. Mine are mostly Geddan. There’s the chalet in Ibet but that’s the first place they would go looking, if they come after us.” She put delicate fingers to her temple, pressing into the curve of skin and bone where the fine filaments of her hair began. “You’ve run before,” she said. “How did you do it?”

  “Better than you.” He could hear the scorn sliding into his voice, and wasn’t proud of it. “With significantly more planning.”

  “Don’t be cruel,” she said. “Please. I’m asking for your help.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, glad to accept her censure for his bad habits. “I … you have to want it, I think. To know that what is on the other side will be worth the bother of getting there.”

  “Was it, for you?”

  The sun struck the water, finally. “No,” he said. “But it will be, for you.”

  * * *

  “Jinadh. Jinadh, wake up.”

  Lillian felt like she was playacting as a little girl on Solstice morning, badly. She was excited, yes, but also confused and not a little worried. Jinadh, still deeply asleep, mumbled something into his pillow as she shook him.

  “Wake up,” she said. “I need to talk to you about something.”

  He opened his eyes. Half awake, the muscles in his face slack, he seemed both older and younger—the tension had gone from his expression, but the lines at the corners of his eyes were more prominent, and the soft skin beneath them darker and more delicate without the animation of his mercurial expressions to make him look younger and less tired.

  Then he went through the motions of waking—blinked, swallowed, tried to speak and had to clear his throat—and settled with each action into the wakeful version of himself.

  The familiarity of the transition unsettled her—it was one that she had watched before, and forgotten about. How many more moments like this would there be, in which she remembered how to be in love?

  «What’s happening?» He sat up, unwinding himself from a sheet so fine it showed the shadows of his joints and moving muscles through the weave.

  «I spoke to Makricosta about our plans.»

  His thick brows wrinkled. «Was that wise?»

  «In retrospect, one of the best … no … » She patted the bedspread with an impatient hand, trying to call up the word in Porashtu. When she failed, she shrugged and said, “‘Canniest’ is the word. One of the canniest things I could have done.”

  «And?»

  «He has a house in Asu. Two, really, but the apartment in Sunho would suit us best, I think.»

  «What?» he said. «Asu?»

  «There are foreign language papers all over the city,» she said. «It’s very cosmopolitan. We could both find work. The important thing is that it gives us a place to … go to the ground?» The idiom translated awkwardly. She knew there was a better phrase, but her vocabulary was flighty this morning, fighting a losing battle against anticipation.

  Jinadh’s face, under his tangled storm of hair, shifted from confusion to comprehension as he took in what she was saying. «How much does he want?»

  «No,» she said, «he isn’t selling it. Just offering it to us, to use. Until he needs it back, I suppose.»

  «But that’s perfect.»

  «If there isn’t a catch,» she said. «It seems that there should be, from what I know of him.»

  «Admittedly,» said Jinadh, «I know less. But it is enough that I can speculate. He isn’t doing this for himself. He’s doing it for your brother.»

  «I had thought of that,» she said, picking at a bit of gold thread that had come loose from the embroidery on the coverlet.

  «But?»

  She sighed and smoothed the frayed bit of gold against the silk. «I don’t know. What I read, about their affair … there were not many details. And they had a great deal to offer each other, in their work, so I assumed�
��»

  But Jinadh was shaking his head. «Imagine how the dossier on our relationship might read.»

  «But Makricosta—» she began.

  «Is not a machine. Not any more than you are. Is it so impossible that he loved your brother?»

  Lillian thought of Cyril. Not as she had last seen him—his charming veneer crazed with the craquelure of bitterness and pain—but as the boy he’d been before their father packed him off to train as a kit. Before the irregular letters and the sudden appearances at holidays with bruises, plasters, and half stories.

  He had always been a little lazy, with a weakness for pleasure that often swamped his better judgment. As a child, he once made himself sick eating hard sauce with a spoon. But if he loved someone, he would lay down across a track for them, with the train oncoming. And he fell in love too easily: with causes, countries, people.

  Someone like that, she knew, could be used cruelly. He had been, in her opinion, by many hands: their father, the Regionalist government, the Ospies. But by Makricosta?

  You have no idea what you’ve cost me. Not the faintest trace of an understanding.

  Perhaps it was not so impossible, after all.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-TWO

  After the sun was over the horizon, things happened fast enough to make Cordelia’s head turn on its stalk.

  There were too many of them, by now, to fit in Pulan’s office without banging elbows, and nobody wanted to sit around the dining room table again. Instead, Pulan got them all together in the library, around a large table with the air of having been swept clear of its usual debris.

  And all of them included Aristide, who had asked to be let in on everything, and was working so hard to look prideful she got the feeling he’d rather hunch up like a vulture and glare. Maybe give a good peck at Memmediv’s guts, if he’d really had a beak and talons.

  Lillian’s fair skin didn’t hide the dark circles under her eyes. Beside her, Jinadh stared all haughty into the corner where the ceiling met the walls. From the angle of their arms, they were holding hands under the table. Lillian hid it better than he did.

  Asiyah’s eyes skimmed from face to face, as if looking for an in or a secret signal, and Inaz kept looking at him: a lieutenant ready for orders.

  Cordelia had the unhappy position opposite Ari, at the head or foot or whatever end of the table she was supposed to be occupying. And at her left hand, just around the sharp edge of the table’s corner: Memmediv. He kept his hands laced together in his lap, his eyes unfocused except when someone addressed him directly. Then she could see him wrangle his wits like elvers, hooking them through the lip and hauling them writhing to the surface.

  Ari must hit pretty hard.

  Satri doled out orders as if she were the general of a small and irregular army. “Mr. Memmediv, you and Ms. Hanes will depart from here this evening. Pramit will drive you to Anadh to catch your ship; first light tomorrow, an express liner to Amberlough City. You will be out of port before the ink on the first editions is dry. Once you make landfall, everything is up to you. Mr. Memmediv knows where we will meet, in the end.”

  She nodded to Daoud, who handed Cordelia an envelope. When she tipped it out onto the table, she got a spread of papers and documents for her trouble, complete with overlapping visa stamps that made it look like she’d been to a bunch of places she’d hardly even heard of.

  “My properties department has many talents,” Pulan told her, when she gawped at it. “You are now a Geddan diplomat.”

  “And when I’ve done my job?” Lillian’s voice verged on hoarse. “How will I get out of Anadh?” Then, she caught herself and looked at Jinadh. “How will we?”

  Some of the glee went out of Pulan’s eyes, and her tone turned business-hard. “I understand you have some method of contacting Sofie Cattayim? Yes, good. When we adjourn here, you will call; her story runs tomorrow morning.”

  “And then?”

  “You give us as many days as you can. I will send Jinadh on the Umandir up to Hoti, at the mouth of the Shadha. Take the ferry when you must leave Myazbah, and he will be there waiting for you. The Umandir will take you from Hoti to Dadang She is a fast little boat; you should arrive well ahead of Asiyah and the child.”

  Cordelia swallowed hard at the thought of that handoff. After that … well. It was a different set of logistics. After she and Memmediv passed Stephen to Asiyah, they’d be operating on a different timeline, with different goals. Everyone around this table would.

  “And me?” asked Aristide.

  “Ah,” said Pulan. “Yes. You will of course be traveling to the shoot with the rest of us. You are, after all, our director.”

  “And then? We both know I won’t be dawdling around making a musical. I can book my own passages.”

  The smile Pulan laid on him would have crisped the hairs on a softer man. “Of course not,” she said. “I have arranged something very tidy for you.”

  It wasn’t her smile that got him in the end. He held fast until she asked, “I do not think that you have ever flown?”

  “In an airplane?” The fact that he didn’t sass her, thought Cordelia, meant he knew she wasn’t joking.

  * * *

  As the afternoon slipped toward evening, Lillian gathered her things and said a strange farewell to Jinadh—she would be separated from him for a fraction of the time they had been kept apart before this, but they both wept, overcome by fast-paced change. She felt embarrassed about it, after.

  Red-eyed, she went down to wait for her car and, by some stroke of hideous luck, arrived in the foyer at the same time as Memmediv and his suitcase. Their gazes crossed, then strayed. Lillian pretended interest in a set of faïence figurines arrayed on a plinth. Memmediv whistled an abortive tune, then settled into a caned chair beside a potted palm.

  Anyone else, Lillian reflected, would have happily let him sit there in silence. Anyone else would have been grateful for the fiction that they had nothing to say to each other, and were in fact unaware of each other’s presence.

  But Lillian wasn’t good at leaving people to their own devices. She didn’t like to sit in silence wondering what they thought—she wanted to put thoughts in their head, control the direction of the conversation.

  “How’s your head?” she asked, speaking to the faïence.

  “Horrible,” he said. “But better than it was.”

  “Oh.” She didn’t say I’m glad, because it wouldn’t sound credible. “What shall I tell Flagg, if he asks about you?”

  “You won’t have time to tell him anything,” said Memmediv. “Tomorrow morning, your job will be more important than his.”

  “He’ll make me take the time,” she said. She could not turn to look at him. “He’ll want to know what happened here.”

  “Then tell him you don’t know. Tell him we kept you well away from negotiations, sent you out on the boat or to the beach. It’s too bad you didn’t get a sunburn.”

  “DePauls don’t burn,” she said, and immediately regretted mentioning her family.

  “Really? With your complexion?”

  “No. Dark eyebrows. We brown and bleach.” Then, because it was hanging between them, “By the end of summer holidays, my brother and I always looked like film negatives.”

  She wasn’t expecting an apology. If anything, she thought Memmediv might lapse back into silence. But she heard him shift on his chair and clear his throat.

  “Do you miss them?” he asked, after too long a pause. “Your family, I mean.”

  The words were out before she even considered them: a tinned response, ready to deploy without any preparation. “Of course.”

  In truth, she’d hardly seen her family all together in her life. Her father had been abroad most of her childhood, and her mother in Gedda at the bench. She’d been sent away to school at six. She and Cyril overlapped by a few years, but then went on to different secondary schools and universities. At most it was those scant summer weeks on the lake, or holiday
s at Damesfort. Then she’d joined the corps and hadn’t been back in Gedda beyond the odd month or two, stationed first in the Onyongo consulate, then the North Lisoan mission proper, then Yashtan, and finally Porachis. She’d been home for Mother and Daddy’s funerals, and when Cyril was in the hospital, but beyond that … sometimes it felt like she was just waiting for their next letters. Cyril, especially, had been an erratic correspondent. Months could go by between …

  Never three years, though. Stones, had it really been that long?

  But now that she would never see any of them again, she did miss them, truly. Or, the possibility of them. She had taken their existence in the world for granted. Now she was no longer a node in a network stretched across the globe, but a single blinking buoy on a dark sea.

  No. She had Stephen. She had brought him into this world, and would keep him safe. And now—terror and excitement burst in her chest and spread through her veins like someone had applied a soda siphon to her heart—she had Jinadh as well.

  “Do you miss yours?” she asked, rounding on Memmediv finally, snagging control of the conversation before he could … apologize? Excuse his actions? She wouldn’t be able to live with herself.

  “Every day,” he said, and there was no trace of anything tinned about it. There was blood in the words, and yearning.

  “Your parents,” she said, “are they—”

  “They still live in Tatié. In Solnin, now.”

  “The capital?” It was a sounding rope.

  “A rancid compromise.” His accent came on more strongly, held in the front of his mouth like sour spit. “I wouldn’t call it a capital city.”

  “Flagg said your father was an alderman, in Dastya.” This was more like it. He had let his emotions take over; she controlled the conversation’s course.

  “Yes. And my mother’s family dealt in dry goods. Now, he has a bad heart and a wrecked name, and she’s been working as a typist. A waste—she was very good at playing commodities.”