Armistice

by Lara Elena Donnelly

It was a bigger station than some of the small towns they’d passed through kept, but Cantrell had the school, and the school meant parents and kids coming and going with trunks and baggage. Plus it meant things brought in to feed them, teachers brought in to teach them, lecturers and guests and old graduates. The town had more money than its neighbors, too, if the pretty shops and streets were any indication.

  She couldn’t have said if it looked any different now than before, but suspected it didn’t.

  “All right,” said Cordelia, climbing out. “See you soon, one way or the other.”

  And then Loren was gone with the car around the corner, and Cordelia was standing at the station staring up the stairs. She took them carefully, unused to heels, and went into the foyer.

  After the elaborate interiors of Porachin buildings—tile, gilding, carved screens, and embroidered hangings—the austere white marble and dark wood looked stark as an overexposed photograph: nearly black and white, all straight lines and plain stone.

  “Excuse me,” she said to the young man in the ticket booth, taking care to keep her words in order and her whine tamped down. “Is the station agent in?” She couldn’t ask if it was still Greasepaint; she didn’t know his real name. Didn’t even know what he looked like.

  “What’s your business with him?”

  Kidnapping? Sedition? “I’m a friend of his cousin Pearl’s,” she said, cousin Pearl being the fake family member all Catwalk members shared.

  “Cousin Pearl?” The ticket boy didn’t look convinced, and for an awful moment she was sure somebody’d sung about the code. Her mouth went dry as sawdust. Then the boy said, “I didn’t know he had one.”

  “She lives down in the city,” said Cordelia, trying to summon some spit so her tongue didn’t cleave to the roof of her mouth. “I told her I was coming and she said I ought to drop by. Said she’d ring him up to let him know I was coming.”

  The boy shrugged. “I’ll check for you.”

  Waiting was hard. There wasn’t anybody in the station to pretend for—it was late, and between trains—but she tried to look normal anyhow, like she wasn’t standing on tacks in stocking feet. Like she wasn’t hoping the man who came down the stairs the ticket boy had disappeared up would recognize her for a friend.

  If he didn’t clock cousin Pearl, and didn’t by some miracle have one of his own, she’d have to play it off as a misunderstanding. If he clocked cousin Pearl but knew her for a Catwalk signal in a way she didn’t want?

  Well, that was why she’d had Loren park down the tracks. She could see the doors to the platform from here. Provided a train didn’t come through, she had a clear shot at an escape.

  It took the ticket boy long enough to dig up the station agent. By the time she heard the office door and footsteps on the stairs, Cordelia could feel sweat gathering between her shoulder blades.

  When the kid hit the floor, he was leading an older man in a neatly pressed black suit: a bland-faced sort of sculler with thinning dark hair neatly parted at the center. He looked like somebody’s boring uncle. He sure didn’t look like the kind of person who’d throw in against the Ospies. The sweat between her shoulders dripped to the waistband of her skirt.

  “Hello,” he said, offering his hand to shake. “Aldous Dyer.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Dyer.” At least the gloves would keep him from feeling her damp palms. She hoped he wouldn’t clock the stuffed false fingers. “Pearl said she rang you up? Let you know I was coming?”

  His unreadable smile reminded her horribly of Van der Joost, his look of satisfaction while she sobbed into a spreading puddle of her own blood, swallowing bile as she told him everything he’d asked her to.

  “Oh,” said Dyer. “Yes. I know who you are.”

  At that, her stomach dropped three feet straight down; she almost fancied she could hear the smack of it on the marble floor.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Lillian got the last ferry into Hoti, and only made it by the barest edge of her nails. In the dead hours of the night, she sat under a lamp in the lounge and tried to read the week-old gossip magazine. Not Gelari. Her already rampant heart would not have survived the sight of Jinadh’s byline.

  A cab across town took her to the harbor. Satri had given her the berth number for the yacht, and she had learned it by heart. This many hours before dawn, the part of the harbor dedicated to passenger crafts was nearly empty. Her heels echoed on the boardwalk.

  A woman in white-and-gold livery stood at the bottom of the gangway, swaying sleepily. She straightened at the sound of Lillian’s footsteps and gave a half bow.

  “First Officer Sandeepa Karthi,” she said. “You must be Lillian DePaul. Welcome aboard the Umandir.”

  The yacht was small—perhaps eighty-five feet—but luxuriously appointed. Officer Karthi led her up the gangway onto the deck, into a partially enclosed patio open at the stern to the breeze and the view, decorated with potted palms and strings of colorful lights lit against the predawn gloom. It had rained in the night, and the clouds lingered.

  «There’s coffee in the galley, if you’d like some,» said Officer Karthi. «And the cook could make you breakfast. Unless you’d prefer to retire to your cabin?»

  «Where’s Jinadh?» she asked, and saw a flicker of something unpleasant pass over Karthi’s expression.

  «He couldn’t sleep,» said Karthi, «so he went out for a stroll. He should be back soon.»

  But he was not.

  They sat around the table under the colored lights and finished the pot of coffee. The clouds burned off and the sky in the east over town began to glow pink. Lillian yawned, the back of her hand across her mouth, and felt like it belied her inner turmoil. The clock ticked. The sky brightened by another degree. Jinadh still failed to show.

  A woman came down from the wheelhouse and introduced herself as Captain Amunpoor. «Your pardon,» she said, «but the tide will be turning soon. If we want to leave Hoti this morning—»

  «Still waiting on Addas,» said Karthi.

  Amunpoor’s eyes drifted toward Lillian, then snapped smartly back to her first officer. «Come tell me as soon as he’s aboard.»

  «I don’t understand,» said Lillian, alarmed that her own voice sounded so close to tears. It was the moment she realized exactly how tired she was, and exactly how much faith she had placed in this delicate, porcelain plan. «What’s happened to him? He should be here.»

  As if she had spoken an incantation, a shadow passed in front of the risen sun’s glare.

  «And I am,» said Jinadh. «Though it isn’t thanks to you.»

  * * *

  «You had no right.» It was the fourth time he’d said it, and it wasn’t getting any easier to hear.

  «I did,» she said, speaking softly, evenly, using the voice she employed when speaking to angry or panicked diplomats after they saw their names in unflattering print. «It was as much my secret as yours.»

  «Did you not think it might make things more difficult for me? People know my face, Lillian.»

  The ship hit a swell and she put a hand out to brace herself, then settled gingerly onto the foot of the bed. They were closed into the master cabin at the prow, where they had retreated after Jinadh’s arrival and a decided lack of pleasantries.

  «They know mine too,» said Lillian.

  «The press know your face.» He shook his head—not a negation, but disbelief. «The people know mine.»

  «I apologize if it caused problems for you,» she said. «But I thought—»

  «No,» he said, volume rising. «You didn’t! I barely got back to the ship this morning. If you turn the radio on right now, parliament has probably declared a state of emergency. Auntie may have a heart attack. People tried to stop me in the street, Lillian. Someone spat on me. Who knows? The captain might even throw me overboard. I can never come back here, now.»

  «It doesn’t matter,» she said. «We were never going to come back. Not for years, at least.»

&
nbsp; The blood went from his face, as though he were only just realizing what their flight meant. «That wasn’t your choice to make.»

  “I didn’t make it!” Anger threw her back into her native language. “Not on my own. We made that choice together, eight years ago. And now we’re accepting the consequences.”

  Anger, likewise, kept Jinadh in his. «You should have asked.»

  “When was there time? Did you want me to ring you up from Flagg’s office last night?”

  «We’ve had years to do this!» he said. «And you refused, every time.»

  “You didn’t want to tell,” she said. “You wanted to run! So here we are. We’re running.”

  «I only wanted to be with you. To live normally.»

  It drew a bitter laugh from her. Live normally. “This is the only way we can. With no more secrets to exploit.”

  He shut his eyes and fell against a patch of wall, head tipped back to expose the stubbled column of his throat. The skin around his eyes pinched tight, emphasizing his crow’s-feet.

  “I’m right,” she said. “You can’t tell me I’m not right.”

  When he swallowed, she could see the muscles slide beneath his skin, the sharp movement of his larynx. When he spoke, though, he didn’t tell her she was wrong. He only said, «Please. Don’t ever do this to me again.»

  It was everything she’d feared, this push and pull of risk and responsibility. She was terrible at it: selfish, controlling, decisive. She had ruined it all before they even began, doing only what she felt was necessary.

  Aiming for levity to break the tension, she said, «I don’t think I’ll have to. We only have one son.»

  «That isn’t what I meant.» He put a hand to his face, across his eyes, and from the movement of his lips she saw with some alarm that he was about to cry.

  “Jinadh,” she said, and stood to go to him. But he put out an arm to stop her coming closer.

  «Listen to me,» he said. «I love you, and admire you. But I have spent my life subject to the whims of people who view me as an ornament, an afterthought. Someone whose opinion matters very little, if at all.» He dropped his shielding hand and met her gaze. «I want to spend my life with you, Lillian. But it must be mine to spend.»

  Embarrassed heat crept across the bridge of her nose and spread over her cheeks, but she didn’t break eye contact. She had done the necessary thing. He could not shame her about that.

  «If you want this to work,» he said, «we have to make it work together.»

  “I made an executive decision,” she said. “I didn’t have any other options.”

  «There are always other options.»

  “There have never been any other options. Not for us.”

  «There might have been,» he said, «if you had let us try.»

  She wanted to say, How dare you. She wanted to demand a list: What options? Enumerate them for me now. But she also wanted, desperately, not to have this fight again. Not now, when it was so close to becoming irrelevant.

  She shifted her conversational weight to bear his heavy accusation more easily. A complimentary tack would change the tenor of their rhetoric, make it less confrontational. «You’re such an optimist.»

  It worked; her words conjured a wavering smile out of his distress. «One of my many flaws, I know.» She wanted to know if it was surrender or self-deprecation, but couldn’t tell. She knew, though, that either way he had bent to her will. It turned her stomach that she had such power, and filled her with relief.

  «What are mine?» She took the hand he had held up to keep her back and drew him closer to her, the bed behind her a suggestion, an offer, a distraction.

  «You don’t have any,» he said, and the shift in his weight was not a metaphor—it pushed her back against the footboard, so she fell. «Which is in itself the worst kind.»

  Not for the first time, his opacity impressed her. Was he insulting her? Was it a compliment, or pity?

  The next roll of the waves brought him down on top of her, and to her great relief neither of them spoke again, except to sigh and curse and say each other’s names.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Ten minutes later, Cordelia was still shaking. Her teacup rattled in its saucer so bad she had to set it down and clasp her hands together.

  “I’m so sorry I gave you such a fright,” said Aldous. Now that she knew he wasn’t about to take the rest of her fingers off, his blandness had lost its terror and become kind of sweet. She could see why nobody had clocked him: How could you suspect this pudding-faced father-type of anything? He seemed about as sneaky as milk custard.

  This man alone had helped her people derail or destroy nine freight trains last year. Five railway folk had died on account of him. And here he sat, stirring a lump of sugar into his tea.

  “I’m pretty ready to jump at a squeak these days,” she said.

  “I’m very sorry to hear that. I’ve been on edge myself.”

  “Cousin Pearl says you ain’t been real chatty lately.” The hot tea, once she got it down her chute, settled her. She hadn’t realized how numb she’d gone, from fear.

  “Well, it’s been … tense, hasn’t it? The family situation. And, I’ve had other things on my mind. Politics, you know. People are very riled up about pushing over the border in Liso. I think it’s a trifle … jingoistic, myself. Closer to home, those peace talks limping along in the east. And then, right in our own back gardens, there’s the matter of Acherby.”

  “What about him?”

  “His son started at the school this year. He’s making a big show of coming to get the boy himself for Solstice, see the prize-giving and what have you. There are police all over town, and some militia folk too. It’s been … twitchy around Cantrell the last week.”

  “Mother’s tits,” she said. The news hit her so fast she hardly felt it.

  “I’d close my teeth on that kind of swear,” he advised. “They boarded up our temple up a year or so ago, and at the Equinox someone lit a fire. We lost some beautiful stained glass, hundreds of years old.”

  “Acherby’s here?” she asked, setting her cup down too hard. The spoon rattled in the saucer.

  Aldous nodded. “He gave the commencement speech yesterday for the older boys, and his son was awarded … oh, a commendation for good sportsmanship, or something. I believe they’re leaving tomorrow, with the general outpouring. Traffic will be a terror.”

  Damnation. Loren was still waiting on her. “Thanks for the warning. I gotta get out of here and get back to the folks I came with, so they know you ain’t cut my throat or something.”

  His laugh came near to a giggle. “It’s thrilling to think I might be so dangerous.”

  He’d been pretty damn dangerous to those five people on the trains they’d blown. She didn’t mention it.

  “Before I go,” she said, “you know anything about how this pickup works? With the kids?”

  Thoughtfully, eyes unfocused, he poured himself another cup of tea. “Most of the children take the train themselves—it’s such a festive time of year around the station, I adore it. So is the beginning of fall term. But, some of the higher-profile students do have chauffeurs or something along those lines. Just another reason this Acherby situation is so absurd.”

  “Yeah, but … I don’t know, do they check you against a list or anything? Do you have to talk to somebody, or can you just … grab the kid and stuff him in a car?”

  Suspicion or distaste pinched the corners of his eyes. “I’m not sure I like where this line of questioning is headed.”

  “It ain’t kidnapping,” she said. “I’m picking up a kid for a friend; I got a letter from her and everything. I’m just nervous ’cause I never done it before, and I don’t want to stand out too far, for obvious reasons.”

  “Right,” he said, though he still didn’t look convinced.

  “Listen,” she said, lowering her voice. “This kid’s ma, she’s been in a bad spot—under the Ospies’ boot. They won’
t let her see him, even at holidays, and they been using him against her like a knife to her back. I’m getting them both out of a bad jam.”

  As she talked, she saw his expression settling, his soft brown eyes turning placid again. “There,” he said when she was done. “I like the sound of that much better. How old is he?”

  She had to cast back in her brain for that. “Eight, I think.”

  “All right. If he were an older boy you wouldn’t have to interact much with the staff at all. As it is, you’ll have to talk to the matron of his dormitory, and she’ll double-check with the dean of students. Her name, I think, is Sarason. We’ve lunched together on occasion.”

  “She liable to give me trouble?”

  “It will all depend on the boy,” he told her. “Does he know you’re coming?”

  “He knows somebody is. The way his mom tells it, he’s used to strangers in black cars coming for him at the end of term, as long as they’ve got a letter from her.”

  “That’s good,” said Aldous. “Some of the children have family drivers they’ve known their whole lives. If they don’t recognize the person who’s come to fetch them, or make the slightest fuss, the school won’t send them away until things are cleared up.”

  She hoped this kid was a quick one, and turned his cards up behind two hands if he turned them up at all. She couldn’t afford a fuss.

  “How do you know all this stuff?” she asked Aldous. “You got a kid in school?”

  “Oh no,” he said. “I’m a bachelor, and childless. But I’ve lived in this town my whole life, and I was a day boy at the school when I was young.”

  “Really? They let you in there with all those swell kids?”

  Instead of taking offense, he chuckled. “The Dyers have always been a well-regarded family in town, and well-to-do. My mother was the station agent before I was; it’s a position with some social cachet, though the responsibilities are very real. I’m proud to bear the title, and proud of the work I’ve done.”

  That brought her up short. “Even now? I mean, with…”

  “With what I did for cousin Pearl, you mean?”