"We will get through this," Jahir said again, quieter: as if speaking prophecy now, with that same calm assurance. "But to do that... we need to survive the next few days. We must attend these sessions, ariihir. Please."
Vasiht'h said, "Maybe... maybe you should go alone. You can tell me what they say later."
"No." Implacable. And then, pained, "I won't leave you alone. I don't think I should." An apologetic kiss on their hands, then. "Please come."
What could he do? How could he say no?
Would that be how it ended up working? Jahir would go, and he would follow because he couldn't deny him, deny the mindline, deny the gifts the Goddess had given him? Would it hurt less with repetition?
Vasiht'h said, "Let me... let me just clean up."
He endured Jahir's hovering while he ate, though the last thing he wanted was to put anything in his roiling stomach. And after that, he obediently followed his partner through the ship to the conference room where the Captain was already talking with Lisinthir and one of the women from the charade: Cory, the one who'd offered the Ambassador her lap. They were joined by several others from the ship, including Triona, and then the meeting convened.
What they said, Vasiht'h didn't know, though he had some sense of Jahir arguing for them both, as he had during the planning for the rite that had made the Glaseah family. He knew he should be participating, that it was important that he pay attention, but he couldn't; he felt hollowed, as if his skin was supposed to be wrapped around a great turmoil and wasn't, and yet nothing had filled the space. The sensation left him feeling strange and not entirely present, and that the meeting seemed to go on forever only made him all the more lost. By the time it concluded he was so disoriented he couldn't even react to his partner's quiet reminder that they were supposed to practice.
Vasiht'h would go. What else could he do?
In some kinder universe, he would have been oblivious to Jahir's fear for him, and his mounting grief. But the mindline that he himself had welcomed left him no illusions.
"You're off to the gym, I hear?" Triona said, stopping him as the crew began to seep from the room.
Lisinthir glanced at her. "To practice, yes."
"Cory's told me a bit about what you consider practice." The Seersa flicked her ears sideways, diffident. "Mind if some of us join you? We could use the exercise ourselves. We won't interrupt your private lessons."
"More than welcome, and it is I who should be thanking you for the use of the facility."
Triona shook her head. "It's nothing. I'm glad you're being diligent about it. How are your pupils coming along? Your countryman seemed engaged in the discussion in the areas that applied to him."
"He has no more desire to be caught unprepared as the rest of us," Lisinthir said, wondering why she was keeping him—because she was very obviously keeping him. "He is no soldier, of course. But he should be able to keep himself in one piece, and his partner with him."
"You sure about that?"
There, that was the crux of it. Lisinthir rested his hands on the back of his chair and looked at her.
"You know the sort of work we do on the border," the Seersa said, tail twitching. "And you know what I do, given my specialty."
"I have some notion, yes."
She nodded. "Then I hope my judgment will carry some weight with you when I say something's gone very wrong with the Glaseah, and if someone doesn't shake him out of it he'll be a liability—or a corpse."
Brutally presented, but he couldn't disagree. He'd known the moment his cousin and Vasiht'h had entered the room that the problems that had been fretting Jahir into insomnia had not been dispelled by the night's sleep. Worse, unlike Triona, he knew that if Vasiht'h couldn't be brought round, Jahir would be crippled too... and it would be not one corpse left behind, but two.
More than anything, Lisinthir wanted this transmission to bring the Chatcaava before it summoned their rescue. He needed the information he could derive from a visit to their attacker's vessel, and if he could secure a prisoner, so much the better for them all—him, the Emperor and the Alliance too. But wanting that increasingly meant putting his House cousin and partner in a danger they might not survive, and that disturbed him.
It wouldn't stop him—it couldn't, not with two lives pitted against the fate of nations—but it disturbed him.
"I'll see what I can do," he said. "But for now, there is other work to be done."
She nodded. "I'll join you in a bit, then, since you don't mind."
"Not at all." He let her precede him out the door, then left for the gym. The nerve block seemed to be holding, but he was subtly aware that things were not well with him. It remained absurd that he was not regaining his condition now that he was being regularly nourished and protected from the depredations of the Chatcaavan court... but he wasn't, and that he could no longer tell how badly off he was concerned him. Perhaps he should ask his cousin to remove the barriers between himself and the pain? Except he would be of lesser use to everyone if he was incapacitated by it.
Raynor stopped him in the hall, drawing him from his thoughts. "Ambassador, a moment if you can spare it."
"Of course, Captain?"
"I'll need you tomorrow if you're up to it," Raynor said. "We're going to be running drills for the traps Cory's setting up with the partitions and since you've volunteered to be bait, we need you to be part of them."
"I'll be up to it," Lisinthir said. The lieutenant's suggestion that they use the emergency bulkheads to separate and trap large parties, if large parties they found themselves facing, had intrigued him. "I wouldn't miss it."
"Good. Bring the civilians if they're willing. They need the practice."
He had become his cousins' keeper? Interesting. Lisinthir also noted he was not, apparently, a civilian. "They may have prior engagements with Hea Borden."
Raynor made a cutting gesture with a hand. "This has to take priority. We're already working on borrowed time. I'm assuming worst case scenarios here: we send the message, we get maybe a day's warning if we're lucky before we have to deal with the Chatcaava."
"When will you send out the first?"
"Tomorrow evening at the latest."
"At the latest?" Lisinthir said, surprised. "Why so soon if you are concerned about the crew's preparedness? You could give yourself a few days to run your drills first."
Raynor shook his head. "I don't think we can afford to wait. Your healer tells me you're going to need a hospital soon, Ambassador... and our own reserves are dwindling. If we don't move now, the power we've got left coming from that second generator wouldn't be enough to charge the weapons for a single shot. No, it's got to be done as soon as possible." Raynor smiled without humor. "I'd send it now if I could, but we're not done siphoning the energy over to the main array. If we can light that panel up, I'll kick our last surveillance drone out and send the message tonight."
"It would be good for this to be over," Lisinthir murmured, flexing his fingers, remembering nails tearing flesh.
"The sooner the better." Raynor grinned. "Let's hope your dragons are prompt."
Lisinthir returned the smile, recognizing the hungers that motivated it. Raynor might not be pared to bone and nerve-edge battle instincts the way the Eldritch was, but he also wasn't the innocent to violence that some of his officers were. "I'll pray they are."
Less than a day before the transmission was released, he thought as he entered the gym. If the Chatcaava had been searching for them since... it depended on which direction they'd begun their search, of course. They could arrive within an hour of broadcast, or it could be days.
His students, barely willing and completely unwilling, were awaiting him. Two of the Pelted were also present, though they were already sparring against one another: close-quarters fighting, he saw, and approved. Chatcaavan ships did not have the long and roomy corridors their Alliance counterparts did, which greatly reduced the utility of the palmers the Pelted preferred.
That left
him to his cousins, and what he saw did not fill him with confidence. Jahir was wearing a mask that would have rebuffed an entire court, one that encompassed his eyes; had Lisinthir not known him well enough now to guess how rare that complete non-expression was, he would have been hard pressed to know his cousin's state at all. But that much self-control had to be hiding too much pain. And Vasiht'h... Vasiht'h wasn't angry. At least yesterday he'd resented having been dragooned into these little self-defense courses. Today he didn't seem to care, and Lisinthir distrusted apathy far more than he did anger. Anger he could work with. Apathy....
Nevertheless, they had work to do. "We begin," Lisinthir said. "Different task this time. Stay away from me."
What followed was not a disaster, but only because the word implied emotional distress that his students simply didn't have the energy to invest. Vasiht'h was sluggish, distracted or clumsy, and did not seem to hear direction half the time; worse, he didn't seem to hear his partner's either. As if in overcompensation, Jahir was skittish and divided his attention between the Glaseah and Lisinthir with the inevitable results. Halfway through the session, Lisinthir stopped them and sent Vasiht'h away to fetch water for them both. The moment the Glaseah had crossed the mat, Lisinthir stepped close to Jahir and said in their tongue, black as earth over a grave, "Tell me now."
"He thinks himself unfit because he does not want to follow me to this conflict," Jahir said, shadows flying over the words, and his distress was so palpable Lisinthir wanted to pull him into his arms.
"And... he thinks that you will go to it, and so he must follow."
"Worse, he believes he will be forsworn for not going. Not just to me, but to himself and his Goddess."
Vasiht'h was on his way back, but Jahir had given him enough to mull. Triona was right: if the situation couldn't be healed, couldn't at least be stitched up in anticipation of a real healing, then they would both be prey for the first fight that found them. It was an irony that they had become like him, he thought: holding their wounds together but very much in need of enough peace and help to become healthy again.
What to do? He gave them the order to defend and resumed their training, and let the problem simmer while he worked the agitation from his own muscles and the fear from theirs. Exhaustion would help blunt some of their desperation, and that would make any discussion with them less fraught. Because the discussion was inevitable. He had only to see the rigidity of Jahir's spine to infer the panic his cousin was concealing.
When he judged they'd had enough, he sent them on, staying to talk briefly with Triona and the others who'd been working alongside them. The Pelted had questions about the preferred fighting style of shipboard Chatcaava, and he was glad of the chance to arm them with the knowledge he'd paid so dearly to learn. They returned to their own practice when he begged off, working out how they'd fight in corridors that narrow. They were soft for the work to which Lisinthir had become accustomed... but they had the benefit of their training and their confidence and their will to the fight. He'd become fond of them. Perhaps it shouldn't have surprised him, given how he'd liked Laniis. But being here among the Pelted while they struggled through this crisis had helped him make some peace with having to live in the Alliance while seeing to his half of the work. He might begrudge the time he spent apart from his beloveds, who after all would not live even a third his span, but he did not plan to be away long if he could help it. And if he was to be here at all, it was a balm to find the people worthy of his protection.
He knew how to live in a world where the Pelted were wingless freaks, and that had kept him alive in the Empire. He could now slide back into a world where the Pelted were people... and this would keep him alive in the Alliance. A fair trade, he thought, and saluted them before he left. Cory tossed off a quick reply, fingers to brow, and Lisinthir smiled.
But now, to a different duty.
He found his two cousins in their cabin, dressed for bed but not in it and also patently not talking to one another. Jahir was sitting on the couch, his body language as tightly constrained as an Eldritch courtier's. Vasiht'h sat near him by the table, front paws together with one wrist cocked, as if he'd been scratching himself. There were uneaten ration bars in front of them, and untouched water, and the pall in the air was so distinct it seemed to depress the lighting.
He did not try to dispel it with humor or sarcasm. Sitting on the table between them, he threaded his fingers together, hanging them between his knees, and addressed himself to Vasiht'h. "One act changed the heart of the Chatcaavan Emperor. A single act."
The Glaseah looked up, which was more than Lisinthir had expected.
"I had given him the Eldritch shape, and with it the power to sense the feelings of others," Lisinthir continued, ignoring his cousin to concentrate on Vasiht'h. "And we had been spending... I don't know. Weeks. Months. Playing with that ability. This culminated in an evening where the Emperor insisted that he was the stronger of us both and I countered with the assertion that he was wrong, and that what proved this was my ability to bear the suffering of others."
How vivid that night remained in his mind, though others had smeared, their details lost.
All that you can bear, I can bear twice.
Prove it.
Lisinthir drew in a breath. "The act that convinced him involved my torture." He looked at Vasiht'h. "This he chose because he had forced me to undergo it before in order to prevent the death or torment of others. It was one of the few ways he had to keep me in check, because while serial rape I could live with—poorly, but I could, because it involved my fighting it—complete powerlessness undid me."
Vasiht'h drew in a breath but didn't speak. Lisinthir could feel Jahir's regard and thought, Later for you, cousin.
He continued. "Because I wanted him to know what I'd been willing to undergo to save others, I permitted the torture. He was to stay with a hand on my face, to listen through the skin. And this he did, and it lasted..." He trailed off. How long had it lasted? "I don't know. Several hours, I think they mentioned later. In the past, the Emperor himself had administered the torture, but in order to be free to witness, he summoned the Surgeon to act in his stead. As you can imagine—" His eyes flicked to Jahir, then back at the Glaseah. "—a physician who has no compelling reason to abhor torture is very good at prolonging it without killing."
Vasiht'h shuddered.
"And now you wonder why I am telling you this," Lisinthir said. "You have some sense, I think, that I love the Emperor, and you were willing to accept that on your beloved's word though no doubt you think it unbelievable. But I also love the Slave Queen. You would have more compassion for her, knowing that she was a lonely prisoner for all the years of her life, friendless and abused, her very wings mutilated to deny her the sky. She was kind to me from the beginning, who had no reason to be; though her culture did not teach her any context by which to empathize with aliens, she nevertheless saw the similarities between them and herself. She was my first ally in the Empire. She taught me, she gave me safe haven when I was exhausted and beset on all sides, she helped me free the slaves. In all ways, not only an exemplary person... but the Chatcaavan who showed the Emperor the path to what he should become."
Hesitant, Vasiht'h said, "She... she sounds amazing."
"She is," Lisinthir said. "And while I grew to love the Emperor once he changed, the Slave Queen I loved from the start, because she never needed any change to be worthy of it." He smiled. "The Emperor knows it also. He calls her his Treasure, which for Chatcaava is..." He trailed off, trying to decide how to explain it. "It is to call her an ideal of everything good and worthy."
"I can see that," Vasiht'h said softly.
"She was the one who suggested we have the Surgeon perform the torture on me for that final experiment," Lisinthir said. "She said he would be able to prevent injury, and that he would be properly dispassionate about it. The Emperor thanked her for the suggestion and offered to grant her any request. Do you know what she asked?"
Vasiht'h shook his head, a little twitch.
"She asked to leave so she wouldn't have to watch."
He heard Jahir's sharp inhalation, but didn't break his gaze from Vasiht'h's. The Glaseah was quivering. Very gently but with distinct emphasis on each word, he finished, "I don't respect her any less for that."
"She abandoned you," Vasiht'h whispered.
"She knew her limits," Lisinthir said. "And chose not to punish herself by staying... a gesture which I would not have thanked her for, knowing how it would hurt her."
The Glaseah was visibly shaking now. "She should have supported you. You needed her."
"What I needed was her whole," Lisinthir said. "Because when it was over, I could not have put her back together. I was in no shape to be of aid to anyone, and knowing that I had failed her in her need when I myself was near my own destruction... how would that have helped me?"
Vasiht'h's ears flattened.
"She chose the wise course."
"She was weak!"
There, at last, the hidden pain. "She was strong in ways I cannot approach, arii. But that did not make her invulnerable. No person is so strong as to have no weaknesses at all. But one flaw does not make you weak, and one flaw does not make you unlovable."
The Glaseah looked down, and Lisinthir reached over, slipped two fingers beneath his chin and tipped it up. Startled, Vasiht'h met his eyes.
"Had the Slave Queen not helped me in those first days, arii... I would have failed. The task would have been too much for me. And everything that happened after: the changes in the treaty, the freed slaves, the Eldritch heir returned, the Emperor's rebirth and with that rebirth a hope for a new Empire... all those things would never have happened without her choosing to help an alien ambassador in defiance of all acculturation, and the danger to herself. She had no stomach for torture and no taste for battle... but look at all she accomplished...!"
Some Things Transcend Page 28