“Fine,” said Jinadh, and she saw him fighting to swallow her practicality. “So they will cable you here. What then? Will he come to Gedda?”
That brought her up like a hunter balking at a fence. “I’m … I don’t know. I suppose we could have him? Would you mind?”
“Would it be safe?”
The Ospie press had not been kind to the DePauls, following Lillian’s flight from Porachis. Her liaison with Jinadh had been blown out of proportion to the tune of espionage, eventually linked—not so erroneously—to Porachin money and Lisoan arms funneled to the Catwalk. She had been able to spin that story in her favor, after Acherby was deposed. What they had printed about Cyril … There was less room to maneuver, there.
A multiple murderer and turncoat to all sides. No loyalty paid to the OSP, nor to the FOCIS, which at least would have made him an honorable opponent. The only angle a sympathetic reader could latch onto was his affair with Aristide Makricosta, which had been trotted out briefly as a small detail in a sorry, sordid string of them. Someone in Acherby’s administration had clearly realized there was a hook there, and bent it down as flat as it would go.
Lillian rubbed at the stiff spot in her neck. “As safe as it is for anyone, these days. There’s been more than enough news in the last five years to bury anything we’d rather stay out of the sun.”
«If this scheme of yours plays out,» said Jinadh. «If you end up press secretary—»
«Then I will be perfectly placed to deal with that kind of problem.»
«What about Stephen?»
«What about him?»
«You don’t think your brother might be a … that he might not be the best role model?»
Lillian rolled her eyes. “They’ll probably get along like dogs.” Then, seeing Jinadh’s confusion at the idiom, she added, «Um, friendly as a wick and a match?»
«Lillian, I’m serious,» said Jinadh. Firelight reflected from deep within his eyes—as deeply as he hid his anger.
«I know.» She put her hands over his. «I’m sorry.»
He shook his head. «No. No, I should be. This is your weight. I’m supposed to help you carry, and I’m scolding.»
“We’ll just have to wait and see,” she said. “I can’t tell you what I plan to do right now.”
He nodded, somber, turning his hands palm up to take hers where they lay together on his lap. With an air of resolve, he said, «It will be good, if he comes. I always … it hurt, that you had no family for me to meet, and you could not meet mine.»
«I don’t think it will be like that. Not … not like a happy reunion. I don’t know what it will be like. I don’t know what he will be like.»
«He’ll be your brother,» said Jinadh. «No matter what he’s like, I’ll be glad to have met him. Especially at Solstice.»
CHAPTER
THREE
“I will warn you,” said Asiyah. “He is not … he is not looking so good, maybe, as you remember him.”
They stood in the courtyard of a family compound in the outskirts of Dadang. A fat bottle palm squatted by a well, casting crosshatched shade. Colorful tunics and shawls hung to dry on lines strung between semiseparate houses. Aristide wondered who they belonged to. Surely no one lived here. Still, the illusion was admirable. And focusing on the tradecraft kept him from thinking about what he was about to do.
“He spent a long time in enemy territory,” Asiyah continued. “He … bah.” Dropping into Porashtu, which Aristide understood poorly but far better than Shedengue, Asiyah said, «Lived by his wits?»
Aristide nodded, wondering where Cyril had learned to do that. Thinking of all the questions he never asked: about that livid scar that crossed his middle, the odd habits of watchfulness that haunted his steps as he moved through the world. Where had a desk-bound son of privilege learned such things? What other ways had life marked him now?
“Are you ready?” asked Asiyah.
Aristide hated that he was so transparent in this. He glowered at Asiyah. His anger hid nothing, but it made him feel a little better.
“Come,” said the prince, and swung open the door.
The widening arc of sunlight illuminated a comfortable sitting room, pegs scattered around a board where someone had abandoned a game of solitaire. The hush that hung over the house reminded Aristide of an empty film set, or backstage early in the afternoon. A place prepared for drama.
Asiyah stopped at the end of a long corridor, with a door at the other end. Aristide felt laughter threaten, faintly hysterical. If this had been one of his films, he wouldn’t have shot it any differently. Maybe a little dolly zoom to heighten the tension. He certainly felt dizzy staring down the hall.
“I will wait here,” said Asiyah, and retreated to the sofa and the peg solitaire.
“He knows,” said Aristide. “Right? That I’m coming?”
Asiyah nodded once, then pinched a yellow peg from the table and placed it pointedly in a hole.
Aristide hesitated for a moment longer then stepped into the corridor, which stretched before him like taffy until he was, quite suddenly, at the door.
Should he knock? It seemed absurd. But it was a courtesy he expected Cyril had not been granted in some time. And it put off the inevitable that much longer.
When his knuckles struck the wood he checked the blow, then worried it had landed too softly. He was about to knock again, when something rustled behind the door.
Every scrap of air left his lungs.
“Come in.”
Disappointment hollowed him out. The voice wasn’t right. He could hear it in his memory: its warm timbre and smooth tones as rich and lived-in as a cotton velvet smoking jacket, or the curves of heirloom furniture. This voice was hoarse and curt with ragged edges.
The silence stretched, aching, until it was broken by another rustle. This sound Aristide could pinpoint with ease: a newspaper page, insolently turned.
The crackle of paper, timed perfectly, struck a chord: Cyril at the breakfast table, avoiding an awkward question by the turn of another page—the licked thumb, the moment’s pause before the sheet of newsprint swept in front of his face and settled against its fellows. The flash of his eyes in the flicker of paper, like a zoetrope. Sometimes Aristide caught him watching in that slight gap. After, they pretended that their eyes had never met.
When he opened the door, he couldn’t help but stare.
It was certainly Cyril. It had to be. Behind the bulwark of the paper, his eyes were sharp and blue as Aristide remembered them: the center of a candle flame. But now they were rimmed in red and sunk deep in shadow, the thin skin around them stained purple with exhaustion.
Cyril’s hair, which shone in Aristide’s memory as yellow gold, slick with oil and sticky with wax, had been rudely clipped close to his skull, showing dirty scalp beneath the stubble. His face had settled into pouches and pulled into lines. He was nearly ten years younger than Aristide, but looked a decade older.
Muscle had melted from his bones. Aristide would have put him at a little less than ten stone, except for the weight that heavy drinking had hung around his waist. The same had burst capillaries across his cheeks and nose—once straight and sharp as a knife blade, now buckled at the center and healed badly.
Aristide had once marveled that whatever violence had beaten Cyril body and mind, it had spared his delicate nose. Left it for him to stare down in moments of inbred, monied arrogance. Now even that had been taken from him.
He looked terrible.
If Cyril was as—what? Devastated? Astonished? What was this echoing emptiness of an emotion? If he was feeling as strange as Aristide, he hardly showed it. Instead, he folded the newspaper and set it aside, then picked up a cigarette smoldering in the ashtray. He held it cupped beneath his palm, cagey and cramped, as though he expected the wind or rain to put it out. A shame: He had been such an elegant smoker.
Aristide shut the door, too hard. Cyril jumped, then settled back into his chair as if he hadn’t noticed his
own tic.
They were in what would have been a bedroom, if this had really been a home. It was clear of furniture except for two caned chairs and a plank table. Aristide took the seat opposite Cyril.
“Hello,” he said, and immediately felt like a fool.
“Stones,” said Cyril. He took a drag on the straight and let it out slowly. “You got old.”
* * *
It wasn’t true. Well. Halfway. When Cyril looked at Aristide he could see everything the other man had been. The years hadn’t diminished him: only made him slightly more delicate. He’d always been evasive about his age, and good at avoiding it as a topic of conversation. But in the intervening years it seemed to have caught up with him. There was something brittle in his movements and his manner. Or perhaps that was only the situation in which they found themselves.
And anyway, he couldn’t be that old, silver hair notwithstanding. It looked good on him: the roots gleamed, and faded into dusty streaks of brown and black at the bottom of his shingle, set in waves.
Still, cruelty comforted Cyril. It was be cruel or come apart, and he knew which option would hurt less.
“You don’t exactly look—” said Aristide, then stopped when his voice edged toward breaking.
“Say it,” said Cyril, who wouldn’t be able to bear it if Ari went maudlin on him. “I look awful.”
“Like somebody peeled you off their shoe.”
The cadence of his speech, the slang, scooped a chunk from Cyril’s heart he hadn’t realized he had left to lose. He took another drag on his cigarette to fill the hole. He’d killed his sense of taste, smoking too much, drinking too much, taking tar when other vices wouldn’t cut the tension or dull the pain. The cigarette tasted like nothing now; it only burned.
“Asiyah told me you were behind enemy lines,” said Aristide. “I knew you had been working for the LSI, but last I heard…”
“I was dead.” He’d thought he had been, too. And there had been times he wished it were true. A part of him, maybe, still did. “I came close.”
“So were you abducted?” asked Aristide. “Or did you run?”
“I haven’t had a talent for that, historically.” He let the words fall between them caustic as lye, because it was easier to be angry at Aristide than at himself.
And Ari did pull back as if it stung. Cyril could spot all the ways in which he reassembled himself, and wondered if he had honed his observational skills so much more sharply in the time since they had last seen one another, or if Ari was getting sloppy. Or if this was just long-dormant familiarity with the other man’s affectations, rising to the surface.
Of the three options he preferred the first. The other two he didn’t consider too closely, for different reasons. Now that he had the luxury to think beyond survival and subterfuge, he found his mind was a field of unexploded ordinance.
“So,” said Aristide. “It really was republican militants?”
Cyril nodded, slipped back into debriefing mode. “They came in the middle of the night, said they knew what I was doing for the south. Beat me and hauled me back to camp.” Here, he glossed over the gruesome pieces, which he had reported in full detail for Asiyah’s people. Given a choice—he would always make sure he had a choice, in the future—he would never repeat any of it to another living soul. “They kept me for a week. I didn’t tell them anything.” Tits, he’d need to work on that defensive tone; it gave away too much. “They would’ve killed me, but they were close to the border and a raiding party found them. Destroyed the place. Saved my life.”
“Why didn’t you go back across the border?”
“Did I say they rescued me?” He’d fallen out of debriefing clarity, he realized, into the safety of vagueness. “I woke up in a pile of ashes. They’d burned the place around me. Maybe they thought I was dead, or didn’t realize I was there. Maybe they didn’t give two dried shits. I don’t know.”
He pulled another cigarette from the lidded basket on the table and lit it from the end of his expiring straight, which he snuck into the pocket of his waistcoat with the four others he’d already smoked this morning. They’d dug up a gnarled old three-piece linen affair for him, somewhere. Just for this meeting, he suspected. To make him feel more comfortable? Rotten parody. It fit badly. He’d have been more at ease in a tunic and drawstring trousers. Though anything was better than the rags they’d stripped him out of on arrival.
Aristide reached for the cigarette basket.
“They didn’t leave me any matches,” said Cyril. “No knives, either. Nothing interesting.”
“Why?” asked Ari. “Would you have … gotten up to mischief?” He stumbled on the playfulness. Cyril analyzed the possible tracks his sentence might have taken: Set the house on fire? Done yourself harm?
He analyzed his own answers, and decided not to provide any of them. Only a smile screwed ratchet-tight.
Aristide took a lighter from his jacket pocket and tapped it on the table with a painful, pointed flourish. It was a beautiful object: purple enamel with gold braiding at the cap. Something Cyril would have teased him for, an age ago. Now he had an absurd urge to snatch it, weigh it in his hand, put his tongue to its vivid smoothness. Instead he watched, dry-mouthed, as Aristide lit his straight with hands that trembled, almost imperceptibly.
Ari with unsteady hands. What kind of world had he come back to?
“What happened then?” Smoke barely softened the edges of Ari’s words, which were surprisingly curt. Well, Cyril could play that game; had been, since the door opened. Get the barricades up and dig your heels into the mud.
“I’ve already been debriefed, Aristide.” He crossed his arms. “Why are you here?”
“Someone needed to come, and I was closest. I had my secretary send a cable to your sister. Lucky thing we’ve kept in touch.”
Sacred arches. “You’ve met Lillian?” It was too much to ask: return to a world where social interactions weren’t predicated on strength, arms, information. Readjust. Meet your old lover; the one you’d almost … well. And then find out that, while you’d been embedded in purgatory, he’d been jawing with your sister? “I’ll wager that went well.”
“Better than it might have,” said Aristide. There was a world of subtext in the angle of his wrist, the way he stared at the ash on his straight. Silence built like a fogbank, precariously caught on craggy hills. Just before it culminated in something smothering, Aristide blew it away with a change of topic, a change of tone. “I looked for you, you know.”
Cyril tipped his head to the side, inviting the rest without evincing any particular interest.
“Not right away. When you didn’t … when I didn’t hear anything. But while I was in Porachis, when I met Lillian, some information came to light. I heard you had been seen in Liso. Asiyah was very accommodating, though he didn’t believe you were still alive. It’s why I came. This would have been what, five years ago? Anyway, he said you’d been trying to get me out, with your ill-fated machinations. It seems we were working at cross-purposes. I felt … compelled to search for you.”
It was like walking through a swamp, unsure of the ground in front of him. This was not some heartfelt confession. If Ari was telling him this story, there was a sinkhole somewhere in it. One wrong step would drown him in mud and crush his lungs.
“You didn’t find me,” Cyril said, because sometimes one could count on facts.
“Well,” said Aristide. “I stopped looking, didn’t I?”
Cyril didn’t want it to hurt. It shouldn’t have. But it was delivered with theatrical perfection, calculated to pass between his ribs and kill. “Why?”
“Sorry?” Aristide cocked his head, one ear closer to Cyril. “Didn’t catch that.”
He was being needlessly cruel now. Cyril gritted his teeth and forced the words between them. “Why did you stop?”
“Well, darling.” Now he had cut himself with his own vicious edge, and a thread of pain slid through his words like blood. “How long were
you out there? Eight years? I wasn’t exactly keeping the lowest of profiles, and there are newspapers, even in the jungle. It just finally hit, like a sandbag to my head: Even if you were alive, you never came looking for me.”
And Cyril, who had nearly drowned before—who knew the sensation and still lived in fear of it—felt the waters of guilt close over his head. “I suppose you want an apology.”
Aristide, apparently feeling better for having got that pettiness out of the way, put the ember of his straight into the ashtray and said, almost cheerful: “I’d settle for lunch.”
And because Cyril owed and owed and owed—Aristide, Amberlough, everyone—he went along.
* * *
Cyril’s intelligence and experience had been gold to cells of royalists in northern territory, but it wasn’t worth much to the LSI with the war as good as ended. They’d wrung him like a dishrag over the course of a week holed up in that family compound. They wouldn’t have brought Ari to the house if they weren’t done with all that it required.
He was free to go.
Liso owed him a pension. It felt very academic. A set of requirements to fulfill so he’d have somewhere to set his carcass down until it died.
In the meantime, he let himself be bundled into a car and driven through the city, and sat on his stool when he was pointed toward it.
Under the low ceiling of a dark taverna, empty at midday, the silence between them seemed compressed, pressurized. Ari ordered a cocktail in rough Porashtu, which the bartender half-spoke—a double martini, very dry, with a twist. Cyril lit another cigarette. The constant availability of something he’d had to scrounge for made it hard to stop. Nicotine hummed beneath his skin. He took a handful of matchbooks when the bartender’s back was turned, and put them in his jacket pocket. Perhaps the suit hadn’t been such a bad idea. A tunic and trousers wouldn’t have afforded him so many spots to stash his spoils.
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