Amnesty

by Lara Elena Donnelly

  Silence settled over the diners, but it was not the awkward pall it might have been; people were simply eating and drinking.

  “This is superb,” said Aristide, tipping his glass close to a candle flame. “Cestinian? An ontichialo?”

  A mercy: The cellars had lain largely undisturbed since Daddy’s funeral. The wine was the one true luxury on the table. The interim tenants’ depredations had been patchy; someone without taste or knowledge, probably, who had left them a fair selection of good vintages. Small blessings. And another mercy: Each bottle drew out the effects of whatever Solstice magic had descended on her house.

  Porashtu mixed with Geddan—nearly everyone at the table understood both. Jokes switched languages halfway through.

  «You know Belqati Solstice custom, right?» A lock of Daoud’s hair had fallen from his wax, and he’d lost the stiffness that usually held him at right angles. «For married couples?»

  “Oh no,” said Lillian, laughing.

  «The longest night of the year,» Daoud went on. «You have to spend it like you want to spend the rest of them.»

  “Holy stones,” said Stephen, putting his face into his hands. Lillian’s attention had wandered, and it seemed Magnusson had been … festive in pouring for her son. Oh well, it was only once a year.

  «Just married couples?» asked Jinadh, leaning in on one elbow. «Heaven and earth, the things the court got up to on Solstice night would sizzle your small hairs.»

  “I think it was similar for some families in the village,” said Lillian. “Of course, not our parents.” Cyril didn’t return her smile; she hadn’t been expecting it, really. “But I know some women thought it was a good night to conceive.”

  “Stopped premature births,” said Aristide. “Kept the baby longer in the womb. That’s what the older women always said, anyway.”

  Something about the rhythm of his speech shifted slightly when he said it, in a way that Lillian could almost place. “And when were you conceived?” she asked, wine-daring.

  He gave a little shrug. “The only people who could answer that question are long dead.”

  Damnation. She’d put her foot through the fragile glass of flirtation and merriment. Striving to regain sparkling ground, she said, “Well, what did you do for Solstice when you were young? Before they went?”

  “Mother died when I was born.” He delivered it like any other small talk, with a wry twist to his mouth. He knew it wasn’t what she’d hoped for. Perhaps this was revenge for her probing questions this afternoon. “My father would go down the mountain to the pub and drink ’til he was sick. Sometimes I went along, when I got older. Not to drink so much as to get him home safely. And the tips were always better that time of year.”

  “Tips?” asked Jinadh, looking trepidatious.

  “The first boards I ever tread,” said Aristide. “Solstice was the only time my father saw me sing. And the only time he didn’t beat me for it. He didn’t like me to go down to the pub. Embarrassed, I think.”

  Like everyone else at the table. Pudding course finished, brandy poured, there was nothing in the offing to end the eggshell silence that had crept between the plates.

  Until Cyril, who had been silent through the meal, said, “Why don’t you sing something now?”

  He didn’t say it kindly, nor as though he expected Aristide to take the suggestion. He tossed the words into the center of the table like a lit firecracker, or a live grenade.

  Despite all that, she thought for a moment Aristide might do it.

  Then the hour struck and the sound of the clock made him start. He closed his mouth so sharply she could hear his teeth.

  “Time for coffee and liqueurs, I think,” she said too loudly, and the moment was lost in the scraping of chairs.

  * * *

  Cyril wasn’t trying to conceive a child or ensure good fortune for the rest of the year, or even make sure the sun rose the morning after the longest night. He simply couldn’t sleep.

  He kept hearing the faint shift of Ari’s vowels, moving to the front of his mouth. Wondering why he’d parted with so many hoarded gems of information so swiftly, just because Lillian pressed him. Kept seeing the soft opening of his lips as if he really meant to sing.

  It had been cruel; he’d known even as he said it that it would destroy the fragile idyll his sister had managed to tweeze from this thorny imitation of festivities. But he’d watched Aristide lay down facts about his childhood deliberately as coins on a counter, at Lillian’s slightest suggestion, and something about it slid under his skin like splinters.

  Back then, all he’d ever gotten for his troubles with Aristide was a smile. But how much trouble had he really taken? They had kept any confessions they might have made hidden behind their respective roles.

  None of it really excused ruining dinner. But dinner didn’t mean much to him besides another chance to eat he might not have again. His stomach ached, though he could hardly remember the taste of anything he’d put into his mouth. How long would it take to stop thinking of food this way?

  To occupy the time until dawn, he made himself a mission: to open every door in the house, and assess how much of it was being used. Excluding the master bedroom, in which he could hear the sounds of Solstice being celebrated. He found Stephen’s room by accident; the boy was soundly asleep, sloppily spread across his pillows. He’d have his first hangover tomorrow. After that it was empty room after empty room, all dusty as the one that looked into Aristide’s windows. Which were lit, barely. No movement. And no sound, when Cyril crept down the hall and around the corner to put his ear against the door.

  This was the one he’d meant to open all along. The knob turned, when he tried it.

  Wrapped in a rug and a dressing gown Aristide reclined in an armchair, head raised from the book in his hands to watch the door open. The room was lit only by the lamp beside him and the glow of embers. His spectacles caught the light and shone it into Cyril’s face, obscuring his eyes.

  “You might have knocked,” he said.

  Cyril shut the door behind him but kept his back against it.

  “Have a seat?” Aristide opened his palm, indicating the dormer window adjacent to his chair.

  Cyril didn’t accept the offer. “Why did you come here, Aristide?”

  He made a show of checking his page number before he set the book aside. “I was invited.”

  Cyril shook his head. “No. Why did you really come?”

  Aristide looked at him, too intently. “Why did you?”

  A question he had been trying not to ask himself. He could say Cordelia, but putting her name between them now felt cruel, to Aristide and himself and the memory of her chemically red hair, her laughter and her freckles. Her face when he’d pulled a gun in her dressing room. Her anger when he offered her an out.

  And anyway, he knew she was only a part of it. Had he only come because Aristide asked him? Because he wanted to come home, and believed this might be it?

  Had he come because some deeply buried part of his mind—a prideless, animal shard—knew that solitude in Liso would be a good excuse for slow suicide? Or perhaps not so slow. He no longer had a pistol; that had been taken during debrief. But he had the skills to find another, or some other method. Dying wasn’t hard.

  That idiot shard that clung to life didn’t understand what he owed. But it was stuck deep, and it throbbed with longing.

  His laugh, when it came, felt like being sick. “Are you in earnest? I wouldn’t have missed that dinner for all the world. Your cockmuff flirting with my brother-in-law, and all your quaint little childhood stories.”

  Aristide blinked twice, surprised, and then said, “Quaint? Is that what you heard?”

  “I never knew you were a country boy.” The snide sound of his own voice was familiar: the kind of disdain he dropped during an interrogation, when shame seemed the likeliest iron with which to break his subject. The only difference was that this time, he hadn’t used it on purpose. It had used him. �
�You shook that mud off your shoes and shined them.”

  “Yes,” said Aristide. “Your point?”

  “Why tell her? All of them? Why now, tonight, and never—?” He stopped himself, just, with the quick application of fingernails to palm. He was losing his footing, yanked along by hurt like a rider dragged behind a frightened horse. He should not have opened this door.

  “So that’s what this is about.” Aristide fussily rearranged his blanket. “Do you want to know what I didn’t tell them? Would it make you feel better to know just a little more about me than your sister does?”

  “Never mind,” said Cyril, reaching for the doorknob. “I don’t—”

  “I didn’t just earn onstage,” said Aristide. “My father said he beat me for singing, but we both knew what the blows were really for. What I got up to out the back door, against the wall.” His accent was slipping, pressing up against his teeth, and Cyril had heard this before: Ari’s hands tangled in his hair, spitting curses when he came. When he was startled. When he was afraid.

  How had he never guessed that Aristide came from the north, from the mountains? Chuli, by his looks, or part—that piece fit neatly now. Wise of him to hide it: before, during, and after the Ospies. From what little Cyril had gleaned from old papers and overheard conversations, aid had been slow in coming to the shattered tribes up north. Acherby had fallen, but old prejudice died harder than dictatorship.

  Still, why had Cyril never seen past the elaborate stage name, the carefully constructed persona?

  Because he hadn’t wanted to know. He’d preferred some secrets then. Now he wanted light to shine in every darkened corner, so nothing lurking there could hide.

  “Tips were better at Solstice,” Aristide went on. “For walking the boards. But I made less at the holidays, for all that. Folk aren’t after paid teeth on their tackle so much, that time of year. Made ’em feel ashamed, maybe. As if they oughtn’t to the rest of the time, knowing how my pa came after me about it.”

  “Ari.”

  The nickname stopped him cold, halfway through inhaling to continue his tirade.

  “There.” Powder and silk returned to his pronunciation as it sank back toward his soft palate. “Now you’ve heard it. Did you find it quaint? Filled with rustic charm? I’d have thought you already had your fill of that, with your tweeds and your guns and your country house.”

  Cyril realized he had pressed himself against the door so hard the panels were putting divots in his back. “Do you think you have some sort of monopoly on childhood horror?”

  “I never said it was horror. It simply made me what I am.”

  “As if this didn’t?”

  “This?” Aristide sat forward in his chair and swept a hand through the air in front of him, as if encompassing the whole of Damesfort. The weight of the house, the family, tradition: It felt as though that hand had hauled them from the dust and laid them across Cyril’s shoulders. “It turned you into something, I’m sure.”

  Cyril took a deep breath and bore up under the weight, then let it fall to force his next words out. “You have no idea.”

  “Why don’t you tell me, then?” He flung it across the space between them as though it meant nothing, but Cyril heard the faintest nasal resonance beneath the rough edges of his anger: sadness, held hard in check. An aching, upturned end to the question.

  Afraid that he might answer, Cyril opened the door behind him. “Goodnight,” he said, and left Aristide to wonder.

  CHAPTER

  FOURTEEN

  Aristide and Daoud left early, and if Lillian thought any of her relief had shown she would have been mortified. But she had been trained almost her entire life to hide emotions like that, and so instead of embarrassment, she only felt privately ashamed.

  The rest of her brief break from work passed in a well-fed blur, and suddenly it was time to return to the city. The family’s last night in Damesfort found them in the drawing room: Lillian with her stocking feet on Jinadh’s lap and the evening edition of the Clarion across her own. She had given the ciphers to Jinadh, who was frowning over the crossword with his pen against his lip. Ink had left a spot there, like a freckle. Stephen—miraculously—was buried in a book with a pad of paper next to him, studiously copying down chemistry notes. The wireless played low, music and advertisements mingling with the soft sounds of the fire.

  Cyril had disappeared after dinner. He’d stayed cagey and quiet in the days after Solstice, keeping mostly to himself.

  She didn’t know what to do for him. And she didn’t know what to do with him. It might be possible to quietly keep him at Damesfort through the election; it didn’t seem likely he would go into the village. The only tricky matter was the staff. She trusted Magnusson, and he would have impressed upon the rest of them a strong need for discretion. But would they abide by his authority? And how loyal would they be to an employer they had only known six months, whose budget they understood to be somewhat strained? An employer who might let them go at the end of the season to cut costs?

  It would be better to get Cyril out of her house; out of the country. Some peaceful, quiet place where he could calm down. Possibly a retreat, or sanatorium. Somewhere they could help him with whatever made him jump at loud sounds and slip food into his pockets. She’d seen him doing that at meals, when he thought no one was watching, and later noticed grease spots on his jacket.

  There were some places in Ibet that might do, or Suldatia. Mountains and fresh air and no-nonsense nurses. She was leery of alienists as a general rule, but perhaps in Cyril’s case psychological intervention might be helpful.

  When she would have time to take care of it all, and how she would pay for it once she had … She sighed into her paper and turned the page.

  “‘Coming home sans quarry,’” said Jinadh. “Eight letters. Starts with O, sixth letter X.”

  “Oh, you know I’m rubbish at these things.” But she reached for it anyway, to look.

  “Better than me,” he said, “at least when they are in Geddan.” Which was true. She wouldn’t have dreamed of attempting any word game in Porashtu. She could speak and write it with fluency, but the kind of linguistic and cultural nuance a crossword puzzle required? Beyond her reach.

  His, too, from the scribbled-out letters in each box. How he could keep his answers straight from his mistakes, she didn’t know. “This one, here?” she asked, pointing. He nodded.

  On the wireless, a mournful little foxtrot number wound down and was replaced by the chimes that heralded an hourly news broadcast. Lillian looked up from the paper toward the radio, as though watching its dial would clarify the signal.

  “Good evening to the folks at home,” said the anchor. “This is Hour by Hour, and I’m Marlowe Flanders with your late-breaking nightly news.”

  Flanders had a smarmy Amberlinian drone that put Lillian’s teeth on edge, though it probably played well with city-born listeners.

  “Do we have to—?” said Jinadh, but Lillian shushed him.

  “Now normally,” Flanders continued, “I’d lead up to the big story with a lot of little tidbits from today. But today the tidbits have been blasted out of the water by a story I only got a whiff of this afternoon.”

  That was a bit … sensational, for the hourly bulletin. Lillian sat up straighter, crossword puzzle forgotten.

  “Hunting down Ospies hasn’t been a priority of the provisional government,” said Flanders. “If anything, they’ve decided to let bygones be bygones. In fact, as some of you may know, former Ospie foreign service member Lillian DePaul is a part of the provisional government’s press office.”

  Lillian’s hand, holding Jinadh’s pen, fell to the paper in her lap.

  “If you were keeping up with the news under Acherby, you saw her fall from favor. But you also know she didn’t drop the Ospies for the greater good. DePaul collaborated with the Ospies in Porachis for three years before eloping to Asu with a Porachin noble. For three years, she did due diligence keeping up Acherby
’s image in the world at large. Coerced, she says: forced to do their dirty work to save her son.”

  Stephen shifted, staring intently at a spot on the carpet.

  “And that was good enough for some of you,” said Flanders. “I won’t judge. We all had a hard time of it under Acherby. But the story I’ve got for you now makes that a much harder sell.”

  Ink flowed from the pen’s nib into the fibers of the paper, soaking them black in a spreading circle. She stared at the empty boxes Jinadh had asked her to help fill, and knew what was coming next.

  “Ms. DePaul may have her excuses,” he went on, “but there’s none can be made or honored for her brother. Another story news-noses might remember from the same dustup that dirtied Ms. DePaul. A helping hand in the Ospies’ coup, Cyril DePaul forked the ACPD over to Acherby, ensuring the swift destruction of the regionalists. He should be brought up on charges. Instead, a reliable source relayed to me he’s sitting snug and safe within the borders of the country we had to claw back from his old friends.”

  Outfoxed. The word was outfoxed.

  “Hear the full story tomorrow morning,” said Flanders, “from my colleagues on the A.M. Bulletin. For now, this is Marlowe Flanders, leaving you in the capable hands of Cary Reiser and his Swingin’ Six.”

  The three tones chimed again, in descending order this time. A smooth-voiced advertisement for Scandal cigarettes played over the opening strains of Cary Reiser’s band.

  Lillian lifted the pen from the paper and set the cap over the nib with a crisp click.

  “Stephen,” she said, hearing her own words from a long way off. “Go and get your uncle, please.”

  * * *

  Though Cyril would not see reason, she would have gone on arguing. For every one of his refusals, she would have thrown herself harder against his stubbornness. After all: This was her fault. Her slip of the tongue with Frye had led to this, and now she would be the reason her brother hanged. Or whatever they did to traitors these days.