by R. C. Lewis
I looked at him. “You don’t know? You were a Midnight Blade, one of Olivia’s guards.”
“She was selective about what she trusted me with because I was your mother’s guard first. The order to kill you was a test.”
A test he failed. “Do you know about Olivia’s job as royal theurgist, her ‘magical’ healing abilities?”
Lunak steepled his fingers. “We do, and we have wondered. Of course, as people with an…unusual gift ourselves, we try not to rule anything out. You know something about those abilities?”
“Aye, I think so.” I thought back to memories I didn’t want, things I’d seen and heard in the palace, along with what I’d deciphered from my mother’s notebook. “There are poisons, different kinds, that create symptoms to look like diseases. My father and Olivia slip targeted doses into the water supply. A house here, a shop there. Doctors can’t make anything of it, but Queen Olivia can save them. But there’s no magic. It’s just the antidote. She’s done it for my father since before I came along.”
“That’s why you always check the water,” Dane muttered.
Stindu sniffed, apparently not hearing him. “Seems you do know a few things of use.”
I glared. “Oh, I do indeed. How to rig every gadget you touch to short out your heart, for one.”
The members of the council shifted restlessly, some even looking to the doors with the very large guards on the other side.
Go ahead, Essie, threaten planetary leaders. Sharp.
Kip held up his hand before anything became of the murmurs. “That’s not necessary. We didn’t know about the poisoning. Thank you.”
“I didn’t know about the battle staging. Thanks for that, I suppose. I still don’t understand, though. You aren’t the ones battling in the outlands, yet you are enemies of Windsong. You’re talking about things like coups. They exiled you to this planet, they fear what you can do—why not just leave them to their fate? Or use your Transitioning to take the upper hand?”
“We were working toward peaceful coexistence,” Dane said. The sudden heat in his tone startled me. “We had the embassy, we kept the law, but your mother broke it. She kept her identity secret, she risked all of us, she even risked you. If it weren’t for her—”
“Dane!” Kip cut in sharply. Good thing, too. My fists balled so tightly, my nails cut into my palms. “You don’t have the whole story.”
Dane’s posture went rigid, and his mouth barely moved. “Maybe now is a good time to fill me in, Uncle.”
The straight-backed woman I’d noticed the first day—Mura, Kip had called her—answered. “Queen Alaina didn’t risk us. We risked her. We created her false identity, altered her appearance, orchestrated her marriage to Matthias. She did it all at our request.”
My body stayed frozen, but a fire sparked within. It hadn’t been her own ridiculous idea. Mother had been a spy. All of it a plan—one that had gone horribly wrong.
All of it?
Dane processed it more quickly than I did. “But…my father, he says we always have to be honest about what we are, keep the law, always. It’s the only way we can get others to trust us again.”
“You were young, Dane,” Stindu said. “That was the role you were to play at the time.”
Those words broke me out of my silence. “His role, was it? You had it all engineered like a bit of Garamite clean-tech. So neatly planned, every piece in its place. So what about me? Was I planned? What role did this council rig for me before I was born?”
The old leaders looked at each other. No one answered.
“Tell her,” Kip pressed.
“We hoped Alaina would be able to gather information to help us bring down Matthias from the inside,” one of them said. “Barring that, she was to ensure Matthias’s heir would be a very different type of leader. But she died when you were young, leaving no assurance of the kind of person you’d be, and then you were gone as well.”
A simple plan. One my mother had believed in. She’d left me many of her secrets but kept the most important one—that she’d put her trust in people who couldn’t protect her. People who maneuvered lives like strategically placed pawns.
Leaving only me, the last pawn to play, but I’d been knocked off the board years ago.
“All the planning in the world, but you couldn’t account for Olivia, could you? My mother dead, and one of your own men ordered to kill me. Sparkling job. Congratulations to the First Families of Candara.”
I didn’t want to hear anything else they had to say, so I did the only sensible thing and left, forcing one of the guards to follow and make sure I went to my room. It didn’t matter what the Exiles did with me. They didn’t have what it took to outwit my father.
If my mother couldn’t, no one could.
BOREDOM MEANT TOO MUCH TIME to think, and thinking only led to confusion. Facts and emotions got all tangled and knotted, and I didn’t want to unravel any of them, too afraid of what I might find underneath. Avoiding that meant I had two choices. I could lose myself in puzzles on my slate, or I could demand that the drones be allowed to come keep me company.
Neither option would keep my problems at bay for long. Fussing with Dimwit and Cusser would keep me more than busy, though. Especially if Dimwit set something on fire. It’d be better than staring at the ceiling.
I rolled over to activate the communication console, but my hand missed as the bed shifted beneath me. My momentum carried me over too far and I fell, smacking my head against the console’s hard edge.
At first I thought I had a concussion—and maybe I did—but two failures to get up off the floor told me the room really was moving.
Not moving…shaking. A lot.
Only a few things could make a room shake like that. Too prolonged for an explosion. Too intense for weather.
An earthquake.
Father’s stories of the dark kingdom, where the ground swallowed whole any who dared speak against the king—
Silly stories, Essie.
It was easy enough to tell myself that, but harder to believe. I focused on the scientific explanation of why quakes happened, massive continental plates butting against each other, building pressure until something gave way. The governing complex hadn’t collapsed on top of me yet, so it probably wouldn’t.
Of course if it did, I’d be buried by so much stone and marble, they’d be lucky to find a smear of me.
It won’t, though. Right?
The trembling stopped after a minute or two…in the building, anyway. My body, curled on the floor, kept shaking for long minutes after.
“Essie?”
Dane’s voice finally pushed me to my feet. The room moved unnaturally again, but this time I knew it was my woozy head. One deep breath and I managed to cross the room to the door.
“If you’re here to continue blaming my mother for every bad thing—”
I stopped. Dane wasn’t alone. His uncle stood next to him. Kip’s eyes went straight to my forehead, and I realized the wet trickle wasn’t a bead of sweat.
Running through a palace corridor, turning too quickly and crashing into a pair of legs…the black-and-gray uniform of the Midnight Blade…worrying the guard would yell at me…Kip helping me up, making sure I’m not hurt.
Years later, both of us staring at the knife…
The memories collided, making the pain in my head more pronounced.
“Let’s get that taken care of,” Kip said, gently taking my arm. It sounded like a good idea.
“We usually have more warning when a quake is about to hit,” Dane said from behind.
“This kind of thing happens a lot?” I asked.
“All the time. The tectonics on this planet aren’t too stable. We built Gakoa here because the quakes are less severe than everywhere else.”
“Right lovely place, then, isn’t it?”
He harrumphed. “It’s not bad. And it’s not like we have anywhere else to go. This is the place no one else wanted.”
I tur
ned to Kip. “Was there damage? Was anyone hurt?”
“There are bound to be some minor injuries like yours, but nothing serious,” he said. “And no major damage. Come on, right through here.”
The only real difference between the doctor who patched up my head and the one who’d healed my hands on Garam was that the Exile was female. Her expression of disdain matched the Garamite’s down to the little furrow between her eyebrows. Apparently Thanda was the only planet in the system where people weren’t afraid of a few scars and well-worn clothes.
“I want both of you to come with me,” Kip said once the doctor finished.
I hadn’t changed my mind about letting him help me escape, but I doubted he wanted to discuss that. Dane and I followed him to a lift, up several levels, and down a long corridor to another lift. As we went into the second, I saw Dane’s tension increase, like he was bracing for a fight. I edged a little closer to the corner.
The higher we went, the heavier the silence became. I wasn’t about to break it, not between those two. They may have been family, but they occupied very different parts of my history. I hadn’t figured how to reconcile their connection just yet.
Finally we arrived at a short hallway with a door at the end. Nothing seemed especially remarkable, except the very sophisticated lockpad with fingerprint scanners in the numbered keys.
Kip took five steps from the lift to the door and turned to Dane, waiting.
“We shouldn’t be here,” Dane said.
“It’s the one place you should be.”
Dane glared, exhaled sharply, and jabbed a code into the lockpad, using a different finger for each number. The door slid open, and I peered between the two of them to see what the big deal was.
The big deal was a big room, with a bigger view.
We walked in, and I discovered the room had a hexagonal shape. Three of the walls were floor-to-ceiling windows, and the whole city of Gakoa spread before us, and beyond. A river snaked along the edge of the city, sunlight glinting off its surface, then farther to green fields and forested hills. We were high enough to see everything, higher than any building in the governing complex. I thought back to the flight over the city—a glare of reflected sunlight off a particular point on the mountain. I’d thought it was some kind of sentry or lookout post. In a sense it was, I supposed, but no guard was stationed inside.
For the briefest moment, I wondered what sunset would look like from there.
When I finally tore my eyes away from the view, I noticed the rest of the room. Soft benches lined the perimeter, some facing out, others in. All blanketed with a layer of dust. No one had been in this room for a while.
I turned back toward the door. Maps covered the walls on either side. One looked familiar, so I took a few steps closer. Windsong. Every part of it, from the outlands to the capital to the whistling canyons that gave the planet its name. The other wall mapped Candara. I recognized nothing, but I found Gakoa. All of the other labeled cities were in the same province.
“All right, Kip, why are we here?” Dane asked.
“To remind you that you have a decision to make soon, and I want you to stop avoiding it.”
I had no idea what they were talking about, but it felt distinctly like a family conversation, something I shouldn’t be part of. I continued examining the map. The areas without cities had other things labeled. Volcanoes. Major fault lines. Lots of them.
“My father will be back before I have to decide, so it doesn’t matter.”
“It doesn’t matter? Even if getting him back means sacrificing her life? Is that really what you want?”
So much for not being involved. I felt their eyes on me but refused to look, instead studying a chain of Candaran islands just off an area marked with the words TYPHOON ZONE.
Silence hung around us like the cold on Thanda. Unbreakable.
“Princess,” Kip said finally, “I’m sorry.”
No more excuses, so I turned. “Sorry for what?”
“For ignoring you far too long. Are you all right?”
“Aye, the doc did a fine job patching me up.”
“That’s not what I mean. Eight years on your own, and Thanda is not a gentle planet. How have you been all this time?”
Oh, so he didn’t mean ignoring me since we walked in the room, or even just since I arrived on Candara. I glanced at Dane, who knew exactly what my life there had been like. He stared out the window, unfaltering. “All right enough. Or I was, anyway, until a certain impulsive Exile crashed near my settlement.”
Kip ran a hand through his hair and paced a stretch of the marble floor, but said nothing further. Dane continued to pretend I wasn’t there.
Another uncomfortable silence loomed. I had to break it. “How does all this marble hold up with the quakes?”
That got Dane’s attention. “With everything going on, you want to know about architecture?”
“Dane,” Kip cut in, holding up a hand to silence him. “Our first permanent settlements two hundred years ago didn’t hold up so well, but we learned. The marble’s been modified, and all our buildings here in Gakoa have been carefully engineered to cope with the stress.”
“Ah, stress,” I said. “Good to know something around here copes with that.”
Dane shot me a look, proving he felt the dig. “Any other questions?”
“Aye, for Kip. When did you leave Windsong?”
“Same time you did,” Kip answered. “Or nearly.”
“Not enough time to get Dane’s father and the others out with you?”
Kip sank onto one of the dusty benches, his manic, pacing energy drained. “No. I thought…I thought if I went to the embassy, if I even sent word to warn them, it would be taken as a sign of collusion. If I just left, I thought the queen would believe I acted alone, wouldn’t make the connection that I’m Candaran. I didn’t know an entire half of her plan was to blame the embassy for your death. Even when I didn’t return, she framed them for an attack.”
“You didn’t even warn them?” Dane burst out. “You just left them? Why didn’t you ever tell me?”
“How could I? You know your father is a brother to me. How could I tell you I made a choice that landed him and so many of our people—so many of my friends—in Matthias’s prison while I walked free? The choices I made, Dane, so many…I’m not proud of them.”
Kip and me staring at the knife, staring at each other.
“It’s not only the choice you made that haunts you,” I said quietly. “It’s how close you came to choosing the other way.”
“What?” Dane pressed. “What do you mean?”
“Like he said, he was the one ordered to kill me.” I turned to Kip. “I saw it when you held the knife. I saw you consider it.”
“Princess, no! That’s not what you saw,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking about using the knife! I was thinking about whether to keep it and bring you with me.”
My memories of it seemed so clear, though. Kip looking at the knife, trying to decide if I had enough of my mother in me to be worth saving.
Maybe I’d been the one wondering that, not him.
“Why didn’t you take me with you?” I asked.
“I thought—I don’t know. I thought you should have a chance at a life away from all this, including us. That you were safer away from me and the wrath I was bringing down on myself. So I sent a nine-year-old to fend for herself on the next best thing to a prison colony.” Disgust sharpened the edge of each word.
“I fended well enough, didn’t I?”
He shook his head. “You shouldn’t have had to. Forgive me, Princess.”
Now I understood why he let me convince him not to sneak me away a second time. He couldn’t repeat his mistake. Except it didn’t feel like a mistake. Not the part where I ended up on Thanda, anyway.
“Nothing to forgive. I told you, I’m all right,” I said. “But Dane’s father and the others certainly aren’t.”
Dane spoke up. “My father w
ould’ve done the same thing. He would have saved you even if it meant prison for them. How could anyone let a child die to save themselves?”
Those shouldn’t have been the only choices, with others paying the price to keep me alive. It made my fingers twitch with the same helpless energy I’d had ever since my escape. Energy that told me to do something, when there was nothing I could do.
Or would do.
Kip straightened his shoulders. “That’s why I’ll do everything I can to convince the council not to trade you. We can’t give Olivia another victim.”
Another. “Did she kill my mother, then?”
Something flashed across his eyes. Pain. “I don’t know whether she did it herself or had it done, but yes, I’m confident it was her.”
Oh, I knew Olivia well enough. She’d likely have done it herself. Only…why had she left the job of killing me to someone else? Maybe to make sure Father never connected it to her. Or maybe the idea of killing a child was too distasteful, even for her.
I wasn’t a child anymore.
While I thought on that, Kip continued. “You may have doubted me, but I never had to question. I always saw Queen Alaina in you, Princess. I still do. She was very brave. And, Dane,” he added tersely, “I’ll not have you speaking against a woman who did nothing but sacrifice for our people.”
“If I’d had all the information I should have, I wouldn’t have said it,” Dane said, giving Kip a meaningful look. “I’m sorry, Essie.”
They were both being too nice, too sympathetic. I hated it. Kind words didn’t change anything. They didn’t bring my mother back, remake my childhood, or return me to Thanda. They didn’t return Dane’s father or end the killing on Windsong, either.
The twitchiness in my hands sharpened. Too much standing around talking. Too long without doing anything. My mind swam with codes and algorithms, trying to push away the memories of my mother. She pushed back.
Always do what needs doing, even when it’s hard.
She always knew what needed doing, or so it seemed. Then she got herself killed.
Windsong needs you.
I hadn’t just failed her. I’d failed an entire planet. Maybe two.