Erelah turned it over in her head. There was no sense of completion or an end of things. This situation held all the unsteady energy of a gathering storm.
Perhaps I’ve lived this way so long, that’s how I’ll always feel: something’s about to happen.
There was an air of expectancy to it all. If not from the fastidious Yasu, then from his unseen master, Hirano. It was not expressed overtly, but each day there was an emissary from Hirano’s court, sent to learn how her recovery fared. There were gifts, trays of fruit and other delicacies.
Shelter and aid were one thing. Bribery was another.
This was not the reception you gave the ward of a disgraced house or the pregnant lover of a disavowed guildsman with no other place to go. This mercy and succor were being provided at a price.
“Kelta,” Erelah said, still regarding the ceiling. “It must not have been an easy thing for you to come back here, to Ironvale.”
There was a pause before Kelta replied. “Asher knew what it meant for him. Yet he had me obey.”
“These people would have killed him had he returned with me.”
“Always, in my heart, I knew he was meant for some violent end. At times it seemed as if he reached for it with both hands.” She heard Kelta shuffle closer. The surface of the mattress sagged slightly as she settled on the corner of the bed. “It was a hard choice, my lady. I am sorry. But in the end, it was the right one.”
Erelah rolled over to face her, pushed up onto one elbow. “There’s more, isn’t there? Every day, Hirano sends gifts. Sends people to speak with me. They ask questions about me, about my life. But it’s the questions that they do not ask that worry me.”
Let me be wrong. Let it be nothing.
The older woman had shed her dark, plain-style clothes in favor of a soft ivory—the color of mourning on Nirro. Under the heavy wimple, her eyes were reddened and puffy. Her chin quivered. “You must forgive me—”
“Okay!” Rachel elbowed open the delicate paper-paneled door and pushed inside with a winded rush. Her arms were filled with the tubing and slick coated packets of pharms for that morning’s treatment. “Who ordered the dose of alien-gene therapy with a side order of…”
She stopped, realizing Kelta’s presence. “Oh, hey, Miss Kelta.”
“I’ll let your physician attend you, my lady.” Kelta stood abruptly, smoothing down the front of her dress as if caught. She gave a quick bow of her head to Rachel, who promptly snickered.
“Hon, you gotta stop bowing at me or calling me lady.” She glided past the bed to the table. “Giving me a complex.”
Erelah reached across the mattress to seize Kelta’s hand. The sudden motion made her vision tunnel and her heart pound. “Finish what you wanted to say. Tell me.”
Rachel allowed her armful of supplies to drop onto the nearby table and began organizing the pile. Humming softly under her breath, she gave the appearance of someone trying to look as if she weren’t keenly eavesdropping.
Kelta looked from Rachel’s back to Erelah. She allowed Erelah to tug her back to her seat on the corner of the bed.
“Tell me,” Erelah prodded.
With a surrendering sigh, Kelta spoke. “The Ironvale are hard people, deeply mired in their traditions. Honor is everything. Without it, a man or the house he leads is nothing.” Kelta paused as if trying to gather strength. “I came to Nirro at Asher’s command. No other place would be safer for you and the baby. He knew that even though his Kindred name is dishonored, Yasu would still give you the shelter and aid that you needed if I were to ask. As my friend, Yasu was honor-bound to do that. But if Asher were to return to Nirro and be captured, his life would be forfeit.”
“He knew this, Kelta. It was a risk.”
“And so, what then? He lives as a fugitive? Never to see you or his child again? I’ve already seen the destruction of one family, how it killed Ravinia, his mother.” Kelta looked down, placed her hand over Erelah’s. “I was selfish, arrogant. I thought I could broker a deal that would grant Asher a pardon as well. So that he might remain with you and live to see his child grow. For that, I needed something with which to bargain. Something powerful.”
“I don’t….” Erelah stared at Kelta’s lowered head. Her stomach dropped. “What have you done?”
“No shit,” Rachel’s voice cut in. The woman had given up pretending disinterest. She now watched them avidly. “That’s ballsy. What’d you do?”
Neither of them acknowledged the doctor.
“Forgive me,” Kelta sobbed. She slid down the side of the bed to her knees, her upper body stretched across its surface. She pressed a kiss against the knuckles of Erelah’s hand.
“Someone going to tell me what’s going on?” Rachel looked from Kelta to Erelah. “What’d she do?”
Erelah released a shaky breath. “The jdrive. Asher promised to destroy it…the moment he brought Jon back to Narasmina.”
“He fully intended to. But when you were taken, he realized its potential in getting you back, you and the baby. That was his only concern. He’d given it to me for safekeeping,” Kelta said, her voice thick. “It would be to barter for you, and only as a final option. Nothing more. He never intended for anyone to actually get it. He did not betray you.”
“Where is it now?” An edge moved into her voice. Erelah pulled from Kelta’s grasp and maneuvered to the side of the bed. She stood on legs that belonged to someone else. A cold sweat slimed her skin and the room tilted. Rachel was there, arms coming around her shoulders to steady her, force her back to the bed.
“Guild Master Hirano,” Kelta replied with a quiet, broken voice. “He has it. He demands to see you when you are well enough. He has vowed to give you shelter and protection the rest of your days if you show him the device’s construction and purpose.”
Erelah gave up fighting the doctor’s embrace and sagged against the side of the bed. She propped her elbows on her knees and cupped her face in her hands.
For a long time, she listened to Kelta’s sobbing.
When Rachel spoke, her voice seemed overly loud. “This is bullshit. Erelah, you don’t have to stay here. We can leave. I’ll go find Maeve. She’s still docked here. We’ll find a way to get you out of here. Find some other place to go.”
“No.” Erelah straightened. The voice seemed to belong to someone else, someone brave and decisive. She looked to Rachel. “No more running. No more hiding.”
Rachel scowled. “So what…you’re just going to roll over, take it? Give everything up to this Hirano guy?”
Erelah shook her head. “No more being prisoner.”
“I have no idea what that means, but I’m all for it,” Rachel replied, lifting a quizzical eyebrow.
Erelah turned to Kelta, gripped her hands in her own, and waited for the woman to look at her. Kelta straightened her habit, drew her shoulders back. “As am I, my lady.”
Erelah stood. This time her footing felt firmer. Her heart did not pound so much. “I want to know everything about Guild Master Hirano. About all three of the Guilds. Their allies, their enemies. Everything.”
Fifty
Jon sat up in the darkened room, the bedclothes pooled around his waist. For a moment the room was alien. Then he recognized the huddled shapes of tasteful furniture. This was the house on Nirro, one of many rooms in Yasu’s sprawling villa.
He’d been dreaming about Hadelia and the cramped little bunk room on the Cassandra. The room was blackened with soot. The walls, charred. That was how they’d left it after Sela rigged the velo cells to overload, a parting surprise for the mobster Koenii. Oddly, an aftermath they’d not stayed around to witness, but in the logic of dreams, he knew. Sela thundered at him, intent to tell him something vital, something urgent.
He did not remember waking. There was only the familiar numbness in his chest that greeted him as he slid from the languid expansiveness of dreaming into the jagged waking world.
She’s gone. Sela’s dead.
It was the f
irst waking thought of every day. He went back to the notion often, testing it out. Prodding it the way a tongue seeks an empty socket to judge the sort of pain it evoked. This was his habit now. Despite it, the hope was still there, worming under the pain. Perhaps that was why he started seeing her.
You don’t believe that. Not for a second. Her voice. Low, chiding. You know how hard I am to kill, Jon.
Her ghost sat at the edge of his bed. Half her face was shadow, the other picked out in the soft glow of the simulated morning beyond the drawn curtains. If he stared hard enough, he could make out the worn shirt, one of his cast-offs, that she’d adopted. The hole in the seam of the left shoulder exposed some of the puckered scar beneath, the reminder of a pulse round that had nearly stolen her from him. Her sleep-mussed hair was unraveled from the neat plait.
Swallowing, he looked away. Made himself count to ten. “I’m going crazy.” His own voice seemed overly loud in the silent dim.
I could have told you that.
Jon looked back. Sela remained. Her head tilted. The mellow light reflected in her eyes.
Didn’t Tove’s priestess say her gods would match us up again? Make them keep their promise. What’ve you got to lose? Come find me.
Then, in the space of a heartbeat, she was gone.
Fifty-One
Sansus
Peylor’s Glory
Monican Republica
Storm…something.
Sela faltered, licking the cracked and peeling skin of her lips. The second part of the name was there, right there. The ships that she’d served on, called home. It hovered right on the edge of thought, dissolving if she pressed too hard. She started over from the beginning, muttering under her breath. This was her litany, like one of those useless prayers that the woman would say after every meal.
The woman.
She stumbled over the thought. The woman with the wide green eyes, pale skin, and punchable face. The one that was the cause of all this misery. She had a name. Sela knew it once.
Of that, she was absolutely certain. There was an attachment to it. Something very important about the woman. A skill she had. A useful skill that a lot of people would want.
People like Fisk.
But Fisk had said he did not care about the nameless woman and what made her special. She got the sense there were memories tied to that. He’d already confessed his lack of interest in the woman. Hadn’t he?
It felt as if someone had their hands in her brain, rearranging things, meddling. They dug around in there until they found the negative shape of what was important. They could judge the size and weight of it by its very absence. Perhaps they’d already found what they wanted, and Fisk’s daily question was another distraction.
Dread welled up, sickening.
She shut her eyes, allowed her head to sag. The muscles in her neck were like hot cords. By now, she was used to the constant pressure in her skull, worming behind her eyes, nestling there with bad dreams and ugly thoughts.
Storm King!
She sat up, spine rigid. Storm King. How could anyone forget a name like that? How could she forget anything, for that matter?
Sansus.
Peylor’s Glory
Monican Republica
Storm King
If she cared to break this cycle, she’d feel them watching from somewhere. Feel him there, watching with detached amusement: Fisk.
His visits were shorter, she felt. Lately, she thought she sensed desperation to his daily question: What do you want?
It had taken her some time to realize the answer he wanted. He expected her to ask to join him, to allow Poisoncry to swallow her whole as it had him. Perhaps he’d envisioned her begging for it. She got the sense that things were taking too long.
Did people question him just as he did her? The thought of an anxious or frustrated Fisk gave her a pleasant flutter—the equivalent of a drunken buzz, compared to the agony otherwise.
She’d run out of ways to kill him in her narrative and suspected she’d started over. It didn’t matter. There were no points for originality here.
At least Atilio had stopped coming to see her, bleeding out on the deck just beyond her reach. Those were tired ghosts for her by now. She knew them for what they were, something that Poisoncry could do to her, force her to relive. In her lifetime as a soldier, she’d been witness to and created so much death. Perhaps they could only guess at what she might find disturbing.
It angered her that someone could simply poke through her head, like a blind pickpocket rummaging for coins. The nameless woman could do that: reach in your head, pull out memories and make you do things. Make you dream, or sleep.
The pressure built in her head. It came in waves. Sela felt the invisible eyes on her again.
The pressure would stop. The pain would stop. All Fisk wanted was an answer, the right answer to his question.
What do you want?
Such a simple thing. A few syllables. An utterance.
Sela bit her lip, hard. Blood welled. The copper taste was new, different. The pain was nothing, but it broke the pressure.
Sansus.
Peylor’s Glory
Monican Republica
Storm King.
Fifty-Two
“Hadelia?” Erelah frowned up at Jon. “Why would you want to go back there?”
His clothes hung loosely over his shoulders. The beard that darkened his chin hid some of the fact that his face was thinner. It had been nearly a week since she’d seen him last. That had been when she told him of the baby. Something changed in him then, something unseen gave way, crumbled. Even with the Sight fading, she could sense the twisted sense of agonized joy her announcement had brought. It’d freshened his loss, for some reason. But he never voiced it. Instead, Jon had embraced her, whispered his congratulations and stalked away. He’d shut himself into his rooms.
This was a different Jon that stood before her now. He’s been infused with some frenetic energy that worried her more than the sullen version she’d last seen. He launched into a fragmented missive about having…needing…to return to Hadelia to find Sela.
Erelah gestured for the attendant, one of Yasu’s multitude of servants, to leave. The woman did, her hungry gaze taking in the siblings. She gave a slight bow and withdrew, gathering her skirts up and backing out of the door before sliding it closed with a practiced delicate ease. No doubt everything she’d just witnessed would make its way back to Yasu and ultimately, Hirano.
Let them talk. Let their tongues wag.
“I know I sound crazy. I can’t explain it. But I thought you, of all people, would understand.” Jon gave a pale-lipped smile.
Her brother had lost himself somewhere as they fled to Nirro. The painful part was that she was to blame for this. Were it not for her, Sela would still be alive. There was no way to fix it. Perhaps not even time would heal him. Who was she to judge his grief or how he wore it? Not a morning passed that she did not look at the empty bed at her side and wait for the bleakness to wash over her.
“Come. Walk with me.” She fished her arm through his and guided him out of the wide glass doors and into Yasu’s manicured courtyard. The trees and hedges were trimmed and clipped with precision. Each blade of grass and vine was trained to grow and curl according to a specific plan. Everything here had a place. Nothing suggested spontaneity or lack of purpose. Here, everything was a symbol and therefore political. Plants to represent every faction or house that comprised the Ironvale Guild. Each vine and shrub and tree placed just so, positioned to reflect the house’s importance. One misplaced fern and there was insult. It was not a garden so much as a minefield of schemes and ridiculous social mores. That was the way with the Ironvale.
The more she learned about Hirano and Ironvale, the more she despised the narrowness of these people with their careful customs and conservative habits. It was like stepping back in time a full two centuries. They spoke High Eugenes that was ancient and formal, like watching some pretentious
play. Every move, real or implied, had a meaning or consequence: the pause between introductions, the length of a bow, the color of one’s sash.
As a girl, she had been a devotee of historical dramas set in the era of the Expanse. The romanticism of it. The honorifics and genteel customs, particularly the dress expected of women of rank. The stuff of silly girlish dreams untethered by the reality of this time: the cloistered thinking, the insular rules, the regimented installation of class structures.
Asher, you were right to disavow these people.
Arm in arm, they followed the slate path. The razor grass and opalescent sand glistened after the morning’s scheduled rain. They paused for a while, pretending to take in the green and red shining glass chimes suspended from the sabron fig trees. Another of Hirano’s gifts, after he learned they were her favorite.
At that moment she missed the garden on Narasmina with such a sudden painful intensity it was suffocating. It was their place—hers and Asher’s. After dinner, they’d wait for the house to quiet and find each other in the lush green shadows. It was early days then. They were figuring things out still, how they fit with each other and how the worlds were meant to fit around them. They kept it as their secret, though Kelta no doubt suspected. She’d kept her own coy counsel, feigning ignorance.
Erelah forced the memory away, at the same time brushing a stray lock of hair from her eyes. Absently she regretted having allowed Yasu to talk her into cutting her hair.
It is the style, my lady, as you are unwed.
Which was Yasu-speak for “you have little choice.” Now the shortened locks barely tucked behind her ears. Her natural curls once weighed down by the length, defied all efforts to control them.
“How will you get there?” she asked Jon when she could stand the silence no longer. “Have you thought about that?”
“I went to Yasu,” Jon confessed. He ducked his head. “He found an Ironvale fleet captain to take me on. I’ve agreed to an acting rank…Special Information Officer. Whatever that is. They’ve got a detachment bound there already, to impose order over the capital. Some sort of police action.”
Allies and Enemies: Exiles, Book 3 Page 18