In A Burning Room

by TS Ward

  “They don't know what happened in Conleth,” she hummed, standing. “Clary brought us straight to Rabbit. You're the one who convinced him you should be the Empress, that you're on their side. He would have made you a saint for them much sooner, if you hadn't handed yourself over. You knew him, Soren, years ago.”

  I stood across from her, too exhausted to keep up the fire in me. I searched for a hair tie in one of my pockets and drew my hair over my shoulder to silently braid it. Teeth and lips clamped shut.

  Clary. That name had been mentioned before. It was familiar.

  It was a streak of red hair racing through the forest, diving into the lake from a cliff. If she brought us to Rabbit, she was a rebel, but the way Fitz had said her name made it sound like she was on the same level as the rebel leader, if not something more.

  And, if it had been my idea to become Empress, then it had been my idea to remove my father from the throne. It had been my idea to commit regicide.

  How? How could you?

  How could you not? An unfamiliar voice. This god.

  “Soren,” Roam said. She seemed confused, without my mouth fighting back, as if she'd prepared for an argument and had all her points laid out clear before her.

  I looked up. The lack of real sleep weighed heavy in my voice. “Who is Clary?”

  “Clary’s… your friend. Ask Jack about her.” She was quiet as she said it, looking away. “He would know, more than I do. I only met her once.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “And he met her what, twice?”

  “He lived with her.”

  “Oh,” I hummed and tucked stray hair behind my ears.

  A strange feeling wormed its way into my gut. To hear about a life I didn't remember, from someone I didn't remember knowing, made me sick. It didn't bother me, in the Embassy. Not knowing, only having an awareness of what was now, it seemed like a blessing. But this, these people—it made bile crawl up my throat.

  “I only remember the last four—by the stars, only the last, what, two years? That's all I know. The Embassy, just that and a few bits and pieces that don't even matter. I don't…” I breathed out.

  Six years of watching my little bear grow up inside my head, six years spent in the pristine black and marble halls of an embassy full of Lumen and doomed Sceptres. But the years I had in the Embassy were all I had.

  “Ellie doesn't think it's all lost forever, so maybe everything will work out just fine and we’ll… be back to our normal selves.”

  Normal? What the hell is normal?

  I sat back down on the cot with a huff. “Why did he say you were dead? What’s the point in that?”

  She was quiet. Still. She must have been thinking about it for a long time with how quickly she answered. “You always showed more love for him than you did for me. He spoiled you, gave you everything you wanted, always caved if he tried to say no and you got upset. In that way, all the discipline and the rule setting came to me, and when he got caught up in work, I was the one you would come to and you would tell me about all of the rules that you broke—sneaking off to see your friend, and then sneaking off to see her brother and not telling either of them about the other.”

  I nearly choked on a laugh. “Sure. Likely.”

  “You did. You were happy. So I let it happen. You always came to apologize, but I knew what was going on before you ever told me. When your father found out, he… we could feel the thunder shake the walls. He said it was dangerous to go anywhere alone, and it was, to be fair. I put you in danger.” She started talking with a laugh and ended in a hoarse whisper and I felt guilt weigh down my shoulders.

  “Not your fault I’m a menace,” I muttered, and then frowned. “You didn’t put me in any danger. He shouldn’t have made you think that.”

  I closed my eyes, listening fully as she spoke.

  “He gave the soldiers and the Lumen orders to keep you within the walls and the fences of the Manor. He set other rules, too, but you broke them just to break them. So he tightened security even more and there was a while where you hadn’t figured out the patterns and you were… you were so upset. You said you hated him, that you didn’t love him anymore.”

  She paused.

  Something dripped behind my eyelids—the colours of a dining room dressed in dark stained wood and a stretch of intricately designed carpet, a table full of candles and decorations and carefully set ornate plates.

  My father didn’t like to waste time in the exposition of a speech, so instead he made his presence clear in his dress and in his surroundings. He was a lover of a dramatic dinner, and I knew that then.

  A sharp memory filled my mind of that Soren walking in late and dressed down, seething in anger as she searched out the eyes of the guests at the table—my father and mother at opposite ends, the two Doctor Carsons who sat apart with James next to his mother, Lourdes and that child with his dark eyes and solemn face, Astra, and a few others whose names and faces I could not place but they were most definitely not the ones to put in a room with a petulant child like me.

  I remembered standing there with my hands in fists as I looked my mother straight in the eye and— “Did I say something about him and… and Lourdes, in front of a room full of people some might consider important political figures?”

  Roam cleared her throat. “Yes. You did.”

  “I’m sorry,” I murmured, and I was sorry—that it was true, that the boy with the dark eyes was my brother, a Beckett without the blue, and maybe that was why she denied it so vehemently. All of them did, and I was exiled from the dinner exactly as I wanted to be. That I remembered.

  I locked myself in my room for two days. I was a siege of myself within the castle keep.

  “Anyway, my point was—he could spoil you all you wanted, and he could try to be angry and stern, but all that ever did was get you just as angry and just as stubborn and petty as anything. And you would never do what he wanted. So I imagine convincing you that I died, taking away all the memories of me, was because he thought he could tame you into what he wanted you to be.” She sucked in a breath. Her hands fell loosely to her sides.

  “I must be an absolute delight to be around,” I sighed.

  Roam laughed quietly. “You have your moments.”

  I was content in this moment, to sit with her as she struggled to piece together a lost life. I was content to smile softly to myself, imagining that behind closed eyes I sat wrapped in the embrace of the sweet grass meadow that I hadn’t seen in so long.

  I was not content to remember when I crawled out of a sensory deprivation tank to find my head buzzed to the skin.

  “I don’t remember when I forgot. It was after Arden died, and after I made another scene during another dinner and I broke the champagne glasses. I know that she was the second Pluto. I know it was before the third Pluto, but after Arden. Sometime between them, they shaved my head and stuck this thing in my brain,” I touched a finger to the scar behind my ear and held still as she reached out to trace the length of it. “To… An electrode, to help with controlling the static. It’s supposed to dissolve two years after installation. I guess that’s now. Maybe that’s why I’m the way I am right now.”

  “You were always so proud of your hair,” Roam said.

  “At least it grows quickly,” I admonished, and then, “Arden’s didn’t. When she came to the Embassy, it was really long, just like Tiger’s, and then they shaved it and she cried.”

  She hesitated a moment before her arms came around to hug me. “I’m so sorry, baby.”

  “Anyway,” I leaned forward, slipping out of her reach and swallowing an aching heart.

  As much as a memory of her in the same room as my father might have reminded me who she was, I still didn’t know her. I still didn’t feel how real this all was. I didn’t remember where the dreams I had ended and reality began, but here she was, and I was not ready for so much warmth between this woman and my mother.

  “Where are we? Where is everyone? What happened?”
/>
  ———

  The men and Ellie and the person whose boot I still felt on my chest were gathered together around a few crates off the Sailer.

  Maps and papers littered the tops of them.

  Moon Rabbit knelt with his staff, in deep concentration as Pucks pointed out scribbles on the biggest map. Neither of them looked up. Ellie sat cross legged next to them with her chin propped on a hand, eyes closed.

  “What I’m saying is we don’t stand a chance if we approach guns blazing.” Fitz paced back and forth in the shade of the boat. His hands ran over his face. He had a bright orange beard coming in, the hairs short and thick. It clashed with the red burn on his skin. “That place is a hive of top-tier soldiers and Lumen. We won’t get close. What we need is cover and a select team to go in for extraction.”

  Jack stood with his back to me, arms crossed over his chest. “I’m cover. You and Soren go for Percy. We don’t need anything more than that, except maybe backup on the way out.”

  “I don’t know, Jackaboy, let’s just say that works for the hell of it—what next?” Fitz sighed and slapped an open palm against the hull of the land boat, the other hand settled on his hip. He leaned his head back and squinted up at the sun. “This isn’t just about the kid. This is a direct attack on the Empire. This is a war that we’re starting and once we do, we’re all dead. Every single one of us will be slaughtered just for endangering the farmland, not to mention the Emperor and all those high-horses in the towers.”

  “To start,” his nephew waved a hand vaguely, “We get Percy out. After that it’s a matter of getting Rabbit’s people into the city without triggering a lockdown.”

  “Or we get Clary,” Fitz mumbled. That girl again.

  “Nighttime?” Rabbit's guard offered. “Or a market day? We could fake a caravan.”

  Fitz shook his head and sank down to the sand, propping himself up against the Sailer. “The civilian risk is too high with the market, and nighttime would put us at more of a disadvantage than it would them.”

  “There’s a civilian risk no matter how we do this,” Jack muttered.

  I stepped closer, slowly, cautiously, kicking myself for what was about to come out of my mouth. Arms crossed over my chest. “You would be better off just assassinating my father.”

  Everyone’s heads whipped around.

  Jack turned on his heel. The tenseness that was in the set of his shoulders faded as relief washed over his face. He took a half step forward, arms unfolding, and for a fraction of a moment it seemed as if he wasn’t going to stop there. But he did.

  Instead, his eyes travelled over me quickly, and caught on the dark braid that draped just over my shoulder. “You’re awake.”

  “There’s also the option of not killing anyone,” I suggested, almost as a side note. “Diplomacy is more likely to get you what you want more than fighting is. He will listen. He’s already listening. He wants his people to live, just as you do.”

  “Already listening?” Fitz called out as he sat forward. His eye was set on me under a frow, squinted against the light. His cheek pushed against the eyepatch. “The hell does that mean, princess?”

  “I don’t mean actively listening in on us right now, dumbass. What I meant was that he’s paying attention.” I paused, took a breath of the warm copper-wire air, the smell and the taste of it so different from the crisp chill of the lake I dreamed of. I chose my words slowly and carefully. “What I meant was that he wouldn’t allow me to be here if he didn’t have some sort of interest or expectation from either of us. He will allow for an appeal.”

  Rabbit stood straight-backed, his broad shoulders squared and his arms crossed over his chest. He looked down his nose at me and signed. Salt interpreted for him. “This land is under the rule of an Emperor. It is not a democracy. It is not oriented to the people; it is oriented to the ruler and the power wielded by him. We have tried civil discussions. We have met with chancellors in many cities. We have not had our voices heard.”

  “You could make the world kneel with your voice, Moon,” I reminded him.

  The man hissed and pointed to his mouth.

  “It comes from more than sound and you know it,” I stepped close to him, and then leaned over their makeshift table to inspect the papers. “And you won’t be the one talking to him.”

  It was a map of the entire Empire, and a map of this desert, with a coin that marked our position. Redbird was marked in the cradle of a mountain ridge, one that had been formed by Sceptres during the Fraxinus War, and we were close to the edge of the first rise of rocky cliffs.

  Pucks tapped his finger on a smaller coin and slid it off the name scratched into the yellowed paper. Conleth. I frowned at the way the name settled unsteadily in my mind. “We can reach the next town by this evening. That is, if we leave now. We’ll be in Redbird in time for the next market day if we keep moving.”

  Conleth was perched on the edge of a wide river that fed from the glacial Black Sky Lake in Redbird.

  I nodded as I looked over my shoulder at the tents set up a little further away from ours and the Sailer.

  Rabbit’s people worked on cleaning and repairing weapons, divided supplies, and passed around meals from a bonfire. They glanced over from the corners of their eyes, over their shoulders, from around their friends. Anxious and nervous and hungry.

  “Then let’s keep moving,” I said. “Percy is the priority and your best bet if you insist on a war is to get into the city without a fight. There’s only one way in, and even then, they’ll inspect your cargo and confiscate your weapons. Let me go speak with my father.”

  “So you can do what, sell us out? Hide away in safety while the rest of us are slaughtered? We are putting our lives on the line for our futures and our children’s futures—”

  “That is your own choice!” I snarled at the man, a sudden anger coiled inside my chest. “It is absolutely not necessary for you to do that. And don’t you dare accuse me of abandoning my people and my promises to serve my own needs. I am not my father.”

  Ellie slapped her palms against the crate. A howled laugh erupted from her as the coins leapt from the force and landed in different locations on the map. She squinted up at me, a sly grin across her face and unwarranted humour in her voice.

  “Damn, kid, you know you sound just like him, with this whole righteous and dignified attitude. At least it looks good on you.”

  When I looked at her, all I saw was him.

  His gray eyes, his slick blond hair, his paper-thin skin and the vein in his temple that was only there when he was angry. The pinched shape of his nose and the curve of his mouth that formed a constant sneer of disgust. The hard line of his jaw and the tendons that pressed against the skin of his neck and the dip between his shoulder and his collarbone, the collarbone that had a scar from my teeth—I tore my eyes away from her and looked back at Moon Rabbit, hardening my expression.

  His mustache twitched as his hands moved sharply. “I hope her wants aren’t similar.”

  I smiled, but it wasn’t friendly and it sure as hell wasn’t happy. “She was referring to her son. You know, the one who kidnapped Percy, the one she has been handing out peaches to for however long, straight from your garden in Warren. The one who killed your daughter. If we’re talking about who’s on whose side.”

  Rabbit looked startled, confused as he processed the information.

  I turned away before it fully sank in, before he reeled on her, and walked back between the tents with my arms crossed over my chest and fingers dug into my shoulders.

  No matter what she did, she would dig her way out of it, even with Rabbit.

  The image didn’t leave my head.

  James above me, his hair that brushed against my forehead and his hands that gripped mine so god damn tightly. I know you can’t remember, I know, but it’s just so hard. It’s hard seeing you like this. It’s hard not being with you, it’s like—it’s like I lost you, but… you’re still here.

  And he
cried. I didn’t know how fake those tears were until—

  “Soren?” Jack’s hand brushed my elbow as he tried to draw my attention to him.

  He kept up with my stride easily. I didn’t even know where I was going. I didn’t remember what tent I was in. I kept walking and he kept up.

  “You’re upset.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “That wasn't a question. You’re not, I know you’re not. I can tell.” He reached into the pocket of his jacket and pulled out a pack of dried fruit. He held it out to me and I hesitated, but then the growl of hunger in my stomach decided for me. “Eat your spaceman food, Sparky. We only managed to wake you up for soup once in the past two days.”

  “Two…?” I shook my head and groaned. “By the stars.”

  We climbed to the top of the dune the camp was shielded by and sank down into the sand. Neither of us said anything before the pack of mango was empty.

  We sat quietly above the camp under the heat of the sun, watched the pillar of smoke rise from the bonfire, and the people that moved between the tents as they made themselves busy.

  I twisted the package in my hands until it became a solid spear. My stomach still growled.

  “How are you?” Jack asked, his voice soft. He didn’t look at me. He sat with one knee up and one leg stretched out, scooping sand up in his palm to let it run through his fingers like an hourglass. “Really.”

  I took a breath and laughed lightly. “I feel like I’m trapped in a room with no door, no windows, no way out. And that room is on fire.”

  The walls of my dark room were made of metal that nothing could dent, coated in a black rubber material that absorbed every shock I threw at it, close and secure and permanent.

  Out here, out in the orange copper sand under the flat blue sky, there weren’t any walls. The sands shifted and changed under weather I didn’t remember ever feeling.

  In the Embassy, the people were hard to tell apart from the robots. Out here, the people were selfless and greedy and soft and rough and terrified and brave and everything all at the same time. They were hard to follow, nothing they did carefully and precisely calculated, nothing they did part of a formula of expectation.