by Ellen Larson
Visions of the next three days shot past her mind’s eye in vivid detail. What she must do as “the Prioress.” How she must behave. There was a lot she did not know, but she had the time to work it out. No doubt, no darkness, no phantom despair.
In amazement she remembered the interview with “the Prioress” in the cloister garden at noon on Sunday. How “the Prioress” had brought ice to comfort a chin she had known would be bruised—oh, how simple the explanation of how “the Prioress” seemed to know the future! How strange it would be—reliving her own past from a different vantage point. No wonder “the Prioress” had had trouble focusing on “the now,” when confronted by her own former self.
Merit pulled the white cowl over her head and tucked her hair out of sight. She placed the stole upon her shoulders. Standing before the glass face of the grandfather clock, she settled the silver band of the shield around her forehead and watched as her bruised face disappeared behind the white double heart.
Slowly, she rounded her shoulders and let her chin drop forward. She closed her hands into fists, hiding her bruised knuckles as well as she could. It would have to do—no, it would do. She knew she could pull it off, because she had already watched herself do it.
She turned around. The study looked just as it had in the scans she had seen on Saturday morning. Except. Something wrong, there—the cascade of toys on the floor. Should she hide them? Where?
No. Lazar would be coming; he would hide them to preserve Zane’s name, even in death. Protecting Zane as he had always done.
Ben Lazar. Though she knew now that he had betrayed the captains at Abydos, she felt no outrage. Indeed, from his haggard face and haunted eyes, she knew he had paid for that deed every day and night of his life since. No, her concern was only to convince him that she was the Prioress, so that he would play his part as the drama unfolded. Fortunately, he would be preoccupied with his own shock, his own guilt.
Likewise she would have to keep the housekeeper and gardener from discovering her identity. She and Lena were the same size and had the same body type—just like every Retrospector. And she had the advantage of knowing what was going to happen, as if she had been given a script with which to make this, her long-delayed debut as an actress. She would claim that illness—the cold was becoming worse by the minute—and grief had overwhelmed her, lock her door from the inside, make sure no one saw her without a shield, refuse to see Eric and her former self tomorrow, name Sunday noon as the time that they would meet. She could do it. She knew she could. After all, she had seen it done.
And when the next three days were over and she reached her home time-frame, after which there would only be one of her again, what then?
It was an explosive question. At one p.m. on Monday the Vessel would reappear in the study. In it would be found a pile of ash wearing her clothes and her pendant. Everyone would believe that Merit Rafi was dead. Lena had been right about that. History would see her as the murderer of Omari Zane who had paid for her crime with her life, though a few might see her as a patriot, bravely trading her life for his. Neither tale would be true, but that did not matter, because she would be free.
Free to fight on.
What if . . . what if three days of disguise should become longer? What, she asked herself, might she not accomplish from such a position, working unseen within the circle of her enemies? She would have to distance herself from the Steward, but that would not be hard—he had said he was leaving, and there was no reason she could not tell him to leave at once. As for Gabriel Castor, avoiding him would a problem, but not impossible, if she had help, if she didn’t have to carry on alone.
And she knew she would not be fighting alone. Marshall Frey might make a valuable ally. And there would be others, she knew that now. No matter if they were Oku friends or Rasakan enemies. She had been a fool ever to think that such a distinction meant anything; that the word “enemy” was predictive. She would be a friend to anyone who loved the rule of law and despised Authority’s tyrannical hand.
But that lay further in the future, in a time she could not see. For now, the only ally she needed was Eric.
The room tidied, her disguise complete, she let herself think of him. She knew she could trust him with her life; in retrospect, she realized he had proven that beyond all doubt. Had she hated him for saving her life? Now she blessed him for it, because it had given her this chance. From now on, they would be together, to support each other, to debate the troubles they faced, to fight for what they believed in.
Gabriel Castor had tried to use her hatred of Zane and her own self-hatred to push her to do the flex. He thought he had succeeded, but in truth he had failed.
“You were wrong, Lena,” whispered Merit. “I never would have flexed if I had not seen Eric with someone I thought was you.” There was paradox, indeed.
Two short days to get through—again—and on Sunday night she would be able to tell him. Her heart soared as she allowed herself another remembrance of what she had seen. Somehow, she would have to get word to him to meet her—or rather, somehow, she had gotten word to him. She must have, for he had gone . . . would go . . . to the cloister Sunday night at ten. How would she do it?
I found this on the floor by the General’s desk on Friday night.
Again came enlightenment, as in her mind she watched “the Prioress” give the tondo wrapped in the pink hankie to Eric.
Fumbling through the folds of the unfamiliar robes, she pulled out the two tondos. For the first time, she compared them. They looked exactly the same, down to the smallest detail of chisel work—down to the scratch at the top edge. Of course they looked the same. They were the same. Even as there were currently two of her, there were currently two of it. And like her, when the time loop closed on Monday, there would only be one again.
Crossing to the desk, she knelt and, reaching back as far as she could, placed the tondo from the box of toy soldiers on the railing that ran under the back right corner of the desk, so that her former self would be able to find it on Saturday. The tondo she had found on the railing and brought with her back in time she put back in her pocket. On Sunday, she would write her coded message on it with the red nail varnish and give it to Eric.
Merit looked around the room a final time. There was nothing left for her to do. The stage was set. She, the lead actor, must take her place in preparation for the rise of the curtain.
She went to Omari Zane and took up a toy soldier that had fallen onto his lap. If she could have altered the past, it would have been to change this; to have had the chance to talk with him; to tell him she knew the Resistance had been wrong about him; to tell him how he had been manipulated by those around him. To tell him he had been wrong to give up, but that it was never too late, that she would fight on in his name.
“Someday, what’s left of the world will know.” She slid onto the arm of the chair and laid her head against his bloody breast. “I’ll make sure history gets it right.”
EPILOGUE: THREE DAYS EARLIER
* * *
Friday, 14 April 3324, 11:00 pm
The door opened silently. The Steward entered, a tall, thin man in a black half-shield. “Prioress?” He started, then came swiftly forward. “Saints help us!” Throwing off his shield, he put his hand on Zane’s wrist, feeling for a pulse.
The Prioress raised her shielded face from the man’s bloody chest and stood.
“Are you injured?” The Steward gestured to her blood-streaked robes.
“No,” she said in a hoarse voice. “It is his blood.” She moved behind the Steward, pulling her stole around her neck.
The Steward began to weep. “What happened?”
“I don’t know. I found him this way. Forgive me, I can’t bear it.” She walked slowly to the door, then hesitated. She turned her head over her shoulder. “You must call Authority. Tell them they must come at once. Tell them the Prioress demands a Retrospection.” She passed through the door, and as she went slowly down the stairs,
her footsteps faded away.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
* * *
Ellen Larson was first published in Yankee Magazine and most recently in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. In between she spent eighteen years working as a writer and editor in Egypt, where she indulged in her passions for tennis and bridge. She now lives in an off-grid cabin in the mountains of upstate New York. Larson’s novels and short work, whether mainstream, mystery, or science fiction, borrow heavily from mythology and feature heroic protagonists who experience fast-paced adventures and testing situations that are never black and white.