Chapter Fourteen: Make Good The Cosmic Ache
I am your land. You are my sky.
How shall we speak a world's goodbye?
- Lucy Berry
She knew she was still alive.
Her nerves had rusted in her skin, her limbs slow and hard to move, and the stale air of the room scorched as hot as the hinges of hell through her lungs, but that was good, that was a good sign because dead girls didn't move and dead girls didn't breathe, not at all, not at all, and this girl did so this girl knew that she was still alive even if that was hard to believe right now, with lead eyelids and concrete bones and the drip drip drip of blood in the corner of the room and the faraway sound of people above and below her.
In a room full of dead people, she was very glad to know that she was still alive.
She had not realised she had slept until she was awake again, awake and wishing for sleep. She had slept, and she had dreamed. She had dreamed the very same as a child - of flies raining from the sky and coins glittering below a sheet of ice and the crunch of bone on bone, so the morning always came as a relief, cold and perfect, the atrocious sunrise burning away any traces of the stars but sparing the dusky mist that clung to the roadsides with the tenacity of a constrictor.
She didn't know how long she had laid here, cold stone behind and below her, her breath coming slow and shaky, lying against the wall like a broken thing, all of her strings cut. Sometimes she thought that she could hear someone else breathing beside her, not very far away, and sometimes she thought she could hear heartbeats, a dozen within the room, uncertain and faltering, a thin, wavering staccato. She wasn't sure if she was dreaming them, those heartbeats. She had closed her eyes a very long time ago, when keeping them open had seemed a pointless endeavour, and for a very long time she had barely noticed the difference. In the narrow slit between eyelids where she could see the world, she could only stare at the dark wall opposite her, and that was no improvement at all.
She didn't mind so much. This lethargy was better than what had come before it – when sleep had evaded her with the tenacity of a fennick fox, when she had difficulty keeping her skeleton where it was supposed to be, when her veins had turned to live wires and every faint movement of air across her skin had felt as though her flesh was being stripped whole from her bones and leaving her nerves exposed, bare and raw and vulnerable. That had been worse.
Little white flowers unfurled themselves against the dark canvas of her eyelids, star-shaped explosions of light that burst as sudden as a heart-attack and left scarlet marks like wounds floating in the empty space even as they faded, and the buzzing murmur of voices under the floor ebbed and waned, slowly, like she was tuning a radio, bringing the disparate components of the world around her into a cohesive whole. And then she was suddenly aware of a voice right there, just beside her, speaking to her directly.
"Can you hear me?"
She would have preferred that she couldn't.
"Lady? Lady, if you can hear me..."
Her face was pressed into a pillow, and though all of her nerves seemed to have been dulled by whatever analgesic was pumping through her veins, she could tell even through the haze of lifting lethargy that it was one of the hard, straw-stuffed bolsters typical of the far north, rather than the softer, feather-plumped pillows to which she had become accustomed in the south. The overwhelming scent was that of bleach and iodoform, but there, at the back of it all, the sharp tart odour of near-dissipated phosgene that served as a persistent backdrop to Baffin.
So. Was she home?
She didn't dare to hope.
"Can you move your hand for me?"
" 'Iidha qult nem," she muttered groggily, her tongue lying like a half-dead carcass capable of only minute movement, her teeth seeming almost foreign to her, her whole mouth feeling somehow fuller than before. "Bakarrik utziko nauzu?"
"What's she saying?" The voice from before, the question clearly directed towards another.
A gruff voice, all humour stripped from its bones. "She's asking if you'll leave her alone if she says yes."
She thought she might try to open her eyes. She wasn't optimistic about the result, for they seemed to have been sewn shut, and she almost feared that her lids might rip if she tried. But she did try. She was not in the habit of allowing such trivial matters as injury hold her back.
It was like a layer of gauze had been thrown over everything, over the entire world: her eyes, clouded by that grey of disuse, like dust had settled over her pupils, and her ears, the sound distant and far-away. The buzz behind her eyes were hornets and flies, crawling over her threads of her thoughts before they could coalesce. She knew why she was here, and she knew she did - but the memory spun away before she could grasp it.
Something tugged at her veins, the tube going into her arm, the needle jammed into her flesh, but all of the sinews and bones that composed the girl called Ekaitza Jones resisted her commands even as she ordered herself to turn her head and look, look, look, just look.
But look she did, and she forced her hand up as well. She found the little plastic nub of the tube, acrid in its incongruity, and she pulled it, hard, and bit her lip against the sudden sharpness of the pain, surprising after so long half-asleep, her mind and nerves dulled and quieted. But pain was good, she tried to convince herself – pain meant she was still alive. She wrapped her fingers around the tube again, and tugged again, slower this time, approaching gentleness, and it began to slide free, spilling something dark across her arm. Metallic. Blood.
It hurt.
"Fucking hell!" Her tongue still resisted her attempt at profanity, but there was a low rumble of laughter from somewhere in the room and a pair of calloused hands settled over hers to stop her from yanking the IV out in full.
"I know they do it in the movies." The first voice again. "But trust me. Not a good idea."
Ekaitza's voice did not lack in venom, though it wavered. "You're poisoning me."
"It's saline."
"That's exactly what a poisoner would say."
"Ekai." The gruff voice from before. Her grandfather was hunched over his cane in the corner of the infirmary, looking like he wanted to be absolutely anywhere else. "Falaykun. Let it be."
She muttered something dark under her breath, and pushed in vain at the mattress to push herself up into a seated position, swatting away the first voice's attempts to help her. The first voice, she saw now, belonged to an olive-skinned man with close-cropped black hair and enough stubble to suggest that Ekaitza's coma had been keeping him occupied. He had an accent which suggested he came originally from the Maghreb Republic, just as Ekaitza's grandfather had, and the kind of broad and calloused hands that only came from a long life on the taiga or on the oil rigs, like any self-respecting Baffin man. There was a small nest of blankets and half-read books gathered around the chair beside her low infirmary camp-bed, where someone had been keeping vigil; she highly doubted that her grandfather had been so inclined.
Every muscle hurt as she looked about herself, but nothing so sharp as to suggest where the bullet might have struck her.
"Where…?" She looked at the doctor, and he took her hand and guided it to the side of her head, where her right temple had been thoroughly padded by layers and layers of gauze and bandaging. Her head had been shaved. All her hair was gone.
She remembered being shot.
"The bullet travelled fifteen inches from the side of your right eye," the doctor explained softly. "Then travelled through your neck to land in your shoulder. We removed part of your skull to allow for your brain to swell, and sewed the bone under the skin by your hip to keep it alive – you'll need another surgery in about six weeks to repair that particular damage, but plenty of people have lived the rest of their lives quite happily with bits of their head missing."
"By rights," her grandfather cut in. "You shouldn't be alive."
"Brain damage?"
"Minimal." The doctor smiled.
"No more than usual," her grandfather agreed.
"Was anyone else hurt?"
She could tell from their expressions that they didn't want to tell her.
Saran's family? Yue's parents? Devery? Or any number of the people who had turned out to see her supposedly triumphant return? What could have happened?
Beyond her grandfather, they had run out of beds on which to store the bodies. So they had stacked them on top of one another in extensive rows, long sheets of gauze thrown over them to shield their identities from the world, blood leaking slowly through the fabric.
The Selection abruptly felt an entire world away.
But she knew better, right now, than to push the question.
"Thank you very much for saving me, Doctor…?"
"Please, call me Atsegina."
Ekaitza almost smiled. An apt name for a doctor, meaning kind one. A feminine name, but then, living with Uzohola for so long had rather stripped those sorts of things of any huge implication.
"I owe you a debt, Atsegina."
"Not at all." Atsegina smiled. "I should thank you. I've lost a lot of people during this war. I'm not really used to patients who refuse to die."
Ekaitza shrugged, and then visibly winced as doing so jarred the IV in her arm. "Well, I never was the co-operative sort."
Demetri hadn't realised he still knew how to be nervous, but standing outside the watchmaker's house, he felt his nerves start to fray a little at the edges. He had, on Uzohola's instructions, brought flowers - the kind that Raphael had always liked, purple hyacinths and white tulips, somehow managing to seem washed out amongst all the mad colour of the town. Flowers, he thought grimly, really, just flowers? For all the misery he had put Raphael through, he thought she deserved much more.
The door to the house swung open, at precisely the stroke of eight o'clock. Demetri was glad that the Selected girls were not in the house to hear the bitterness in Raphael's voice - he wasn't sure they would have ever thought of him in the same way had they heard how the watchmaker spoke to her supposed king. "Your Majesty."
Demetri seemed to have abruptly lost his voice. He hadn't seen Raphael in... years. Seven years? "Rafa."
She stood in the threshold, but seemed unwilling to admit him to the house. "You've heard what Oscar Wilde said about losing parents? Once is a tragedy, twice, carelessness."
Demetri pressed his lips together, and nodded.
Raphael's voice shook a little. "That's three times I've had my family stolen from me. Three times. Gross negligence on my part, isn't it?"
"Rafa."
"First the king killed our parents. The Crown killed my sisters." Her voice was very cold. "Then Gabriel butchered himself in the name of the rebellion."
All he could say was, as the General had said so many times before, "the nature of rebellion is to make sacrifices. You know that as well as anyone." Eggs. Omelettes.
Raphael's voice was like ice. "I'll never forgive Klahan for what he did to you." She jerked her head. "Take off your shoes and come in. Agares can't wait to meet you."
Liara wasn't entirely sure where they were going – Atiena had arrived into their shared bedroom simply with the news that they had been instructed to get ready to go out. Over the past weeks, the girls had gone out to Layeni for walks, for visits to the libraries and trinket shops, for Report segments on the Selected candidates helping orphans and learning about the culture of the Kingdom in Exile. But Liara wasn't prepared to question it too much. Any glimpse at the Kingdom was an insight into the rebellion, and any insight into the rebellion was an insight into the man who led it – even if Liara had not glimpsed Demetri in several long days. So she did as she had been told, and went down to the back courtyard to wait for the other girls, and caught sight as she stepped out of the door of Täj reclining against the wall encircling the compound, Feste the nameless dog lazing at his side, basking in the early evening sun.
The pale man was dressed in a pale blue sweater and faded jeans with a hole over the knee, barefoot with slightly bedraggled hair, like he had been roused from sleep for the purposes of dinner. It was so strange, Liara thought – until this moment, she wasn't sure she had fully realised how young he was, how close in age to the Selected girls, maybe even younger than the King of Dust himself. Vulnerable wasn't the word, for he was still so pale and sharp and watchful that there was no scope left for softness, but maybe she could call it an openness, a youth, a humanity that Liara had never quite perceived in him before this moment, otherwise unremarkable in its mundanity. His pale blonde hair had grown too long, and was curling about his collar. He still had bandages on his fingers, starch white against the more muted, dirty colours of his clothes.
She gestured to his attire. "I'm feeling slightly overdressed," she said, rather sardonically, but in truth she thought that if there was any chance of seeing Demetri, then the opposite was entirely true – she was clad in just a simple slip dress, its fabric a deep violet hue, and a pair of ballet flats loaned to her by Raphael's wife, Agares, which were slightly too small for her and pinched at the toes. All of the other girls had similarly resorted at this point to second-hand clothes, borrowed from the Smetiskos or bought from the tiny serpentine markets which choked this town's streets, most of Raphael's clothes far too big and long-legged even for the willowy Atiena, who was the tallest of the girls, while Agares' clothes, conservative and concealing, tended not to suit given the unbearable heat of the sun overhead at all times. "Should I change?"
"The king won't be there," Täj said, almost as though he had read Liara's mind. "It's just dinner."
Liara frowned. They had grown into a sort of routine as of late – the girls and Raphael and Agares dining together, a pseudo-family in the cramped kitchen, communal dishes passed around the table and quiet chatter maintaining a near-constant buzz for the ensuing few hours in which they ate and shared stories and made tea and cracked jokes about the whole strange experience. As divorced as this all was from Liara's expectations of a Selection – the prospect of the same had been mentioned, on occasion, in passing, as Mordred drew closer to seizing power from his regent mother, and it had always rather gone without question that Liara would find a place therein – she could not deny that it had, in its own odd way, been a nice way to get to know the other girls. Without Raphael's insistence on "family dinners", she thought it highly likely that she would never have learned of Saran's acute empathic abilities, Atiena's marked intensity and determined focus, Yue's quiet love for the arts, Lissa's love of more outlandish theories. They were alternately shy, guarded, and suspicious girls, and Liara had a creeping impression that without Raphael's insistence on time spent together, they might never have grown past greetings and pleasantries.
"Ms Smetisko has some prior engagement," Yue said softly. Atiena and Yue had stepped out onto the porch behind Liara; Atiena was wearing some of Raphael's refitted camo trousers and a black tank top which left her strong arms bare, and Yue had adopted one of Agares' long floral skirts with a pale pink camisole that reminded Liara a little of the primroses that Ysabel had always grown in the third garden of the palace.
"She specifically needs us out of the house for that?" Atiena seemed unable to keep down her eyebrow. "Interesting engagement."
Atiena always was the cynical sort. Liara had to say that she rather enjoyed that quality. There were very few people in the safehouse willing to give voice to the pervasive air of pessimism and near-certain doom which seemed to suffuse the whole strange atmosphere of the Selection. And it was better Atiena that did say these things, rather than Liara herself. She needed to keep her head down, caught in that awkward position where she needed to make an impression on the king while eschewing the attention of all of his followers, lest she attract it for entirely the wrong reasons. Never before had she realised that a childhood in the court of Mordred would train her so perfectly for infiltration of a rebel kingdom, but anyone who was expected to dine with Ysabel learned very quickly to perfect their poker face, do what they had to do, and watch their tongue.
Täj didn't say anything in response, but pushed away from the wall, and gestured that they should follow him. The restaurant towards which they headed was one that Liara had passed several times over the past few weeks, but into which she had never quite ventured; it had a beautiful set of pale purple shutters pinned open to expose a set of frosted annealed glass, rippling with golden light from the lamps and candles which lit the dining area within. The staff recognised them as they walked in – or at least, they seemed to recognise Täj – and silently guided the motley group into a back room, decorated with a very low table around which was scattered stools and brightly coloured cushions, illuminated from the walls by a soothing amber light which spilled romantically across every surface. To Liara's surprise, the propagandist Wickanninish Harjo and the orphanage girls – tiny, feisty Saran and wild, dreamy Lissa – were already settled there, glasses of wine set on the table in front of them.
Täj sank into the seat next to Wick as the girls picked their positions – Yue angled immediately for Saran, as she was wont to do, and Liara and her roommate, Atiena, picked spots on the other side of the table, to ensure a mostly even distribution of people. To her amusement, she saw that Täj had already produced his tiny silver snuff box and was rolling a new cigarette, as though he could stand to inhale clean air for only a few seconds at a time. He caught her watching him, and made a face, and Liara could not hold back the tiny smile which followed.
"How has your week been, ladies?" Wick had an endearing, broad smile that he used to great effect now, looking relaxed as he reached forward for his glass of wine. "Rafa keeping you busy?"
Yue nodded. "We spent a lot of time out by the minefields," she said, her gaze flicking anxiously around to ensure that no one thought she was speaking out of turn. She always got so nervous around dinnertimes – any mealtime, really. Liara was pretty sure she knew why, but she and the northern girl had never been close enough for her suspicions to be confirmed.
"Lots of Report footage," Atiena agreed. That cynicism again! "Ms Ndlovukazi won't be joining us?"
"Uzohola is having an evening off." Wick had a low, slightly delighted tone to his voice, which caused Täj to shoot him an amused, slightly withering look. "She deserves it, I think – she's been working all day, every day, since the Selection began."
"Seems like you all have been," Lissa said curiously.
"Nah. Täj's done fuck all. You've done more for the rebellion with your photo-shoots than he has done in the last ten years."
The pale man didn't seem to be able to argue against that, and nor did he get the opportunity, for they were interrupted by the staff entering the room to set down the food for their meal – a strange fusion of cuisines, as all things in this province seemed to be a fusion of some sort or another. Atiena did not seem to be able to hold back from reaching out for the spicy stew, the feijoada, and muttered by way of explanation, when she caught Liara watching, "just like Mama Morris used to make it." Yue seemed delighted to tell Lissa what all the different pieces of sushi were called – hosomaki, temaki, narezushi, temari, inari-zushi, the words dropping from her lips like she was reciting poetry, more confident in sharing this information than Liara had seen her in a long time, maybe ever. Without needing to be asked, Wick passed Saran the communal bowl of guriltai shul, from which she spooned great heaps of Mongolian noodles and raw mutton out onto her plate. Liara thought there wasn't enough space on her plate, or in her stomach, for all of the foods she wanted to try – the Kingdom in Exile was a poor one, but in every aspect of life they seemed to pour every inch of their creativity and soul and effort, with the result that the room was suddenly warm and alive with the rich scent of spices.
The door slid open, and Vardi Tayna slid in, her long dark hair in loose damp tendrils about her shoulders. As way of explanation for her lateness, she waved the bottles in her hands, and tossed one to Täj, the other to Liara – a bottle of 25 year Invergordon for Täj, 20 year Samaroli Yehmon for Liara. Their labels were worn, faded as though they had been buried somewhere for a long time and only recently unearthed. "Much negotiation was had," Vardi Tayna said, very dryly. "But what Wick wants, Wick gets."
"Are we celebrating something?" Liara asked. She couldn't say that she got along very well with the rebel girl; Vardi Tayna always seemed vaguely insincere, neither trustworthy nor trusting, and it remained slightly beyond Liara's understanding what the other rebels saw in her to count her so solidly amongst their friends – what Demetri saw in her. Vardi Tayna collapsed into a seat beside Liara, and reached for a glass, and soon each girl had a glass of whiskey or wine or rum in front of them, Saran looking slightly apprehensive at the ease with which Vardi Tayna drained her first glass and poured herself a second.
"Absolutely not," Wick replied. "A sober rebellion is no rebellion at all, you know? We drink to forget. We also drink because, well, it's fun."
The bottle was passed to Liara – the whiskey, the Invergordon. Trajan had sometimes drank the same, when Liara's father had called to his study and the two of them would sit with Set by the fire with tumblers of whisky before them and much to discuss. She and Mordred had got very drunk on the same for her fifteenth birthday, hiding on the Lee household's roof, away from the insipidly tacky party her mother had planned for the occasion. Mordred had nearly fallen over the edge; Liara had threatened to push him. And they had shattered the bottle as well, somewhere between drinking and half-climbing, half-sliding down off the top of the building. She could still remember the pale emerald colour of the glass, the same as the bottle she now held in her hands. She wondered if the General had pilfered some of the bottles from the palace, stealing Trajan's alcohol even as he stole Trajan's son.
"Does anyone know any drinking games?" Wick enquired, once the food was nearly all cleared from the shared dishes. An interesting form of cultural exchange, Liara thought, though perhaps an enlightening one. If you could learn about a person's life succinctly, she thought it likely you did so through food, sex or alcohol. And, well, they had already handled the first and the second seemed... rather off the table for the time being.
Lissa was about to speak when the door to the room slid open for a second time, and - Liara had to set her jaw - Demetri appeared on the threshold, dressed far more formally than any of the people before him, the remnants of a suit that seemed to have been eroded by whatever evening event had similarly left him looking tired, drawn and pale: a faded white shirt, a tie loose around his neck, cuffs rolled up to his elbows. "Would you all hold it against me if I were to interrupt?"
"You've missed the food, your Highness." Wick had stretched out, quite languidly, on his side of the table, hands braced behind his head to look at his king.
"I've already eaten." Demetri sounded amused. Liara could count very few times that he ever sounded otherwise. A wry, light amusement seemed to be his default - perhaps because it was difficult to take offence at. "But I could definitely do with some drinking."
Täj was already pouring him a glass of the rum, so Demetri took a seat between Lissa and Yue, and pushed back his hair, and flashed Atiena a smile when he caught her watching him. Maybe it was the softer light, or the late hour, or the slight haze of incense and whiskey fumes which hung over the whole room, but Liara could not hake the impression that everyone here seemed so much younger than they usually did. Less scarred. Less bitter. Liara, as she always did when she was in close proximity with Demetri, could not resist scanning his features - but the man may as well have been wearing a mask for all that he betrayed.
"So," Wick was saying, "a game? Get to know your king..."
A slight ripple of laughter.
"We could sconce," Liara said, her mouth almost moving of its own accord.
"Sconce?" Saran repeated, looking curious. Täj pressed his lips into a half-smile and Demetri turned his head to say something to the pale man as the rebel began to roll another cigarette.
"It's a game we used to play at the palace."
Demetri's eyes were very green, and very steady.
"You say something that someone might have done, and if you've done it, you have to drink."
She was quickly shushed by Wick's call of "show! Don't tell!"
Liara rolled her eyes. "Fine." She stood, glass in hand, and looked around the room, trying to think of something which might amuse the group, something which might rattle Demetri a little, something which might peel back some layer of his armour. "I sconce anyone who... has broken a bone. Now you stand, and you drink, if you have."
The rebels all stood, and Yue as well, and Atiena and Lissa, and they took a sip - some larger than the others - and then they sat again, and Liara looked expectantly at Lissa to provide the next one.
"I sconce anyone who has..." Lissa paused. "Or has had. A crush on one of the rebels."
Dangerous, Liara thought, because a crush on the rebels was not necessarily a crush on Demetri. But the king looked relaxed and laughed at the sconce, and applauded her bravery as Saran rose, looking shy, and then Yue stood also, and Atiena followed suit, and Lissa pointed at the others and said, "I said anyone, not any of the Selected," and Täj and Vardi Tayna and Demetri and Wick all stood and raised their glasses towards Lissa and drained their glasses.
No sooner had everyone sat again than Vardi Tayna bounced to her feet, a darkly gleeful look in her eyes. "I sconce anyone..." Her eyes flicked around the room, looking quite dangerous. Wick looked like he wanted to muzzle her. Täj looked like he thought she might tear his whole skeleton from him with a single word. Even Demetri leaned forward and his smile faded from his face. Vardi Tayna seemed to think better of the one she was going to use, and switched tack swiftly. "I sconce anyone who accidentally cracked their cyanide pill when they shouldn't have, and passed out from panic!"
Wick leapt to his feet in protest. "I told you that in confidence, VT!"
"There are no secrets in sconces," Liara said, rather sympathetically, and poured more wine in Wick's glass so that the young man could take his assigned drink. "You can only take revenge."
Wick laughed. "I sconce anyone who once forgot what name they were using….." Täj and Vardi Tayna both prepared to stand, but Wick held up a finger. "And got incredibly angry at the guy they were sleeping with for "talking about some other girl"!"
Yue clapped her hands over her mouth in shock, and Liara could not help but burst out laughing, her entire body convulsing. Täj's smile was barely restrained and very white indeed as he tipped the contents of his glass into Vardi Tayna's, and the spy girl stood, made an obscene gesture towards Wick, and drained her glass. When she sat, she put her face very firmly in Täj's shoulder, and it was on the pale man to stroke her hair very gingerly and say, quite sympathetically, "it was very, very funny, Tayna."
That seemed to start the flood, for abruptly the accusations were flying and the half-circle which had assembled seemed to have a whole host of scores to settle, though with every call there was a ripple of good-natured laughter and some back-and-forth banter before the penalty was accepted.
"I sconce anyone who convinced an entire Crown regiment that he was Seth Dunin's illegitimate child!"
"I sconce anyone who accidentally shot the General!"
"I sconce anyone who got his ears pierced by a drunk Vardi Tayna and a very dull bayonet!"
"I sconce anyone who replaced his Wanted posters with copies that had a better photo on them!"
Even Saran had joined in. "I sconce anyone who made a child cry by smiling at them!"
At this point, Wickanninish Harjo was getting extremely drunk, for much of the list had been directed at him. "This is starting to feel a little uneven," he complained, but he had a rakish smile on his face and rather seemed to be enjoying the attention. "Well then, I sconce anyone who pretends she can't speak English when she wants to avoid talking to someone."
Saran blushed and rose for her drink.
"While you're standing," Wick added, "I sconce anyone whose family owns most of Mongolia."
Saran again had no choice but to drink.
"And again." Wick's smile was wicked. "I sconce anyone with a Napoleon complex."
"Five foot three," Saran declared. "Is not short, and I refuse to drink for that one."
"That sounds like short-man-syndrome to me, Lady Saran."
Saran made a face and took a third drink, throwing Wick a teasingly angry look as she sat. Yue looked like she had been mulling one over, but Saran beat her to it, as she leaned forward and called, "I sconce anyone who has literally murdered people, but thinks that anyone who dislikes dogs is a monster."
Atiena shrugged. "I stand by it," she said, although she seemed unable to hold back a smile in Saran's direction as their gazes met. She rose, and then there was a ripple of laughter as Demetri stood as well.
"Lady Atiena is rarely wrong," he said, and held up a hand. "I remind you, though, it is a crime to sconce your king."
Vardi Tayna shook her head. "Absolutely, your Grace. It would just be a coincidence if one was to apply to you… now, I sconce anyone who tried to claim he'd been shot when really he had just tripped during a battle and fallen on a piece of rusty rebar."
Demetri shook his head. "I was twelve."
"You were a fucking idiot, is what you were."
So, of course, he drank.
And then the flurry was turned onto the Selected girls, and it was only in so doing that Liara began to truly understand just how well they had got to know one another over those interminably long days at one another sides.
"I sconce anyone who still thinks sixty degrees is a 'hot day'." That was a dig directed precisely at the northern girls, Saran and Yue, who seemed pretty unapologetic in accepting it, though Saran let out a brief protest of, "it is" as she drank and sat again.
"I sconce anyone who started crying after a bee flew into a window." That was from an amused Atiena, directed squarely at Yue, whose blush was almost unnoticeable under the alcohol-induced flush which was beginning to creep up around her cheeks.
"I sconce anyone who, after stabbing someone in the neck, was more concerned with getting blood on their clothes." Liara thought Vardi Tayna sounded almost admiring as Atiena stood to accept that one, and then there was a ripple of laughter as Täj leapt up to join her.
"I sconce anyone who thought an air raid would make an amazing first date for a girl he had never spoken to before." Only Wick would have gotten away with that one, for it was directed at Demetri, who seemed to take it in good humour as he stood, drank, and said, "I haven't heard any complaints," and Liara quelled the little voice in her head that asked why she had been accorded five minutes in a supervised room while Nina got a roadtrip. Though the rebels had drank the most of any of the group, they seemed the least affected; Liara supposed a life as hard as theirs tended to breed a tolerance for alcohol.
"I sconce anyone who has run away to try and join the circus." From a languid Saran, for an amped-up Lissa, and though Liara had not heard this particular story before, she couldn't say it surprised her in the least about the slightly wild orphan. She was a strong drinker, almost as steady as Wick with the tenacity with which she flicked back her glass of rum.
"I sconce anyone who started collecting teeth after fights." Vardi Tayna seemed unapologetic standing up to accept that one from her unlikely roommate, Yue, who giggled through most of her words, and from the laughs of Wick and Demetri, this was a story that they had heard before.
Saran, looking curious, leaned forward and said, "I sconce anyone who's hooked up with someone else here."
"Define hooked up," Vardi Tayna began, but Täj shook his head, and said, "if you have to ask, darling..."
They clinked their glasses, and drained them in a single swig. The rest of the Inner Circle looked utterly unsurprised at this revelation, but some of the Selection exchanged shocked looks. Yue looking thoughtful. Wick took a more muted sip of his drink. Demetri did not drink, and Liara could not hope to say why that relieved her so much. Nor could she quite articulate why it so disappointed her that Täj had.
Demetri spoke next, his voice very thoughtful, and very soft. "I sconce any member of the Selected who is actually in this for love."
Yue rose. Then Saran. And Liara, almost without realising it, stood as well. Well, she thought. For a certain sort of love.
Could you call it love?
"For love implies that I didn't love you long before that, darling," Vardi Tayna was saying to the king, as though trying to lighten the somber mood which had descended upon the asking of this question. "Should I stand?"
Demetri grimaced. "I would rather you didn't."
"Hey!" She elbowed him, and he took her empty glass from her and refilled it, and it did not escape Liara's notice that she pointedly did not take a drink.
Well. That was that answered.
"The world," Yue said softly, "is starting to spin a little."
Atiena leaned forward to pour her a little more wine. "That means it's working."
After fifteen years of marriage, Lord Set Dunin still sometimes found himself utterly dumbfounded at the sheer otherworldly beauty of the woman he had the honour to call his wife. It was the sort of feeling one expected to fade, not intensify, after so long together, but occasionally – as today – he caught sight of Ysabel in a sort of living candid, clearly oblivious to being observed, and in that carelessness a pure, unfiltered sort of beauty, not merely physical but in the way her pale eyes moved, the way she smiled a little crookedly to show cuspids that were slightly too sharp, the way she tilted her head when confronted with someone or something she clearly believed to be insipid beyond belief – indeed, most people and most things she encountered.
And as much as he continued to treasure the same, he had learned to treasure also those rare moments over the past fifteen years when she had seemed at rest and at ease – rare before and even rarer now, with Mordred stalking the halls in thinly veiled brooding bitterness and General Lee prepared to launch fresh air raids at the slightest twitch of Set's finger, even after their last two had killed thirty people in all, General Lee's daughter reportedly amongst them. Every vein and artery of the palace seemed to thrum with tension. So it was very rare that Set might enter the drawing room to find Ysabel had managed to steal a few moments of sleep on the chaise lounge at the far end of the room. Even asleep, she managed to look slightly stressed; there were thin lines beside her eyes that Set thought might never fade, like even lost in dreams she was aware of the weight of the kingdom on her shoulders.
Her eyelids fluttered slightly as Set lowered himself down on one knee beside her, but Set put a hand on her hair and said, softly, "don't worry, lovely, it's just me." He kept his voice very low, more a suggestion of sound.
"Mmm." She stirred, turning her head, her hair splayed wildly around her on the pale gold brocade pillow under her head. "What time is it?"
"About seven. Mrs Kucek is going to bring you up dinner shortly." Set paused, gently stroking her hair, and decided against asking her how her day had been, knowing the answer would simply be, stressful. Fighting a war was hardly a relaxing endeavour, Set knew from experience, and Set knew that Ysabel had spent most of the early morning fielding antagonistic questions from international agencies and foreign diplomats about a supposed massacre in one of the northern rebel provinces. He doubted highly that her day had been very enjoyable, and he therefore decided that perhaps he should distract her by speaking about his own. He kept his voice light. "Mrs Lahela sends her regards."
Ysabel, her eyes still shut, smiled slightly. "Thank you for taking that particular bullet, darling."
"She's worried about her daughter. It's understandable." Set was not accustomed to taking the tactful role; he was usually the military commander, charged with planning attacks and leading attacks, minutely more suited to violence than to diplomacy.
"Her daughter made a choice." Even half-asleep, Ysabel could be very cold when she wanted to be. "My son didn't."
Set didn't see fit to mention that Demetri had been Jael's son, not Ysabel's. Mordred and Demetri were brothers, and Ysabel had pledged from the first to allow no different treatment between them. Whatever failures in that vein that she had made had to be forgivable; she had always tried her best. Set could remember her confiding in him, the night before her marriage to Trajan – "all the stories, all the wicked stepmothers…"
"You? Wicked?" Set had put his arm around her and drawn her close. "Not a strong enough word for how awful you are." But that had, at least, made her laugh, rather than cry, and Set had always loved to hear Ysabel laugh, even in those old days when she was his brother's wife, successor to Jael, new queen-in-the-making.
She was not laughing now, but he thought that was probably because the topic had turned, however briefly, to Demetri, and unlike Mordred, who had a gallows sense of humour, or Set, who could be extraordinarily incisive when he wanted to be, Ysabel still rather treated the topic of the lost prince as a kind of taboo that could not be treated with anything less than total reverence. "And General Lee?"
"Is he ever any different?"
"True." She turned her head into his hand, and smiled sleepily. "I should be working. The Selection won't organise itself."
"A few hours of rest might help, not hurt."
"Maybe." She put her hands over her eyes and yawned. One would be forgiven for thinking she looked far from queenly right now, and yet Set found himself, as ever, quite entranced. "Poor Mordred."
"He's about to spend the foreseeable with thirty five pretty girls." Set laced his fingers through his wife's, and gently tugged them from her face; she had to laugh. "Poor Mordred seems like an overstatement."
Ysabel laughed. "Set, you of all people should know that thirty five beautiful women means nothing if one particular person isn't among them."
Set laughed under his breath. "You're starting to sound sentimental in your old age, Ysa."
"God forbid." Ysabel shook her head and sighed. "You know, I had the most wonderful dream."
Set raised her hand to his lips, and smiled against her skin. "Oh?"
Ysabel sounded very, very far away. "I dreamed the Selection was over, and it was Mordred's wedding, and he had found the most perfect woman to call his queen, with Liara as his maid of honour, and she was alive, and she was content, and it was all so wonderful, but we were waiting. I can't remember why we were waiting. Waiting for the bride? And I turned around to speak to his best man, to ask where she had got to, and it was Demetri, happy and whole and home."
Set spoke softly. "Maybe it was prophetic."
Ysabel's voice sounded like it was coming from very far-away. "We can dream, can't we?"
They could, Set thought. Dreaming was the only thing left to them, really.