The Nameless Storm, page 13
Unless this was all leading up to an immaculate and thorough revenge, which she also couldn’t discount. Though watching how Dressa responded to Iata—with a respect that actually seemed deserved—Lesander didn’t think it was revenge.
And him telling her to use the back corridors? She shouldn’t have access at all.
Adeius. But she could Change her palm to Iata’s own DNA. Or Arianna’s, if she wanted to admit that she’d studied stolen DNA before she’d even arrived. Imorie’s, she assumed, would not work.
She didn’t dare attempt Dressa’s biometrics.
In the prep room, Lesander handed her comm to Dressa, who was sitting at her vanity. Pria, dressed immaculately in a brocade coat and trousers Lesander knew was equal to the cost of a small—and maybe slightly older—interstellar ship, worked through Dressa’s hair with a dry conditioner. It smelled like plums.
And here was another reminder that bloodservants were hardly servants. Dressa had said Pria wasn’t as fully trained as Iata, but she was still Change-trained. She was still royalty, still blood. And she was still in training to be Dressa’s shadow co-ruler, if not quite in the way that Iata had been with Homaj.
So Dressa said.
Today, Pria’s short black hair was artfully messy. She eyed Lesander through a spike of bangs with open hostility. Pria had never been particularly friendly to Lesander, but just now her glare could chisel through stone.
After Dressa had explained who Pria’s father was…Lesander didn’t really blame her.
Dressa took Lesander’s comm and read the screen with Iata’s message on it, her sculpted brows climbing. She handed the comm back.
“That’s a test,” she said. “Which of us you choose to use for the biometrics.”
“Yes. I thought as much.” Lesander eyed Pria. She didn’t want to be as open around the bloodservant as she was when she was alone with Dressa, even though Dressa didn’t seem to get that. To Dressa, Pria was just family.
And would Lesander ever have that status in Dressa’s eyes? To actually and truly be family? Would she ever deserve it?
Dressa loved her, yes, but love didn’t always mean family.
But then, family didn’t always mean love, either.
“Any advice?” Lesander asked.
“Don’t try to kill him,” Pria said under her breath.
Dressa sat up straight, her feet thumping hard on the carpeted floor. “Adeius—Pri, give me the bottle, I’ll take it from here.”
Pria’s glare transferred to Dressa, turned admonishing.
“I’ve slept in the same bed as my wife the last two nights and I’m still alive, if you haven’t noticed,” Dressa snapped, getting just a little of her father’s sharp tone. Which she seemed to notice and checked herself, sitting back again. “Well, I’m not going to start worrying now.”
“I’m worried about him,” Pria said. “He shouldn’t be alone with—”
“Pri!”
Pria opened her hands, let the comb she’d been using drop to the floor, and marched out.
Dressa pressed both her hands to her cheeks.
“She’s…not taking this well.”
Lesander said nothing. What in the worlds could she say to that, that she’d now come between Dressa and her bloodservant, who were supposed to be closer than siblings?
Dressa swiveled in her chair and looked up at Lesander with narrowed eyes. “Don’t you blame yourself, not for her. We’ve never gotten on as well as we should, Pri and I. We’re just…very different people.”
Dressa sighed and bent to pick up the comb, flicking shut the bottle of conditioner. “Our parents did their best to make sure our personalities would be compatible.” She shrugged. “There’s only so much you can guess beforehand, though.”
Dressa grimaced, a weird lopsided frown which was a new tic that had started just after…well. And Lesander could hardly blame Dressa for being upset about all of this, too. About her.
Lesander had given up her family for her wife. She had done that. That should count for something—that should count for a lot.
But she had a large debt to pay before she could come even close to forgiveness, or trust.
She had a summons, though. While the Melesorie hadn’t specified a time, “as soon as possible” was implied.
She held up her palm. “The test?”
He would know which person’s genetics she used to gain access to the back corridors. And maybe it wasn’t even safe to use Iata’s own biometrics, with the kill order out on him.
That thought sent another spike worming through her gut.
She’d been trained for how to kill a Truthspoken, but she’d never been trained to handle the guilt of it after. In her mother’s eyes, there should have been no guilt.
And the guilt of, in the end, betraying her family. Betraying both of her families, not truly belonging to either. Despised by both.
Dressa leveled a look at her. One of those too-seeing looks Lesander was coming to seriously dislike.
Lesander squirmed. And was not proud of it, before she regained her composure. But she knew Dressa still saw.
Did she revel in it?
No. No, that wasn’t Dressa. Dressa wasn’t even close, not even a little, to the sadist that was Lesander’s mother. And her mama, too, if she was honest. No one could be in tandem with Yroikan Javieri and keep their morals intact.
“It’s your test,” Dressa said. “I won’t help you cheat.” Then her face softened. A little. “At least it’s Iata teaching you. My father…hmm. Yeah, I would have helped you cheat with my father.”
And with those ominous words, Lesander made her way into the bedroom. On the way, she concentrated and Changed the DNA in her palm to…okay, Arianna’s. The genetics that Imorie had to leave behind. Cards on the table—she wasn’t going to hide from Iata exactly what she’d been trained to do. Even if she’d talked her mother out of marrying Imorie and then replacing them.
Killing them. Then replacing them.
Lesander shuddered again before she brought herself back under control.
She hadn’t been alone with Iata since that night. He’d known who she was, he’d known she was illegally trained—and that much had been glaringly obvious—but he’d still taken her with him into the city. And when she’d been in distress, he’d embraced her.
And she’d stabbed him. She’d been facing him. She’d watched the moment that realization hit his eyes, the slightest flicker of surprise, the universe of hurt.
She would relive that moment in her dreams every day of her life, she was sure of it.
The panel door, which she’d watched Dressa open before, clicked open, and she slipped into the back corridors.
18
TOO MUCH TRUTH
Change is so much of who we are that when you try to view a Truthspoken away from Change, there is no context. If there’s no Change, there’s no Truthspoken. But I wonder sometimes who I would have been without it. Who you would have been, Uncle. Who my children would have been, and my parents, and my siblings. Would we all have been better without it? Or just have different problems?
HOMAJ RHIALDEN, SERITARCHUS IX IN A PRIVATE LETTER, NEVER SENT; PUBLISHED IN THE CHANGE DIALOGUES
Lesander tried to push in the panel door to the Seritarchus’s study, but it wouldn’t open for her, not even with Arianna’s DNA in her palm. It would have for Iata’s, though, she was fairly sure of that. Was that also a part of the test?
The door clicked and swung inward. Iata stood there, a silhouette in the light behind him. His posture was rigid, though she couldn’t see his face well enough to read more. A long weave of three large, loose braids hung over one shoulder, glossy enough to see in the light, glinting with red nova hearts woven into them. His shoulders puffed with gauzy pastel taffeta.
Lesander had never seen any signs in anything she’d seen or read of Iata to indicate he was other than firmly masc. But as Homaj, he wove through expressions of gender fluidity like he’d been born to them.
And maybe it was more complicated than that. Lesander was finding that everything at Palace Rhialden was more complicated than that. For her to have thought she could play on the same level as the Rhialden Truthspoken was…appalling. And appallingly naïve.
Iata was a man who’d performed before an entire kingdom for half of his life. Or maybe all of it? Which was the real Iata, the intense and rigid bloodservant, or…whoever this was before her now?
Every nuance of this man was exactly what he wanted it to be—except, maybe, the glint of the seal on his cheek. And the flare of deep forest green around him.
Iata stepped to one side, and she slipped past him into the study.
He shut the door quietly behind her.
“Thank you for coming. What I would like to do tonight is mostly talk through what you already know. Then we will begin to assess the limits of your education and what you still need to learn.”
Bile rose up, and she pushed it back down. She still couldn’t quite believe he was willing to train her as a Truthspoken. What they were doing now was so illegal—but then, he was the ruler. And his rulership itself wasn’t exactly legal, or at least, not all above board. He wasn’t above the law, but he was still at its pinnacle.
A ghastly part of her whispered, what if she could finish the job she’d started right now, kill him and then rise to power with Dressa?
Or—or—what her mother had wanted, kill him and then kill and replace…well, it wouldn’t be Arianna now, it would be Dressa. She could replace Dressa, she passably could—maybe not in the Truthspeaker’s eyes, she’d have to find a way to kill Ceorre, too. And Haneri.
And Imorie and Rhys while she was at it, wouldn’t she?
But she knew Dressa’s every tic and nuance. Everything that Dressa had shared with her, and Dressa had bared her soul.
At least, she’d thought.
A vicious part of Lesander was proud she’d gotten this far into Palace Rhialden politics. She’d made the mistake about not knowing who Iata really was, but that was hardly a mistake she could be blamed for.
It might even help the kingdom to have the ruling magicker gone. And the bulk of the Rhialdens. The Rhialdens were on a fast slide downward, and she could save them—their family name at least—from the fall.
Lesander could win back her family. And she wouldn’t be a failure. She wouldn’t have to be estranged from them, as she knew she would be now. Then she could sit at the pinnacle. She could hold the power. For once in her life, for fucking once not be beholden to everyone else’s whims, and their cruelties.
She’d only have to kill everyone around her.
She’d only have to kill the woman she loved.
And this man, right here, who’d refused to die the last time. Who was still, still offering to teach her.
Lesander shivered. She wasn’t aware that she was crying until the room around her blurred.
And Iata was there, nearby but not touching, the aura around him radiating his concern—she could feel that, palpably feel that from him. Adeius, he should not be concerned for her. He shouldn’t.
Her chest constricted.
“I’m a horrible person,” she choked. “You shouldn’t train me.”
“No, you’re not,” he said, with such definitive finality that any thoughts to the contrary shied away from her. “And that is the truth.”
It rang in his voice, was searing in his dark eyes when she met them.
“Come on,” he said, and led her to the powder blue couch in the center, taking a seat in the wingback chair across from her.
He eased down with less grace than he should have had, his mouth tight. Was he still in pain? And that was her fault. How could he say she wasn’t horrible—how could she have felt that truth from him—
But magickers would reflect a person’s truth, not necessarily the truth. If Iata had decided not to believe that she was horrible, it still didn’t mean it wasn’t true. Just that he was delusional.
“Lesander,” he said, and there was enough ache in his voice it made her look up again. “I’m sorry.”
She gaped at him, shocked into asking, “What the hell did you do to make you apologize to me?”
He’d done nothing. Absolutely nothing to deserve what she’d done to him.
He grimaced. “I didn’t see. I let my own opinions of your family inform my opinion of you.”
She wrapped her arms around her stomach, leaned forward on the couch. “When Imorie first came back, when you—Iata—brought them back in the corridor—that was you, wasn’t it?”
He might not be angry with her now, but he had been then. His rage had been nearly solar.
He let out a long breath, exhaustion pinching around his eyes. “Yes. I was angry—not at you, specifically, but the Javieris. But at the time I’d equated them with you. The Javieris coerced Eti into using his magics illegally. It’s how Imorie was caught.”
Lesander froze. She hadn’t known that. And she still had the nagging sense that Eti was familiar—had she seen him before? On her homeworld, had they—whichever Javieri had been using him—brought him to her mother’s palace?
No, no she didn’t think that was it. She was sure she hadn’t met Eti until the palace here. Until a few days ago.
But she absolutely believed her mother was capable of using Green Magickers in that way. Her mother had never liked magickers, with an intensity that felt like a grudge.
“I didn’t know,” she said carefully, attentive to every nuance of his reaction.
He nodded, accepting her statement as if it was truth—and he would be able to tell that, wouldn’t he? His aura flared denser around him than any other magicker’s she’d seen. Bright enough that he’d been forced into taking the position of the First Magicker. She was talking to the First Magicker.
Lesander halted her blanch, and knew, for a moment, the fear that all the other nobles must be feeling. That this person could both read her body language and peer into her soul with a glance. What secrets could she ever hide from him? What part of her soul could she hold separate enough that he’d never see?
She swallowed, forced herself to meet his eyes again. “You asked me what I thought about magickers, when we went into the city.”
“And did you give me truthful answers?”
“Yes.” She had. She hadn’t known he was a magicker then, and she’d known what was at the end of that excursion, what she’d planned to do. But she’d let herself pretend, just for a moment, that her life was different. That he really was the person who’d trained her, who asked her opinions and truly seemed to listen. Who walked her through the why of things and didn’t scream at her when she didn’t understand.
She’d almost dared to hope that she could have that life. He had offered to train her, and she knew now he’d really meant it. But she’d known it had to be a lie. She’d thought she had no other choice but to carry out what she’d come to do.
“Good,” he said, and smiled, leaned back. “It’s a foundation from which to start.”
And his face was so earnest. She was off-kilter, too open with him just now, partly because he was not holding his own guard up. She could very clearly see that he was not Homaj Rhialden, though his likeness was perfect, and he was still using most of Homaj’s mannerisms and cadences. His hands glittered with Homaj’s rings, his elaborate hairstyle a marker of Homaj’s tastes, his puffy designer blouse with all the fashion-setting extravagance Homaj was known for. His eyes were sharply lined, his lips a deep violet. A contrast of pastels and rich darks.
But there were a dozen little things that were off from the man Lesander had been made to obsessively study. The way he was sitting, the projection of power, the…empathy. Adeius, this man wasn’t at all how Dressa had described Homaj Rhialden, because he wasn’t. He might project that personality if he wanted to, but he wasn’t the tyrant Lesander had been sent to overthrow, through death or through her slower victory of time.
And if he could see through her soul, he was allowing her to see his as well. She could feel in her gut, clear as a gong, that he was being sincere, no intention whatsoever to mislead her. He wasn’t trying to mislead her in his role as Homaj, either, it was simply where he was mostly settled just now.
He still wasn’t mad at her. Not in any way that mattered. He should be, by every right in the universe, he should be.
But he wasn’t.
19
WORTH SAVING
Void is a color for when the world
hasn’t seen the blaze
of who you are.
OWAM, EXCERPT FROM THEIR POEM “BECOMING FIRE”
Iata frowned slightly, and Lesander almost crumpled—what had he seen or felt, what had she done wrong? Had he found a layer of her soul that was not worth saving? She wouldn’t be surprised.
He sat up again, sat forward, some of the strength coming back into his expression, some of the fatigue leaving.
“We don’t have to do this,” he said. “I’m not forcing you to train. This will always and only be your choice.”
She swallowed and grabbed for the nearest excuse. Anything to get out of his unasked for pity.
“You’re busy. I know you’re busy, you certainly don’t have the time to—”
“This is a break,” he said, his frown deepening. “This is rest, and how I keep my sanity in the maelstrom. Adeius, Lesander, give me the benefit of knowing my own choices.”
She recoiled, and she watched him recoil, too, then hold up his hands, his eyes a little too wide.
“Forgive me. Adeius, forgive me. I am—I’m not used to moving in a Melesorie personality, and I’m misfiring at the wrong moments. That was not called for.”
He wouldn’t be in this position at all without her. He wouldn’t publicly be a magicker, and he wouldn’t be in the pain that he was trying to hide, his only insincerity.
And of course he was still in pain. She’d rammed a poisoned knife into his stomach, after he’d given her a hug.
