Just rusty, he told himself. Just need some time. He laced his fingers together and canted his head at an angle meant to signal solemnity, and watched the body language of the Saldivians shift around him to comfortable attention. All save Iessa, at any rate. She was looking at him hard, now. Like she’d seen his internal shift laid out bare at her feet, and didn’t much like the implications.
He cleared his throat and continued, “Please, tell me what happened when Thratia came to your country.”
“We are small,” Rensair began. “Little islands, you understand? Not big like here, the Scorched, or like the bigger islands of Valathea. Just little islands. We have no selium.” He pronounced it sa-lee-um, dragging the word out as if it were delightfully unique. “But we have great shoals of fish to feed us, and sugarcane and yams.” He flashed a little smile. “Your food here, it is so bitter. But, I ramble. When Thratia came on her airships, we knew not what to think. She introduced herself as a commodore of a great empire, spreading across all of the known world, and promised they came seeking only trade. A little speck of a country, so far across the sea, was not worth the effort to conquer.”
Detan had his doubts about Thratia’s intentions in that regard, but he nodded understanding all the same and motioned for Rensair to continue.
“She stayed a long time, brought people to help with the teaching of Valathean.” His smile grew with pride. “I was the first to gain mastery. To be con-ver-sant. Things were well, and we were trading our sweets for your liquor and your grains, but then these people – they wear white coats – came to visit us.”
Detan’s face went cold, bloodless, his stomach sinking to the bottom of his being.
“You are all right?” Rensair asked.
“Yes.” He cleared thickness from his throat and wiped clammy palms against his knees. Though he could feel Thratia watching him, he didn’t dare meet her eye. “Please, continue.”
“They had learned that we had none of your selium. Our mountains have been dead a long, long time. So they came to find out if we still had sensitives. We had none, and they found this very curious so they…” He leaned back, pressing a hand to his chest while he took a deep breath. The man was near tears. Detan bit his tongue to keep from interrupting.
“They told us they had a way of inducing sensitivity, and wouldn’t that be great? We could have pilots then, like your people. Take a greater role in worldwide trade. Maybe even find some selium deposits on our own land, if we were very lucky. Many people volunteered, and they took all of those who lived very close to the mountains.
“They had no such method.” Rensair caught Detan’s gaze and held it, testing to see if Detan realized the implications of what he meant. Detan nodded, slowly, not trusting his voice. Not even trusting himself to breathe without devolving into a stream of curses.
“But they had tests, experiments.” Rensair’s voice caught on the last word. He cleared his throat and soldiered on. “Many were hurt, many driven mad, and the people with the white coats were not happy. They couldn’t get anyone to become a sensitive. So they took more volunteers, and more, and when the volunteers dried up they began just taking. They kept it very quiet, for a long time, but families began to talk amongst themselves. People spoke up.
“My father-in-law, he went to Thratia, demanded she find out what was going on. She was honest with us, even though she knew the horrors she’d uncovered would mean an uprising. Our king is, and was, a very old man used to peace. He did not know how to go about throwing out the whitecoats, or even if he could. Thratia promised him she would get rid of them, if he let her stay, and she did so. Her people, those working directly under her, were disgusted by what they found their fellows doing, and so they kicked them out.
“Eventually, Thratia had to leave. She said she feared those white-coated people were doing the same things elsewhere, and she needed a stronger base from which to stage her fight. She left her army with us and came here, to Aransa, to start again. We were not a very militaristic people. We could not have supplied her with the manpower she needed. You are very lucky, Lord Honding, that she comes to save your city next.”
Detan stared at these friendly, well-meaning people. Their smiles, some cautious, some open, seemed very far away – phantom grins, all teeth and lips floating in the air, mocking him with their friendliness.
Sweat dripped across his brow, soaked through the knees of his trousers from the palms of his hands. He’d begun to shake, just slightly, a subtle all-over tremble that threatened to make his teeth clack. Every word of Rensair’s story fell like lead, like iron, into his mind. Threatened to batter down old barriers he’d only recently begun to peek hesitantly behind.
Thratia had refused to relinquish control of the Saldive Isles.
Everyone in Valathea, in the Scorched, knew that story. A story of a commodore gone too thirsty for power, her greed and ruthlessness outmatched by anyone else her rank. The very thing, the very power-move, that had seen her exiled from the empire she’d been born and bred to serve.
Thratia had refused to relinquish control of the Saldive Isles to the whitecoats.
And there was nothing, nothing at all, in the tone or the faces of the Saldivians watching him now that led him to believe their story was anything else than the truth as they knew it.
“Excuse me,” Detan rasped. “I need air.”
Worried expressions dogged him. Expressions of concern from Rensair and Iessa blended with the slow, languorous words of Ossar as he pushed to his feet, swayed a moment, then set his gaze on the open doorway and locked it there. His ears buzzed. White encroached upon the corners of his vision.
He staggered to the hall, vaguely aware that he pushed past Thratia, and planted one hand hard against the stone, duck his head down, doubling over so that the blood would rush back into his head again.
However much time had passed, he had no idea, but when the storm of flies in his skull subsided and his vision cleared, Thratia was there, standing beside him, her face as carefully neutral as always.
He straightened, fancy new clothes sticking to him all over from sweat. She seemed smaller to him now, delicate yet fierce in a way he’d never noticed before. She was all persona, he realized with a sinking gut. Just as he put on his mask of bravado or seriousness, she was forever shrouded with how she wanted the world to see her: fearless, ruthless, a creature of power and strength.
And she was those things, was them so fully that he’d never been able to see where the rough edges lay. Where the mask ended and the real woman began.
Because she was all those things, and more. And that was the real terror of her.
“What do you want from me?” he demanded through the rasp in his throat. “Why am I here?”
“Come. It’s time we talked.”
She turned and walked up the hallway, not for a moment doubting he would follow. And skies help him, he did. Dogged her heels like a puppy in desperate search of a bone.
Chapter Seventeen
The skeleton of the Ashfall Lounge was a burnt out warehouse on the outskirts of the city; the flesh was something else all together. Its performers had swathed the building in garishly painted linens, hiding the worst of the damage with sheets of fabric painted with the names of the performers, and the cost for entry. They’d crowded the soot-stained eaves with paper lanterns, covered with squiggles and dots to throw patterns against the cloth and wood.