“I mean, there’s not even a set of shackles. Or the ears of your enemies.”
“Honding. You’re rambling.”
“Haven’t you noticed yet that’s what I do?” The anger in his own voice surprised him. His hands had coiled to fists at his side, though he hardly knew how to use them. Some niggling in the back of his brain told him he was missing something, a sensation like deep hunger or thirst, ramping his irritation as surely as if he’d gone without food for a day. But he’d eaten, and… And skipped his daily meeting with Aella. Forgone the injection of selium and diviner blood that Callia had once been convinced would leash him to her, help him refine his power.
He shivered. The room was cold, but sweat sheeted between his shoulder blades.
He could push her. Standing with that smug little smirk on her face, back pressed up against the open window, she’d never see it coming. Her arms were crossed. It’d take her too long to mount a defense, to dodge his advance. The room was small. Four steps. Four steps and she could be plummeting to the dark.
And take her answers with her.
Detan breathed deep, smoothed his hair with both hands, and forced his shoulders to unbunch, letting his whole body slouch down into the languid posture he used to play the disaffected dilettante.
“Is this where you suck my blood, then?”
She snorted, a brief little laugh. “Don’t be stupid. I have lost count of the opportunities I’ve had to kill you. I suspect you even know why I’ve brought you here, though you’re too much the coward to face it.”
“You want me here, under your thumb, for the same cursed reason everyone else does. Why the whitecoats, why my own aunt, hounds my heels. Because I have a skill you want, a talent unique enough it cannot be replicated, and you want to make use of it. Chain me to your ships and turn me into a machine of war.
“But that’s not why I bent knee to Aella, and through her to you. Whatever you want me for, whatever blasted damage you think I can craft on your behalf – I won’t. Do you understand me? I will not be turned against innocents. I brave Aella’s lessons to gain control. To be less of a threat. I will not be your weapon.”
He stepped forward, heart thudding in his ears, anger making his cheeks and chest hot. At the vaguest edge of his senses he realized there was no selium nearby, nothing at all for him to channel his anger into should the desire arise. Just Thratia’s small, sharp face, half scarred by the damage he’d wrought, smiling up at him. Amused.
“Is that what you think?” she asked.
He’d moved close enough so that he stood over her, her head tilted up to meet his gaze, her breath a warm gust against his throat. He stepped back, unclenched his fists. “You may have the Saldivians fooled, but I’ve seen inside you, Thratia Ganal. I stared into those eyes of yours while you slit Bel Grandon’s throat just to make a point, and a poor one at that.”
The smirk vanished, and while her hard stare made his skin crawl he took small satisfaction in wiping any pleasure off her face. “You are, quite possibly, the most obdurate person I have ever met.”
“Thank you.”
“Detan,” she said, and the sound of his first name from her lips sent uneasy ripples through him. “Listen very carefully.” She peeled herself from the window frame and stepped forward, tightening the distance between them so that he could feel the heat of her. She cocked her head, put her lips by his ear, never touching – not even allowing her breath to gust – as she whispered. “I don’t need you in order to crush Hond Steading.”
He resisted an urge to reel back from her nearness. She was a rock-viper of a woman. Sudden movements triggered sudden strikes.
“Yes. You do.”
She threw her head back and laughed, hands folded over her stomach. The very sound of it drove pins and needles into Detan’s skin.
“Oh, my Lord Honding. You are but one man. An exceptional man, in some ways, but not at all instrumental. Unless you choose to make it easier for all involved.”
He felt himself drawn up on the edge of a precipice, wary and uncertain. Thratia was dangling what she wanted from him like bait on a string, teasing him forward into asking, demanding, just what exactly she wanted.
Whatever it was, he would pretend to give it to her. Pretend to bend his knee, as he had to Aella, just so that he could be closer to the inner workings of her machine. Whatever she wanted from him, he would pervert it.
First, he needed to master himself. To calm his revulsion from the Saldivians’ story and see her as she was, as she always had been: a puppet master, hungry for power. Even if he believed her reasons for taking the Saldive Isles, for taking Aransa, he was convinced they were only set-dressing. A flimsy framework to prop up her own hunger.
She wanted him to ask what she wanted of him, what she’d planned for him. And while he knew full well he’d have to give it to her – if only briefly – he’d be spit-roasted before he made it easy on her. “If the whitecoats are such a scourge to the well-being of the empire, then why did you not go to your empress? Don’t tell me you didn’t have the access, nor the will to make her listen. Your family’s as old as mine.”
The quick breath she took told him all he needed to know – he’d pushed her off balance. “My empress is dead.”
He would have laughed in her face, if her voice weren’t so obviously shot through with the brittle edge of real grief. “I would have heard. Everyone would have heard.”
“Spare me your false naivete. Shortly after the whitecoats arrived in the Saldives, personal correspondence from the empress to me ceased, and her son began to answer in her stead. Such a stupid, pliable boy. I knew his handwriting, though he signed her name, and I knew the strings pulling his hand. I returned to Valathea at once, while my garrison stayed behind in the Saldives. I was denied all access to her, and Ranalae…” She sucked air through her teeth. “Ranalae had her claws in the young prince’s shoulder. The empress is dead, and Ranalae Lasson pulls the prince’s strings. If you believe me ruthless, Honding, you have only to meet Ranalae to then think me a lamb. She desires the puzzle of sel-sensitivity solved, in whole. She will not stop until she’s acquired it, no matter the imperial legacy she tears apart in the process.”
He’d gone cold, the only sound in his head the steady thwump-thwump of his heartbeat. Thratia cocked her head, sensing his unease, but he ignored her regard. He licked his lips, ignored long-buried images surfacing through the many vaults of his memory. Ranalae Lasson. There was a name he’d buried, a woman he’d erased from his own mind – had thought only of in terms of her long, white coat. Director of the Bone Tower. Founder of the whitecoats. The woman whose scalpel had danced across his skin long before he’d ever fallen into the clutches of Callia and Aella his last time in Aransa.
That name. That horrible, horrible, name.
“We’ve met,” was all he could manage to say.
Her gaze flicked to his arms, to his chest. She knew what lurked there, though she’d never acknowledged it outright. Had to know, to know where to look. No doubt Aella sent her back a detailed description of all the torturous injuries he had once endured, perhaps she’d drawn a cartoonish little map of his scars for her mistress.
“And did she find what she was looking for in you?”
“I don’t know,” he grated. “I escaped the night I heard her say the word vivisection.”
Thratia winced. He was sure of it. She was a master at controlling her expression, her body language, but he’d caught her there – struck her hard. The subtle ripple at the corners of her eyes, the pressing of her lips. That was real. That was horror. A crack in her iron-fast facade.