“Please,” Jason said.
Philip nodded, with an unwillingness that suggested he would have much preferred to forestall the grim truth by ignoring it.
“Fine.” I resumed pacing. “There are sixteen of us. I know that I’m innocent and I can say the same for my companions as well.”
Philip opened his mouth.
I raised my hand to silence him. “If you won’t take my word for it, consider that I’ve never been to Xana, and that I only knew I was coming to Xana hours before I left New London. Will you agree for the sake of argument that it makes more sense to just agree we can’t be guilty?”
Jelaine surprised me by laughing out loud. It was the heartiest merriment I’d ever heard from her, utterly undisturbed by the grimness of the occasion, or the danger we were in. Almost a guffaw, it testified to a capacity for enjoyment that must have rendered her a genuine life-force among the members of her family. “I never suspected you, Counselor.”
The weariness that had overtaken me a few minutes before now seemed to affect Philip as well. “Get on with it.”
I began ticking off points on my fingers. “After that, any attempt to use the process of elimination enters the realm of speculation. Since this is a crime that endangers the Bettelhines in general and the Bettelhine chain of command in particular, I’m willing to declare the three of you probably innocent as well. I’m more sure about Jason and Jelaine than I am about you, Philip, since it was their own agenda under attack, but I’m somewhat inclined to give you a pass as well, as you went out of your way to be aboard and would not need to endanger yourself when any assassins in your employ did their work. That’s not a certainty, of course. Just an extreme likelihood.”
He allowed himself a wry grimace. “I’m touched by your opinion of me.”
“I would say the same about Dejah; she has the resources, and even a reasonable motive given your family’s past attempts on her life, but even if she was financing this thing, I see no reason why she’d feel the need to place herself on the front line. I may be wrong about any or all of those last four names. But the rest are wide open. If I allow your own tentative removal from the list of suspects to stand, that still leaves nine people out of sixteen—nine people out of sixteen who might have been co-opted. Nine people out of sixteen whose actions, once I name the single murderer I am certain about, cannot be predicted. Nine people out of sixteen who might be harboring weapons of their own and may be more than willing to leave another corpse or two cooling in your parlor, if we interfere with the agenda that brought them together.” I took a deep breath and focused on Philip again. “Are you beginning to see how precarious our situation is, sir?”
The silence that followed that question was profound. Philip bit his thumb, glanced at Jelaine (whose expression had not changed), and then at Jason (whose own air of invulnerability echoed hers). Again, they’d given him nothing. Then he turned back to me and said, “What do you suggest?”
“I suggest that when I do get around to providing the name, we should all be ready to fight for our lives. And,” I said, focusing my next attention on Jason and Jelaine as well, “I suggest that the best way for that to happen is to let your brother know just how inaccurate his guess was.”
Philip started at that. His eyes widened as he realized he was about to get some of the answers he’d longed for, and he turned toward them, measuring their own reaction, probing their blandly pleasant expressions as if in determination to ferret out the truth before they got around to giving it.
Jason rubbed his forehead with one hand. “Do you need to know all of it now, Counselor? What happened to me on Deriflys? What my sister and I were looking for, when we left Xana? Why we then did what we did?”
I considered it. It was tempting. But then I shook my head. “No. I can wait for those answers, and the reason you had your father invite me here, until we’re safe. I just need you to admit what you are, so Philip can see how it’s going to affect what’s coming.”
Jason nodded, and for just a moment allowed a look of great sadness to come over his face as he regarded his older half brother with unapologetic affection. Tears welled at the corners of his eyes. “I’m sorry, brother. It was never any reflection on the way we felt about you. But it’s such a difficult secret to hide from the people who know us best. And this thing we’re trying to do together is so very, very important.”
“We do love you,” Jelaine said. “Never question that.”
Philip’s gaze darted between Jason and Jelaine and back, his lips moving without words as he tried to pull the answer from the air. After about a million years, still not getting it, he managed, “…what?”
Jelaine brushed the back of her hand against her gown and stood, the charming half-smile still tugging at the corners of her lips, the tears so much like Jason’s shining at the corners of her beautiful eyes. There was no defiance in her stance, no anger, nothing but a love so bright that it pained me to look at it.
I wondered about the kind of courage it took to share a confidence like this when it could destroy as much as it healed, and found against my will that I envied her, as much as I’d always envied the Porrinyards, for their courage in taking this journey that still remained beyond my own powers of faith.
Even as she stood, Jason stood and joined her, so they could stand together as they faced Philip as the united force they’d been for so long. A subtle change overtook their expressions as they synched up, emphasizing their already strong resemblance, rendering them more than mere siblings, closer than they would have been even if born twins.
They each raised complementary eyebrows as they faced their older brother in shared entreaty and challenge.
Philip’s eyes went wider. He was not a stupid man, and I think he figured out the truth a fraction of a second before his strange brother and sister spoke in unison, their shared voice not male or female, but some gender that was both and neither. Maybe that heartbeat of advance realization made the moment easier to absorb when his siblings said, “Once upon a time I was two people, a brother and sister named Jason and Jelaine Bettelhine. Once upon a time they left Xana as separate people and came back as one. Now I’m a linked pair. Now I’m both Jason and Jelaine, together….”
Philip fell out of his chair. Literally.
He tried to stand but his legs collapsed underneath him and sent him falling to his knees as the slackjawed attention he owed his siblings swallowed all other capacity for thought. It would have been comical if not for the horror and revulsion and incomprehension and denial warring on his handsome, aristocratic features. When he finally managed words he said, “How… could you?”
Jelaine spoke alone. “I know this is difficult, Philip, but you must understand. Jason was shattered by his time on Deriflys, and by…some other things that happened when we went away. He could not live inside his own skull, not by himself. So Jelaine, the single Jelaine, offered to seek out the procedure and help him carry the weight.”
“He was wrong! He shouldn’t have let you destroy yourself to save him!”
Now Jason and Jelaine spoke together. “That’s what he thought. He fought her. He tried to tell her he wasn’t worth what she would have to sacrifice.”
Jelaine let out a soft laugh. “He was wrong. It was no sacrifice.”
Philip recoiled from them as they approached in a misbegotten attempt to comfort him.
Stymied for the moment, the linked siblings turned to the silent Skye and said, “Oscin? Skye? You’re what I am. Please back me up on this. Tell my brother that neither Jason nor Jelaine sacrificed a damn thing. Tell him that everything that made up the two people they were, from their memories to their loves to their heartbreaks and their convictions, all still exists inside this new individual created at the moment they joined. Tell him how healing the process is, how insignificant it made your old concerns seem, how much better it became to look at life through two sets of eyes instead of only one. Tell him that there’s nothing horrible about it, nothing in it that needs to change how he sees my shared self as a sibling or how I can see him as a brother. Tell him.”