Chris Wooding - Retribution Falls

Trinica’s expression was surprised and wounded. She’d not expected such cruelty. Frey found himself thinking that the white-skinned bitch who had taken the place of his beloved might actually cry. He’d expected anger, but instead she looked like a little girl who had been unjustly smacked for something they didn’t do. A profound sadness had settled on her.

‘How can you hate me like this?’ she asked. Her voice was husky and low. ‘How can you take the moral high ground, after what you did to me?’

‘Broken hearts mend, Trinica,’ Frey spat. ‘You murdered our child.’

Her eyes narrowed at the blow, but any promise of tears had passed. She turned her face away from him and looked out of the window again. ‘You abandoned us,’ she replied, grave-cold. ‘It’s easy to be aggrieved now. But you abandoned us. If our child had lived, you’d never have known it existed.’

‘That’s a lie. I came back for you, Trinica. For both of you.’

He saw her stiffen, and cursed himself. He shouldn’t have admitted that, shouldn’t have let the words free from his mouth. It weakened him. He’d waited years to throw his hatred in her face, to confront her with what she’d done, but it had always gone so much better during the rehearsals in his head. He wanted her to wreck herself on his glacial indifference to her suffering. He wanted to exact revenge. But his own rage was foiling him.

She was waiting for him to go on. He had no choice now. The gate had been opened.

‘I went from place to place for a month. Thinking things through. A bit of time away from you with all your bloody demands and your damn father.’ He cut himself off. Already he sounded surly and immature. He took a breath and continued, trying not to let his anger overwhelm him. ‘And I decided I’d made a mistake.’ He thought about trying to explain further, but he couldn’t. ‘So I came back. I went to see a friend in town, to get some advice, I suppose. That was when I heard. How you’d taken all those pills, how you’d tried to kill yourself. And how the baby . . . the baby hadn’t . . .’

He put his fist to his mouth, ashamed of the way his throat closed up and his words jammed painfully in the bottleneck. When the moment had passed, he relaxed and sat back in his seat. He’d said enough. There was no satisfaction in this. He couldn’t even hurt her without hurting himself.

‘I was a stupid girl,’ said Trinica quietly. ‘Stupid enough to believe the world began and ended with you. I thought I could never be happy again.’

Frey had sat forward in his chair, his elbows on his knees and his fingers tangled in his fringe. His voice was brittle. ‘I ran out on you, Trinica. But I never gave up on myself. And I never tried to take our child with me.’

‘Oh, you gave up on yourself, Darian,’ she replied. ‘You were just a little more indirect. You spent three years drinking yourself to death and putting yourself in harm’s way. In the end, you took your whole crew with you.’

Frey couldn’t muster the energy to argue. The weary, conversational tone in which she delivered her accusation robbed him of the will to defend himself. Besides, she was right. Of course she was right.

‘We’re both cowards,’ he murmured. ‘We deserved each other.’

‘Maybe,’ said Trinica. ‘Maybe neither of us deserved what we got.’

All the fire had gone out of Frey. A black, sucking tar-pit of misery threatened to engulf him. He’d imagined this confrontation a thousand ways, but they all ended with him demolishing Trinica, forcing her to face the horror of what she’d done to him. Now he realised there was nothing he could say to her that she hadn’t already thought of, nothing he could punish her with that she hadn’t already used to punish herself more effectively than he ever could.

The truth was, his position was so fragile that it fell apart when exposed to the reality of an opposing view. While he nurtured his grievances privately, he could be appalled at how she’d mistreated him. But it didn’t hold up to argument. He couldn’t pretend to be the only one wronged. They’d ruined each other.

Damn it, he hadn’t wanted to talk. And now here they were, talking. She always had a way of doing that to him.

‘How’d you get this way, Trinica?’ he said. He raised his head and gestured at her across the gloomy study. ‘The hair, the skin . . .’ He hesitated. ‘You used to be beautiful.’

‘I’m done with beautiful,’ she replied. There was a long pause, during which neither of them spoke. Then Trinica stirred in her seat and faced him.

‘You weren’t the only one who turned away from me after I tried to kill myself,’ she said. ‘My parents were disgraced. Bad enough they had a daughter who was going to give birth outside of marriage; now she’d killed their grandchild. They could barely look at me. My father wanted to send me to a sanatorium.

‘In the end, I stole some money and took an aircraft. I didn’t know where I was going, but I had to get away. I suppose I thought I could be a pilot.

‘I was caught by a pirate two weeks later. They must have seen me in port and followed my craft out. They forced me down and boarded me, then took my craft to add to their little fleet. I thought they’d kill me, but they didn’t. They just kept me.’

Frey couldn’t help a twinge of pain. That dainty, elegant young woman he’d left behind hadn’t been equipped to survive in the brutal, ugly world of smugglers and freebooters. She’d been sheltered all her life. He knew what happened to people like that.

‘I wasn’t much more than an animal to them,’ she went on. Her tone was dead, without inflection. ‘A pet to use as they pleased. That’s what beautiful does for you.

‘It took me almost two years to work up the courage to put a dagger in the captain’s neck. After that, I stopped being a victim. I signed on as a pilot for another crew, learned navigation on the side. I wanted to make myself indispensable. I didn’t want to be dependent on anybody again.’

She turned her attention to the window, evading him.

‘I’ll not bore you with the details, Darian. Let’s just say I learned what it takes for a woman to survive among cut-throats.’

The omissions spoke more than any description ever could. Frey didn’t need to be told about the rapes and the beatings. Physically weak, she’d have needed to use her sexuality to play men off against each other, to ensnare a strong companion for protection. A rich girl who’d never known hardship, she’d been forced into whoredom to survive.

But all that time, she’d been strengthening herself, becoming the woman he saw before him. She could have gone home at any point, back to the safety of her family. They’d have taken her back, of that he was sure. But she never did. She cut out every soft part of herself, so she could live among the scum.

He didn’t pity her. He couldn’t. He only mourned the loss of the young woman he’d known ten years ago. This mockery of his lover was his own doing. He had fashioned her, and she damned him by her existence.

‘By the time I got to the Delirium Trigger, I’d made my way in the underworld. I had a reputation, and they respected me. I knew the crew was troubled and I knew the captain was a syphilitic drunk. It took me a year, building trust, winning them round. I knew he was planning an assault on an outpost near Anduss, I knew it would be a disaster, and I waited. Afterwards, I led the survivors against him. We threw him overboard from two kloms up.’

She gazed across at him. Her black eyes seemed darker in the faint light of the electric lamps.

‘And then you turned yourself into a ghoul,’ he finished.

‘You know how men are,’ she said. ‘They don’t like to mix desire and respect. They see a beautiful woman in command and they belittle her. It makes them feel better about themselves.’ She looked away, her face falling into shadow. ‘Besides, being pretty never brought me anything but pain.’