Юн Ли - Raven Stratagem

She was certain that the Shuos would profess indifference to this matter as well. But Feiyed said, “You would have to be careful, it’s true. However, I don’t think it’s impossible. The question is, how much are you willing to compromise? I mean, it’s not like anyone in the hexarchate knows or cares about your customs. They wouldn’t recognize them, and that works in your favor. You could lie low for a dozen years—forever at your age, I realize—and start introducing your customs to the receptive. You do accept adoptive Mwennin, don’t you?”

Nija stared at her. She hadn’t expected Feiyed to know about that point of Mwennin practice. It was the only reason the Mwennin hadn’t died out entirely, according to—she clamped down on the thought. Her grandfather was dead.

Feiyed chuckled softly. “I was adopted myself, so I keep track of these things. Besides, I have an ulterior motive. You’d make an entertaining Shuos if you put your mind to it. Fight from within and all that.”

Nija’s first instinct was to say something her father would have chided her for. After all, the destruction of the Mwennin was that bitch Cheris’s fault for being stupid enough to enter faction service in the first place. But Cheris had already paid for her mistake, and Feiyed was making a disturbing amount of sense. “I’ll think about it,” Nija said.

Feiyed leaned back and smiled.

AJEWEN DZERA WISHED she could lose track of how long she had been sitting in the cell, under spider restraints that tightened painfully whenever she moved too suddenly. The walls were a white just gray enough to look oppressive. The door, only four paces away, might have been on another planet. Whenever she approached it, she was wracked by a burning sensation that started at her skin and needled inward. Incongruously, the cell smelled of a persistent, pleasant fragrance, with notes of lilac and starbloom. One of her Vidona handlers liked perfume.

There was a clock display on the wall. Dzera hated looking at it, but it was impossible not to let her eyes rest on it periodically. In two days there would be another remembrance. She imagined the Vidona would execute her before then. In the meantime, the illicit prayers that had comforted her all her life stuck in her throat like hot stones.

They had taken away her partner of twenty-nine years almost from the start, rousing them in the middle of the night. Harsh bright lights everywhere, enforcers in Vidona green-and-bronze tramping through the small garden where their daughter Cheris had liked to watch the birds as a child. Derow hadn’t been born Mwennin, he had married in and learned their traditions, but this distinction hadn’t mattered to the Vidona.

Another minute ticked past. Dzera caught herself watching the clock, and slowly and carefully averted her face. Her bangs fell in her eyes. Slowly and carefully, she reached up to brush them away. If she had known this would happen, she would have picked a different hairstyle. A haircutter had come in once to trim her hair. She had prayed to fall dead then, but they hadn’t killed her afterward.

Dzera often thought of Cheris, who had left the City of Ravens Feasting for the Kel. Cheris had left them long before then, if the truth were told. Dzera hadn’t been able to admit it to herself, however, until the day Cheris came to them, pale, shoulders squared, to inform them that she had been admitted to Kel Academy Prime.

There were so many of the old stories she had not told her daughter, although she had made a scrabbling effort to pass on the language, the prayers, the poetry. The story of the one-eyed saint who kept a casket with no lock, and what became of her lovers who found a way to open it. The story of the half-tailed cat who lived in the world’s oldest library. The story of the raven general who sacrificed a thousand thousand of his soldiers to build a spirit-bridge of birds to assault the heavens.

Sometimes Dzera thought that if she had found the right stories to tell Cheris, Cheris wouldn’t have needed to run away from her own people. But as much as Dzera agonized over it, she’d never figured out which stories those would have been.

Without warning, a video came to life right where she had been looking, an unremarkable patch of wall. She jumped, although she knew better, then choked back a sob at the restraints tightening around her. No matter how often this happened, she never got used to the experience.

It took her a few seconds to understand what the video was showing her, partly because of the bite of pain, partly because she didn’t want to. A man in dust-colored clothes like the ones they had put her in held still in a chair very like her own. Next to the chair was a table with a bronze tray. The chair explained everything. It was of a dark green material, glossy, with bronze striations.

Next the video showed a Vidona officer entering. Her uniform was a slightly lighter green, the bronze piping and buttons brighter. In her hand she held an instrument that resembled a spoon, if a spoon had incandescently sharp edges.

Dzera guessed what was coming, but not in time to look away. The image tracked the movements of her eyes. It was suddenly impossible to squeeze her eyes shut. The spoon flashed. The man screamed. His eye was a lump with red flesh clinging to it. Blood and fluid dripped from it, and tracked viscous lines down the man’s face. The Vidona tossed the eye onto the tray. The tray was much larger than the eye was. Dzera could guess what that meant, too.

The Vidona were unlikely to go through this with every single Mwennin in custody. Too inefficient. But Dzera couldn’t look forward to an efficient death because she was Cheris’s mother.

I can’t do this, she thought.

She looked sideways, seeking to escape the video even though she knew it was hopeless. The next one had already begun playing where her gaze had fallen. This one showed a young woman who might have been Cheris’s age, although Cheris had never worn her hair that long. Dzera liked to think that Cheris would never have cringed like that.

When the spoon flashed again, Dzera felt a sudden sting in her right ear. She tensed up, breath scraping against her throat.

“Don’t react,” a tiny crystalline voice said right in her ear at the young woman’s next scream. The voice spoke flawless Mwen-dal. The timing was just as well, because Dzera flinched anyway. “It will be painless. We tried to find a way to free you, but this is all we can do.”

The stinging sensation intensified, and then there came a subtle flash of heat. A hundred questions crowded in her mind, then ebbed away. The last thought she had before her benefactor’s drugs scoured everything to static was that there would be no one to restore the garden.

BREZAN WISHED HE could claim that he had no idea how he and Tseya had started sleeping together, but he knew very well how it had happened. Nothing in the Kel code of conduct forbade it, and their pursuit of Jedao took enough time that they both welcomed the diversion. He wasn’t under any illusions that either of them saw it as anything more than that.

Right now Tseya was sitting at the edge of her bed combing out her hair. She had an astonishing variety of outfits. Today’s involved a blue-gray chemise beneath a vest that seemed to be more lace than substance, and darker pants. Her bare feet looked weirdly incongruous. She had a grudge against socks when she wasn’t wearing shoes.

“I should make you help me with this,” Tseya said, amused, when she caught Brezan admiring her hair. He appreciated the aesthetics when it was someone else’s problem. “There are days the stuff tangles if I so much as breathe.”