A Dictionary of Fools (The HouseOf Light And Shadow Book 2) Page 8

  He’d been older when he’d had Mahalia; he should have been wiser. In his mind, he’d always been the victim; not the daughter who’d given birth alone in some horrible barracks infirmary while her husband was at a conference and then turned to the task of raising two small children with no support or guidance from the people who were supposed to love her most. Mahalia had had no one to rely on except Rajesh; she’d been a stranger on Brontes when she’d arrived, uncultured and provincial and very, very young in a court of bland-faced barracuda who’d wanted nothing more than to see her fail.

  And where had Zerus been? At home on Goliath V, licking his wounds while his coterie of devoted followers—or, at least, those select few human beings smart enough not to challenge his worldview—praised him for bearing his martyrdom with such dignity. Aria had never met the woman, but she knew Laila had never intervened. Laila and Zerus hadn’t had a marriage; they’d been roommates, each doing their best to ignore the other.

  Aria wanted to extract her hand, but didn’t.

  “They love each other,” she said gently. She had nothing to lose, at this point, by speaking plainly. Zerus would die, either way, and he needed to understand. The idea that he’d fade away, still wrapped in his hateful, self-serving cocoon, was intolerable. He wouldn’t escape the truth—she wouldn’t let him!

  Zerus moved his head fractionally. “No,” he breathed, “he turned her head with his wealth…gave her things. She turned her back on everything that she was raised to value.” He paused, and Aria thought he’d stopped. But then he spoke again, obviously with great effort. “Those twins…unnatural. Always strange…like their father. They get it from him.”

  Aria waited.

  He drew a ragged, shaking breath. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the rumors turned out to be true…boys have been making a stitch since they were small.”

  Aria wasn’t confrontational at the best of times, but she honestly didn’t know how to respond. This was all Zerus could think about? That Kisten had been sleeping with his brother? Zerus had intended to shock her, naturally. That he assumed she knew so little about her own husband said a great deal about his own two marriages. But Aria had heard the rumors, too: that the twins were unnaturally close.

  What did it matter? She felt a hot rush of anger. She didn’t care if Kisten had had sex with every man, woman and goat on all six Home Worlds and twelve colonies! She loved him! Him!

  And there it was: simple recognition of what should have been obvious a long time ago. She loved her husband. She loved his dry, incisive wit; she loved how observant he was. She loved that he saw humor in everything, even though he took it so seriously. She loved that he never lost sight of his own sense of duty. She loved his crooked half smile and how the light caught his hair, and she loved how he held her and somehow managed to make her feel safe even when the world made no sense.

  In retrospect, she realized that she’d loved him for a long time: when she’d first come out of the bathroom to find him in her room. Something had happened then, although she hadn’t recognized it for what it was. And then later, something had happened again when he’d turned out to be a man who could quote poetry as well as kill. When she’d woken up to find him sitting next to her, surrounded by pigs.

  They had so much in common, too. Her husband had succeeded beyond the scope of most men’s wildest dreams, but he’d been alone—always alone. She knew what that was like, knew how it felt to struggle under the crushing weight of expectation. To find oneself being molded, even against one’s will, and unable to fight the process. To exist, for so many, as little more than a means to an end. She’d been so wrapped up in her own fears for the future, her own self-pity…she hadn’t seen that his need was the same as her own.

  He was ruthless, perhaps. Even cruel. All of that was nothing. She loved him.

  She’d allowed herself to question her own judgment, her own instincts, because they didn’t comport with her rulebook—with her parents’ rulebook. A rulebook that had brought her nothing but pain. She’d wanted a new life, and when she’d found it all she could do was judge it. No, her life didn’t mirror her parents’, or her sister’s—but so what?

  Mahalia hadn’t been entirely certain of her choice in husband, at least not at first. I’d wanted to have an affair at seventeen, she’d told Kisten once, not get married. Rajesh Mara Sant was no woman’s dream of an easy man to love. Their age gap, too, was more than chronological: where she’d grown up on a colonial outpost, he’d grown up at court. Her only friends had been books. His only friend, he’d told her later, was her. He’d had acquaintances, though, many of whom had been female. Whatever there was to do, he’d done it—and more than once.

  Aria saw so much of herself in Kisten’s mother. This moment, right now, was just one more step on a circular road. Mahalia’s story, and Aria’s, had happened before and would happen again—and again and again, forever. Two people fall in love despite all the odds, and commit to each other, and to a life.

  Zerus had never learned to change, to accept his life as it was rather than as he imagined it to be. Aria saw the truth with horrible clarity: if she continued to interpret everything as rigidly as Zerus did, she’d end up just like Zerus. She didn’t want to be the one lying, dying, moaning on about how her life hadn’t been a fairytale. Lei was right: it was high time that she started writing her own fairytale.

  Aria had been afraid to trust and Kisten…Kisten, when she’d met him, had been as angry, embittered, and disillusioned as it was possible for a man to be. He would have fallen into the arms of any woman who’d given him a reason to smile. She could only be profoundly grateful that she’d been that woman—and equally as profoundly relieved that she’d come to this realization before making a terrible mistake.

  Suddenly, it was unbearable that she couldn’t tell him. He had to come back, and soon, so she could.

  Aria took no position on God, or on the gods that Kisten’s family worshipped, but she nonetheless cherished the idea that this wasn’t her only turn about the wheel. That her soul, her essence, would be reborn again and again. Each life was just another chance to get it right, to progress a little further until she finally achieved enlightenment. People like Zerus, for all their protestations of faith, believed that death was the end. They lived in fear of making a mistake, of ruining their one shot at glory, and so they never took risks.

  But one had to take risks! If she crashed and burned, the worst that could happen was, well, death. But she’d rather die alive, having done her best to achieve her dreams, than drift to the end of a road she’d traveled while half asleep. If there was a next life, she’d try again; and if there wasn’t, she’d have no regrets.

  She felt like she’d dashed to the edge of a cliff without seeing it, and regarded her own actions with the half breathless astonishment of someone who knows that he’s alive by happenstance.

  She breathed a deep sigh and leaned back against the pillar.

  Someone laid a hand on her shoulder. It was a gentle touch, she noted, as she swam back into awareness. As impossible as it seemed, she must have fallen asleep. Her eyes fluttered open and she smiled slightly, expecting to see Kisten—finally, finally, Kisten.

  But it wasn’t Kisten.

  It was Aros.

  He glanced down at Zerus. “How long has he been dead?”

  “What?”

  “I’m sorry I…assumed that you knew.”

  “He’s not dead, he was just talking to me!”

  “Aria, I’m sorry.”

  Staring down at Zerus, she saw that Aros was right. Zerus’ skin was beginning to turn waxy, and his chest no longer rose and fell. He’d died while she’d been asleep! She couldn’t believe she’d been so negligent.

  As if sensing her thoughts, Aros spoke. “It only means you’re a real soldier,” he told her kindly. “We learn early to sleep when we can. Welcome to the club.”

  Aria smiled wanly. Rain still pounded on the roof above their heads, still rattled
the windows in their casings.

  “Aria….” Aros stopped.

  Aria turned and looked, really looked at Kisten’s second for the first time. What she saw terrified her. His face was as lined and gray and lifeless as that of the corpse at his feet. Only his eyes were alive, and those just barely. In them, she saw a quiet sort of resignation.

  “Where—where is my husband?”

  “Aria, I need you to prepare yourself.”

  “Tell me where he is!”

  But Aros didn’t answer.

  “Tell me,” she demanded again, her voice barely above a whisper.

  “We don’t know. He’s injured. He might be dead. We just don’t know.”

  THIRTEEN

  I know how men in exile feed on dreams.

  Where had he heard that?

  He rolled over and groaned, getting a mouthful of foul-tasting straw. A million or so rats had pissed in it, shat in it, and died in it. The rough edges pricked his face, but he didn’t care. Everything hurt, but for the moment he couldn’t remember why or even how he’d gotten here. He clenched his teeth as another spasm of pain wracked his body. He wasn’t sure he cared.

  For a few minutes—or it could have been hours—he tried to lie still and get some kind of grip on himself. The pain was so bad that he could feel it in his teeth. It made his eyes water. He couldn’t think straight, and he needed to. His face itched abominably; his hands, too, he realized. It was the straw. Gradually, a sense of purpose was returning to him. If nothing else, he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life wallowing in rat shit. He adopted the ambitious plan of sitting up.

  It took a long time.

  He eased himself back against a rough slatted wall, hissing at the effort. Shock waves of agony had given way to a dull, numbing pain. He could ignore it, if he had to. But it was like a beast that, once disturbed, would roar into life. So he stilled himself as best he could, feeling like he’d been broken apart into a million pieces and was trying to hold them all together. Just breathe, he told himself. You’re alive, you’ll be alright. As long as he lived in the world, he’d be bound by its laws and would experience physical pain. But while the body might suffer, the soul could not be harmed. The self embodied in the body of every being is indestructible….

  Another sharp twinge, but his eyes were adjusting to the gloom. He blinked, and stared. He was in a cattle pen.

  Everything came rushing back at once: he was on Charon II, and he was a prisoner of war.

  Kisten Mara Sant was twenty-eight years old, and he was First Officer aboard the Predator-class warship Callisto. He was too young to be a first officer—if he even still was, he thought with a pang. The Callisto might have met the same fate as the Solent. When he’d been sent to the surface, things had been bad. That the Alliance would win against Charon II was a foregone conclusion. But at what cost? How many men would die senselessly in this war of attrition, before the Rebel Coalition had the sense to sue for peace?

  Jivaj was dead. Kisten should have been dead, but wasn’t. He’d expected to die, had wanted to die—hadn’t he? Or was he only telling himself that to escape the crushing weight of survivor’s guilt? He didn’t know; his brain still felt like it had been packed with cotton wool.

  He and Jivaj had been leading the colonists to safety when they were ambushed. Betrayed from within, into the ungentle hands of the Rebel Coalition. By whom, Kisten thought with a wry twist of the lip, he’d undoubtedly never discover. Knowing their duty was to the women and children under their care, he and Jivaj had sent them on ahead and stayed to cover their retreat. Had they made it? God, he hoped so.

  And then…there had been heat, and thirst, and a medical tent. A little while later, there had been torture. For how long? How much time had passed, since he’d been captured? He didn’t know, couldn’t guess. His internal clock had broken.

  Did Kisten believe in the war? Had he ever? He honestly wasn’t sure. Right and wrong had seemed a lot more straightforward, as concepts, before he’d seen his two best friends die and a woman had come to him in Dharavi and told him that her daughter had been part of a “killing contest” between two rebel officers. They kept running tallies, and reported them to the papers. Which, of course, on pain of being included more directly in the game, published the results. Kisten had…seen things, things he couldn’t even have imagined in his barracks at Mirzapur. And he had a good imagination.

  War is Hell. Someone had said that, too—but who?

  It seemed like an understatement.

  Torture, as an activity, was divided up into two categories: black torture and white torture. Black referred to physical torture, and white to psychological. The distinction was specious; both were equally bad. He’d suffered both; he should know.

  First, they’d interrogated him.

  But they’d saved the real fun for after he’d started to heal. His memories of those first few—weeks, he realized, it must have been weeks, gunshot wounds didn’t heal overnight—were fractured and vague. Mercifully so. A small square of light above him; the polyurethane and cotton smell of tents. An orderly who’d been, if not actively kind, then at least not cruel.

  Kisten wasn’t sure if they knew who he was—really was. He suspected not, or he’d be dead. That he served the evil empire gave them reason enough to hate. They’d beaten him, slowly and methodically. They’d done things with bamboo shoots that made him scream, but they were clever enough to keep him conscious when he otherwise would have passed out.

  They’d raped him, too, of course.

  That he’d known it would happen—known it would all happen—hadn’t made it any easier to bear. One man in particular, the one who’d stripped Jivaj naked and stolen his uniform, had been particularly brutal. Kisten was a strong man, but even a strong man could be chained to a wall or tied down to the top of a desk if enough men held him down. The man—Kisten never knew his name—wore Jivaj’s uniform while he did it, at least the first few times, the coat hanging open to reveal a stained undershirt. He’d had a paunch, too, and his sweat-slick skin had pressed against Kisten when he thrust.

  Kisten reminded himself, over and over, that Jivaj didn’t need his uniform. Anything to take his mind away from what was happening. To divorce himself from the intrusion of the other man into the body that had always been his own.

  Sometimes he caught himself wondering if, knowing what lay ahead, Jivaj would have chosen to die rather than face it. But of course he wouldn’t; no one would. Being raped was preferable to being buried, however hateful the experience might be. The man who’d adopted Kisten as his new favorite pet was quite a bit older. Ten or fifteen years, Kisten guessed, but his experiences had aged him prematurely. He reeked of sour sweat and stale tobacco. He smoked cigars, but cigarettes, too; he liked to put them out on Kisten’s back.

  One of the conclusions that Kisten had drawn, during those interviews, was that he’d given up smoking.

  When he’d started smoking at thirteen, he’d told himself that it didn’t matter; he was a prince, he could afford new components should the need arise. The idea seemed so ridiculous now. Laughably so. There he was, being alternately beaten and raped, and all he could think to do was debate the wisdom of having a lung transplant. God, something was wrong with him.

  Kisten studied his new home from his bed of straw.

  The irony was, he could use a cigarette right now. Or ten. He knew he was in some kind of livestock enclosure, because he’d seen one once while touring his estates. A long time ago now. He guessed cattle, because it smelled like cow shit. There were cows in Shadowmarch, his ancestral seat and childhood home. Cows were social animals and, like human beings, naturally formed into large, organized herds. They established relationships within those herds, too, bonding with some members and avoiding others. He met the gazes of his fellow prisoners; there would be no friends here, he thought.

  The cattle pen was a large one and it must have held several hundred starved and stricken-looking men. Getting a co
unt was difficult, as their gaunt faces were barely visible in the gloom. Night, then, Kisten decided, or close to it. He looked up at the ceiling, where the last of a bruise purple twilight filtered in. Soon it would be pitch black, and even he wouldn’t be able to see with his superior Bronte eyes.

  The pen’s other occupants looked back at him with mixed suspicion and loathing. Most of them had congregated on the other side, presumably looking for others from their regiments. Some chatted in low tones. Only the most pathetic and enfeebled lay strewn around Kisten. The man next to him, he realized, was dead.

  He made no move to converse with the ones who weren’t and they in turn offered no addresses to him.

  There were no men in his squadron, here. He drew his knees up to his chest and, shutting his eyes, tried to rest. Soon he was lost in shadow, and no one even knew that he was there.

  The other conclusion he’d drawn during his introductory experiences as a prisoner of war was that, if he ever did get married, he’d be a better husband for his experiences. Although he doubted if he’d ever find a woman he could tolerate being married to—and besides, what woman would have him? He was hardly much of a prize. Especially now.

  But he understood, for the first time, what it meant to be powerless.

  Even in those first months at Ceridou, he’d had the protection of knowing that the school meant him to survive. No one wanted to kill him—at least not intentionally. And he’d been secure in the knowledge that he was a prince, even though everyone did their damnedest to batter it into his head that status didn’t matter. And he’d had his brother, of course.

  And, perhaps most importantly, a way to win.

  As a guest of the Rebel Coalition, however, his world had shrunk down to where it was bounded on all sides by survival: achieving it, accepting its conditions, realizing that it could be taken away. Despite his best efforts, he could do nothing to alleviate his circumstances other than somehow charm, outwit, or out-maneuver his captors. Just like a woman.