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CHAPTER 4

SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL


In the end, I told Cassandra nothing that night. We left Volcano House and strolled down the mountain to the sea, where Neema was waiting. We spoke little of the lieutenant. I told Cassandra only that the Emperor had offered me a pardon, and when her eyes widened with delight I told her I had no interest in accepting it, crushing whatever dreams were in the dear girl of leaving Jadd and seeing the universe. I told her what the prince had told me, that the Jaddian navy had intervened to stop what they suspected were cannisters carrying the lethovirus.

Her eyes had stretched wide then, and I think she believed that it was this news that so disturbed me, for she ceased her questioning. I did not tell her my father was dead. Lord Alistair was nothing to her. A name. But rarely did I speak of him, or of my mother, or Crispin. Of my sister, the Lady Sabine, the sister I had never known, I must have spoken even less.

I had ceased to be a soldier of the Empire long ago, in an echoing hold aboard the Tempest. A single moment—a single blow—had erased centuries of service. A single blow, and a single sentence.

She was only Tavrosi.

She had been everything to me.

Certain ancient sophists would hold that we are each the masters and owners of ourselves, that we might thereby do anything—might even destroy ourselves—so long as that destruction came as an exercise of our own will. But like all sophistry, this sentiment is pyrite, and no true gold. Our lives are not in our bodies, but are distributed things, partly contained in us, partly in those persons and institutions which make up the landscape of our lives. Part of me had lived in my Red Company, and in the Tamerlane, my home, just as part of me—the greatest part—had lived in Valka.

So too a part of Valka had lived in me, and lived still.

In the long years of my exile, I had courted self-destruction many times, had looked down upon the flowing stone of the canal with longing, and dreamed of hurling myself from the parapet. Yet I knew that to do so would have been to destroy that piece of Valka that lived in me—which was among the best pieces of myself.

On this I often meditated in the bitter hours of the night, and stalked the halls of my villa and the shore like a ghost. I slept little in those days, desiring but ill-finding the waters of that older, sweeter Lethe. I sleep less now—and dream instead the waking dreams that have replaced it. When Cassandra returned to Volcano House, the three moons had risen high. I walked barefoot upon black sands, and watched the noctilucent algae bloom and shimmer like the stars along the water’s edge. It seemed I walked in Faery, in Dream . . . or along the very rivers of Time.

Oft I imagined that I might encounter Valka again beneath the Jaddian stars, rising like Venus from the sea.

For the dead do speak to me, as they speak to all of us.

It takes a sophist to deny that it is so. Any child of the Alcaz du Badr—any child in the galaxy—knows I speak the truth.

“Do you know, my boy, that we live on a truly beautiful world?”

Tor Gibson walked beside me. His ghost—his memory, if you like—trudged along at my right hand, the hem of his robes soaking in the moon-tossed surf, though he held it in one spotted hand.

It was three days since my visit with the prince, since my dinner with Cassandra. Three days and nights spent with little sleep, three days of hard walking up the volcano’s side or along the glowing margins of the sea. There is a madness that comes from lack of sleep, a madness and a pain. Perhaps that was why I saw Gibson’s shade, or how I saw it. Or perhaps it was some faculty of my vision, some other memory or something . . . else. Yet he seemed so real to me, as present and solid as Neema had been when I set out for my midnight walk.

“It is beautiful, isn’t it?” I said, stopping to look out to see. The Noctiluca drifted and shone blue and green as nebulae about our ankles, and the three moons—white and white and green—gleamed high and pink-tinged in the reflected light of Jadd’s mighty sun.

“What are you afraid of, Hadrian?” the old scholiast asked.

“Afraid?” I did not turn to look at him, knowing that—were I to do so—he would vanish like the dew. “I’m not afraid, Gibson. I’m old.”

“Kwatz!” The word fell like a slap, which was what the old Zen masters had made it for. “You are pretending your lieutenant never came here. Pretending there is no letter. Pretending nothing has changed.”

“Nothing has changed!” I almost shouted, cognizant of how my voice would carry on the water, and sure that to any neophyte of the School out for a midnight stroll I would appear utterly alone. More softly then, I said, “The Cielcin. The Watchers. The Empire. None of it’s changed.”

Gibson’s voice seemed to come from my left hand then, though his shade stood at my right. “It has gotten worse, as you well know. That is change. Most change is for the worse. All change increases entropy, even change for the good.”

Entropy. The word called to mind the unkindling of the stars, that darkness at the end of time which I had seen—been shown—upon the mountaintop on Annica.

“It’s inevitable,” I said. “Even were I to stop the Cielcin—even if I could—something else would tear the Empire down.”

“Yes,” the scholiast replied. “And something will. But it is not for the Empire that you act. Nor is it for the Emperor.”

“For all mankind, then?”

“For him.”

I longed to turn my face, to see if the Gibson at my right hand were gray-eyed or green. The silence stretched. The surf tossed about us. The three moons peered lidless down.

“Why should your burden be light?” came the old, beloved voice at last. An old question. “You hoped to reconcile mankind with the Cielcin. You cannot. You know this. And you know what you must do. He showed you what must be.”

“He did,” I said, and saw again that other Hadrian, young and fey, his face twisted in the crooked smile I knew all too well.

Do what must be done, he’d said. Fire at will.

Light. I had seen that all-consuming light wash away the Cielcin tide, their worldships—great as moons—all washed away in that flood of fire. But it was a young man who had given the order, and I . . . “War is a young man’s game, Gibson.”

“Kwatz!” the word fell once more like a blow.

“Have I not suffered enough?”

“You will suffer more if you do not act,” he said. “We are beasts of burden, we men. Have you forgotten it? The struggle?”

I almost laughed the words. “The struggle!”

“The struggle alone will fill that great emptiness within you, dear boy.”

“The struggle,” I began, “made that emptiness, Gibson.”

“You are not afraid of what you have suffered, Hadrian,” the shade said. “You are afraid of what you must do.”

“Seek hardship, is that it?” I asked. “It was Brethren who said that to me. Were those the Quiet’s words? Part of the message he left Brethren for me? Or were they the demon’s own words?”

No answer.

I pressed, still not taking my eyes from the glowing sea. “What are you, Gibson? A spirit sent to torment me? Or just a dream?”

For a long time there was no answer. Then one spotted hand swung into the periphery of my vision, one crooked finger pointing toward the sky. “She will suffer,” he said, “if you do not go.”

“She’s not part of this! You leave Cassandra alone!” I snarled, rounding on the shade, certain then that I would find the Quiet’s green eyes peering at me out of Gibson’s imagined face.

I found nothing instead.

I was alone. A madman standing in the gleaming surf, the waters rising with the swelling tide. Tight fisted I stood there a long and silent moment, listening to the waves. The steams from distant Hephaistos where its fires met the lagoon billowed and twisted on the night wind.

“Come back!” I yelled. “You leave her out of this! Do you hear? She’s just a girl!”

Silence. Total and absolute.

I was alone.

Alone, I turned my back on the gleaming night sea and Jadd’s three moons, and slouched my way back across that beach of black sand.

“My lord!” a shrill voice filled the air, rising to meet me. “Master! Master Hadrian!”

It was Neema. My Jaddian servitor had hurried out into the small garden with the orange trees that stood behind the villa, was standing on the edge of the retaining wall that verged upon the sea. I could see his narrow figure framed against the light of an arched and pointed window.

When he caught sight of me coming up the shoreline to the steps, he hurried toward me. “It’s the girl!” he exclaimed, marching with his arms now stiff at either side. “She’s come back.”

“Demetra?” I asked. She wasn’t due to return until the new week.

“Not Demetra! Your daughter!”

“Cassandra? But it’s the middle of the night!”

“I caught her in the study,” the butler said, falling into line beside me as I mounted the short stair to the garden path. The orange trees creaked in the sea breeze as we made for the door. “She is going through your papers!” I stopped short, and Neema hurried three or four paces past me before he realized I was no longer with him. “Domi?”

The crooked Marlowe smile asserted itself. “Of course she is.”

“I tried to stop her, sir,” Neema said, gesturing for the door. “But short of forcibly removing her from the premises, I didn’t know what to do.”

Brushing past the man, I quipped, “You couldn’t forcibly remove her if you wanted to.”

“I could so, sir! She’s still just a girl!” Neema said; the Jaddian had a clinical distaste for women I always found amusing.

“That girl is nearly a Maeskolos, Neema. She’d take you apart if you tried.”

The butler had no response to this, and followed in my wake. The house’s static field prickled the hairs on my arms as I pressed through it and into the tiled recess in the back of the villa’s rear parlor. The bar with its dark bottles neatly stored behind glass panels stood to my right hand, a holography well near at hand, surrounded by couches of tufted, wine-dark leather. A series of portraits done in my own hand hung upon the walls, alternating white-on-black, black-on white, and back again. There was Tor Gibson’s face, and Pallino’s, and Corvo’s and Siran’s.

The study was upstairs, at the top of the squat, four-story tower that dominated the rest of the long, low house. It was reached either by a steeply spiraling stair or by the lift it encircled.

“I came to find you directly, Master Hadrian. I don’t know how long she’s been up there, or what she thinks she’s about!”

Neema had fallen several paces behind me by then.

“I do,” I said, and keyed the lift door. The ironwork slid back into place before Neema could join me, forcing him to take the stairs. It was a cruel maneuver, but I wanted a moment to myself, wanted a moment with Cassandra before the good butler caught up to us.

She had come to find the Emperor’s letter, would find Crispin’s with it. There would be questions. So many questions.

She will suffer if you do not go.

Did I really think we could stay on Jadd forever? Did I really think she could?

I had been waiting to die, had been seeking that very self-destruction I wrote of not but a few leaves past. What I would not destroy with fire—casting my body into the magmas of the mountain—I had hoped to undo in time. But I had been a fool, and was even then only just beginning to see it. As part of Valka lived yet in me, so too a part of me was in Cassandra.

She was my daughter, after all, and the part of me that would live on the longest in the uncertain future. Were I to die on Jadd, by fire or by time, that part of me would live in her, and my burdens would become hers.

Why should your burden be light?

The iron grille slid away, admitting me to the vestibule that opened on my study.

The inner doors stood open, and a jeweled light shone from within.

The chamber had—in the initial conception of the villa as a research station—been an astral observatory. The telescope and its steel dome were long gone. The place had been entirely transformed long ago, had served as a residence for the princes of Jadd when they sought retreat and contemplation. Where once the leaved dome of the observatory had been, a dome of stained glass now stood. So like the Dome of Bright Carvings it was, its minute tiles fashioned in kaleidoscopic panoply, its colored shadows rich and textured fell by day upon the thickly carpeted floor. The chamber was round, and perhaps a hundred feet in diameter, with bookcases lining the walls between the high windows and two doors that—opposing one another—opened onto the encircling balcony. My suit of armor stood between two windows, its shoulders wrapped not in the Imperial white I had worn for most of my life, but in a lacerna black above and red beneath.

She was sitting in my chair, and started as the elevator’s grille rolled back and I stormed in. Knowing she’d been caught with her hand in the trap, she stood, and rather than accept my wrath, she struck first. “Why didn’t you tell me grandfather was dead?”

There was a holography disc open on the petrified wood of the desk. A wafer of crystal paper perhaps three inches across and inlaid with the necessary circuitry in hair-fine gold wire. The ghostly image of a man stood above it, a cubit or so in height. Cassandra must have halted the playback, or else it had reached its natural end, and the figure hung as if frozen in time.

I opened my mouth to shout at her, to drive her from the room she should never have been in, but the portrait above my desk caught my eye and checked my tongue.

Rage is blindness, came the old voice I always imagined was Gibson’s from deep within. Steadily I tried again to speak. “I didn’t know how to tell you.”

“Have you even seen this?” she asked, shoving the holography disc toward me. “The envelope was still sealed. I guess the lieutenant must have told you?”

“He did.”

When she pressed the holograph toward me, the figure it projected rotated, and I saw a man broad-shouldered, barrel-chested, dressed in the muscled cuirass and armor of a knight of the realm. I was slow to recognize him. The square jaw and short, black hair. The hard eyes. There was none of the old mocking laughter in them, none of the slack-jawed gormlessness that had so repulsed me as a boy.

There was gray in the black of his hair, gray at the sides where he kept it shorn within microns of his scalp. A great, ugly scar wound across the underside of his jaw, stretching almost from ear to ear.

I had never seen the man Crispin had become before that moment.

There was a hardness in him and a virtue I had not thought to find. Even in frozen image he seemed to bear his grief nobly. His back was straight. His eyes were clear. His hands were clasped before him, and his head was bowed.

“That’s my brother,” I said, foolishly, feeling a sudden pang of loss deep in my secret heart, the opening of a wound I’d scarcely known I’d carried. I touched my eyes lest Cassandra see my welling tears.

“What’s a Monumental?”

The question slashed across my grief. “What?”

She held up an unfolded sheaf of white vellum. Its text shone red as blood in the lamplight. It was the vermillion of the scholiasts, and the twin fractal seals stamped at the bottom showed the Imperial sunburst beside the same, smaller sunburst in the grip of a human hand. The former was the Emperor’s own seal, the latter—I guessed—was the mark of HAPSIS.

Even at ten paces, I knew the signature—the only part of the letter written in black—knew the cramped and spidery handwriting, so unlike the man.


William - 23


There were no titles, no enumerated honors—that was proof the scrawl had been set to the parchment by the man himself.

I saw no crystal chit, no holograph.

Only the letter.

Handwritten, the letter had the virtue of absolute secrecy. Doubtless it had been written by one of the Emperor’s own scribes. That scholiast had placed the letter into the hands of an Imperial courier, an apostol—possibly Lieutenant Albé himself. A simple letter was proof against praxis, against interception on the datanet, against the implants of sorcerers and demoniacs.

How could I possibly explain? Cassandra knew but little of my story.

“A weapon,” I said, sure the villa was bugged by Aldia’s Yahmazi, whatever his assurances to the contrary. “A Cielcin weapon.”

“Don’t lie to me, Abba,” Cassandra said, brandishing the letter. “The Emperor says he wants you to slay it. You don’t slay a weapon. What is it?”

I was still fast then, fast enough to snatch the vellum from her grasp, and taking it turned swiftly from her and the portrait above and behind her to read it with some measure of peace.


To the Lord Hadrian Anaxander Marlowe,

Much has passed since our last meeting. You will know, we are certain, that Nessus is lost, and with it our hold on the outer provinces. Our Jaddian allies have enabled us to hold the line, but we are losing ground. The loss of the provincial datanet has limited our ability to coordinate our defense. With the relays lost, we can only telegraph via direct lines, and we have too few of those to manage a defense across the greater galactic volume—and then there is the matter of the Extrasolarian plague to consider . . . 

Most of your life, you were our faithful servant. We have no expectation that you so remain.

But we are in need.

On Carteia, we spoke of the grave threat the Monumentals pose our Empire. At the time, you swore your sword and faculty in the cause of their destruction.

We have found one, and beg you to help us. The Monumental must be slain, lest it fall into the hands of the enemy. The information our servants will relay to you was taken from the Cielcin at Asara, and so we have reason to believe the enemy is aware of the beast’s location.

There is very little time.

Your crimes are forgiven. They are nothing. We have commanded that a copy of your pardon be enclosed with this message.

Hadrian, you must be careful. There are those among my servants who count themselves your enemy. This you have always known. But we have in recent years uncovered many spies in our court. Demoniacs all. Trust no one. If you will aid us, speak to Director Oberlin. He has come himself, but will have sent one of his subordinates for you.

Pray destroy this letter.

May the Hidden One protect you.


I read the letter perhaps a dozen times, each time with greater speed.

“My lord, you might have waited for me!” Neema had appeared in the doorway, huffing from the effort of using the stairs.

I raised a hand to silence him. I read the letter one final time. “Oberlin,” I said, looking round at Cassandra. “There was a Friedrich Oberlin in Legion Intelligence.” The words meant nothing to the girl. She had risen from my chair as I read the letter, but simply stood there with her head cocked to one side. Oberlin was Director now? Of Legion Intelligence? No, that had been Sir Gray Rinehart. Of HAPSIS?

It had been Oberlin who revealed that it had been Sir Lorcan Breathnach behind Lieutenant Casdon and the knife-missile that had nearly claimed Valka’s life. Had he truly come? Was he Lieutenant Albé’s master?

The part about spies in the Imperial court troubled me more than the rest together. Demoniacs all, the Emperor had said. That meant Extrasolarians. That meant MINOS, surely. The sorcerers had infiltrated the Grand Conclave of the Commonwealth. Surely they must have infiltrated the Imperial Court. Legion Intelligence. Special Security. The Chantry. The scholiasts.

Trust no one.

“We have to help, Abba!” Cassandra said. “You read the letter! The Emperor himself! Is that really his signature?”

I could only nod.

“We must do something!” Cassandra said.

In response, I crushed the Emperor’s letter in my hands, tossed the refuse to Neema. “Burn that,” I said sharply, pointing. “Neema, at once.”

“But domi, the girl!”

“I will punish my daughter in my own way, Neema! Thank you! Alle!” I pointed to the lift.

The servitor bowed and shuffled from the room.

“You shouldn’t be so harsh to him!” Cassandra said when the lift rattled shut and was gone.

“And you should not presume to lecture me,” I said, eyes raking over the girl and the projection of my brother glimmering above the desk. It was too much. Too fast. My eyes settled on the portrait above and behind my desk. Valka . . . I closed my eyes. Would that you were here . . . 

The portrait was still there when I opened them. So was Crispin’s ghost. So was Cassandra. “What possessed you to come in here?” I asked my daughter.

She angled her chin, defiant. “You told me the Emperor gave you a pardon. I wanted to see it. I wanted to see why.”

“Why?”

“I’m not a fool, Abba!” she said. “I know how bad it is out there! The war!”

“You really have no idea,” I countered, casting my gaze up at the jeweled dome overhead.

“I know you were a hero!” Cassandra said, words striking me as forcefully as Gibson’s kwatz. “I know the Emperor needs you. If you can turn the tide, you must! Don’t you have a responsibility?”

Once more the tears welled up. Once more I shut my eyes. “A responsibility,” I echoed the sentiment. Had Gibson’s shade spoken truth? Was I really hiding on Jadd from what I knew I must do? “Your mother would be so proud of you, Anaryan.”

Am I a coward?

“What’s a Monumental?” Cassandra asked, not knowing what else to say.

I tried to meet the gaze of the woman in the portrait, but I had drawn her looking down. “You have a lot to learn,” I said.

“Then teach me!” She rounded the desk, stood before me with feet apart. “Master Hydarnes says I’m ready to take the Trial of the Heart!”

I felt my eyes grow hard. “Cassandra, no!” I said. The Trial was what made a Maeskolos. Neophytes trained for decades before making an attempt, and while Cassandra had been a neophyte for nearly thirty years, still it felt too soon.

“I’m not a little girl, Abba,” she said. “Master Hydarnes says he has no more to teach me. That you should teach me instead. He says I’m ready. I am ready, Abba!”

Valka was looking down on me from the portrait, smiling after her fashion. She was looking down at a child with twin braids who smiled back at her, a girl in a long Jaddian tunic. There were flowers in her hair, and Valka stooped to place one there as she never had in life. Little Cassandra was laughing, looking up into the face of the mother she had never known. I stood behind them both, a shadow in black charcoal, the only one of us three peering out of the image.

We held each other’s gaze a moment. Art and artist.

Only the artist blinked, and when he did, it was to blink away fresh-forming tears.

How I envied that charcoal man.

“Maybe you are,” I said, wishing I’d never drawn the damn portrait in the first place.

“The Emperor’s letter said you should speak to this . . . Oberlin,” Cassandra said. “It said he was here. On Jadd. The lieutenant must be able to put us in contact!”

“He wants us to go offworld,” I said, and brushed past her to stand before my brother’s ghost.

“Offworld?”

I didn’t answer her.

Crispin hadn’t moved. His image floated above my desk, transparent as a reflection in darkened window glass. Before Cassandra could speak again, I tapped the node to cycle the paused recording.

Crispin vanished, was replaced by the tri-D security fractal that demonstrated the authenticity of his seal. The Marlowe Devil emerged, red on black, and silver trumpets played the half-forgotten anthem that heralded the coming of the Lord of Devil’s Rest.

Crispin appeared, arms crossed, head bowed.

He did not speak for a moment, then began. “I . . . wasn’t going to send this message.” His voice was deep and dark as his armor. “I didn’t send one when Mother died because you should have, but you should know our father is dead. He passed a week ago, on the ninth of Anthesterion. You should know he didn’t suffer. The Red Sleep has come to Delos, but . . . he never caught it. It was Time that did for him.

“He was planning to leave next month, to sail to Caria to be with Sabine—he always liked her best. He made her Countess of Caria—did you know? Did you know he bought a County in the Outer Perseus? He did it, Hadrian. He made himself a lord. A proper lord. He’s left Devil’s Rest to me, and what’s left of the prefecture—for what little it’s worth. The High College won’t grant me an heir.” He almost smiled, and said, “House Marlowe dies on Delos with me.”

My breath caught.

“My wife—her name’s Gianna—believes it’s because of you. Thinks the Emperor wants to keep the number of us mad Marlowes down. Me, I think Aunt Amalia just wants the mining rights . . . ” Crispin trailed off, let his arms fall to his side a moment before recrossing them. “I know she helped you escape. Our mother. Captain Kyra told me. I never told Father, but I wanted you to know. I hope it was worth it. The stories they tell about you . . . I don’t know what to think. But I saw your triumph. The Emperor had the broadcast sent across the Empire. Father wouldn’t watch it, but I did.”

“You’ve seen all this?” I asked Cassandra.

She shook her head, took me by the arm when I would not take her hand. “I stopped after he said he’d be the last.”

Crispin was not finished. “You should have played your part, like me. Like Sabine. We were your family, Hadrian. Did you even know Mother had died? Did you even care? After what she did for you! What she risked!”

“Crispin!” a woman’s voice drifted across the recording, its owner just out of frame.

Crispin raised a hand for silence, shook his head. “Don’t feel compelled to respond. They say you’re on Jadd. That you tried to kill the Emperor. I hope it isn’t true.” He seemed to chew his tongue a moment then, and glowered into the camera. “I don’t ever want to see you again, Hadrian. Do not message us. Do not come home.” He was silent then a long moment before saying his final words. “We’re done.”

The image vanished, replaced once more by the Marlowe Devil and the music of trumpets. So bright and gay was that music, measured against the gravity of my brother’s words.

I felt . . . I wasn’t sure what I felt. An emptiness seemed to stretch over me and through me, as though some airlock had long ago opened in my soul. It was only that I was just noticing it. There had been no shock of decompression, no howling of psychic winds. All was hollow then.

Life is very long.

I had not known my brother in centuries. It may seem strange to you, dear Reader, who has not perhaps the luxury of so long a life, that my brother should retain so great a hold on me after so long—and yet it is so. But the impact of childhood, I have found, does not diminish. Not after a hundred years, not after five.

“I’m sorry, Abba,” Cassandra said, still clinging to my arm. “I shouldn’t have looked.”

“It’s all right,” I said, sparing a glance for Valka in the sketched family portrait above my desk. “How could any daughter of mine not look where she’s told not to? I’d have done the same thing at your age.” I’d have done the same thing at my age, though I did not say as much.

Slowly, I extricated myself from her embrace and moved to one of the side doors. “Abba?” Her words followed me, and she turned to follow herself. “What are you going to do?”

I opened the balcony door and—passing through the static field—stepped out to overlook the sea. Presently she came and stood beside me, and together we looked out at the three moons and the dark surf with its fringes gleaming blue-white as highmatter in the night, rippling as the tide rolled in. “You’re right,” I told her, turning to try and smile. “We must do something.” I gripped the rail with both hands, feeling the true bones in my right hand creak as I tightened that grip. The hollow bones of my left hand offered no complaint.

She will suffer . . . if you do not go.

“We have to help. That’s what you said,” I said, looking at her. “The Emperor needs me.”

The Quiet needs me.

“You’re serious?” Cassandra’s eyes were like green fire. “We’re going?”

“I’ll call the lieutenant in the morning,” I said. The truth was, I had no choice. If what Aldia said was true, and the Empire was threatening to withdraw its support of Jaddian shipbuilding efforts, they would have no choice but to hand me over. The Empire had need of the Jaddian navy—and of Jadd’s clone armies most especially—but so much more did Jadd require Imperial gold. And more than gold. Uranium. Ytterbium. Adamant. Antihydrogen. Antilithium.

Jadd needed the Empire as much as the Empire needed Jadd.

And the Empire needed Hadrian Marlowe.

The Emperor needed me.

“Abba.” My daughter’s voice was at once very small. “What of the Trial?”

I looked her, shaken from my thoughts of geopolitics.

The Trial of the Heart.

“You’re sure you’re ready?”

Cassandra answered, “Hydarnes thinks I can do it. And if we’re to leave . . . ” She trailed off, a terrible thought forming behind her eyes. “Unless . . . I’m not coming with you?”

The way her brows arched brought pain. The thought of leaving her had occurred to me, but Valka’s shade seemed to hover between us, to glare down at me from the portrait sketched up upon the wall. “Your mother would have killed me had I tried to leave her behind,” I said. “I won’t leave you, either.”

The girl brightened, but my own heart sank. “Do you know what the Trial is?”

She shook her head. “No one does. The masters don’t talk about it.”

“You don’t have to take it,” I said.

“I want to take it!” she said, and thrust out her chin.

“But Anaryan,” I said, “the students who fail . . . they don’t come back.”

“They die, you mean,” Cassandra said. “Abba, I won’t fail.”

“You can’t fail,” I said. “I can’t lose you.”

“You won’t!” she said. “I’ll only fail if you don’t let me try. If I leave here anything less than a Maeskolos, Abba—”

“I know!” I said.

“Hydarnes believes I can do it,” she said. Voice suddenly very small as she asked, “Don’t you?”

What could I say to that?

“All right,” I said. I could not stop her. The decision to take the Trial could be hers alone, and if Hydarnes had approved her to take it . . . no power on Jadd could stop her.

“Abba.” Her fingers found mine, squeezed. “I won’t fail.”

I lay my other hand over hers. “I know . . . I . . . ”

Cassandra grew closer. “I wish I knew what to say. About Uncle Crispin. About Grandfather.”

“You don’t have to say anything,” I said. There wasn’t anything to say. We stood there together a long while, neither one of us moving. Silently, I wrapped an arm around her slim shoulders.

The only family I had left.

At length I opened my mouth in search of words, and found them. Looking down on the Noctiluca and the moonlight rippling on the black-jade sea, I said, “Do you know, Anaryan, that we live on a truly beautiful world?”


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Framed