CHAPTER TWENTY
The motion of a swift is an impenetrable language; as incomprehensible to me as the thoughts of a flower when it opens its petals at dawn, without memory or mind. A coherent logic and a dance, but not one I can shape within myself. All my attempts are approximation. One cannot render meaning in a language one finds meaningless; nevertheless I know there is a design, a speaking, a world just on the other side of shadow, untouchable but nonetheless real. Three years since I came home from Ebrekt, and I still dream of the swifts, running: in dreams, sometimes I understand them.
NINE Hibiscus knew the shape of the Parabolic Compression without ever having set foot on its decks: knew it as she knew her own ship. Eternal-class flagships were all built on the same bones, the same enormous and delicately balanced armatures of steel and shipglass. The same design. She could be standing on the Parabolic Compression’s bridge and have the arc of vision she had now, the consoles in the same places, only the uniforms changed, exchange the Tenth for the Twenty-Fourth, one Fleet Captain for another—
Almost, almost she wished that she could make that switch. Take Sixteen Moonrise’s place, her hands on the navigational controls, flying her ship on a brutal-fast trajectory through alien space, her mouth shaped around the insubordinate words—Don’t listen. Even Emperors can be mistaken. There’s nothing about these enemies worth talking to—all they do is poison us, and they will poison us forever if we don’t burn them out.
Nine Hibiscus could imagine it all too easily, and not only because she had cored out her own belly with guilt when she gave Swarm the order—the permission—to destroy Sixteen Moonrise if he—if they—could. Guilt wasn’t a sufficient impetus to want to die in place of one of your soldiers.
Wondering if that soldier was right, after all—now, that was enough to wish yourself on the bridge of a distant flagship, even as it shattered under alien energy-cannon fire: a blaze of killing-blue, pinpoint-precise (Swarm was always precise—bloody fucking stars, this was never going to stop hurting, was it), and then a sparkling cloud, glitter of glass and metal, spreading slowly in the void.
What was left of the Parabolic Compression slowed its arc forward. Somewhere in that glitter was all that remained of Sixteen Moonrise.
The alien ships withdrew, as quickly as they’d appeared; whatever cease-fire they had brokered was holding. For now.
Nine Hibiscus let herself wish it hadn’t, wish it as savagely and miserably as she liked—she was a soldier, a leader of soldiers, she was not meant to have ended a war like this—and then locked her wishing away, as if she’d swallowed slow poison her own self.
Nineteen Adze brought him a bowl of tea. It was the second-most surprising thing Eight Antidote had ever seen her do. The first had been when she hugged him, without preamble, taking him from the guiding hands of the Sunlit in public, in the gardens right in front of Palace-Earth, and wrapping him in her arms. She was very thin, and taller than him, and her arms were ropes of muscle. He had thought she’d throw him in prison, or just lock him in his rooms forever, which would be the political version of the same thing, but—this. A fast, savage hug. He couldn’t remember when someone had hugged him last. Hugs were for little kids. He’d hugged Two Cartograph, Five Agate’s son, when they’d stopped playing, but that wasn’t the same thing at all.
The Emperor hadn’t locked him up, or locked him away. She took him to her suite. Kept a hand on his shoulder, firm and guiding, even when the world slipped sideways, a shadow in a corridor resolving into the shadow of some Shard’s vision of three-ringed death—a memory, he told himself, not real, not anymore. Took him to her suite, and told him that she’d be back in a little while, when she had finished wrapping up the day. And left him there. Unguarded. Cloudhookless. (Probably his cloudhook was going around and around on the subway still.) He could have left, or gone out the window, or—anything—
Instead he sat on a window seat behind the long white tufted couch, and stared into the early-afternoon sun on the water gardens below, and tried to remember where he was. Where the edges of him were. He didn’t know if he’d ever go all the way back to just being in one place, being absolutely sure of who and where and what he was. It was dizzying and awful, and he guessed he deserved it. The afternoon stretched into evening. He slept a little. Maybe. He might have dreamed he slept, or imagined it, or remembered someone else’s sleeping. But when he was all the way awake again, the world outside the window was flooded blue and fuchsia with the end of sunset.
And then the Emperor Herself came back, and sat on the windowsill with him, and handed him a bowl of tea, clear green and sweetly astringent. He wondered if she’d made it. It seemed like the perfectly absurd sort of thing she’d do. He drank some. His hands still worked, and so did his throat, and he tasted the tea with only the tastebuds that were absolutely and definitely his, so that—helped. It did.
He said, “I’m not sorry,” because he wasn’t, and because if the Emperor was going to punish him, he wanted to deserve it.
Nineteen Adze looked at him for a very long time, long enough that he wanted to blush, and cringe, and get away, even though he did none of those things. Then she nodded, as if she’d come to some satisfying conclusion, and said, “Good.”
Eight Antidote blinked in surprise. “Good?”
“Good. You’re sure what you did was right. You had your reasons to do it, you made a plan, you executed that plan. You didn’t harm anyone else in the process, aside from scaring that Shard pilot half to death, thinking she’d gotten the imperial heir killed or brain-damaged, and she’ll be all right. So: good. What did I tell you about successors?”
“That you would rather an—um. An annoying one, than a dull one.”
Nineteen Adze, when she smiled, looked more dangerous than when she didn’t. “You are absolutely an annoying successor, little spy. And not dull at all.”
“Did it—did what I did work?” he asked, suddenly helpless not to.
The Emperor held out her hand, tilted it one way and then the other. Maybe so, maybe no. “What did you want to have happen?” she asked.
Eight Antidote thought about being a spy: about keeping all his own desires as close as possible, unrevealed, even when asked directly. About choosing, always, if he was going to tell. He could keep doing that. He probably should. He’d be an Emperor, if there was an Empire left, and he couldn’t just tell people what he wanted to have happened, they’d use it against him—
But Nineteen Adze had told him about his ancestor-the-Emperor, and the machines from Lsel Station. About what he might have been. She’d told him that, and he’d used it against her, and yet they were both still right here.
“I wanted the Teixcalaan you told me about,” he said. “Eighty times eighty years of peace, and no one deciding a whole planet is worth killing just to prove a point. I wanted—I wanted to stop Three Azimuth’s order, and I wanted to send mine instead, and I want us to win the war anyway.”