THE FRANGIPANI-SHAPED FLUTTER THAT melted into Persis’s palmport was delicate to the point of fragility. The message that whispered into her head a split second later was anything but.
Persis, darling. I’ve been hearing some very odd reports about a strange houseguest you entertained in our absence. Return home at once. Love and duty, Torin Blake
Persis scrunched up her face. Her father always sounded so formal in his flutters, like he couldn’t quite break out of the message etiquette he’d learned in his youth.
At once, Papa. Kisses.
She retrieved Justen and herded him back to the Daydream as quickly as the crush of the court would allow.
“My parents found out you spent the night,” she explained as Slipstream swirled in excitement around her feet. He hated the court and was always relieved to get back into the ocean. “And now they’re burning to make your acquaintance.” Perhaps the name alone was enough to make up for her going against their wishes and bringing a stranger to their home. Perhaps her mother had rested all day in preparation for Justen.
“I look forward to meeting them,” was all the Galatean said. Was all he said almost the whole trip back, as they skirted the coastline on their way to the far southwestern point of Albion that served as the seaward entrance to her father’s estate. As the cliffs rose above them, turning the water a shadowed shade of teal and blocking out the glare of the sun, Persis watched her passenger stare up in wonder.
“Scintillans pali takes some getting used to,” she said, using the ancestral name of the precipice, “but you saw it when you brought me home, right?”
“No,” Justen replied. “I was down below with you. You were . . . convulsing.”
“How embarrassing,” Persis said, her tone carefully crafted to reveal only shards of her true humiliation. “I can’t apologize enough.”
“Don’t worry about it.” He was fixated by the rock rising above them. “I’m a medic. Besides, you’re doing me a huge favor by agreeing to this subterfuge. Call us even.”
“Does that mean I can’t count on you for any more medical assistance?” she asked coyly.
He cast her a dark look over his shoulder. “If you mean concocting more genetemps drugs, absolutely not.”
“Humph.” She slouched in disappointment as he shook his head in disgust or contempt or something bordering on frustration.
Well, he wasn’t the only one frustrated. She had a Helo medic, who’d grown up in Citizen Aldred’s house, sitting on her very own boat and she was unable to ask him anything important. The Wild Poppy’s mission depended on her ability to hide her true identity, to present herself as shallow and disinterested. And it was vital to do so in front of this Galatean revolutionary. He may have asked for asylum, but that didn’t mean she could trust him.
Which reminded her, it was time to school Justen on proper court behavior. “Back at the court, those Galateans you were talking to—”
“The Seris?” He snorted.
“Yes.” In another time, another guise, she might have snorted herself. Horrible Lord Seri, to suggest that the Darkened would have been better off just staying Reduced! For a man who’d been temporarily Reduced himself, it was an astonishing assertion. Of course, he was one of those aristos who would have preferred that the cure had never happened. It was good the Seris had lost any claim they once held to control the lives of others. And yet, they still held influence among the Albian aristos on the Council. “You know, you shouldn’t be so hard on them. I heard they were tortured. Given that Reduction drug.”
“I know,” he said softly. “And I regret—that my fellow countrymen did that. But they are safe now, and I will argue to the death against their bigoted beliefs. People like them are the reason Galatea was driven to revolution.”
Not people like the revolutionaries? Persis longed to say but could not. She’d never get Justen to change his mind—and she didn’t truly want to. Most Galatean aristos had been horrid to their population after the cure had been administered. Though the people were born reg, most had still been treated like Reduced slaves. Many weren’t paid for their work or educated or allowed control of property, and the aristos and more fortunate regs who’d campaigned for equal rights had been shouted down by the queen and her supporters—or worse.
Desire for change was more than justified. Persis couldn’t deny that. But the revolution was changing things in all the wrong ways. More slavery wasn’t the right solution, and torture was torture.
Besides, if Justen was going to be an asset to Isla, he’d need to learn how to tread lightly on the mines scattered about the Albian aristocracy.
“Have you heard their story?” she asked. “I have. They were enslaved on their own ancestral lands, put to hard labor for the amusement of their prison guards.” Until the Wild Poppy rescued them.
“Oh, the horror,” Justen grumbled without turning around. “To have to labor. Like all their servants did for generations. Like your servants do now.”
Persis bristled. “My servants do their jobs. They work fair hours and are paid fair wages. They aren’t enslaved or imprisoned”—she hesitated, framing the words more carefully, more like Persis Blake ought—“and we don’t give them drugs to make them stupid, either.”
“But what of the Reduced servants Lord Seri didn’t want to give the cure to?” Justen asked, turning to look at Persis at the helm. “Choosing to withhold the cure from them would have enslaved them forever—in body and in their own minds.”
Persis gripped the wheel tightly as a shudder skimmed beneath her skin. That’s what was happening to the prisoners in Galatea. And it wasn’t only the revolution that held such horrible fates for its people. Even here in Albion, some were enslaved in their minds, and some had that future looming before them, with no possible escape. There was nothing Persis could do for the Darkened—nothing at all. But even if such inevitabilities were written into her genetic code, she wouldn’t let that kind of suffering befall anyone it didn’t have to. The Reduction was over. She wouldn’t let the revolutionaries bring it back with their appalling pink pills.
“But the cure wasn’t withheld, in the end,” she said at last. That was safe enough. A point even Persis Blake could make. “The queen who ruled then made its application universal, just as the king here did. Did your revolutionaries spare her descendant in gratitude?” Persis would never forget the night of Queen Gala’s death. Her Reduction had been the first blow, but even then Persis—and all Albion—had been naive enough to believe that it was a temporary insanity and would all be resolved. But when she’d died and her body had been desecrated by an angry mob, Persis could think only of her own princess. Her own best friend, young and ruling and without the power to prevent these things from happening.
It was the night the Wild Poppy had been born.
“No.” Justen lowered his head. “We made many errors. I told you, I no longer believe in the way the revolution is playing out. But that doesn’t make the goals that brought us to this point any less valid. Sometimes bad things happen when you try to do something good.”
Persis knew that all too well, as had her namesake. Since symptoms of the illness didn’t manifest until the victims were around forty, Persistence Helo had been old when Dementia of Acquired Regularity had first appeared among the population of the Helo-Cured regs. She’d spent the remainder of her life in seclusion. Some said it was from embarrassment, but Persis often wondered if she’d been researching, trying to find a way to fix the problem she’d unwittingly created.