As for Tristen, once he'd determined who they were, where they were going, and why, he remained quiet— painfully so—but it turned out he could cook, so Rien and Perceval sat shoulder to shoulder, wrapped in Pinion's warm but worrying embrace, and watched. There was something tremendously comforting in having an adult appear and take care of things, Perceval admitted, watching the tall white man stir dinner with curious focus.
She was fascinated by that. And by how very white his hair was, and the soft translucence of his skin. She could see the blue veins where his salvaged clothes did not cover, and she was surprised that not only was his symbiont apparently healthy, but that it had managed to keep him so. She was also amazed by his resilience; she had only been captive a few days, and she thought she would lie staring at ceilings the rest of her life. She could not feel safe.
But there was Tristen Conn, singing to himself as he tasted broth and stacked and rolled tender kudzu leaves into long tubes for chiffonade. And he made her feel safer, his broken sword tucked into his belt and a knife from a magnetic rack inside one of the mouse-rummaged cabinets rocking in his left hand. Perceval hadn't seen a wild mouse, but she knew that all the mice in the world were as white as Tristen, albinos. They would have red eyes, though—natural mammal blood color—not stained blue by the symbiont blood-marker.
She and Rien sat and watched Tristen cooking, and she tried not to let herself feel too safe. But that was hard, when he brought them plastic mugs of salty broth full of shredded rehydrated mushrooms and soy protein, the delicate rags of sliced kudzu floating on top, a soft and saturated green.
She cupped the mug in both hands, first undraping her arm from around Rien, and sipped. It tasted fantastic. The tightness across Perceval's shoulders—where the weight of her wings wasn't—eased at the warmth. They sat in an uneven triangle, eating in silence.
When Perceval had finished, she flicked Pinion shut— even the brief breeze was warm and welcome—and got up to get more, collecting Rien's cup as well. Tristen placed his hand over his mug when she reached for it. He'd only gotten through a little more than half, and was taking it slowly.
Too much food in a hurry might not be good for him.
As she ladled more soup into the cup, she spoke. It was easier, somehow, when you were not looking. "Rien, do you think we're being maneuvered into finding things?"
Rien made a noise. Startled, rather than affirmative. "I hadn't thought of it." In the stainless-steel trim around the backsplash, Perceval saw Rien press three fingers to the side of her head.
"Lord Tristen," Perceval hastened to add, "no offense. I did not mean to insinuate that you were a thing."
"Considering how you met me, I could hardly be offended if you did," he said. His voice was returning, but it was still soft and weary; she wondered how it felt for him to be clean and clothed and full of salty soup after the builders knew how long crawling through bat muck and gnawing raw bones. She hoped she could remain glad to never know. "But I don't believe anyone knew where I was."
"Then how did you come to be there?" Perceval asked, just as Rien volunteered, "We got help and directions from a necromancer." Perceval turned back in time to see Rien's guilty glance at Gavin, but Gavin never shifted.
Tristen, however, craned over his shoulder to look at Perceval, then watched her walk back, balancing mugs, to sit again beside Rien. "You're trusting of a stranger." His tone ruined it, though—he might be trying for menace, but he only sounded avuncular.
Which, Perceval supposed, was exactly what he was. Their father's brother.
"Only strangers who can cook," she replied. "And anyone who would bury himself under a metric ton of bat shit to fool us deserves to. We mean to try to stop a war, Lord Tristen—"
"Don't Lord me," he interrupted, the electric blue eyes narrowing in colorless sockets, "and I shan't Lady you."
"And so are all the forms of courtesy defeated," Perceval said, but she smiled. "So are you for war?"
"When I was free, I was for any war I could get," he said. He touched the hilt of his broken unblade. "Now that I am free again ..." He shrugged. "Durance vile can alter your expectations. You think someone is machining this war, Perceval?"
"Ariane Conn," she said, without hesitation. "And somebody on the Engine side, too. Who is willing to risk biological warfare. And to arrange things so that I might be captured by Rule, so as to bring the contagion among them."
That was dangerously close to topics Perceval was not yet ready to discuss—not without first gathering some intelligence—so she drank soup and then changed the subject before someone could pursue it. "In any case, I'm feeling schooled. And I do not think your sister is the Commodore who is needed in Rule."
"Commodore?"
"I'm sorry," Rien said. "La—I mean, Ariane killed your father."
"Good riddance," Tristen said, his woolly white braid sliding forward over his shoulder. Despite two elastics, the end was fraying. "But how can she have declared herself Commodore, when I am legitimate, and so much older?"
For the time being, even Tristen seemed content to avoid conflict. They skulked and hid, Gavin their ears and Rien's unsettling, newly intrinsic sense of geography their guide. They saw no one else alive, and Rien was both grateful for and worried by it.
They might have been not too far from Benedick's residence on a straight line, but many of the corridors were blocked or ruined. Two days' careful and unobtrusive journey followed. Tristen acted impervious, Rien thought— but she also noticed that he slept propped in corners, and that she'd wake and find him staring into space or reading on a hand-screen he'd scavenged in one of the rooms they bunked in, his nose pressed almost to the display as if his sight were failing.
As they came closer to the border between Rule and Engine, the travelers saw at last evidence of Ariane's war. Foliage scorched and trampled by battle, a blasted bulkhead. A body, which Perceval knelt beside and brushed with her fingertips.
"His name was Alex," she said, and rasped her hands over her stubble in the thinking gesture of someone accustomed to long hair. The prickles looked as if they must itch, but perhaps knights, like ladies, did not scratch.
Gavin seemed to have the knack of riding shoulders; when Rien hunkered to wait, he aided her balance.
Tristen, in his blue fleece and salvaged sandals, knelt, too. He placed one hand on the dead man's forehead, as if in benediction. And then he began to go through his pockets.
"Sir!" Perceval protested. And Tristen paused, and only looked at her.
They stared, back and forth a moment; Rien noticed the sameness in the shapes of their features. Though Perceval's face was squarer, and Tristen's was long, they were both thin and tall, with deep-set eyes. His nose wandered; hers was incongrously pert. Nevertheless, Rien thought the resemblance would have been striking if Perceval still had her hair, and if Tristen's was pigmented rather than wooly and white and if the line of his jaw was not concealed by the beard.
He glanced down, his lashes thick and ivory against his blue-tinged cheek, and drew the dead man's sheath and knife from his boot. There was a holster for a sidearm, but the pistol was not in evidence. Tristen, however, did pull two clips of caseless ammunition from his pockets.
Silently, he offered bullets and knife to Perceval.
"You take it," she said, without looking at his hands.
They continued on.
They made camp when they grew tired, in another abandoned section of crew quarters. The irrigation system had failed here, and nothing but crisped brown stems grew in the beds and wall boxes. The air could have been fresher, for it—but there was running water from the taps, though it was cold only, and Rien, whose menses had started, took the opportunity to scrub herself with a soapy rag and wash her hair. Gavin stood on the edge of the basin and studied a cracked dry valve from the irrigation pipe, turning it over and over in his claw, before eventually putting it in his beak and swallowing it, like a chicken gagging down pea gravel for its crop.