Stitching Snow (15 page)

“Wait!” Dane cut in. “Essie, please.” My neck twinged as I turned too quickly to gape at him.

Trading me had been
his
idea. It was what would reunite him with his father.

Kip spoke to me before I could fi gure what his nephew was getting at. “You don’t have to betray any confi dences. Just . . . is there anything you can tell us that would help us understand the situation better?”

“I don’t have any confi dences to betray. But I’m not going to help you kill more of the soldiers there.” 137

S T I T C H I N G S N O W

“We haven’t killed anyone on Windsong.” Now they thought I was ignorant just because I’d been living in a frozen wasteland for eight years. I rolled my eyes. “I’ve read the newsfeeds about near-constant battles in the outland territories.”

“We know. But it’s not us.”

“It’s your father,” said Lunak—the thin, thoughtful man I’d noticed before. “The battles are staged quite theatrically, with his best soldiers posing as Exile insurgents. A theater that’s all too deadly for the Windsong militia, however.” The blood rushed away from my face. It may have left my body entirely. I’d seen images on the networks I’d cracked, bodies strewn across the outland fi elds, bloodied and broken.

Always the corpses of Windsong infantry . . . the Exile casualties carted away quickly by their own army before images could be captured.

It made sense, though. I should have noticed it. Let the Exiles gain just enough ground to frighten the public and make them remember they need a strong leader to protect them. Push back just enough that the people think their leader is doing what he promised. Neither side really made any progress, but only if you saw the long scheme. In each moment, the war was dynamic and hard-fought, looking like their dutiful king was keeping them safe.

That kind of strategy was just like him.

And if the war was fake, was it still my fault? People were still dying, fake enemy or not.

I shook my head. “It’s unhinged. You’d think the blazing poisons would be enough.”

“The what?” Kip asked.

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R.C. ll E WI S

I looked at him. “You don’t know? You were a Midnight Blade, one of Olivia’s guards.”

“She was selective about what she trusted me with because I was your mother’s guard fi rst. The order to kill you was a test.” A test he failed. “Do you know about Olivia’s job as royal theurgist, her ‘magical’ healing abilities?” Lunak steepled his fi ngers. “We do, and we have wondered.

Of course, as people with an . . .
unusual
gift ourselves, we try not to rule anything out. You know something about those abilities?”

“Aye, I think so.” I thought back to memories I didn’t want, things I’d seen and heard in the palace, along with what I’d deciphered from my mother’s notebook. “There are poisons, different kinds, that create symptoms to look like diseases. My father and Olivia slip targeted doses into the water supply. A house here, a shop there. Doctors can’t make anything of it, but Queen Olivia can save them. But there’s no magic. It’s just the antidote. She’s done it for my father since before I came along.”

“That’s why you always check the water,” Dane muttered.

Stindu sniffed, apparently not hearing him. “Seems you
do
know a few things of use.”

I glared. “Oh, I do indeed. How to rig every gadget you touch to short out your heart, for one.”

The members of the council shifted restlessly, some even looking to the doors with the very large guards on the other side.

Go ahead, Essie, threaten planetary leaders. Sharp.

Kip held up his hand before anything became of the murmurs. “That’s not necessary. We didn’t know about the poison-ing. Thank you.”

“I didn’t know about the battle staging. Thanks for that, I 139

S T I T C H I N G S N O W

suppose. I still don’t understand, though. You aren’t the ones battling in the outlands, yet you
are
enemies of Windsong. You’re talking about things like coups. They exiled you to this planet, they fear what you can do—why not just leave them to their fate?

Or use your Transitioning to take the upper hand?”

“We
were
working toward peaceful coexistence,” Dane said.

The sudden heat in his tone startled me. “We had the embassy, we kept the law, but your mother broke it. She kept her identity secret, she risked all of us, she even risked you, if it weren’t for her—”

“Dane!” Kip cut in sharply. Good thing, too. My fi sts balled so tightly, my nails cut into my palms. “You don’t have the whole story.”

Dane’s posture went rigid, and his mouth barely moved.

“Maybe now is a good time to fi ll me in, Uncle.” The straight-backed woman I’d noticed the fi rst day—Mura, Kip had called her—answered. “Queen Alaina didn’t risk us.

We risked
her
. We created her false identity, altered her appearance, orchestrated her marriage to Matthias. She did it all at our request.”

My body stayed frozen, but a fi re sparked within. It hadn’t been her own ridiculous idea. Mother had been a spy. All of it a plan—one that had gone horribly wrong.

All of it?

Dane processed it more quickly than I did. “But . . . my father, he says we always have to be honest about what we are, keep the law,
always
. It’s the only way we can get others to trust us again.”

“You were young, Dane,” Stindu said. “That was the role you were to play at the time.”

Those words broke me out of my silence. “His role, was it?

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You had it all engineered like a bit of Garamite clean-tech. So neatly planned, every piece in its place. So what about me? Was I planned? What role did this council rig for me before I was born?”

The old leaders looked at each other. No one answered.

“Tell her,” Kip pressed.

“We hoped Alaina would be able to gather information to help us bring down Matthias from the inside,” one of them said.

“Barring that, she was to ensure Matthias’s heir would be a very different type of leader. But she died when you were young, leaving no assurance of the kind of person you’d be, and then you were gone as well.”

A simple plan. One my mother had believed in. She’d left me many of her secrets but kept the most important one—that she’d put her trust in people who couldn’t protect her. People who maneuvered lives like strategically placed pawns.

Leaving only me, the last pawn to play, but I’d been knocked off the board years ago.

“All the planning in the world, but you couldn’t account for Olivia, could you? My mother dead, and one of your own men ordered to kill me. Sparkling job. Congratulations to the First Families of Candara.”

I didn’t want to hear anything else they had to say, so I did the only sensible thing and left, forcing one of the guards to follow and make sure I went to my room. It didn’t matter what the Exiles did with me. They didn’t have what it took to outwit my father.

If my mother couldn’t, no one could.

141

14

BOREDOM MEANT TOO MUCH TIME

to think, and thinking

only led to confusion. Facts and emotions got all tangled and knotted, and I didn’t want to unravel any of them, too afraid of what I might fi nd underneath. Avoiding that meant I had two choices. I could lose myself in puzzles on my slate, or I could demand that the drones be allowed to come keep me company.

Neither option would keep my problems at bay for long.

Fussing with Dimwit and Cusser would keep me more than busy, though. Especially if Dimwit set something on fi re. It’d be better than staring at the ceiling.

I rolled over to activate the communication console, but my hand missed as the bed shifted beneath me. My momentum carried me over too far and I fell, smacking my head against the console’s hard edge.

At fi rst I thought I had a concussion—and maybe I did—but two failures to get up off the fll oor told me the room really was moving.

R.C. ll E WI S

Not moving . . . shaking. A lot.

Only a few things could make a room shake like that. Too prolonged for an explosion. Too intense for weather.

An earthquake.

Father’s stories of the dark kingdom, where the ground swallowed
whole any who dared speak against the king—

Silly stories, Essie.

It was easy enough to tell myself that, but harder to believe.

I focused on the scientifi c explanation of why quakes happened, massive continental plates butting against each other, building pressure until something gave way. The governing complex hadn’t collapsed on top of me yet, so it probably wouldn’t.

Of course if it did, I’d be buried by so much stone and marble, they’d be lucky to fi nd a smear of me.

It won’t, though. Right?

The trembling stopped after a minute or two . . . in the building, anyway. My body, curled on the fll oor, kept shaking for long minutes after.

“Essie?”

Dane’s voice fi nally pushed me to my feet. The room moved unnaturally again, but that time I knew it was my woozy head.

One deep breath and I managed to cross the room to the door.

“If you’re here to continue blaming my mother for every bad thing—”

I stopped. Dane wasn’t alone. His uncle stood next to him.

Kip’s eyes went straight to my forehead, and I realized the wet trickle wasn’t a bead of sweat.

Running through a palace corridor, turning too quickly and crashing into a pair of legs . . . the black-and-gray uniform of the Midnight
143

S T I T C H I N G S N O W

Blade . . . worrying the guard would yell at me . . . Kip helping me up,
making sure I’m not hurt.

Years later, both of us staring at the knife . . .

The memories collided, making the pain in my head more pronounced.

“Let’s get that taken care of,” Kip said, gently taking my arm.

It sounded like a good idea.

“We usually have more warning when a quake is about to hit,” Dane said from behind.

“That kind of thing happens a lot?” I asked.

“All the time. The tectonics on this planet aren’t too stable.

We built Gakoa here because the quakes are less severe than everywhere else.”

“Right lovely place, then, isn’t it?” He harrumphed. “It’s not bad. And it’s not like we have anywhere else to go. This is the place no one else wanted.” I turned to Kip. “Was there damage? Was anyone hurt?”

“There are bound to be some minor injuries like yours, but nothing serious,” he said. “And no major damage. Come on, right through here.”

The only real difference between the doctor who patched up my head and the one who’d healed my hands on Garam was that the Exile was female. Her expression of disdain matched the Garamite’s down to the little furrow between her eyebrows.

Apparently Thanda was the only planet in the system where people weren’t afraid of a few scars and well-worn clothes.

“I want both of you to come with me,” Kip said once the doctor fi nished.

I hadn’t changed my mind about letting him help me escape, but I doubted he wanted to discuss that. Dane and I followed 144

R.C. ll E WI S

him to a lift, up several levels, and down a long corridor to another lift. As we went into the second, I saw Dane’s tension increase, like he was bracing for a fi ght. I edged a little closer to the corner.

The higher we went, the heavier the silence became. I wasn’t about to break it, not between those two. They may have been family, but they occupied very different parts of my history. I hadn’t fi gured how to reconcile their connection just yet.

Finally we arrived at a short hallway with a door at the end.

Nothing seemed especially remarkable, except the very sophisticated lockpad with fi ngerprint scanners in the numbered keys.

Kip took fi ve steps from the lift to the door and turned to Dane, waiting.

“We shouldn’t be here,” Dane said.

“It’s the one place you
should
be.” Dane glared, exhaled sharply, and jabbed a code into the lockpad, using a different fi nger for each number. The door slid open, and I peered between the two of them to see what the big deal was.

The big deal was a big room, with a bigger view.

We walked in, and I discovered the room had a hexagonal shape. Three of the walls were fll oor-to-ceiling windows, and the whole city of Gakoa spread before us, and beyond. A river snaked along the edge of the city, sunlight glinting off its surface, then farther to green fi elds and forested hills. We were high enough to see everything, higher than any building in the governing complex. I thought back to the fll ight over the city—a glare of refl ected sunlight off a particular point on the mountain.

I’d thought it was some kind of sentry or lookout post. In a sense it was, I supposed, but no guard was stationed inside.

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S T I T C H I N G S N O W

For the briefest moment, I wondered what sunset would look like from there.

When I fi nally tore my eyes away from the view, I noticed the rest of the room. Soft benches lined the perimeter, some facing out, others in. All blanketed with a layer of dust. No one had been in that room for a while.

I turned back toward the door. Maps covered the walls on either side. One looked familiar, so I took a few steps closer.

Windsong. Every part of it, from the outlands to the capital to the whistling canyons that gave the planet its name. The other wall mapped Candara. I recognized nothing, but I found Gakoa.

All of the other labeled cities were in the same province.

“All right, Kip, why are we here?” Dane asked.

“To remind you that you have a decision to make soon, and I want you to stop avoiding it.”

I had no idea what they were talking about, but it felt distinctly like a family conversation, something I shouldn’t be part of. I continued examining the map. The areas without cities had other things labeled. Volcanoes. Major fault lines. Lots of them.

“My father will be back before I have to decide, so it doesn’t matter.”

“It doesn’t matter? Even if getting him back means sacrifi cing
her
life? Is that really what you want?” So much for not being involved. I felt their eyes on me but refused to look, instead studying a chain of Candaran islands just off an area marked with the words typhoon zone.