The Providence of Fire (94 page)

Gabril, as though sensing his thoughts, patted him on the shoulder. “Come. We will see you to your chambers, and I will command the watch at your door myself.” If the First Speaker was exhausted after the long night, he didn't show it. But then, the First Speaker hadn't spent the afternoon fighting for his life against Adiv, Matol, and the Ishien. Kaden started to accept, then shook his head.

“There's Triste, too,” he said. “I have to see her.”

In the chaos following his emergence from the
kenta,
in his urgency to see the council installed before any opposition could coalesce, Kaden had allowed the girl to be led away, her eyes blank, baffled, and hopeless. The palace guards had wanted to kill her on the spot, but Kaden stopped them, insisting on her imprisonment instead. In truth, he had no idea what to think about her final bloody massacre, no idea how to feel about it. Certainly she had saved his life, both by holding up the tunnel as Adiv sought to tear it down, and by killing the soldiers under the leach's command. It seemed, however, that something inside the girl had snapped, some cord tethering her mind to the world. He had walked among the bodies in the Jasmine Court, had looked at their faces. There were ministers among the number, and courtiers, one old woman, and at least three children. They couldn't all have been a part of Adiv's plot. They weren't all supporters of Adare and il Tornja.

The sight sickened and saddened him, both for the victims and for Triste. Whatever fury had consumed her, whatever power had torn the lives from five or six score Annurians, it was clear that she understood it no better than anyone else. In the wake of the slaughter, he wanted nothing more than to sit with her, comfort her, try to understand just what had happened and how—but there was no time. Instead, he had seen her drugged with adamanth root, locked in a barred chamber inside the Crane, and placed under triple guard while he went about wrenching aside the final foundations of empire.

Now, before he slept, he owed her a visit. Gabril seemed to have other thoughts on the matter, and his jaw tightened as Kaden changed course for the Crane.

“Whatever your past with that woman, she is an abomination. She should be killed, not coddled.”

“She's hardly being coddled,” Kaden replied, his own voice harder than he'd intended. “She's locked away.”

“Allowing a known leach to live is hardly a way to build support for the republic,” Gabril said. “Especially a leach who only just now cut down hundreds of your subjects.”

“They're not
my
subjects anymore,” Kaden said. “And it will be the council, not me, who determines Triste's fate. It doesn't change the fact that she has been with me since this all started, has
saved
me more than once, and I intend to see her now, to offer her what comfort I can.”

Gabril shook his head. “Then you go alone. I will be outside your quarters when you have finished with this folly.”

“Not alone,” Kiel said. “I will join you, if you allow.”

Kaden nodded wearily, watching the First Speaker turn on his heel and stalk across the courtyard.

*   *   *

At first Kaden thought the room was empty. Someone had drawn the heavy shutters without bothering to light the lamps, blocking out the faint blush of light seeping into the eastern sky. He could make out a small pallet at the far side of the room, two lacquered chairs, and a basin with water on a low table; the chamber was hardly a cell, but it was certainly a far cry from the other guest suites in the palace. The air was hot and stuffy, as though the window hadn't been open for months.

Kaden took a few tentative steps into the room as Kiel pulled the door shut behind them.

“Triste?” he called.

Silence.

He crossed to the window, unlatched the shutters, and pushed them open. When he turned he saw her, crouched between the pallet and the wall, arms clutching her knees to her chest, eyes staring at nothing. Despite the bowl of water, she had made no effort to scrub the blood from her face or hands. It had dried and cracked, making it seem as though her skin was sloughing away. Her dress, too, was black and heavy with blood. She paid no attention to any of it, staring blankly at a section of wall a few paces distant.

“Triste?” he said again, crossing toward her hesitantly. “Are you all right?”

Her body convulsed, shaking with something that was part sob, part bitter laugh.

“My mother is a traitor,” she said without shifting her eyes or raising her voice. “She sold me to my father, who was a traitor and a leach.
I
am a leach and I just murdered I don't know how many people.”

The bald statement of the facts brought Kaden up short. He wanted to offer some consolation, but had no idea what to say. As the silence stretched, she raised her eyes at last.

“When will I be executed?” The words held no fear. If anything, there was a note of hope in her voice.

Kaden shook his head slowly. “Triste … I … The council will decide, but I'm going to fight for you, fight to see you saved. Not all leaches are evil.”

Her mouth dropped open in disbelief. “I saw the bodies, Kaden! The people I killed! A child with her head torn halfway off … A man holding his intestines in his arms … I
slaughtered them
.”

Kaden hesitated, then nodded. “You killed them, but you didn't
mean
to kill them. That's important.”

“I didn't?” she asked, staring at him bleakly. “How do you know?”

“Do you remember what happened?” Kaden asked. “In the tunnel, back on the island with the
kenta
?”

She shook her head, a tiny defeated motion. “Parts. Glimpses. I remember fury. And blood.” She paused, tears streaking her blood-soaked face. “And power. I'm a leach. A
leach
. Just like the Atmani.”

“Maybe you are,” Kaden said, “but there are worse things to be.”

His years with the monks had ground out most reflexive aversion, but there was still something deep inside him, some vicious muscle trained in his early childhood, that recoiled at the thought. All the old words, like dumb fish rising to the light, floated into his mind:
foul, twisted, loathsome
. He looked at Triste, at the delicate arc of her neck, the fall of her hair onto her shoulders. It seemed cruel of Bedisa to weave something so vile into a being so beautiful.

Put it away,
he told himself, taming the feeling that crouched, muttering, inside of him. At every point since he'd met her, Triste had been kind and generous. When events came to a head, when she fell into the hands of the Ishien, it had been Kaden who failed her, not the other way around. If she was a leach, she was a leach.

“It doesn't change who you are,” he said, though as the words left his lips he remembered her pressing Matol up against the
kenta,
his hand at her throat, her lips pressed to his as she forced him struggling through the gate, remembered her standing, silhouetted, at the end of the corridor, her scream loud as the sun.

She raised her head. Firelight reflected in her streaked tears as though she were crying flame. “Who am I?” she whispered, eyes boring into him, both defiant and desperate.

Kaden shook his head helplessly, and for the first time, Kiel stepped forward, crouching a pace away from Triste, considering her carefully.

“Tell me everything,” he said. “Start at the start.”

“Why?”

“Because,” the Csestriim replied, “you want to learn the truth. I have lived a long time, and seen more than you know.”

Triste glanced at Kaden, then back at Kiel, and then the words were tumbling out of her, like water spilling over the lip of Umber's Pool back in the Bone Mountains, falling too fast and far to recall, pulled by a force as old and strong as the earth itself. Kiel listened in silence, nodding when Triste faltered, his face still as stone, eyes intent as she recounted it all: the flight through the mountains, her reading of the script in Assare, her impossible passage through the
kenta
and killing of Ekhard Matol, right up through her utter destruction of Adiv's guard.

“There's something wrong with me,” she concluded finally, voice breaking. “Something awful and broken.” She had managed to dam up her terror and grief, but Kaden could hear them pressing behind her low voice, a massive weight barely restrained. “I know things,” she concluded. “Things I shouldn't know. I can
do
things.…” She trailed off, staring out the window.

Kiel glanced at Kaden, then returned his gaze to the girl.

“A remarkable account,” he said. “Unique.”

“I'm a leach,” Triste said, circling back to where they began.

“Almost certainly,” Kiel replied. “It would explain your ability to match pace with Kaden and Tan in the mountains, not to mention the fact that you just held up a hundred tons of stone. You are not just a leach, but an extremely powerful one.”

Triste nodded helplessly, but Kiel pressed ahead.

“There is more.”

Kaden nodded slowly. “Just being a leach wouldn't allow her to pass the
kenta,
would it?”

He hesitated, then shook his head. “No. Not that I've ever heard of.” He turned to Triste. “How did you feel when you stepped through the gate?”

She frowned. “Terrified. Every single time. Confused and terrified.”

Kiel nodded. “It should have destroyed you.”

“And then there's the languages,” Kaden said. “You didn't learn them in the temple.”

Triste shook her head weakly. “I wanted to believe that, but … no.” She paused, gazing out at the blank sky, eyes wide and lambent as the moon. “It's like there's … someone else.”

Kaden narrowed his eyes. “Someone else?”

She grimaced, wrestling with the unspoken words. “Someone else … inside me.
She
could read the writing in Assare.…”

“She was the one who spoke after breaking Matol's hand back in the Heart,” Kaden said. He summoned to mind the girl's words.
“
‘
Stoppered to your cries will be my ears, and dried to dust the wide lake of my mercy.'
”

Triste shuddered.

“Do you remember saying that?” he pressed.

“I don't…” She hesitated. “I'm not sure. It's like something I dreamed and then forgot.”

“It doesn't sound like you,” Kiel observed. “Different syntax. Different idiom.”

Triste looked from Kaden to Kiel, then back again. “What does it
mean
?” she asked. “How can I not be myself?”

Kaden shook his head. The Shin would have torn apart the question as predicated on incoherence. The very words
I
and
self
were mired in error, referring to nothing more than illusion, a shifting amalgamation of senses and perceptions with no core, no foundation, no indivisible essence. And yet, the thing that made the illusion so deceptive, so persuasive, was its very coherence. For Triste's self to shift, to shatter … the monks had never spoken of such a thing.

“This other … aspect,” Kiel said carefully, “she seems to emerge only under certain conditions.” He ticked them off on his fingers. “The flight through the mountains. The attack in Assare. Your assault on Matol. Conditions of extreme stress.”

“Like my mind is broken,” she said. “Like something broke it.”

Kiel nodded, but Kaden shook his head.

“Broken suggests two halves from a shattered whole,” he said, then indicated her with a vague hand, “but there's nothing missing from you now. You're a whole person. And what Kiel's calling the other aspect doesn't seem like an aspect. She's confident, angry. She seems to have a memory of her own, abilities of her own. There might be some bleeding between the two of you, but you both seem whole, distinct. Like another soul was somehow planted in your body.”

The whole thing seemed impossible if Kaden paused to consider it, but Triste's eyes blazed.

“Who is she?”

Kiel shook his head. “It doesn't seem like you can know. There may be some … seepage between the two of you, but not enough for you to remember or understand.”

Triste's lips tightened. “Ask her.”

Kaden shook his head. “That's what they were doing back at the Heart,” he said. “That was the whole point of the torture. Matol demanded to know who you were a dozen times, and all he ended up with was a broken hand.”

“But,” Kiel pointed out, “Matol was a foe. Tan was a foe. Maybe she would talk to us. To you.”

“
Ask
her,” Triste said.

“All right,” Kaden said, frowning. “The next time she … emerges, I'll ask.”

Triste shook her head grimly. “Now.”

“It won't work,” Kiel said. “You can't just call her out.”

“Yes,” Triste said, seizing the knife from Kaden's belt and pressing it to her stomach, “I can.”

Kaden and Kiel both started forward, but she was already driving the knife into her flesh, slowly but steadily, the cloth of the robe and the skin beneath parting under the pressure. Her face twisted in pain and Kaden extended a hand, but Kiel held him back.

“Come out here, you bitch,” she spat, voice hoarse and ragged. “Get the fuck
out.
”

“She'll kill herself,” Kaden said, body tight as a bowstring.

“It is her mind,” Kiel replied, “and her body. Her choice.”

Kaden hesitated. The first inch of the knife had disappeared, and blood soaked her dress, drenching the gruesome fabric. Her lips had gone dark as night, and her eyes rolled in her head, but she kept her white-knuckled grip on the knife, the slow, relentless pressure.

It's over,
Kaden thought, horrified at what he had allowed to happen.
It's over.