I look around, searching for a way I could spirit my mother out of here and to safety. But Constantine has warned me of this.I am always watching you, he told me. Even if I cannot see them, I know there arehidden soldiers in the trees and along the horizon, snipers on the roofs of the estate, their guns trained on my mother’s head. If I try something, they will shoot her dead. Even I, with all my Skyhunter enhancements and strength, cannot stop them all.
My mother smiles sadly at the look on my face. She knows that the luxury she gets to indulge in this month is solely because my obedience has pleased the Premier. And this time I can see, behind all this new luxury around her, the weight her eyes carry no matter what conditions she’s in. Her safety always comes at a cost.
Still, she brushes it away. “What?” she says, a teasing lilt in her voice. “You’ve never imagined your mother as a Basean noble?”
Genuine relief floods me. Being trapped in Cardinia, where no one else can understand Maran sign language, with only Constantine able to comprehend everything I want to say, with my emotions held back tight within my chest, has left me a hollow shell. But on these days, I can be with my mother. I can let my heart open a little and take her in.
I suppose I can thank the Premier for that too.
“I was about to say that you look like you belong in those clothes,” I sign.
She nods to the horse waiting beside her, and I hurry to it, ready to savor every minute of this day. I grab the saddle and swing easily onto the creature’s back, then guide it around to follow my mother. We turn in the direction of the rolling hills that make up the rest of the estate. The breeze is gentle, the air just the right hint of warmth, and I find myself leaning into it, trying to ignore the strangeness of enjoying this perfect morning in a hostile nation.
“How is your pain?” my mother asks after a comfortable silence, and I feel myself lean toward the soothing sound of Basean on her tongue. It’s a question she brings up during each of our visits. For a while, myanswers had beenalways,constant,never-ending. She would see the small changes happening on my body—one month, the metallic tint of my hair; another month, the addition of bladed tips on my wings. When they infused the marrow of my bones with steel particles; when my heart was forced to grow larger and stronger to accommodate the changes in my body; when I spent those early weeks sitting up at night, gasping for breath and clutching my chest in agony, certain that my heart would burst from the strain… my mother saw the consequence of each week.
For all the anguish I feel in seeing my mother suffer, I imagine the sight of me causes her even more pain.
I shake my head. “Only a little, sometimes, when I’m sleeping,” I answer as I drop the reins to sign. “There’s not much left to my transformation now.” And before we can dwell on this, I quickly ask, “The mayor’s treating you well, then?”
My mother snorts a little. “That woman,” she says. “Do you know how she delivered this horse to me? She waited until I was lounging in a bath, and then had the horse stick its head right through the open window to drink my bathwater. I could hear her laughing even over my shrieks. A Cardinian with a sense of humor. I’ll be damned.”
I laugh in surprise, the sound coming out in a thin wheeze. “I suppose someone has to be a real human being in this country.”
My mother laughs too, then quiets as our horses leave the manor behind us and enter a stretch of grassland bordered by thickets of trees. “They bring me three meals a day,” she says in a low voice. “Porridges fat with chicken and eggs. White buns and scented rice. Fish and stewed beef and noodles. Basean foods, Talin. All of it, as if made by some master chef. The Premier keeps his word and wants to remind us of it at every turn. And all I can think about every single day is that, somewherein their kitchen, a chef who likely fled Basea’s collapse is now making me meals in exchange for Karensan coins. By the order of the Premier.” Her lips tighten as she turns her eyes to the horizon. There we can see a few silhouettes of ruins from the Early Ones, tall pillars sticking out of the ground and reaching up to nowhere. “I’m sorry, Talin, that you have to serve them because of me.”
I start to shake my head. During the first couple of months, I’d lived in terror of my mother killing herself in order to spare me the torture of continuing to obey the Premier. She had become so listless, so damaged by the sight of my suffering. I’d fallen to my knees during our second visit, sobbing like I was still a little girl, and begged her to stay alive. Told her that if she died, I would too. I forced her to promise me to live. So she had lived on, month after month.
Sometimes I wonder whether I’ve done a terrible thing to her, making her stay alive.
I nod at her hands. “Your wounds have healed faster than I’d thought they would.”
She nods and looks down, turning her now-scarred fingers this way and that. “The headman for the prison team I worked for took me off my shift early, after the Premier sent word halfway through the month that you’d been doing well.” Her words turn careful as her eyes dart back to me. “I spent two weeks in the hospital there, doing nothing but listening to stories coming back from prisoners of war along the outer Karensan states.”
I am careful not to react to my mother’s words, careful to keep my mind calm so that even at this distance from the palace, I don’t potentially alert Constantine to what I’m thinking. But my heart skips a beat.
This is the other reason my mother has decided to keep living. Thisis something that Constantinedidn’tanticipate. Few others in Cardinia move around as much as my mother, from prison district to mayor’s estate in the span of a month. With each new place she’s brought to, she listens. She searches for information that might be useful to me.
She is spying.
“I’m grateful you had those stories to listen to while you healed,” I answer her, my fingers moving casually.
“They were nothing but rumors.” My mother shrugs. “Just a few skirmishes and protests from citizens in Tanapeg. A few of the ones arrested were sent to the prison district I worked in. The mayor has put them to work on her estate.”
Just a few skirmishes and protests. It is a careful phrasing. As she says it, she turns to give me a pointed, sidelong look, and I know immediately what my mother is really trying to tell me.
The mayor has put them to work on her estate.And I remember what the mayor said to me when I first arrived.She’s stronger than she should be after such a long captivity. Maybe we’re treating our prisoners right, after all.
Did my mother heal quickly because of the mayor’s help? And if so… why would the mayor help her? The thought is so wild that I’m afraid to follow it. What else is the mayor helping?
“Oh?” I answer calmly, waiting for more. “I didn’t think they had much to protest, now that they’re under the Federation’s fold.”
My mother eases her horse into a slow trot, and I nudge my steed to do the same, until we’re riding around the edge of the thicket of trees. “Does it really matter if the other states have the occasional group that wants to separate?” She glances back once at me. “It’s only real trouble for the Federation if they bring it here.”
At that, I look sharply at my mother. My fingers move rapidly, wordsthat she can see but no one else can hear. “And have they brought it to Cardinia?”
She nods once. “Right into the heart,” she signs back to me.
Then she prods her horse into a fast trot. I do the same. “And now I’m here, resting on this estate. Who knows where those prisoners have been shipped off to? Maybe they’ve already died in the prison district.” She laughs a little. “Or maybe they’ve found themselves working in higher places.”
