Da-Xia had smiled at her, her voice dripping honey. “Near enough.”
The bickering then became general. Grego (a Baltic nobleman struggling under the weight of his Russian name) took up the part of minority languages, Thandi talked about cultural privileges, and Han (missing the point of the argument entirely) began laying out the simple terms by which one might recognize a god.
“Way I see it,” said Elián, unfurling his about-to-get-shocked smile, “anything you can take out with a decent-size pulse bomb—not a god.”
The blow to his nervous system knocked him from his chair.
Elián had come into my life the way comets had once come to medieval skies, the way Swan Riders still came, over the horizon with their wings catching light. He’d come like a portent of doom. But when he rolled over on the classroom floor, gasping and laughing at once, he did not seem portentous. Foolish, yes. Crazy, possibly. But too human to be reduced to a symbol, merely.
And besides, he could garden. There are those, newly come to the Preceptures, who think gardening is beneath them. Not Elián. He knew his way around compost teas and drip irrigations, around cockleburrs and flea beetles. He was, he told us, the son of a pair of sheep farmers.
“Farmers?” said Han. “Then what are you doing here?”
Dear Han. So slow to speak, and yet so often he said the wrong thing. It was clearly out of bounds to ask about a hostage child’s history. Much pain could be hidden there, and no good came of poking at it.
But Elián took no offense. He propped a foot up on the lug of his spade and raised an imaginary glass into the air. “Here’s to Grandma. My mother’s mother is Wilma Armenteros.”
Wilma Armenteros, the Cumberland Alliance’s secretary for strategic decisions—the newest of many euphemisms the Americans have used for “person in charge of war.” I had been reading about her. Recently I’d spent many hours poring over fragile, dry sheets of news dispatches stacked up on the misericord’s map table. The dispatches were printed on special paper, easy to compost. They were so dry, they pulled moisture from the skin. I read them until my hands themselves dried, until the skin between my fingers cracked and bled. I was unable to look away from the war that was inching toward me.
Wilma Armenteros loomed large in those papers. Her great-great-something-grandfather had led the evacuation of Miami. Some more recent ancestor had been the secretary of unity during the period when the drinking-water-supply wars had finally torn apart the former United States. By all accounts the current Armenteros was the shadow president of the young state, the power behind the Cumberland throne. Of course Talis would demand a hostage from her.
And she was lucky to have one. If she had not had a beloved grandson . . . Remember when kings used to be required to have children? said the Utterances. I require you to have children. You want to be a king, I require you to have children. You want to be a president, you want to be a general, you want to be a lord high dogcatcher—if you’re in charge of blowing stuff up, I require you to have children.
I wondered if Elián realized that he’d been chosen—and not just by Talis. He was here because Wilma Armenteros loved him. But apparently not enough to avoid nominating a hostage. Not enough to turn her position down.
“My mother wanted out of politics,” said Elián. “And I’ll tell you, she got as far out as she could get. Married this dirt-poor farmer from Kentucky—the hilly bit, you know. Down nigh the Licking River.”
“The Licking—” said Da-Xia, as if she couldn’t believe her luck.
Elián scrubbed a hand over his face, and his voice came out small: “The south fork.”
“Have you at this point heard all the jokes about that?” asked Grego.
“I’ll bet there are more,” said Thandi.
“Shut up,” said Elián, majestically. “So my mom, she married this Jewish farmer from a tapped-out springwater town. Got herself religion and settled in to live happily ever after, only with some sheep. And then Talis took her son anyway.” He pushed his hat back and swiped the sweat off his forehead with his sleeve. “My father didn’t want me to go, but the Swan—”
Spiders moved under his clothes.
Elián stopped talking, took a steadying breath, and resettled his hat. “And here I am,” he said. “So that’ll put a snake in your asparagus, heh?”
Even the proctors must have been baffled by that. They did not hurt him.