“Sit down, Your Highness,” Armenteros rumbled. “Burr, get the queen back.”
“Don’t you dare,” I snapped at him. And then I rounded on her. “And you,” I said, “are not permitted to use my title. My name is Greta, and so you will call me. You think because I am hostage to the Precepture that anyone can use me? I am a Child of Peace. Touch one hair on my head and the AIs will come for you. Talis will wipe Cumberland from the map, do you hear me? From the map!” I slapped the table so hard that several soldiers jumped. My hand stung numb.
“Sit down,” said the general, and raised one finger. There was a wave of clicking around the room as guns swung up and pointed at me.
I laughed. “You won’t shoot me. You can hardly torture me if you shoot me first.”
The general made a tock with her tongue, acknowledging the point. She sounded so much like the Abbot that it made me reel. I grabbed on to the table edge.
Tolliver Burr looked at Da-Xia as if deciding what role to cast her in. “What about her? We could shoot her.”
“The roommate? Who is she?” said Armenteros, as some of the guns swung to cover Xie.
Da-Xia smiled her destroying Tara smile, pressed her palms together in front of her and bowed over them. “I,” she said, “am the Daughter of the Heavenly Throne, the Beloved of the Mountains, the Pure Soul of Snow. Single me out, and you will find yourself at war with most of central Asia.”
“She’s quite right,” said the Abbot. His head was hanging, and there was a thickening whirr in his voice. “They both are. The UN won’t take this lightly. Talis will personally order the strike on Cumberland.”
Talis. On the lips of another AI, it was a name to conjure with. The temperature in the room seemed to drop.
“I am leaving,” I said. “There is no need for me to be here while you decide how to hurt me.”
I let go of the table, which had pressed a white fault line into the soft part of my palm. I would have staggered, except that Da-Xia came and took my elbow, formally, as would befit the escort of a queen.
“And you,” I snapped at Burr. “You must have some other equipment in that ship of yours. Use it. I won’t talk to my mother through the Abbot again. Let him go.”
“Thank you, Greta,” the Abbot slurred. He didn’t lift his head. His hand was still pinned to the table. But he was alive. The guns followed us like eyes as we processed toward the door.
The light through the broken ceiling was chiaroscuro: here bright enough to make one squint, there thick with shadow. The soldiers by the door were blurred by their chamo and mostly hidden in the darkness; I could see only their movement, shifting to make way for us.
It wasn’t until I was nearly there that I saw that one of them—his gun slack in his hand, his face as tense and sick as if the spiders were crawling over every inch of him—was Elián.
16
IN THE GARDEN
Outside the miseri Da-Xia took my arm, and we ran like deer. We spilled out of the shadowy transept and into the bright morning. The grass was wet under our bare feet.
“?‘It would astonish me if you were coy’!” Da-Xia tumbled against the Precepture wall, grinning from ear to ear. “There you are, Greta. Well done!” She was laughing.
A few moments ago I would have been laughing too—at the release, at the look on Armenteros’s face—but seeing Elián had ripped it from me. I felt hollowed out. “Oh, Xie. . . .” I leaned against the wall beside her. The easterly light was sweet, but the old stones were still cool with the memory of night. “Do you remember Bihn?”
Bihn. She’d been tiny for her age, and sweet fingered. She had liked to braid my hair. She could hold so still that doves would come and eat out of her hand. When we were nine a Swan Rider came for her. He’d called her name, and she’d started screaming. Sidney, Vitor, and Bihn. Three of my classmates had died, in my time at the Precepture. But only Bihn had been dragged out screaming.
Da-Xia pivoted away from the wall, so that we were face-to-face. “You will not lose your courage, Greta,” she said, willing something into me, something fiercer than a blessing. Her eyes were black with their intensity, locked on to mine. “Listen to me. You will not.”
We were belly to belly. Her face was powerfully close.
I am not sure which of us moved first. But suddenly my mouth was on hers. And her lips were warm as the sunlight, and her skin was cool as the grass, and she was everything. Da-Xia. My whole world.
How could it possibly have taken me so long to see that?
Her hand slipped under the hem of my shirt and brushed over the goose-bumped skin of my flank.
“Xie . . .” It came out almost as a moan. I found my hand on the small of her back—awake to the flare of her hip, to the way my fingers fitted between the buttons of her spine. I pulled her closer.