Burr got up, looking gormless. One could almost see the questions circling his head like stars. Talis said nothing. We all looked at Burr. And we all said nothing. Burr stared from face-to-face—and then he broke into a shambling run, skirting the crater, making for the open plain.
“Well, that’s boring.” Talis flipped a hand toward Burr’s shrinking form. “He might even live.”
“No,” said Elián, who had set out on that path himself once. “Probably not.”
Talis scratched behind his ear like a hound, watching Burr move out of sight. “Right, well. Two things. One: Greta, your mother wants to talk to you. Two: Does anyone know how to sterilize a scalpel?”
In a slight variation of my don’t-encourage-him policy, I didn’t ask about the scalpel. I was not sure I wanted to know. I had, after all, taken a master class in anticipation from a torturer, and I had learned that ignorance really can be a kindness.
Talis sulked when no one rose to his bait, but he didn’t press. He hooked me under the arm, and took me back to the Precepture, to the miseri.
He’d dug out from somewhere—the Cumberland equipage?—a tablet of smartplex the size of a piece of paper folded in two. I sat down at the map table with it. The tablet was a Halifax thing, and it did not belong in the Precepture, but it sat as comfortably as a book in my hands, and was better by far than the jolt of seeing my mother’s face overtake the familiar screen of one of my teachers.
Still, I had to take a breath, and two, and three, before I tapped it on. Talis hovered.
“Mother,” I said.
The screen came to life. I got my mother’s privy secretary, a hasty bow, and then my mother herself, sinking into her chair with a scroop of satin. The heavy loops of her wig were caught up in a jeweled net, but her glasses were wire-rimmed and plain, ordinary things. By this I knew she was not meeting me with ceremony, but with love. “Greta . . .” She looked over my shoulder. “Thank you, Lord Talis.”
“Oh, hey. You bet.”
“And now, if you would leave us? ‘Shoo,’ is that how one puts it?”
How I loved my mother.
Talis raised both eyebrows, but then made a sweeping bow. “As you wish.” Then: “Greta?” He closed a hand over my shoulder in parting, his fingers finding the tender places where he had healed me. “Surgery’s next. Meet you in your room.”
And before I had a moment to say he was by no means welcome in my room, he was gone.
“Surgery?” My mother’s voice almost cracked. I could see her do exactly as I would once have done: swallow the question to allow me my own space and dignity.
“Don’t,” I said. “You’re already so far away . . .”
She looked so close that I might touch her, reach for her as if for a book. I put my fingers on the smartplex. But I also knew how it would look to her. She was sitting at the dressing table where she took private calls. I would be in place of her mirrored reflection, caught in the glass, reaching out.
“You’re so far away,” I said again.
“I wish I were not,” she said. “I wish I had not always been.” She put her fingers against mine. I felt nothing. Pearls and sapphires glowed in the net that held her hair. “The broadcast, Greta. The—apple press . . .”
Well, there was a word I would never be able to hear again. I felt as if there were still screams ringing around in the hollows of my ears.
“Don’t faint.” My mother was leaning close, her breath almost fogging the mirror between us. “Should I call you help? Father Abbot!”
But he wasn’t there. It was only me, and she, and the distance.
I took a breath. My mother and I both breathed. Fingertip to fingertip, we steadied ourselves, then let our hands fall away.
“We did not know, in my time . . .” I saw her eyes glance behind me, to the curve of the wall that hid the grey room. “Do you? Do you know—what Talis will do?”
Even now she could not drop the Precepture’s coded speech. Do you know what will happen in the grey room? Do you know how you will die?
How could I even begin to explain?
She was desperate with her good-byes. “I only wanted to say—to say—”
“Mother—” I interrupted her, and she fell completely silent. Her eyes were bright blue and almost glazed, as mine had been in that fateful portrait. They held a resignation that seemed more terrible than grief. It occurred to me that she had been waiting to talk to me for a whole day, and might well have thought me dead. A war had been declared. A Rider—and what a Rider!—had arrived. I should be dead. And yet she had held herself ready for the call, waiting. I wondered how long she would have waited.
“Mother,” I said again.
She had waited through every inch of the apple press.
She had been waiting for eleven years.
There were tears welling behind her only-for-family glasses.
I thought if I closed my eyes, I would be able to feel her fingers fiercely tight on my five-year-old arms.
And for the first time since choosing my own fate, I too began to cry. “Mother. It’s not death. He’s not going to kill me. I’m not going to die.”