“All right, then,” Jedao said, “what is it you think I do care about? And why bring it up now, General, and not earlier?”
“Does every card player you encounter give away everything after the first hand?” Khiruev said. Brezan, for instance, had a terminal inability to bluff. Not coincidentally, he stayed out of high-stakes jeng-zai.
Jedao’s smile flickered at her like a candle flame. Khiruev caught herself wishing it had lasted longer. Nevertheless, for all that the argument was transparently designed to appeal to a gambler, Jedao didn’t draw it out. “Fair enough,” Jedao said. He fell silent, and Khiruev was reminded that Jedao hadn’t answered the first question.
Khiruev, no longer young, had not dueled except casually in years. But she had a counter ready. “Why is it,” she said, “that you’re so determined to teach me how to think autonomously? What would that give you that simple obedience wouldn’t?”
Jedao leaned back, began to put his feet up on the table between them, caught himself. The whole sequence looked so natural. Khiruev wasn’t fooled. “Simple obedience won’t suffice for what I have in mind,” Jedao said. “Never mind that for now. Tell me what I’m really up to, since I’ve apparently lost my ability to bluff.”
Highly unlikely. But then, Jedao’s arched eyebrow suggested that he hadn’t meant the remark seriously. At any rate, Khiruev was stuck in the role of pupil. She didn’t care to dispute Jedao’s superior experience anyway.
“I can only assume that you’re at war with the hexarchs,” Khiruev said, “and that the Hafn are only useful insofar as you can use them against the hexarchs, or to gain influence with the mass of citizens.” Anyone could have come to the same conclusion. But Khiruev had the nagging sense that she shouldn’t have approved of this goal as much as she did, considering how long she had served the Kel loyally.
“The great difficulty of a Kel army,” Jedao said with surprising bitterness, “is that there’s no one to tell me when I’m wrong.”
“You can’t possibly hope to prevail.”
Jedao’s grin had just a glint of teeth. “Funny, that’s what Commander Chau said going into Candle Arc.”
The only reason Jedao wasn’t best-remembered for Candle Arc—a space battle in which he’d been outnumbered eight to one and still smashed the enemy—was the massacre. “You said yourself that the hexarchate is a big place,” Khiruev said. “Eight to one is nothing compared to what you face now. ‘Outnumbered’ doesn’t begin to describe it.”
“That’s what everyone says. And so the hexarchs keep their stranglehold on the populace.”
The stirring of hope that rose in Khiruev was ridiculous. How could Jedao hope to coordinate a rebellion across the entire hexarchate? As the heretics proved, over and over, rebelling was easy. The coalescence of a viable successor government was another matter. And yet, she wanted to warm herself by that hope: proof that she was a suicide hawk.
Jedao rose all at once, not graceful so much as efficient, and stood before Khiruev. No wonder he’d been a fabled duelist in his first life, that flawless balanced poise. He looked down at Khiruev, intent, unsmiling. “Tell me what you want me to do,” he said, as if he hadn’t lined up all the advantages on his side of the conversation.
Khiruev’s heart contracted. “Sir,” she said, as steadily as ever, “I wouldn’t presume.”
“Don’t tell me you never tire of the endless wheel of failed heresies.” His words spoke of one thing. His eyes, as sweet and merciless as ashes, spoke of another. He reached out, hand pausing just short of Khiruev’s jaw.
Khiruev knew where this was leading. Her disappointment in Jedao was almost as great as her desire. Even so, Jedao’s phrasing was sufficiently ambiguous that Khiruev could construe it as a simple remark. And so she had the defense permitted even a fledge-null. She stared mutely at Jedao and waited to see if he would force the issue.
Over her lifetime, Khiruev had failed at all her relationships. She hadn’t dated until she was in her thirties; had only managed a single short-lived, dismal marriage. Or maybe it had started earlier, with the mawkish tone poem she had composed for an alt when she was fourteen, only to think better of ever playing it for anyone. (She still remembered every note.)
Upon reflection, the marriage had been a disaster from the beginning. She had been thirty-seven, awestruck by the beautiful, elegant singer, Dosveissen Moressa, and her ability to come up with double entendres for engineering jargon, to say nothing of her dazzling smile when she brought her gifts. Moressa’s favorite had been the music box Khiruev had restored for her, exquisite decoupage tigers on the outside and, once opened, an endless hunt of clockwork figures.
Moressa and Khiruev had contracted for a year after dating for several months. A year was a pitiable length of time for a marriage contract. The relationship cooled off after five months. Khiruev had been so convinced at the outset that they were being rational about building something lasting. Who would have guessed that a conservative approach to romance would end so badly? But the fact that they had rarely discussed long-term plans, even after they’d known each other intimately, should have warned her that they would founder on fundamental points.
The funny thing was, years later, Khiruev couldn’t remember the topic of the quarrel that had finally driven a spike into the relationship, in part because the topic was sideways to the emotional undercurrents. Moressa had spoken in a voice that was never anything but calm, yet at the end her face twisted with frustration. Even when you laugh you never smile, she’d finally burst out.
I have no idea what you’re talking about, Khiruev said, just as calmly. The lie knifed between them. Moressa stalked out of the apartment after an icy pause rather than continue looking at her. Khiruev stared at the sudden meaningless detritus of figurines and jewelry scattered around the apartment for the rest of the night. Moressa never returned. Indeed, they communicated only once for the rest of the marriage (the rest of their lives), to negotiate over some fine point of mutual finance that neither of them cared about. Even then they didn’t meet in person.
Khiruev hadn’t told either of her mothers about the whole debacle, which had taken a great deal of finessing. They would have been unbearably understanding or, worse, inclined to blame Moressa. In fact, Moressa’s only transgression had been telling the truth.
After that, Khiruev made a point of consciously sabotaging all her relationships by choosing unsuitable partners on the grounds that this beat doing it unconsciously. Khiruev was most ashamed of the time she’d picked out a man who’d been a refugee and who begged her over and over to leave the Kel and do something safe. Khiruev had never contemplated abandoning her career, least of all for a lover who grated on her almost from the beginning. It wasn’t anything the man did so much as the constant reminder that Khiruev was in the business of creating refugees when she wasn’t creating orphans and corpses.
She had thought she had her heart under control, by which she meant that she had memorized the usual trajectories and had well-established protocols for dealing with the inevitable recriminations and breakups. It served her right to be confronted by a man who could demand her devotion in more than the usual sense, who had a dark history with the Kel, and who had no reason to fear the execution that would ordinarily await a soldier who slept with a soldier; who might well miss even the cold facsimile of companionship.
Jedao’s hand shook visibly. “It would be so easy,” he said to himself. His thumb grazed Khiruev’s chin. Khiruev froze. It was as though her heart had crystallized inside her.