28
“Don’t say that name again,” muttered the skull-faced man to Arin.
The queen asked a sharp question. Her brother’s answer was slow, complicated. It was marked by pauses. Each pause gave life to a new tone of voice.
The rain must have stopped. The peaked ceiling, made from that sheer stone, glowed with sudden sun. Prismatic light lit the room. Arin watched the queen’s changing face as her brother spoke. Her black eyes, lined with elaborate patterns of color, narrowed. She stopped him.
“This is the part where I translate,” the Dacran told Arin, “and you hope that I tell the truth.”
The queen said, “You’ve broken three of our laws”—here, her brother stopped his translation to hold up four fingers—“what keeps you alive is our curiosity. Satisfy it.”
Arin said, “I have a proprosal—”
“No,” the man told him. “Don’t start there. We don’t even know your name.”
So Arin gave it, and his rank.
“Governor is a Valorian title,” said the queen. “You are Valorian.”
The insult went bone deep.
“You cannot deny it,” said the queen. “We have heard of you. Arin of the Herrani, who once bit his masters’ heels, is a tame dog once more. Did you not swear an oath of loyalty to the emperor?”
“I’m breaking it now.”
“Do you so easily break your oaths?”
“Wouldn’t you, for your people?”
“I’m not translating that,” the skull-faced man told him. “It’s insulting. You’re a little self-destructive, aren’t you?”
Impatient, the queen interrupted. She told Arin to explain his possession of the Valorian dagger.
“It’s a reminder,” he said.
“Of?”
“What I despise.”
The queen considered this. Her face was leaner than Risha’s, but much like her younger sister’s. It was easy, looking at the queen, to feel again his admiration for Risha, the way it had grown from the first moment Tensen had revealed her to be his Moth. Arin said to the queen, “I know that your country has suffered. I know that my own is too small to stand alone against the empire. If I had a choice, the empire or the east, I’d choose you. Let Herran be your ally.”
She cocked her head. “What exactly would we do with you?”
“Let us fight for you.”
“In exchange for our protection of your little peninsula, no doubt. As you have pointed out, Herran is small. Your soldiers would hardly swell our ranks. Do you want your people to be our cannon fodder? Even if you did, how would that work? We do not even speak the same language.”
“We’ll learn yours.”
The queen raised a skeptical brow.
“I’ll prove it to you,” Arin said.
“I would like to see you try.”
“Good,” Arin said, using the one Dacran word he knew, the one that the skull-faced man had said to him on the pier.
The queen’s surprise was clear. But she didn’t smile, and what she said next made Arin wonder if he hadn’t just somehow deeply offended her.
“Let us turn,” she said, “to the subject of your punishment.”