Empress of a Thousand Skies(65)

“Did you know Andrés Seotra?” she asked.

“Did I?” the Elder asked, and Rhee silently cursed: She’d given herself away. “Does that mean Seotra is . . . ?”

“Dead,” she confirmed. She wanted some sort of reaction. A flinch. A smile, even. Yet the Elder gave her nothing.

After a long minute of silence, he asked, abruptly, “Do you know how many souls perished in the Great War?”

Rhee couldn’t see what the Great War had to do anything, but she could tell the Elder expected an answer. “Estimates are at a hundred million,” she said impatiently.

“Closer to three hundred million, but I’m not surprised that’s what your history books tell you. They would hardly mention the faults of your planet . . .”

Rhee swallowed her frustration. “I’ve not come for a lecture on sins I didn’t commit.”

“And I haven’t invited you inside my home to give one,” he said, seemingly matching her own impatience. “Your father ended that war. He and Seotra both, in a way. It was Seotra himself who called off his unit after I’d refused to surrender. He told me Fontis was destined to lose the war. And I told him that we would take one hundred thousand more Kalusian lives before that happened.” Elder Escov looked down at his palms, as if seeing an old story written on them. “I was a prisoner of war for a time, but then the Urnew Treaty was drafted and I was released. Seotra and I became . . .” He trailed off, searching for the right word.

“Friends?” Rhee asked.

“No,” he said firmly, but there was some warmth in the man’s blue eyes. “Not friends. Allies, perhaps.” Rhee wondered if Dahlen knew of their history. Surely Dahlen wouldn’t have killed Seotra if he’d known the truth. “I met your father because of him—not a bad man by any standard. There was nothing he wouldn’t sacrifice for peace. I was to receive him on Fontis the day your family crashed in the rings of Rylier.”

“We were going to see you?” she asked. She knew they were going to Fontis, but not to visit an Elder of the order.

“Surprised?” he asked mildly. “Surprised your father was keeping the company of terrorist fanatics?”

“I don’t think that,” she said quickly. She’d first said it out of fear—the archers still hovered nearby, after all—but then realized that she meant it. She thought of Dahlen and how she was scared of him, but she admired him too. He was smart, calculating, cunning. She wondered about his coldness, and what atrocities he’d witnessed to make him that way.

“What is it you’ve lost?” she had asked Dahlen.

“Everything,” he’d answered. And Rhee knew he’d spoken of his family.

Now she looked up to meet the Elder’s eye. “Your father confided in Seotra that he sensed danger,” he said. “Some of the people were angry about the terms of the Urnew Treaty. For some, peace was inconceivable because of the hatred they’d been taught to feel. And for others, peace was merely an inconvenience—it prevented them from mining freely on Wraeta, and profiting from a war.”

Nero. His flowery language, his love of the camera . . . it was designed to make him seem trustworthy, competent, dynamic. A new, worthy leader will rise . . .

“The night your family died they were not going on vacation, as they had publicly claimed, but you already knew that.”

Rhee could barely bring herself to nod.

“They hadn’t made it to their final destination, but they were fleeing to Fontis with one of our escorts. To us, peace was very important.” His voice softened. “To us, we owed him that.”

And Rhee should have been with them. She should have died on that ship. She felt a wrench of pain in her gut, as if someone were turning a knife there.

“When did you come here to Erawae?” she asked, still unsure whether Elder Escov could be counted as a friend.

“Just after your family’s death. It was a dangerous time, and neutral territory had seemed safer. I was wrong, of course . . .”

Rhee wondered what it must’ve been like to witness the raids here, and watch as his people were rounded up and imprisoned.

“I admired your father greatly,” he continued. “I met him once, on the day he signed the Urnew Treaty. I met you and your sister too.”

“I don’t remember.” Without accessing her cube, she couldn’t pinpoint the moment they met. Now the memories from her childhood were faulty—just scraps, like ribbons fluttering on the wind. But she’d practically lived in those memories. She’d replayed that day enough times to know she’d worn a Kalusian formal dress, and waved at a crowd. There’d been confetti that she’d tried to snatch out of the air. That night she’d fallen asleep in Josselyn’s lap, while Joss had fallen asleep on their mother’s shoulder, the remnants of a celebration around them. It was a still image they showed on the holos every year, on the anniversary of her family’s deaths.

Now she tugged at the memory like a lifeline that would pull her up into that moment, that feeling. And it helped her remember why she’d come all this way.

“You knew my father, and you admired him. He’s dead now, just as Seotra is. And Nero, the man who’s installed himself as a ruler, will bring war down on all of us. But I’m here now. Help me,” she insisted. “Tell me what Seotra had planned to do.”