Fantasy of Fire (The Tainted Accords #3)(36)
I think it’s ‘animal leavings’ that tips me over the edge. I roll around on the bed, lost in a fit of giggles. Olandon eventually gives up and laughs with me.
We munch on the last of the fruit and settle into companionable silence. The diet here is much heavier than I’m used to. The food we’ve just eaten would be considered a mere snack to a Glacium warrior. On Osolis, we stick to a diet of nuts, vegetables, and fruit, with very little meat. I smile when I catch Olandon studying my face. He does this a lot when we’re alone and I wonder what he’s searching for. It’s times like these, when he relaxes, that I feel I'm with the brother I knew as a child. It’s when I feel this closeness that I can pretend everything is like it was before Kedrick, the delegation, and all of the mess since then. Though now there are some parts I don’t want to forget.
“There is much I must tell you, sister. Things I should have told you when I first regained consciousness,” he says guiltily.
The lingering smile falls from my face. “Tell me. Just please tell me the twins are okay first.” My mind had been running rampant while waiting for him to confide in me.
He grabs my hand as my heart thuds in my chest. “They were fine when I last saw them. What I have to tell you is bigger than us, or our family.”
I stroke his hair back, as I used to when he was young. He hasn’t allowed me to do so in the last few years, but he lets me do it now. His reassurance about the twins is dubious. If something happened to them, I don’t know if I could come back from the loss. It must require a tremendous amount of strength to return to yourself as Jovan has, after losing family members.
“Mother is starving our people,” he says, eyes squeezed shut. My hand stops, arm frozen in the air. I stare at my brother in disbelief. He opens his brown eyes and I see he believes he’s telling the truth.
“For years. That’s why the stores are so big. We’ve been fooled, sister. The happiness we see on the migration back to First Rotation is planned to keep Mother’s court complacent. Not that they’d care” He hangs his head.
“I saw a great deal on my journey,” he whispers.
“She—” I croak. I don’t understand. I knew she’d been stockpiling for the war. I never realized she was doing it by slowly starving our people! I thought she was sowing more seeds, not killing innocent Solati. Once again, my mother’s cruelty steals the ground from under me. I’m shocked. I should be past this astonishment by now. But I can’t fathom how someone could be so heartless and without mercy.
“She feeds them enough to work and survive. The villagers told me the rations were lowered so gradually they didn’t really notice until last year when the peace delegation arrived. The Tatum started taking more and more from them.” Olandon struggles to hold back his emotion. I don’t even bother to hold back my own as I wonder if it was my friendship with Kedrick that tipped the balance.
His voice cracks as he continues. “Your capture was the last straw. You were their hope. You still are their hope. When you were taken, they weren’t angry—they were desperate. They began to speak out against Mother.”
“They rebelled?” I whisper. I need to know. All this time they’ve been suffering, and I've been living in relative comfort.
“For more than one Rotation, but not anymore,” he says darkly. “Mother … made an example.” He rubs a hand over his face, looking older than he should. “Do you remember a man named Turin?” he asks. The name does strike a chord, but I cannot place it.
“He had a young son. A daughter, too. The boy tried to remove your veil in the village?”
I gasp as the memory reaches me. The toddler who tried to lift my veil. I grasp Olandon’s forearms. “What did she do?” I ask. “Tell me!” Memories of the village girl’s slit throat flash in front of my eyes.
He winces as I dig my fingers in. I can’t loosen them because I’m in horror’s thrall. I know what happens next.
“They were slaughtered and hung from the Oscala in the First Rotation,” he says quietly.
I flinch at his words, swallowing the bile threatening to rise.
The punishment was well known on Osolis, if rarely used. The bodies were hung off the Oscala, so every Solati would get a chance to see the decaying corpses during a revolution. Turin had a wife, a son, and a daughter. Now they were all dead. A whole family. Because of me—because I wasn't there to stop my mother.
More time must pass than I realize, because suddenly Olandon is stroking my hand. “You could not have controlled what happened to Turin and his family—even if you were there,” he murmurs.
“Did the villagers stop after that?” I ask eventually. My mouth feels thick as it forms the question.
Olandon’s lips press into a grim line. “It took others, many others, until the villagers were convinced.” He looks away from me and clears his throat. “The villages are not the happy places you believed them to be. But everyone was too afraid to speak. The peasants in the Royal Rotations fare better than the rest. But not much.”
The population of Osolis was much smaller than Glacium’s. Each rotation on my home planet had a sole village. Each community was large and held all the necessary tradesmen, farmers, and craftsmen. Most were located as close as possible to a water supply, whether the man-made rivers or Lake Aveni. Why did Mother allow me to go to the village if she wanted to squeeze the life from her people? I have my answer the next moment: the peace delegation. It was all an act. But then my brother and Kedrick had toured Osolis, along with the other delegates. How did my mother orchestrate a subterfuge of this scale?