The Stars Are Legion(50)

“You must want me,” she says. “I don’t desire a thing which has no love for me. It’s easy to force affection. Far more difficult to entice it.”

“I do love you,” I say, but even to my own ears, I am unconvincing.

“You don’t,” she says. She pulls my hands from her throat, and I think about how easy it would be to turn my caress into a strangle. Perhaps that’s what she’s thinking, too.

We are having dinner in her rooms again. The wardrobe is open; the green glow of the iron arm beckons to me from the darkness. I go back to my seat. Rasida has poured wine, but I haven’t had any since the night of my joining, when I became too sick or drugged to remember anything.

“You don’t want me anymore?” I say. “You only want the thing in my belly?”

“I can have anyone I want,” Rasida says. “I can have the whole Legion, can’t I? They bow and prostrate themselves; they tear off their clothes and beg for my favors. But that is not wanting.”

“We fucked here in this room,” I say, “under false pretenses.” I do not make my hands into fists. I eat instead, but it’s painful to pretend at decorum. I try to imagine Zan doing this without severing Rasida’s head, and fail. Zan has a temper. I do too, but I have become far better at moderating it than Zan. I have the patience she does not. Which is why I’m here and she isn’t.

“Whose false pretenses, though?” Rasida says. “I’ve told you, I never lied to you. The truce was never with you. It was with Anat. I never told you I wouldn’t take the Legion.”

“You can’t say you love someone and then murder their family,” I say. I sip my drink, my expression perfectly blank. I admire my own calm. I’m not even drunk.

“Why not?” she says, and her tone is not mocking. It sounds like a genuine question. “You didn’t love your family. You loved belonging, perhaps, to something greater than yourself. But you hated Anat. You’ve hated her since you were a child.”

“Every daughter despises her mother,” I say.

“I love my mother very much,” Rasida says. “She knows her place here. She performs her function well.”

“I don’t know why,” I say. “You treat your family the way Anat treated me.”

Rasida jerks out of her seat.

I start and scramble back. I’m moving more slowly than I’d like; my body is changing with the pregnancy, ungainly and sluggish.

But Rasida does not hit me. She goes to the wardrobe and pulls out the iron arm again. She throws it at my feet.

“Put it on,” she says.

“I . . . can’t,” I say.

“Why? You are Katazyrna. It will fit you, surely.”

I hold out my left arm. “It won’t fit,” I say. “It’s not mine.”

“It wasn’t Anat’s either,” Rasida says, and I wonder at this turn in the conversation. “She had cut her arm up so it would fit in there. Whose arm was this, Jayd? What world did it come from?”

“I don’t know,” I say, “Anat has always had it.” I snap my mouth shut, but it’s too late. Rasida has seen Anat many times. She knows when Anat acquired the arm, not long before Zan joined us.

Rasida meets my gaze, and we acknowledge the lie with that one look.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“The time for lying is over,” she says.

“The witches,” I say, and maybe I hope that saying this so quickly, so immediately after she says the lying is over, means that she won’t know that this, too, is a lie. “The witches know how it works. They gifted it to Anat. It’s something very old. That’s all I know. If you can find the Katazyrna witches, they could tell you.”

“You could have said this before,” she says.

“Maybe I feared what you would do with the arm,” I say. In truth, I know what she could do with the arm, and it’s not what she thinks. It’s far worse than that. It would undo everything I’m trying to achieve here. The longer I can keep her from putting it on, the longer I have to find out how to steal the world, too.

“There are people here on my own world who would betray me,” Rasida says, “the way you betrayed Anat.”

“I didn’t betray—”

“I know who Zan was, Jayd. I’m not the fool you think I am.”

“No one knows who Zan is,” I sputter. “Not even Zan.”

“I know what you did to the Mokshi. You think I don’t have spies inside Katazyrna?”

“I’ve never thought you a fool.” Even if it was true, if she did know who Zan was, when even Anat had never intuited it, what did it matter now? Let her think Zan was a construct, something I cobbled together from bits of other women, or the spirit of some general, plopped into the body of one of my own sisters. But she mentioned the Mokshi in the same breath as Zan, and that made me fearful.

“I want you to know what happens to people who betray me,” Rasida says.

“I didn’t betray—”

“Not you,” she says. “Not yet.”

Relief floods through me. “Your people love you, Rasida. I have seen their eyes when they look at you. Why do you fear?”

“Because you are new here,” Rasida says, “and everyone will try to turn you against me. We can’t have that. We must cut the cancer out now, before it’s too late.”