Blood of a Thousand Stars (Empress of a Thousand Skies #2)(31)
“Don’t throw your scripture in my face. You’re just like everyone else. You don’t think I’m capable of knowing what’s best for my people. You follow your Elder on faith, yet he keeps you in the dark.”
“I don’t understand,” he said. “What are we actually talking about?”
Rhee bit her lip. “Your Elder—he told me as much. ‘There are things you know, and things you don’t know you know . . .’” She still didn’t understand what Elder Escov had meant when he spoke those words back in Erawae, but now, the words seemed alive with meaning.
“You’ve misunderstood.” Dahlen’s blond hair fell across his eyes again, and he pushed it behind one of his pointy ears. “Those words are a meditation on faith and trust in the word of Vodhan.”
She’d never seen him wear his irritation so plainly, and it made her feel all the more humiliated—some empress she was, simpering and begging. She could barely stand herself.
“Your faith,” Rhee said. “Your blind faith. It keeps you trapped, so bound in this idea of right and wrong that you can’t even look up and see the world for what it is.”
“Could we not say the same thing about your brand of faith?” he said. “What is your ma’tan sarili, Empress?” Like most in the galaxy, Dahlen knew it was an everyday greeting—but he knew, too, the intimacy of it, its deeper meaning, the pledge to be your highest self.
Honor. Bravery. Loyalty.
Had she betrayed these very ideals?
Dahlen looked at her, and Rhee found her answer in the disappointed look in his eyes. He shouldered his belongings.
“You’re wrong to leave.”
“I was wrong to hold you to your highest self,” he said, as he made his way toward the door.
She suppressed a shiver at his words. The hope—and disappointment—in them left her shaken. She wanted to be the leader he spoke of, the leader he imagined. But she wasn’t. Not yet, anyway.
“Go, then!” she called. “I don’t need you. I need a partner who will help me end this mess of a war, not a fanatic whose scripture is so far up his ass he can’t see the reality. The reality is that we need to be strategic.”
“With respect, Empress,” Dahlen said spinning around, “Nero isn’t just going to acquiesce. You think he’s willing to pull troops out of these territories without some big trade-off that benefits him? There’s no coming to his senses or rising to the occasion. He’s toxic. His promises are a trap, and I thought you would do better than believe him.”
“What if I told you he was after some sort of powerful cube tech?” She shifted her weight between her feet. “He said as much on Houl. That he was seeking a tech he wanted to change and alter a person’s memories.”
“Even if that’s true, aligning yourself with him will not get you closer to the truth.”
“Ancestors. Listen to yourself! Isn’t this all because he turned on your cube?” she fired back. She was desperate now. Without him, she had no allies outside of the palace. Nero had made sure of it. “Because your precious vow to the order was broken? There are more important things than your faith,” she reminded him. “There are lives at stake, and I fear we will lose more every day that we hesitate.” She was trying, so hard, to strike out. To find the thing that would make him react. Make him stay.
And yet still, Dahlen gave her a look that was so icy it nearly froze her lungs. “You think I don’t feel fear?” he asked. “Because I, too, fear—for Kalu, and for all of us.” His voice stabbed into her, nearly taking her down, but his face was impassive again, its sharp profile cutting a jagged silhouette.
Panic hit her then—an ocean of it. Surely he was right about Nero. But the only way to secure peace was to work with him, even if it meant navigating a labyrinth of lies. Why couldn’t Dahlen see that?
If she couldn’t keep the loyalty of her last friend, how could she earn it from her people? She would be lost without Dahlen. She’d ditched him on the zeppelin and yet he’d still found her again, still stood by her.
But now she’d gone too far.
She loathed to admit it, even in her most private thoughts, but it was true: She needed him. Precisely because he was so unbending. He was the moral compass she leaned on in this directionless world she’d woken up to.
“I must follow my own path and you yours,” Dahlen said as he walked through the threshold. “I cannot do business with a demagogue.”
“So that’s it?” Rhee asked, steadying her voice. She wished more than anything he would stomp and throw things, spit a colorful stream of Fontisian curses. Or that he would sulk, or cry, or grab her shoulders and shake her, or anything. She wished he’d show what he really felt—not just what his moral instincts were, but what he held in his heart. She needed to know that he didn’t hate her.
In a short time, he had become the person whose opinion mattered most to her.
He turned away from her without a word, and Lahna moved to follow him. Rhee didn’t know what impulse overtook her. She just couldn’t stand to see him go. Wouldn’t. She had to have one last word, one last glance, some sign that he cared, that he hadn’t completely given up on her. Without thinking, she pulled Veyron’s knife from the belt where it now sat always, even when she slept, nestled tight against her hip.