20. Lacero

lacerō ~āre ~āuī ~ātum, tr.

1. to rip, to lacerate

The five-year-old girl—tucked snugly in her feather bed with her big blue eyes peering over the covers—asked the most important question.

“Has anybody ever seen the enemy, Papa?”

Her father smoothed the blankets over her little feet and smiled, all crinkles and kindness in his dark gaze. “The last people to see them died a long time ago, sweetheart.”

The girl, having just last week learned about death with a particularly unfortunate koi, nodded solemnly. Her father put the bedtime book away and turned the holocandle down to a bare flicker.

“But we still have pictures of them. Do you know the hangar doors in the tourney hall and the great doors of the king’s palace?”

The girl nodded, remembering marble and carvings and a man with a lance on a horse. “A lot of scary snakes. Knight Jorj.”

“He’s a saint, Mirelle.”

“Oh. Is that different from a knight?”

“Only a little.” The father smiled around at the walls of his daughter’s room plastered in paper drawings of steeds and their riders in valiant stick-figure poses. “A saint is like…like God’s knight.”

“Ohhh. Okay.” The girl thought on it, and then pouted. “Does God need protection?”

“Sometimes.”

“From what?”

This time, it was the father who silently thought on the marble doors and all their carvings. He thought about the steedcraft factories, the silver gel of the saddles, and about the strange royal-gold steed of the king’s—Hellrunner. It was deployed so rarely, only against those the king deemed the strongest of noble riders, but its rider changed every few years—always talented young children barely older than his daughter.

The father did not always think about these things; only once he’d married into Hauteclare did more questions about riding haunt him than answers. He’d been but a boy before marriage, watching every tourney with awestruck eyes and a cheerful heart. But his daughter sought answers now, her blood buried deep in a prestigious family who were privy to the secrets of things, of the gears beneath the Station’s honeycomb surface, and he remembered keenly what his mother had said to him the day he became engaged.

“The higher one climbs, Grigor, the longer the fall becomes. Do not break yourself for them.”

The father stared into his daughter’s eyes and knew he would break any part of himself for her. Every part. Anything to keep her safe—anything to keep the House she lived in standing and secure and strong.

And so he stopped thinking and began unthinking.

“It’s time to sleep, Mirelle.”

Fifteen years later, in a much-changed bedroom, Mirelle Ashadi-Hauteclare woke up.

Gone were the pictures of knights and steeds, replaced with countless medals and trophies. Books crowded her shelves—endless dull-covered books on skirmishes and the War and the tactics of riding. Only one book remained bright: a thin, well-thumbed children’s book half sticking out at the very end of a shelf, a knight and shining steed painted beautifully on the cover.

Mirelle rolled out of bed and stretched, sheet of sleek hair cascading down her back. She brushed it aside—a troublesome thing, but necessary—and rang the bell for her maids. In a flurry of brushes and powders and perfumes, they dressed her—an ivory waistcoat and pale-green skirts etched in gold. When one of the maids took her hair strangely, Mirelle raised an eyebrow.

“What are you doing?”

The maid dropped the twist and locked her eyes on the floor. “I’m sorry, milady. I just thought… I’ve been studying the newest fashions, and I thought one of them might suit—”

“Perhaps things were done differently in the lower House in which you last served,” Mirelle said crisply. “But House Hauteclare does not bow to the whims of fashion. A lady’s morning hair is to be braided, and that is all.”

The maid bowed deeply, and Mirelle’s hair was summarily braided with strands of greenest grass and fresh marigolds from the manse’s garden. She watched her vis while they worked, waiting for even a single ping. When it never came, she snorted and jumped to her feet.

“That’s enough. I require food.”

The maids scattered as she clipped down the hall to the breakfast salon. Her mother and grandmother sat at the table before plates of delicately fried quail eggs and poached salmon—mirror images of each other in high bouffants and jewels. The smell of lemon butter beckoned her, but she couldn’t help noticing the icy quiet that fell the moment she walked in. Mirelle’s stomach twisted uneasily, but she refused to let such a thing show—’twas not the Hauteclare way.

“Mother.” She bowed. “Grandmother. Did you sleep well?”

“Quite.” Grandmother sipped tea. For a woman so silver in hair, she held herself as powerfully as if she were queen.

“Mother?”

“Very well, yes.” She waved her daughter off. The quiet stretched, neither woman asking after Mirelle’s own sleep or insisting she eat or saying much of anything, really, but this was the usual. Mirelle sat, the footman approaching with her dish quickly, and considered that the two were silent for the obvious reason—the Lithroi girl from the banquet.

“They’ll arrest her, surely,” Mirelle tried between bites of egg. The table said nothing. So she pressed. “The king will never allow such impudence—”

“Do be silent, Mirelle.” Her mother cut her off, titanium and salt. Mirelle fought the rising blush of shame—it burned to know Mother still thought her a child incapable of contributing to House politics. Nineteen was not foolish eighteen, freshly graduated from the academy and full of bravado. On top of all her riding courses, she’d made it a point to study law and jurisdiction late into the night, burning the holocandles in her dorm until dawn, and this direct threat against their House was surely deserving of being designated libel, slander—

“What was that boy’s name…the one you’ve been talking to?” her grandmother inquired. “The Velrayd.”

They’d done far more than just talk, but Mirelle dared not say that before mass, and certainly not in front of her elders—the last thing she needed on a Sunday was the entire house dragging her to the clinic to assure themselves she wasn’t pregnant. She did her best not to flicker a glower to the still-empty vis in her wrist. He hadn’t pinged her for four days—not since the banquet.

“Rax Istra-Velrayd.”

“Ah yes. Quite a name he’s made for himself on the tilt. ’Tis a pity he’s weakblooded, or we’d more readily consider him for you.”

“It’s no small accomplishment to graduate from the academy as young as he did,” her mother argued without arguing, adding a pile of sugar to her usual third cup of tea. “I expected Mirelle to graduate much earlier as well, but…”

Her trail-off was vinegar, and Mirelle was an open wound. Of course it wasn’t enough to graduate a year early at the top of her class—perfection driven on a road already made perfect created no new paths. The family did not expect perfection; they expected exemplary, revolutionary, and she had failed in this. Rax, however, had not.

“I’ve heard talk he is slated to win the Supernova Cup,” Grandmother said. “If he does, I suggest we consider arranging a marriage between Mirelle and one of his higher-bred cousins. It would be good optics for our House to be mated with the winner.”

Mirelle twisted her napkin in her lap. His cousins were not him.

“Naturally, they’d accept,” Mother said. Grandmother laughed softly, a rare thing.

“I’d be eager to meet the House who wouldn’t accept a marriage proposal of ours, Ravenna.”

Her laugh turned quickly to coughing, and Mother and Mirelle leaned forward. “Are you all right, Grandmother? The hospital—”

“Oh, fie on the hospital.” The woman straightened, handkerchief spotted red. “I spend too much time there already—however am I to keep on top of House affairs as acting duke-regent without remaining in the House itself?”

Mirelle knew to read between her grandmother’s words; “House affairs” meant the fallout from the threats that Lithroi waif made, with her nasty pockmarked face and her unbridled arrogance. Mirelle could see her now, the defiant question in her ice eyes (“you think yourself a knight?”), her spine straight on the podium—was the duke dying of sudden heart failure four months ago not enough? They’d barely gotten out of grieving… What right did she have, upsetting her family so? And for nothing—for lies!

House Hauteclare would never do something so dishonorable as murdering a defenseless commoner—it was unthinkable.

“Grandmother, you must let me help in whatever I can,” Mirelle said. “Consider me at your disposal absolutely whenever.”

“Oh, hush.” Grandmother waved her hand. “A lady shouldn’t talk in absolutes—it makes her sound desperate.”

“But—”

“I will take care of the upstart.” Grandmother cut her off. “You will concern yourself with riding Ghostwinder, winning us glory in the Supernova Cup, and the matter of your marriage—nothing more. That is what your uncle would’ve wanted from you, and it remains the best way to honor his memory.”

Mirelle looked to her mother, who said nothing. The second course came—asparagus and fine ham—and halfway through clinking forks and silent sunlight, Mirelle remembered what she heard at the banquet before she intervened against the Westrianis: the traitor had said she was “used to far more men” beating her. Mirelle’s mind wandered to just how different the traitor’s life might’ve been—different in ways Mirelle couldn’t fathom. This gave her the courage to ask the most important question.

“Is she really one of us?”

Grandmother and Mother swallowed their looks at each other, fluttering napkins and blank expressions beneath carefully applied rouge. Mirelle waited on slivers of glass until the butler intruded, bowing to Grandmother.

“The king’s rider is here to see you, Your Grace.”

All three Hauteclare women rose abruptly, and Grandmother’s mouth tightened almost imperceptibly. “Let them in at once, Charlez.”

Visits from the king’s rider were equivalent to a visit from His Majesty himself, and he came only in the most serious of matters. Mirelle’s heart lightened; surely this was His Majesty coming to promise aid in throwing the Lithroi girl beneath the executioner’s vent.

The shuffle of boots preceded the king’s rider and four of his private bodyguards—guards the Hauteclares themselves trained in their private schools and provided to His Majesty. Mirelle recognized some of them from the training yard visits she’d made with Father. The doorway darkened with their polished armor—gold dragon embossment and purple amethysts and projection-sword handles cold on their belts—and then they spread out into the breakfast salon.

At last, a boy came over the threshold.

His hoverchair glided near silently over the rich carpets, coming to a halt before the dining table. Mirelle kept her eyes focused and wide to get a good view of the only one allowed to ride the king’s legendary steed—Hellrunner. The king chose a new rider for it once every few years, but this boy had been its rider for longer than any. He couldn’t’ve been any more than thirteen, thin in the legs and with a face like a newborn lamb’s. He looked like one of the pre-War paintings hanging just above on the wall—soft brown curls and soft green eyes and softer cheeks, a cherub, God’s chosen and the king’s chosen both.

Without so much as a nod to any of them—a duchess-dowager and two ladies of the honorable House Hauteclare—the boy looked right at Mirelle. He appeared soft, but something in his steady gaze knocked the breath from her.

“Are you the one?” he asked, voice barely above a murmur. Mother moved to speak, but the boy held up a hand. “Not you. Her.”

Mother and Grandmother looked to her sharply, and Mirelle swallowed, torn at the attention. “Me?”

“You ride.”

She straightened her spine. “Yes. I do.”

“Was it you?”

Mirelle scrambled for something to say, something to understand. What did he mean? Why was he being so dismissive of everyone but her? Yes, he was the king’s rider, but it was incredibly disrespectful to ignore—

She startled as he suddenly maneuvered the hoverchair around the dining table, past Grandmother and Mother, the vents hissing closer and then dying as he stopped just in front of her. His eyes gleamed the color of polished jade—the king’s eyes. Hellrunner’s previous riders had been his age, younger, but none of them had the king’s eyes. The first queen was gone and the second cloistered with bad health. Surely he was not a—

“Are you the one who’s doing it?” he asked her unblinkingly, and she felt the answer he was looking for was not on her tongue but on her face, in her very God-given soul. A feeling like the saddle crawled over her in slow, velvet increments—knowing and sureness—and she hardened herself.

“Forgive me, sir—I’m ignorant of what you speak.”

He tilted his head like a faintly curious bird. “Do you know what it means to ride?”

The question rocketed into her chest better than any plasma jet. What a question. But the answer trilled itself as clear and true as sunlight, and she raised her chin.

“To ride means honor, sir.”

Suddenly—like simulated sunset slipping beneath true evernight—the gleam in the boy’s eyes faded.

Mirelle was overcome by a howling disappointment in herself—had she said the wrong thing? He turned his hoverchair and left the way he came—quietly, mysteriously. His guards left with him, and when the last bootstep faded, her mother turned to look at her.

“Goodness—what was that all about?”

Grandmother turned to the butler. “Charlez, what have you heard?”

Charlez bowed. “With all due respect, miladies, I’ve heard it spoken that the king’s rider has spent the last two days visiting each noble House. He asks to see their rider and asks them the same question: ‘What does it mean to ride’?”

“A strange question,” Mother mused.

“Never mind it.” Grandmother shook her head. “We have much more to consider than the words of a boy barely out of the cradle.”

“But Grandmother!” Mirelle protested. “He’s Hellrunner’s rider, the greatest steed on the Station, the strongest of us—”

“I’d worry more about the many riders you must defeat in the Supernova Cup to bring down the glory that is owed us, young lady.”

Mirelle bowed her head (“Yes, Grandmother”) and yet the boy’s incendiary question lingered in her chest like an irrepressible ember eating sinew for many days afterward.

Do you know what it means to ride?