73. Aes

aes aeris, n.

1. payment

2. debt

Rax Istra-Velrayd feels the cold first.

Cold metal blazes under his stomach, his arms—everywhere around him. Faintly, his foggy brain notes that he’s naked. Shallow wounds sting on his knuckles: a fight. He remembers visiting Moonlight’s End and the pit in his stomach when Synali closed the door on him. He remembers the former prince coming up to him and then darkness…but wherever he is now is freezing cold. He’ll live—long enough to sit up, at least. He straightens on the metal, a few colors and fewer shapes settling into vision.

He’s in a cell.

No windows. A single LED is suspended from the ceiling, shedding sickly light. There’s a vent, but it’s too high up to fiddle with; water in a bucket and a sealed hatch in the floor for shit and piss and nothing else. Smooth metal walls, smooth metal floor…this place was clearly built to keep someone in.

Rax snorts, rolling his shoulder and working the knots out. If his captor thinks this is bad, they should see a steed’s cockpit after two weeks straight of training. Nosebleeds all the time, bruises all the time. Back then—he chuckles to himself—he had to shit in the corner, and the g-forces would always smear it back on him somehow. And water? Water was a privilege you earned with recited maneuvers and correct positioning, not just lying around to drink from whenever. So when a door suddenly opens in his cell wall, Rax leans back, hands behind his head leisurely, and smiles.

“Pretty nice place you got here.”

The tap of a sapphire cane heralds an equally pleased smile on a forgettable face, hair like a well-groomed swathe of sand. The former prince.

“I’m glad you find it to your liking. There’s nothing less tasteful than providing guests with ill-fitting chambers.”

“Is that what I am?” Rax asks coolly. “A guest? Can I request a quick wardrobe change, then?”

He motions down to his bare skin, but Lithroi smiles like a snake preparing to unhinge its jaw—a smile almost as bad as Mother’s. Rax suppresses a shudder.

“I’m afraid not,” Lithroi says. “Not until our business is concluded. It’s a matter of security, you see—you are engaged to the sort of family who is not above bugging the very clothes you wear.”

“Sorry to burst your bubble, but my father’s tagged my vis, so he probably knows where I am.”

“I’ve taken care of that. It was rather elementary in its design.”

Rax scoffs. What time is it, anyway? Are Mirelle and Synali fighting, or is it already over? He doubts Lithroi would tell him. Plans flash through his brain; he’s much taller than the prince—he could bull-rush him, but…his face wound from that cane sword still smarts. Overpowering’s off the table. Talking it is, then.

“Where am I?”

“Where I want you,” Dravik says simply. A sudden thud against the right wall resounds. Again. Repeated, like something trying to get out.

“Who is that?” Rax frowns.

“Your neighbor. If all goes well, you’ll meet eventually, but let us take things one step at a time. I assume you know of Sevrith cu Freynille’s fate?” The water shivers in the bucket between them. Rax narrows his eyes. The Lithroi man widens his. “I’d like to tell you a story, Sir Istra-Velrayd.”

Rax clicks his tongue. “Not really good with those.”

“Imagine an ant. This ant belongs to a colony. One winter day, when food is scarce, the colony discovers a bit of honey trapped on an island. This island is surrounded by a lake. The only way to cross it is if the ants line their bodies up and make a bridge over the water, so that other ants might walk across and collect the much-needed food. You are an ant assigned to the bridge. You will drown. You know this. You do it anyway, not because you love your fellows or care for them, but because they are you. You feel what they feel. You see what they see. You will continue on, even when you die.”

Rax swallows. Dravik smiles wider.

“Surely you know the nerve fluid in the saddle belongs to the enemy.”

“Obviously.”

“What if I told you the enemy was like the ants? They weren’t themselves—they were all. The concept of ‘self’ does not exist to them and never will.”

Rax doesn’t like the creeping doubt; in the dream, he’s always someone else, not himself.

“Consider this, Sir Istra-Velrayd: long ago, a knight of the War lost her husband to the enemy. He was a rider. After he dies, this knight loses everything. She throws herself onto the battlefield with no regard for her own life and finds she is able to maneuver her steed with astonishing skill and brutality, destroying dozens of the enemy. This is recorded. Rachale de Ressinimus, the—”

“Greatest knight of the War,” Rax finishes. “Her kill count was over thirteen hundred before she died. No one else came close.”

Dravik puts his hands over his cane. “Rachale’s longing for death turned her into an ant.”

“What? That’s nonsense—”

“Of course it is!” The prince begins to pace and gesture passionately. “It makes no sense. Humans know that life is better than death—we are programmed to survive no matter what. We cannot hope to understand the ant because we are not ants. We do not understand that the ant does not die—it continues on in the honey that feeds, that honey becoming another ant, another eye, another nose, another way to see the world. An ant is born from that ant’s death, but it is the same ant, because it feels and experiences the exact same things in its life and in its death. It is bound by the universe, by heat and cold and hunger and physics, as we all are.”

Rax hates the way the prince’s words cling to him—how they sound mad and not-so-mad at once. Dravik stops pacing and turns abruptly to face him.

“If a human seeks death, they become like the ant. Their brain turns differently—their way of seeing the world becomes more like the enemy’s. And the nerve fluid in the steed can sense that—it opens up to others of its kind, because it is an animal that functions in a hive. The enemy embraces those who seek death more readily than those who cling to life, because this is what it understands. The language and mind of the enemy is alien to us and always will be, but death brings us closer to understanding each other.”

Lithroi deftly upends the water bucket then, liquid slithering across the metal floor as he seats himself on its underside. Still smiling. Still smiling as Rax struggles to put it together in his head.

“That’s why,” Rax says at last. “That’s why you chose Synali to ride for you. Because she has a death wish. And Helmann…”

“He sought death, too. Caked himself in it, really. It has no inherent morality to it—it simply sets the good riders apart from the exceptional ones. After a certain point in the War, the knights were encouraged to embrace it because their commanders knew of the death-advantage, and we clinched victory shortly afterward. Every great rider in history has had a personal relationship with death. You experienced it yourself as a young boy, forced to ride Sunscreamer. You wanted to die back then, didn’t you?”

Rax clenches his fists. It shouldn’t make sense. Is that why Dravik tried so hard to keep them apart, keep Synali insulated—so she wouldn’t find reasons to live? It’s too cruel, too calculating to even think of.

He grasps at some semblance of focus; if Lithroi wanted to kill him, he wouldn’t’ve bothered stripping him naked and cold and sore on the metal. He wants something from him.

“Why am I here, Your Highness?”

The mad fervor fades from the prince’s eyes. “Why do you think?”

“You brought me here because you want me to stay away from Synali forever or some shit, right?” Rax leans in, all muscle, water seeping under his bare feet and rage seeping into his eyes—rage that this old conniving fuck is using her for power just like his parents use him. His words come far softer than his clenched knuckles. “You can’t make me, Your Highness—no matter how much you cut me. Cut my balls off, cut my dick off, cut my tongue out—I don’t give a shit. I’m not giving her up. So you might as well kill me and get it over with.”

“Yes. You seem quite fascinated with her.” Dravik brushes past his declaration. “Which is why I’m hoping you’ll agree to my proposition.”

Rax’s reflection in the puddle goes still, brows cinching. “What sort of proposition?”

The prince smiles like a fox given permission to pounce. “Have you heard of a steed called Hellrunner?”

“No shit.”

“Are you aware of what its true purpose is?”

“To kick rider ass when we fall out of line. So we don’t get any ideas about being better than the king. About…” He swallows. Yavn. “…rebelling.”

The prince laughs. “Indeed. Hellrunner is always powerful, no matter who rides it.”

Rax’s mind keels, takes on water, and the water is Mirelle’s nonstop chatter about Hellrunner over the years—its riders overload so quickly. Something wrong with Hellrunner. Something wrong with Heavenbreaker, too.

He lurches, but Lithroi doesn’t stop him, Rax’s fists tight in the prince’s collar and his hiss tighter: “What have you done to her?”

The prince never blinks, his grin splitting his jaw wide.

“It’s not what I have done, Sir Istra-Velrayed, but rather, what my mother did. I’m simply here to see it through, like any good noble son would do.”