Chapter 9: Eld Palace, Ardulum

We’re proud of you, Eld Arik. So very, very proud. It was heartbreaking when you did not return from your Talent Day, but every parent knows the risks of metamorphosis. Your ascension to Eld brings us a joy we never thought we would feel again. Even your andal saplings whisper of you, son. You are in the hearts and minds of everyone we meet.

 

Take care of yourself and Ardulum. In regards to your request about a good time to visit, we understand the duties of your new station, so there is no need to hurry home. Of course, we will always love you, but your talther, mother, and I agree that your time is better spent with your people, and not us.

—Private communication between Eld Arik and his father, first month of Squinth 1_16

 

JANUARY 24TH, 2061 CE

 

Did it really need to be this hot at midday? Arik was already sweating, and all he’d done thus far was walk up the hill from the landing pad to the palace. He wiped his forehead with the sleeve of his Eld robes and frowned. There was no reason to be sweating, especially not over an informal visit to his future home. Of course, he was here for more than just gawking, but he’d never had a problem talking to people before and, and…they were just Ardulans! He’d been managing Eieans for weeks. His own people shouldn’t be as difficult. So, it was definitely just sweat, not nerves. Right?

He’d managed to avoid the palace reconstruction thus far. Nicholas, Atalant’s Terran friend, had mentioned flare issues on a number of occasions, but both Arik and Atalant had been too busy to deal with them firsthand. But, now that the andal saplings were planted and the Eieans were calm—for the moment, anyway—it was time to deal with old problems.

“I told you to stay home. I don’t want you anywhere near these flares. Just because some of them are controlling their Talents, doesn’t mean they all can. Look what happened to the palace! You want that to happen to you?”

Arik took a deep breath, choking back the anger and hurt that rose in his throat. He watched a first don with bright orange hair mutter a “no, Mother” before hanging his head, kicking a stone near his foot, and then walking up the path towards the old market, away from the reconstruction of the Eld Palace. His mother, a Science second don, sighed and went back to her lunch.

Arik closed his eyes for a moment. It didn’t matter that he now wore gold robes. It didn’t matter that most of his markings had burned off. It didn’t matter that he’d moved the planet, nor that flares had been living in secret with the rest of the Ardulan population and they’d been fine. It wasn’t fair, and he didn’t want to be here, dealing with this garbage again. His people needed to grow up, or he needed to grow up and learn how to ignore how much it bothered him.

Arik came the rest of the way down the hill, ignoring the stunned silences and dropped andal that followed him. Given his golden Eld robes, this was to be expected, regardless of his status as an ex-flare. He’d specifically chosen lunchtime for a visit, thinking he might be able to speak with groups of individuals in their self-segregated cliques instead of addressing every Ardulan working construction. But now, looking around at who was eating and who was still working…

He clearly had misunderstood the severity of the situation. This wasn’t old, implicit bias—this was overt ridiculousness.

Arik rubbed his fingers into his temples and looked around the palace grounds. The short sedge was dotted with small groups of “normal” Ardulans chatting and munching on andal. The flares…the flares were still working. A trio of third dons struggled with a joist on a scaffold up near the second floor. A second don was applying varnish near the main entry door, stepping aside every so often and shaking her head, like the solvent fumes were threatening to overwhelm her. When Arik looked up, he saw a handful of other flares on the west part of the roof, laying shingles. They were all sweat-stained, haggard, and too thin. Far, far too thin.

Arik walked to the nearest cluster of people—a group of Science Talents having an animated conversation about architectural designs. The conversation stalled as he drew near, and six pairs of eyes stared at him as he approached, his gold Eld robes wrapping around his legs. He still felt overly hot, especially on his face. Hopefully, the Ardulans would mistake any redness they saw for the effects of heat or exertion, rather than anger. The Eld weren’t allowed to get angry, probably.

“Are you working in shifts?” he asked the woman closest to him, although he already knew what the answer would be.

The woman jumped to her feet, straightened, and clasped her hands behind her back. “My Eld! We weren’t informed you were coming for an inspection. Would you like a tour of the progress made today?”

Arik suppressed a sigh. What he really wanted was to yell, but the Eld probably didn’t yell, either. He had to be calm and seem like he was interested in these people and their excuses, when all he really wanted was to point to his robes, raise an eyebrow, and tell them all to stop acting like first-don children. The flare thing was over. Done. Why was no one moving on? Why did he have to deal with this again?

But, calm, yes. He could do calm. If Atalant could be calm, he could definitely manage it. “I didn’t come for the palace.” He pointed to the flares on the roof. “Have they had a lunch break yet?”

The woman’s brow furrowed. “No, my Eld. They keep working through the day. No one tells them to. They do so by choice.”

“I suppose you don’t encourage them to stop, do you? Or invite them to sit with you?”

It was impossible to miss the disgust on the woman’s face, although she tried to smother it with a forced smile. Arik thought she might respond with some excuse, or even try to change the subject again, but she remained rigid and quiet.

“A flare was good enough to become an eld,” Arik said tensely. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his robes and let his head tilt to the right. He saw the mouth of one of the men open, but he cut him off, knowing exactly what he was going to say. “How and why my extra Talents left me is irrelevant. These are Ardulans, the same as you, working on the Eld Palace. Ardulum itself chose a flare and a subspecies to be the new elds. So, the next time you don’t want to invite a flare to have lunch with you, maybe consider why none of you, none of you ‘perfect’ Ardulans, were fit enough to become part of Ardulum’s new Eld.”

Jaws snapped shut. The woman stared at him, her hands now playing in the fabric of her shirt. That was one group, then, out of…how many? It was going to be a really long day.

 

FIVE GROUPS AND perhaps an hour later, Arik wandered into the kitchens, intent on finding cool water and shade. He’d met perhaps half the groups outside and would meet with the flares privately, in the evening, with Corccinth.

“Water, my Eld.”

A third-don gatoi handed Arik water in an andal cup. He took it with a grateful nod and downed the contents in one go. Before he had a chance to put his cup down, the gatoi offered him another, once again filled with cool water. Arik nodded and took it.

“Your talther is well?” the gatoi asked. “Zie hasn’t visited the palace since its destruction. We’ve been wondering about zir health.”

Arik blew out a long breath and put the cup down without drinking. “My talther…would prefer to be away from the palace, I think, for the time being.” Or at least as long as I might be in residence. “Zie would be happy to see you, however, if you went for a visit. Our forest lands aren’t too far outside of town.”

The gatoi stared at Arik for so long that Arik had to break eye contact. He looked up instead at the crown molding and the fresh paint. Anything to avoid that look of pity.

“I’m sorry, Eld. This must be…difficult for zir. And you.”

Arik didn’t respond. What could he say? That all he had thought about since his Talent Day was going home and working in the andal plantations with his talther? That no matter how many marks Ardulum had removed from his skin, he was still tainted in the eyes of his family? That being an eld apparently wasn’t enough to remove the stain of the flaring?

None of it was worth saying. They all knew. Every Ardulan out there—from the flares to the Science Talents sitting on the grass with their drawings—knew that Arik would always be a flare, even if he didn’t look it. He’d died that day, in the Talent Chamber, and his family had mourned him and moved on. Even if his saplings kept calling him home, it was time for Arik to move on as well.

He left the kitchens with a curt “thank you for the water” and walked to a scaffold on the west side of the palace. Maybe he was being childish by avoiding the other flares until Corccinth’s mandatory evening meeting. Emn was here, somewhere. He could start with her, perhaps. Though, she had the added problem of being an engineered flare, and he wasn’t really sure how to deal with that. Arik imagined that if there was anything worse than being a flare in the mind of an Ardulan, it was being one made in a Risalian lab. Getting Ardulans to come to terms with her was an entirely separate issue.

Unfortunately, Emn wasn’t anywhere he could see, and he couldn’t spend much time looking for her. He had an afternoon meeting with the Eieans that couldn’t be postponed. Maybe he could find her later, back at the inn, and have a more intimate talk than the palace grounds would allow. Arik nodded at the thought. Yes, that was a good plan. Deal with the Ardulan flares here, and Emn…talk to her alone, or maybe with Atalant. Maybe the three of them could come up with a plan to ease Emn into this world.

With that decided, Arik approached the two nearest flares. They were crouched next to the scaffold in front of him, cutting joinery for the floor joists by hand. They didn’t look up as he approached, and he didn’t blame them for it. Ignoring everyone else was likely how they got through the day.

“Hello.”

It was awkward. Arik knew it was awkward, and yet, he couldn’t really help it. There wasn’t a greeting equivalent to “sorry I made everyone even more paranoid about the flares than they already were—I’m trying to fix it, I swear.”

The flares looked up, their expressions morphing quickly from wariness to irritation. It was nice to see that he was still unremarkable to some Ardulans, but the hint of betrayal in the flares’ faces hurt.

“Eld Arik,” the shorter one said with a quick nod of his head. “Was there something we could help you with?”

“You could take a break,” Arik responded. “All of you. I know what you’re trying to do here, and you’re going to end up killing yourselves.”

The taller flare wiped her hands on her pants and stood. “We made it this far in life by working harder, being better, and ignoring the flippant comments of everyone around us. If you command us to take breaks, we will, but otherwise, we will continue on the path that led to our freedom and our equality.” She didn’t finish her thought, but Arik could see it well enough on her face. The path that led to our equality…and then you ruined it all.

“You could put some of that energy into talking to them. We’re not Ardulan to them. We have to find a way to fix that.”

The woman’s gaze turned cold as she crossed her arms. “We are not the problem, and having us help fix a palace, manually, that we could reform ourselves within a day in the name of building camaraderie, is a horrible waste of our Talents.” She jabbed a finger towards Arik. It was so unexpected that he took a step back. “If we are going to be out like this, find something useful for us to do. If they’re going to be afraid of us, at least let’s give them a reason that doesn’t involve massacring a city.”

Arik could only swallow. The only thought that came to mind was how much sense the suggestion made. Manually rebuilding a palace wasn’t going to change anything, but neither would letting the flares bring it into existence in a day. They either needed to do something awe-inspiring that would put them on the same level as the cherished gatois, or they needed to blend back in.

Arik balled his hands into the fabric of his robes as the woman returned to the scaffold and sat down in a huff. He wished, not for the first time, that he were a Hearth Talent. Of course, technically he had all the Talents—or rather, had had all the Talents before moving the planet had burned most of them away—but right now he just felt like a scared, little first don. He’d give anything, anything, to run home to his talther and bury his face in the gatoi’s shoulder. To have his father smooth his hair and tell him that everything would work out all right if he just had faith in Ardulum. To fall asleep amongst the rows of andal saplings as they whispered their dreams to him.

The communicator in Arik’s robes chirped.

“Please excuse me,” he murmured to the flares that weren’t paying a bit of attention to him. Relieved at the distraction, Arik turned, reached into his robes, and retrieved the small, flat biofilm disc. He touched his thumb to the center, and text appeared on the screen:

 

Immediate Reminder: Eiean meeting at 1800 hours

 

Upcoming Reminder: Supervise andal pruning tomorrow, before lunch break

 

Future Reminder: Check status of Ardulan fleet, and Ekimet and Miketh, on Neek.

 

Arik blinked several times as he tried to make sense of the words. The first two were his reminders—he remembered setting them. The third—where had it come from? Why would Ardulan forces be anywhere near Neek? Had someone been playing with his calendar? Frowning, Arik tapped the third reminder and brought up the time stamp and author.

 

Entry made: Third Month of Arath, 26_15

Author: Eld Asth

 

Arik’s brow furrowed. That meant…what? That Nicholas’s attempts to sync all the Eld communicators and calendars to the palace mainframe had worked, clearly, and that at least some of the old data remained. It meant, too, that ships had been sent to Neek well before the old Eld had died. That there was a fleet near Neek and…

They were still without their third eld. There were Ardulans abroad. There were always Ardulans abroad, of course, but they always came home before the move—otherwise, they risked never being able to come home at all. Which meant the only missing Ardulans were the ones on Neek. Arik rubbed his eyes and then furiously tapped a series of commands into his communicator. Names and Talents scrolled across the screen of the flight crews, the pilots, and the captains. No gatois.

Arik took a deep breath and queried for the biological data on the two leaders of the fleet. There was Miketh, a third-don female Mind Talent, specialized in piloting. Unhelpful and not what he was looking for. The last one came up, and Arik enlarged the text, taking his time to read each line.

 

Name: Ekimet

 

Talent: Hearth Talent, specialization in diplomacy

 

Sex: Gatoi

 

Don: Third—metamorphosis completed within the last cycle

 

A new third-don gatoi.

Relief, surprising in its suddenness, washed into Arik. This was it. He might not have solved the flare problem in a day, but this? This was even better! He shoved the communicator back into his pocket, not bothering to turn it off, and broke into a run. He ran past the flares—who called after him, concerned—past a group of gatois just coming from the kitchens, and through a cluster of sawyers bucking a log. He heard voices calling his name, inquiring if they could help, if something was wrong, but he ignored them all. He ran up the hill, his robes tangling in his legs and tripping him twice, before reaching his ship. Arik slammed himself into the pilot seat, put the thing on auto, and set his destination for Sorin.

Atalant would be there, at the inn. So would Nicholas, and maybe even Emn, since he hadn’t found her at the palace. That was good. He could break the news to them all at once: about the fleet around Neek, the marooned Ardulans, and that he had, in all likelihood, found their missing eld.

Things were finally starting to turn around.