This is going to be a disaster. She can smell it the moment she and Arran walk through the door, alongside the scent of smoked bluefish and honey-roasted vegetables wafting up into the atrium from somewhere beneath her feet. Fabian will be down there conducting his kitchen staff with the precision of a concert symphony, and the majordomo Imarry is probably shouting at a scullion somewhere as the staff finishes setting up the manor’s public rooms. The same last-minute energy that always heralds the parties Selah has spent her life attending.
Usually she enjoys those—even when she’s stuck being pestered about her graduate studies by Mima’s politico friends or Dad’s centenarian colleagues, shocking them half to death over lobster and peas—of course granary workers should have equal shares, and no, the election process for the senatorial colleges is confusing and outdated, frankly. But this isn’t a party, and her father isn’t here. It’s his viewing instead, and Selah already feels very tired at the prospect. There are only so many times you can politely listen to people tell you just how really very sorry they are and what an excellent man he was in that same terribly solemn voice before you start to become a little jaded by the whole thing and possibly say something completely inappropriate out of sheer boredom. Not to mention the lecture she’s no doubt already in for as soon as she crosses paths with her mother.
She’s just considering grabbing Arran and making a bid to escape upstairs when a voice cuts through the high atrium like a crack of thunder.
“There you are.”
Selah winces, all plans of avoiding her mother thoroughly shot as she descends the sweeping atrium stairs. Mima is a commanding woman, even without the full mourning gold she’s worn every day for the past fortnight, or the saltwater sea pearls woven through her tumbles of dense, tight-coiling hair. Selah may be paterfamilias now by law, the necessary continuance of familia lines demanding that inheritance pass to the next generation, but the idea of trying to pull rank on her mima is downright laughable.
“I nearly had a heart attack,” Mima says, cutting her way through the bustle of staff. “I swear to Terra, the next time you sneak off from the Archives without telling anyone, I’m putting you under house arrest.”
“Ice, Mima. I was just at the universitas. I had a meeting with Thane.”
“No, I will not ice, Selah,” she snaps. “You aren’t safe. I need to know where you are. Not gallivanting around town getting into who knows what kind of trouble.” And to prove her point, she gestures at the new bruising along Arran’s face.
“What, these?” he asks, ignoring the way the cut on his lip seems to be opening back up when he talks. “Old news. Tripped in the bath.”
Mima rolls her eyes. But then they soften, and she’s pulling him in for a kiss on the cheek. “Thank you for finding her. It is good to see you.” The hug that follows is brief, if only because Arran is quick to break away, smile slightly strained. Selah isn’t the only one to notice.
“How are you?” Mima asks.
“I’m fine,” he responds, and it’s almost convincing.
“Arran.”
“Really.”
“Arran.”
“Naevia.”
Mima fixes him with that look of hers like she knows he’s lying, and then his smile relaxes—truly relaxes—into something Selah knows. Something a little sad. Something like sunlight finally filtering through the rain. They’re right there with him.
“Tell you what, though,” he says, “the second I need a fainting couch, you’ll be the first to know.”
But when he moves to turn away, she catches his hand in hers and says, “You know this is your home. It always will be.” And Selah feels herself glow, because this is important.
She doesn’t know why Arran took off almost as soon as he got home, not really. Oh, she knows how the fight started, over breakfast a few days after he’d come home from Fornia. His tribune had hinted at a promotion if he came back, and apparently Arran was actually considering it. But Dad had put his foot down, and of course Dad was his patron so he needed his permission to go. The two of them had taken it upstairs from there, and aside from the shouts that nearly brought Breakwater House down and then the silent fury of Arran’s leaving, she doesn’t really know what happened. Only that he didn’t come home, not even when Dad was found dead the next day.
Tair had left, and then Arran, and then Dad, and Selah had been alone.
Arran has always straddled a strange line, she knows that, more at home following Gil around or bothering Lian the stablemaster or flirting with the house servae, but never entirely belonging there, either. Dad had been proud of him, though, educating him and including him like any patrician son, always making it clear he isn’t just familia—he’s family. Mima has always accepted that without complaint. She had to. Arran was here first.
So Selah knows what her mother is doing. This is an olive branch, a promise that nothing’s changed. An offer to come back home, back to where he belongs.
“Yeah,” says Arran, after a beat. “I know.”
• • •
When she slips through the door to Dad’s study, Gil is elbow deep in a sea of boxes, tawny hair sticking out haphazard in all directions, and Selah has to stifle a laugh.
“Brought you a present,” she announces, setting the very large bottle of Gallia red down in front of him on the floor. “Thought you might need it.”
Gil’s head pops out of a particularly dusty trunk of old books and breaks into a gratified smile. “You have no idea. I loved your dad, Sel, but for the life of me I don’t know how I let it get to this point without strangling him.” He pops the cork, and is about to take a drink when he stops and glances up at her. “Sorry. Too soon?”
“Savage Quiet, no,” she says, helping herself. “It’s refreshing. Everyone’s acting like someone died.”
It’s comfortable—comfortable, and normal, and she finds herself wishing that she could just hide away in here with Gil for the rest of the night. Let Mima deal with her guests, Selah’s no politician. And even if she were, who could fault her for wanting some space right now? How in the savage Quiet is she expected to make polite smalltalk about the Imperium’s internal elections and the recent hurricane when her dad was just assassinated? But responsibility comes with expectations, and she’s just going to have to swallow that.
She glances at one of the boxes of books and tries to shove down the thought of how much she’d prefer to spend the evening delving into them, helping Gil decipher the notes from Dad’s latest internal research project. A definitive history of Terra worship, apparently, with particular emphasis on differentiating the fringe cultists who view the All-Mater as some kind of actual deity. Dad had planned on proposing a new national festival to the Consul, one that put emphasis on individual responsibility to the physical earth instead—which is what most sane people understand All-Mater Terra to represent anyway, but he’d thought it was worth the reinforcement. That’s the project he’d hinted at, anyway, but Dad had still been in the note-taking stage and his chicken scratch is nearly impossible to decipher.
Speaking of.
“Were you going to ask how the Serv-Ed proposal went,” she asks, “or were you waiting to see how long I could go without bringing it up?”
He glances up at her, sharp. “You didn’t.”
“Didn’t what?”
“You actually proposed that to her? I thought it was just a thought exercise.”
“Of course it wasn’t. And Nija Thane, in true Nija Thane fashion, curbed me in about three minutes because she’s objectively abject. But,” she presses on, finger raised, eyes gleaming, “Arran, being the bona fide brilliant person that he is, figured out a solution.”
“Arran’s home?”
“Yeah, but listen. I have the Archives now. We can just set it up there. Solved. Done. It’s happening.” She claps her hands together, then frowns. “You don’t look excited. Why aren’t you excited?”
“I don’t know . . .”
“What’s not to know?”
“This isn’t some school project. Things are different now.”
“Yeah, I know,” she responds, wondering if he had actually listened to a word she just said. “Now I’ve got the power to do this on my own terms. I don’t need her permission. Or anyone’s, for that matter.”
It’s sort of perfect, actually. Selah has spent the last five years feeling the sting of injustice, the obvious gaps to be patched, held up by the terminal slowness of committee and bureaucracy and protocol, and in the meantime all of the people who deserve so much more than what they get slipping through. But she has the means now. The power to build her own bridge right over those cracks.
Gil, however, just sets down the pile of papers and sits back, leaving Selah with the distinct feeling that she’s being scrutinized, even as he considers and condenses and maybe thinks better of what he’d like to say. From anyone else, she wouldn’t stand for it. But from Gil, with his soft-spoken voice and deadly edge to his humor, somehow she finds that she doesn’t mind so much.
Then, quite abruptly, he says, “You won’t want to hear this, I know, but there are two things you have to take very seriously now. The first is the political game.”
Selah frowns. That isn’t right. “The Archives aren’t political,” she tells him, though he should really know it already. Historians advise politicians on matters of precedent and such, make proposals and suggestions now and again, act as guides and consultants when needed, but they’re not politicians themselves. And Gil, who’s been her father’s secretary since well before Alexander Kleios inherited his mother’s position, knows that.
“Everything is political.” He smiles wryly. “The universitas endowment’s nearly half of our annual budget. Grad students make up a third of our research staff. Faculty and students get access to some of our resources in return for that, but if we start offering courses, too, you might as well cut out the middleman.”
“Except that the universitas won’t let these kind of students in, that’s the diff—”
“Doesn’t matter. That’s how she’ll see it. Thane will be threatened.”
“Good,” says Selah, a little more vindictively than she means to. “Maybe this can be a reality drop for her. Maybe being a little uncomfortable is exactly what she needs.”
“Maybe. But the Consul may still have something to say about it.”
She frowns. Logically she’s always known that the Consul is just as much her father’s direct superior as he is her mother’s, but she’s never given him much thought where the Archives are concerned. Mostly that’s because she’s hardly ever seen him. The Consul of Roma Sargassa—a stoic, old-guard politician called Cato Palmar with a very large mustache—spends most of his time on the island city of Paxenos, far on the western coast. The rare periods he’s actually in residence here, he’s usually busy enjoying the trappings of vacation—playing the Boardwalk tables and entertaining at his Arborem estate Belamar. A lunch meeting now and then is the closest he gets to doing any real work. Somehow she’s always assumed that Consul Palmar never exercised that much control over Dad at all. It’s almost absurd to think of, that waxmelt face storming into Dad’s office to tell him he can’t possibly use that loanword when translating an Aymaran weaving manual, this modulation will come far closer to the original meaning of Quispe’s text.
“Why would Palmar care?”
Gil leans back, chewing his lip, as though unsure how to say exactly what he wants to next. Finally, he asks, “What are the Archives for?”
“Is that a joke?”
“It’s not.”
Selah rolls her eyes. The answer exists like a tattoo written on her skin. “The collection and safeguarding of the world’s knowledge so the Imperium can rebuild and regain its lost progress after the Great Quiet.”
“That’s one definition.”
“It’s the definition.”
“Maybe. Palmar might have a different one.”
“Well, he shouldn’t.” The thought, frankly, is insulting. What does Cato Palmar know about the Archives anyway? He doesn’t work there, surrounded by the richness of millennia upon millennia of human culture and innovation and potential. He doesn’t even live in Luxana most of the time. “Anyway, what was number two? The other thing I have to take very seriously now.”
Gil ignores her mocking, but gives her a sad smile and says, “Time. How much time you actually have in your day, and what you choose to do with it.”
“I’ll have time for—”
“You won’t. You’ll think you will, but you won’t. Your dad was the same, I watched him do it for years. He tried to make time for everything.”
“I know,” says Selah quietly. “It was the best thing about him.” Suddenly she feels a burning behind her eyes again. Stupid. She blinks it back. Stop doing that.
“I want to help you with this, Selah,” Gil says. “I do. But you’re being asked to grow up faster than you were supposed to. You need to learn how to do this job first. It’s not just your own projects. It’s managing everyone else’s research and curation, making sure resources are being properly allocated, securing relationships with the right politicians so the outside world remembers just how vital the work we do here is. You’ve got to be able to see the bigger picture. And I’m not nearly as well equipped as Alex to teach you how.”
Maybe it’s the hand on hers or something in the tone of his voice, but very suddenly Selah realizes that Gil must be just as overwhelmed as she is. Gil Delena has always been an invaluable asset to the Archives. He’s the one who keeps the place running smoothly, who coordinates and organizes more or less everything from behind the scenes. The one who made sure Dad knew which appointments he was supposed to be at and when, and made sure he ate when he’d been too buried in work to remember. But he’s not supposed to teach her how to do this. He’s a plebeian, and a client plebeian at that. He couldn’t have been privy to half of what Dad actually got up to, or best practices to do it. Yet here he is all the same, shoved into the role of teacher, as though it could ever be that easy. As though the patron he’d known and been friends with since they were both young boys wasn’t inconveniently too dead to do it himself.
“No one’s going to forget how important the Archives are,” she tells him gently. “Or how important it is to rebuild the old world. That’s just . . . something we grow up knowing, isn’t it? I think I knew that before I even knew what the Great Quiet was.”
“And you think that’s by accident, do you?” He rubs the meat of his palm against his head. “You don’t think that’s by design? Or the deliberate, careful work of every Historian who came before? We’re doomed to—”
“—doomed to repeat the mistakes we don’t remember,” she finishes for him, reciting the elementary-levels mantra by rote. “I know, Gil. I know.”