774 PQ
Cutting through the sticky September heat, a thin trail of cold slides down her spine like an ice cube slipped down the back of her dress.
Selah is out of her chair before she has time to really consider her next move, much less the alarmed ornatrice she leaves behind in her bedroom, comb and extensions still in hand. Mima calls after her, but she lets the words slide away, already halfway down the carpeted third-floor hall of Breakwater House. She doesn’t think her mother is lying to her, exactly. But she’s certain she’s been misinformed. She must be. There’s no way Dad would let this happen.
The pounding in her ears and the icy chill down her neck carry her upstairs to the fourth floor. Past floral arrangements sitting in blown-glass vases, through intricately carved doorframes, to the door of Dad’s study where the eight-point Kleios sun sits carved in mahogany wood. She doesn’t knock. Not today.
If Alexander Kleios is at all surprised to see his only daughter burst into the privacy of his inner sanctum, hair half-loose, he disguises it remarkably well. He seems, if anything, to have been expecting her. Peering over pale steepled fingers from his wing-back chair, the grand desk of the Imperial Historian’s home office draws the clear battle line between them.
“It wasn’t her fault.”
“Selah—”
“You know it wasn’t her fault.”
“Sit down.”
“I don’t want to sit down.”
“Sit,” he growls, and Selah nearly takes a step back. A far cry from the vaguely frayed academic of a father she knows, quiet consideration has given way to a stone wall of grave authority, and for the first time Selah can truly appreciate that her father is the Imperial Historian of all Roma’s empires.
The Imperium had first appointed the title to their ancestor Antal Iveroa nearly eight hundred years ago, heralding the end of the Great Quiet and the beginning of the Imperial Age of Enlightenment. After untold centuries of darkness and chaos and war, the Imperium had regained control of Roma and her client empires, but so much had been lost by then. Knowledge that would never be restored—or, at least, not for an extremely long time. So Antal Iveroa was charged with the building and safeguarding of the Imperial Archives, the greatest library in the world, and the stewardship of the empires’ collective knowledge. For nearly eight hundred years that sacred task has been passed down, from mothers and fathers to eldest daughters and sons.
This is what it must be like, then, to be one of Dad’s clients, or a patrician neighbor vying for favor. Not to look at Dad and see Dad—auburn hair flecked with white, and how his eyes turn to crescent moons when he smiles—but something else entirely. Centuries of power and authority, and a staunch refusal to be pushed around. But Selah has always assumed it was a projection—that people see what they expect to see. She didn’t know it was something he’s aware of. Something he could intentionally activate, like one of his prize solaric lamps. She didn’t know he was capable of changing masks so easily. It makes her skin prickle.
But this isn’t about her. This is about Tair, who has no one else to be her champion. So Selah swallows her pride and her fury and her shock, and everything else that demands she stand her ground. She runs a conscious hand over her half-loose hair and, with as much dignity as she can muster, takes a seat in the handsome leather chair on her side of the battle line.
“Mima’s under the impression that court didn’t go in Tair’s favor today,” she says, calmly, and watches him move to the black-lacquer bar cart in the corner. “But she must be mistaken.”
“And why is that?”
She could strangle him. She doesn’t need a scholar right now. She needs her father. But this is her father. This is his way—forcing her and even Arran to work their problems out to a conclusion.
“Because I told you what happened to her,” she answers through gritted teeth. “I told you she acted in self-defense. And I told you,” and here Selah has to swallow her guilt, “that it was my fault. Those boys never would have spared her a second thought if I hadn’t vexed them off. So I would assume you told that to the magistrate. What good are the courts if the Historian’s word counts for nothing?”
He doesn’t answer right away, just turns and hands her a wordless glass of whiskey and leans against his desk, glancing out at the orange sunset. She doesn’t touch her drink. She wouldn’t have even if he’d remembered she doesn’t like the stuff. One of his ancient solaric lamps sits on the corner of the desk, the bright, otherworldly glow of its shining black bulb casting shadows across his face. Solaric technology has always made Selah uneasy, as with most things left over from before the Quiet that have yet to be understood. Stick their black irradium bulbs in the sun for an hour and they’ll light up for the next few months. No paraffin or beeswax necessary. And still, all these years later, no one knows how.
“Dad.”
He isn’t ignoring her, she knows that, but this forlorn act is neither helpful nor inspiring much confidence.
“Dad,” she snaps, patience gone. “What happened?”
Finally he sets his glass down on the desk and looks at her. “One of the young men from the incident,” he says at last, his voice betraying nothing. “An Isaya Jellene. He has a scratched cornea.”
The bottom of Selah’s stomach drops away.
“But,” she scrambles, “if it was self-defense—”
“Self-defense doesn’t exist for the servile castes, Selah, you know that. Non habet personam—no persona, no self. One cannot defend what doesn’t exist.”
“But she’s about to be—”
“Whatever her justification, whatever she was about to be, it’s a moot point,” he says, returning to his large wing-back chair on the other side of the desk. “Tair harmed a citizen. Tair broke the law, and that is all that matters to the magistrate.”
“But you’re the Historian,” she explodes, bursting from her chair again, unwilling to entertain that this is truly happening, that this has truly spiraled so far out of her or Dad’s control. “You can overturn it. You can protect her. You’ve done it before, for Arran when—”
“Don’t bring your brother into this.” Dad’s broad, pale face grows somehow dark, and the edge in his voice is back. “The situations couldn’t be more different.”
“How? Honestly, how is this any different?”
“For one thing, Arran has never broken the law.”
Cool and quiet still, he does not rise to tower over her as he very well could, and if she were any less angry Selah might feel foolish standing there, the weight of his authoritative gaze shining steady judgment up at her like the brightest and harshest of solaric lights, leaving her exposed.
“Even if I did wield that kind of influence,” he goes on, “the magistrate has made a decision. He has passed a sentence in accordance with her crime, and it is not my place to interfere. Just as it was not Tair’s place to harm a citizen.”
“You can’t believe that. I know you can’t believe that.”
The Kleios familia is large and strong, and Selah has seen her father laugh with his clients and feast with servae on Terranalia, and he embraces Gil Delena like a brother. He knows Tair, and he knows that she is clever, and funny, and deserves to walk unharmed through the world. He knows this, and she can’t understand why he won’t fight for it.
But then he stands, and it’s clear that this conversation is over.
“We all have our parts to play,” he says, staring out again at the purpling sky. “We are all cogs in the great machine. Someday you’ll understand that.”
• • •
“Two weeks,” Tair says, the dark golden sunset streaming from the small window of her bedroom to nestle in her hair. Sullen, sporting a bruised and swollen black eye, refusing to look at Selah. “Two weeks.”
She stands there, unsure what there is left to say when the cold facts are these:
Tair assaulted a citizen. Tair broke the law. And so Tair, who was meant to leave her verna life behind in two weeks, has lost her eligibility for citizenship. Permanently. That was the magistrate’s verdict.
“I’m so, so sorry,” she says, feeling even as she says it that it’s a fairly weak thing to say.
Evidently, Tair agrees.
“Okay,” she says, half a numb and bitter laugh, and she still won’t look at her. Selah’s feet carry her across the small attic bedroom in two short strides so that she can sit on the bed next to Tair and take hold of her hands.
“I am,” she says, desperate for her to understand how very much on her side she is.
“And that helps me how, exactly?” Tair spits, snatching her hands away. “I had twelve days left, and now it’s just gone. But yeah, sure, it’s okay, because you’re sorry.”
There are no words that can fix this. Selah looks for them anyway.
“Maybe . . .” Her mind races toward Pacifica and Anatolia, and how maybe her parents won’t actually mind Tair going so much after all if Selah goes with her. How maybe things can still be normal, how the line between verna and client pleb is a legal fiction, really, and how maybe amongst themselves they can move forward the way they’re meant to. This is just a minor setback.
“Listen. What if we—”
“Leave me alone, Selah.”
“No, really, maybe there’s a way—”
“Get out.”
• • •
Selah doesn’t know this yet, but this will be their last conversation. When she wakes up the next morning, Tair will be gone, vanished into the air. The Cohort Publica will search the city and surrounding agricultural villages. Street orators will advertise rewards for knowledge of her whereabouts. Gil will mourn her. And Selah will never see her again.