There’s an unpleasant buzz beneath her skin, something that has nothing whatsoever to do with the decanter of Gallia red sitting between her and Gil, and everything to do instead with her disastrous introduction to Consul Palmar. Dad’s study feels oppressive, the walls closing in from all sides. But she’s entirely too alert and annoyed to go to bed yet.
She should let Gil go home. It’s half past one in the morning and he’s been at this all day.
“This is hopeless,” she groans instead. Dad’s handwriting is no clearer than it was when she finally slipped away from the party downstairs, notes allegedly on Terran motherhood cults in northwest Fornia turning to nothing but blurry lines. Selah drops her head on the desk.
Blearily, Gil looks up. “Right, that’s it,” he says, closing the journal he’s been trying to wade through with a definitive snap. “Bedtime.”
“No, you go. I can—”
“This will still be here in the morning.”
Will it?
It’s a stupid thought, she does know that. The stacks of notes, the bar cart, Dad’s desk—her desk, now. They’ll still be here in the morning, he’s right. But for how long? The study still smells like Dad, the leather corner chair still imprinted where he sat. It’s all hers now in name, but she doesn’t want it. Not yet. Doesn’t want to sit here and try to work out his handwriting, not if he can’t read it out loud to her instead, green eyes wide with excitement and arms gesticulating dangerously in the midst of a particularly complicated thought. She doesn’t want to go to bed. Not when it means she’ll have to wake up tomorrow, and don her mourning gold again, and send him as ash into Terra’s arms.
Selah turns—to what, tell Gil to stop? But before she can decide, a dark glint catches her eye.
Her father’s prize possessions.
Black bulbs of irradium stone, set on a base of copper, nothing like them exists on earth. Esoteric and rare collector’s items, more myth than fact to most of the world. Slowly, Selah picks one up, the cool black sphere strangely heavy in her palm. At the bottom, set into the copper base, the eight-point Kleios sun glints, etched inside a circle. However old this tech is, her familia can trace their history just as far. These lamps don’t work like paraffin, but she’s seen Dad do this before. So instead of turning a dial to light the oil, she smooths her thumb across the circle and gently presses in.
The effect is luminous. Brilliant solaric light fills the shadowed study, so clear and clean it puts shame to sunlight itself. Seeping into every shelf and cranny, bouncing off peeling gold-lamé titles so she could read even the oldest of print if she really wanted. Gil looks up, the purple shadows under his eyes brought into startling relief as he squints, and for the first time in Selah’s life she can see the small scar running along the rim of his ear. An involuntary shudder passes over her, raising small goosebumps down her arms.
She presses the sun again, and the room goes dark once more.
“You knew him the longest,” she says then, quietly, and wonders how they’ve never talked about this before. They were children together, then stupid teenage boys, then men. He was born in this house, the same as Dad. His own father works in the gardens even now.
Gil nods, something sad behind tired eyes.
“Tell me something about him I don’t know?”
The smile bursts out full formed. “I can do you one better,” he says, and shifts overlong legs to rummage for something in his bag. When he emerges, Selah has to laugh.
“Not more books.”
“Yes, more books.” He places them carefully in front of her, two crumbling and ancient tomes stacked one on top of the other. Neither appear to have a title. “Books your dad specifically asked me to make sure got to you. He left a note. Classified, apparently.” He winks.
“Oh?”
“Hid them in a special cache in his office and everything. Lucky for you, I’m the only person who knew where that was. We used to leave frogs in there for your grandmother to find when we were kids.”
Selah yawns, smashing a cheek against one hand as she carefully opens the top volume’s front cover. “What are the chances we get lucky again and these hold the code to deciphering Alexander Kleios’s fragging abysmal handwriting?”
He laughs.
But then Selah pauses, halfway through idly flipping the delicate pages. She frowns.
“Gil,” she says slowly, eyes fixed to the page. “What is this?”
“I don’t know, I didn’t exactly get a chance to ask.”
“Come take a look.”
The book on top, it transpires, isn’t just a book.
It’s an atlas. Map after meticulously drawn map, traced over paper so old Selah really does feel she should run and grab a pair of gloves. But that isn’t what’s strange. Gil moves around to her side of the desk, and she doesn’t know whether to be gratified or disappointed to see an equal look of confusion come over his face.
“That’s Aymara, right?”
“Well, I’d assume so,” he answers, shifting the book slightly to get a better look at the particular map in question. “The general coastal shape is correct, but—”
“The internal landmass is all wrong.”
The coastlines may not be exactly accurate, but it’s still distinctly recognizable as Roma Aymara, the tropical client empire to the south comprising two major islands and several minor ones. But where ocean straits and rivers should be is nothing but a sea of green.
Selah’s eyes go wide as she realizes what this must mean. “This is dated Ante Quietam, isn’t it?” she asks, excitedly flipping through pages again, taking much more care this time. “From before the Great Quiet. Before proper cartography instruments and all that.”
“It certainly looks old enough,” says Gil, eyes drinking in the sight of inaccurate map after inaccurate map with just as much interest. “And I don’t recognize this language in the least.”
It’s true, Selah realizes with another little thrill. Forget language, the rivers and mountains and notations scribbled in the margins are all written in an alphabet she finds utterly incomprehensible. Perhaps a relic of some pre-Roma civilization that once existed there.
Only that can’t be it. Roma has been in Aymara—and indeed in Sargassa—since long before the Great Quiet, exploring and cultivating her client empires for hundreds of years before the world went mad and lost all contact. From Roma to Sargassa to Aymara to Serica, and even the Aksum Empire beyond Imperial control. Each had been well and truly on their own. A child of five could tell you that.
Natives, then. Perhaps this book—this atlas—is the result of their crude attempts at cartography. But who would bother to print it? She amuses herself for a moment at the idea of some Ante Quietam printer, a maverick by reputation, pressing and binding this atlas in the dead of night for a native friend. Or perhaps enjoying a period of relative peace, a pocket of time during which Sargassans both Roman and native had worked together toward prosperity. Selah knows of no such time. But there’s so much that was lost to the Great Quiet, and the promise of an academic mystery curls pleasantly in Selah’s mind, warmly chasing away any lingering unpleasantness from the viewing and her encounter with the Consul, temporarily easing the yawning gap of grief that Dad left behind.
“This is a bona fide major find,” she says. “Why wouldn’t Dad have donated this to the Archives? Or at least shared it with us?”
Gil shrugs. “Maybe he thought it was a fake.”
“Maybe . . . but that doesn’t explain why he wanted me to have it. Or why he said it was classified.”
Careful of its crumbling spine, she shifts the atlas to the side. The volume beneath is equally old, though kept in infinitely better shape. Soft leather bindings worn but strong, and Selah is about to flip that open, too, when Gil tries—and fails—to stifle a massive yawn.
Frag. She’d meant to send him home.
“You’re right,” she says, and she swipes a thumb over the leather cover. A final, undiscovered piece of Dad, something that will still be here for her in the morning. “Time for bed.”
• • •
They part ways in the atrium, where the candles in their sconces have nearly burnt out and the handsome grandfather clock declares it to be nearly two thirty in the morning. Selah isn’t tired, though, as she watches Gil’s lanky profile slouch down the hill toward the semicircle of small houses where most of her father’s clients live. Her clients. That’s going to take some getting used to.
She passes from the atrium out into the open air of the long colonnade, and is just thinking of sneaking out down to the beach to be alone with her thoughts and the salt air when she notices a familiar figure ahead. Out where the courtyard juts into a balcony overlooking the far ocean below, Arran looks down upon the now-shrouded body of their late father. Too far away in the falling dark to read what’s written across his face, yet it’s immediately clear to Selah that she’s stepped into something she wasn’t meant to see. There’s a cursory attempt to backtrack, but a scuff on the tile gives her away. Arran looks up, sharp, then breaks into a smile.
“You survived.”
“No thanks to you.” She punches her brother on the shoulder as he approaches, not hard, then wraps her arms around him. “Saw you talking to Theodora Arlot. Dick. I wanted to introduce you.”
He shrugs. “Got there first.”
But there’s something uncharacteristically awkward about it, something spread across high cheekbones that if Selah didn’t know better she’d say was a blush. She can’t help it, the dump of laughter. “You didn’t.”
Arran just shrugs again, and doesn’t even look all that embarrassed about it, actually. Not that he should, Theo’s a perfectly nice girl. Smart, competent, perfectly inspiring in her defiance against the odds to make something of her life. If Selah’s being completely honest, she was actually hoping that Theo and her brother would become friends. Quiet knows Arran could do with some. She just hadn’t really imagined it would be anything more than that.
He would pick someone up at their Dad’s viewing.
She punches him again.
They end up out on the dark lawn, formalwear loosened and discarded as they sprawl across the great hill behind Breakwater House. Out ahead of them, the lawn spills onto the expanse of the estate, disappearing into the Hazards beyond. New-cut grass between their toes, stars laid out far above their eyes. Selah hits the very end of the spliff while Arran rolls another.
“Terra’s beautiful saggy tits,” she exhales deeply, the weight of the day’s anxieties going up in smoke as the gentle slope of the earth welcomes her ever more deeply. “You cannot get plant like this in Luxana.”
“No, you can’t. Next time I go to Fornia, you’re coming with. No excuses.”
“Like they’ll ever let me out of the city again. I’m bona fide chained to a desk arguing with old men for the rest of my life.” And it’s not the ancient scholars that come to mind. Plenty to learn from erudites, if you can stay awake long enough to listen. No, it’s the pale and sagging face of Consul Cato Palmar that sets her teeth on edge.
“Worse fates,” her brother says lightly. “But hey, call it a work trip. All you have to do is visit a museo and you’re gold.”
“They have those out there?”
He shrugs, finishes rolling the spliff, and lights it. Selah frowns as she accepts it from him, and wonders if the question is worth asking. Worse fates. She thinks she already knows the answer, but she would rather hear the truth of it from him. Dad certainly hadn’t been willing to talk about it.
Arran lies down, his familiar weight bumping up against her and giving her the boost of confidence she needs.
“Hey, Arran?” She passes the spliff back and stares up into the dark sky.
“Hm?”
“Why did you leave?”
She hears him exhale slowly, then—“Nah, it’s boring.”
“I know you and Dad weren’t . . . happy with each other. At the end.”
To that, Arran doesn’t say anything at all, and Selah feels a flush of embarrassment. There is nothing the pair of them haven’t willingly shared with one another since she came into the world. Childhood toys and friends and teenage adventure, yes, but also the quieter moments, hopes and fears and dreams. There have been fights, of course. Four years is a tricky age gap to navigate, and certainly there were times when he didn’t want her trailing after him and his friends, or she had screamed at him for patronizing her and calling her a brat. But those are fleeting moments compared to the nights like this one when they’ve stayed up late together, the secret worlds they built in the Hazards as children, the way they know how to navigate each other’s moods and tempers. Arran has never once coddled her, always knowing exactly when to come to her defense and when to let her take a loss. It’s always been the two of them, really.
When she lost Tair, he’s the one who was there for her. Not just because he was Tair’s friend, too—he was, Selah gets that, it’s just not the same. And sure, Gil had been there, too, in his way, in mourning because he loved Tair like a daughter. But Arran was different. Arran was there for her in a way no one else ever could have been, because he was the only other person in the world who understood what it was like to be let down by Dad.
Which makes it all the harder to acknowledge that maybe, this time, it wasn’t her place to ask. She can’t imagine that the brother she knows so well really could care that much about returning to the military legions, not after their family had tried so hard and failed so spectacularly to keep him out of mandatory service in the first place. But a year is a long time, and more than enough for a person to change. Maybe it really is as simple as that.
She’s about to apologize or say it doesn’t matter, actually, just forget it, when he lets out a long smoky exhale and says, “You know what the last thing I ever said to him was?”
“What?” she asks, quietly surprised, as though anything louder might cause him to change his mind.
“Fuck. You.”
Silence.
And then she can’t help it. What Dad’s face must have looked like. The sheer idea of it. Selah bursts into laughter. The plant catching up with her, utterly stoned and bubbling up from deep within, but then Arran’s joining in with her and the two of them roll around in the grass cackling with belly-deep laughter until tears stream down their faces, the release desperately welcome. They don’t settle for a long, lovely moment, until they do, his arm nestled around her.
“He left you an allowance, you know,” Selah says into the comfortable silence, suddenly feeling a little more charitable to their father, who had loved and disappointed them both. Maybe he wasn’t a perfect man but he had, after all, tried his best to make things right at least for Arran in the end.
“Yeah, I do know. The estate doesn’t want to let me have it. Naevia’s getting involved, some loophole about Patron-Client Willable Assets.”
“Sounds made up.”
“Probably is.”
She laughs, unconcerned. Mima’s a force to be reckoned with when it comes to taking care of her familia, and there is no doubt in Selah’s mind that she can get Arran whatever he’s owed. “Thought about what you’re going to do with it?” she asks.
“Well, I was planning on spending it all on booze and loose women—”
“Naturally.”
“—but then I remembered that mooching off your little sister your entire life is considered impolite and sort of embarrassing. So I should probably save up.”
Selah falls quiet for a moment, frowning, while he plays with the ends of her hair with one hand, almost a little kid again. It’s not what he’s said—Arran is notorious for not taking things seriously, and she’s more than used to that by now. No, instead it’s the memory of something they had spoken about earlier in the day, although it feels much longer ago than that.
“Do you seriously think I’d just leave you out to dry?” she asks him.
Though she can’t see his face, lying like this, she can practically feel him rolling his eyes. “It was a joke, Sel,” he says. “I know you wouldn’t.”
She sits up, all business. “I’m not talking about money.” Because the savage Quiet take her but Gil is right. She can’t do this on her own. And neither is she about to lose another member of her shrinking family. “You’re the smartest person I know, and I’m not letting you waste that. Frag the legions, come work with me.”
“That’s funny,” he says, and this time she actually sees him rolling his eyes.
She hits him. Because she isn’t trying to flatter him. Arran is smart and capable and if the world had just let him be someone, then maybe he would believe it, too. “Jokes in a time of crisis are your thing, not mine. I want to hire you.”
“Yeah, but you can’t. I can’t.”
Arran hits the spliff again. She knocks it out of his hand.
“Frag, Selah.”
“If I have to be paterfamilias now,” she tells him coolly, “then I say you can. You have to. Because, Terra bless him, Gil’s doing his best, but I don’t know what the frag I’m doing and I need you. And since apparently I won’t have the time to do it myself, I’ll need someone to head this new extended education initiative.”
Selah watches it happen, the moment it dawns on him exactly which extended education initiative she’s talking about, and then the ghost of a smile creeps onto his face.
“I thought you were going by materfamilias now,” he says finally, and it takes Selah a split second to realize what he’s talking about. Then she grins, and knows she’s got him.
“One battle at a time.”
Arran sits up now, too. He looks at her searchingly for a long moment, the green-gold eyes they share so like Dad’s, set in a stranger’s pale face so very different from her and Mima’s. Then he says, “You know what I think?”
“What?”
“I think . . . that you’re very high.”
Selah nods, solemn. “That’s true. But I’m also very serious.”
They might have stayed like that, eyes boring into one another, until the plant took over again and another bout of laughter came bubbling up. But it’s a loud clatter that breaks the moment, instead, followed by a stifled cry.
Both she and Arran instantly snap their attention up to the manor in the near distance.
Something is hanging out of a fourth-story window, and Selah’s eyes narrow as she tries to focus on what it is. Then they go wide as she realizes. It’s not something. It’s someone.
“Savage Quiet,” she whispers, and hears Arran beside her mutter, “What in the . . .”
She’s already on her feet. Her brother shouts behind her as she races back up the hill toward Breakwater House, but she ignores him. Someone is about to fall out of a fourth-floor window. Someone in her familia, the one she’s now responsible for. Never mind that it’s three in the morning, she has to raise the alarm.
But then something happens that causes Selah to pull up short. Up at the manor, still a ways ahead, the person hanging from the window begins to scale their way down. She can’t see precisely how from here, but whoever this person is seems to know exactly what hand and footholds to look for, and all too soon is landing neatly on the ground like a cat. A chill goes down Selah’s spine. This was no accident. Perhaps they hadn’t meant to fall, but they had definitely meant to exit through the window. And anyone who intentionally leaves through a fourth-floor window is almost certainly not meant to be there in the first place.
A light goes on in the first floor, and though the intruder is hooded and cloaked, Selah catches sight of a thin leather book clutched tightly under their arm.
She knows that book. She was running her fingers over it not even half an hour ago. Not the atlas, crumbling and delicate, but the other unknown tome, the one she hasn’t opened yet, the other classified volume that Dad left behind in her care. The thief looks up, face still shrouded by their hood, locking in on Selah for a half beat before tearing off in the other direction toward the Hazards.
Oh, absolutely not.
Ignoring Arran’s shouts of alarm, the new light now spilling from the manor out onto the dark lawn, she doesn’t hesitate. She races after them—across the massive grounds, into the forest beyond.
It’s another world in here. Dappled moonlight finds its way through the oaks and birches and maples above, casting an otherworldly glow on the forest floor beneath. Lungs pumping, Selah crashes through branches and over roots, her hooded quarry flickering every now and again into view up ahead. They’ve got good ground on her, but Selah knows the Hazards like the back of her hand. Every creek, every clearing, every break in the battered, healing earth. A childhood of playing in the shadow of these trees has taught her well. No man-made paths exist here, but she knows precisely what she’s looking for as the thief ahead of her arcs a wide path around a deep ravine.
Abruptly Selah peels off to the right, focusing on nothing but the sound of her breath and the crushing darkness and the crunch of dead leaves underfoot, gathering speed until she races across the fallen oak over the gaping crack in the earth. And then she barrels straight into something solid. A body. The thief.
The two of them are sent tumbling down beneath the low branches, dirt and sticks flying and tangling in her hair. She comes to a rolling stop with an unpleasant thud, then looks wildly around as the thief scrambles back to their feet. Selah tries to follow suit, but trips over something lying in the underbrush and crashes back down hard, cutting her lip on her teeth. The book. The thief dropped it where they fell, and now the front leather cover lies open in the dirt and autumn leaves—except.
Except it’s not a book at all.
Where pages should be glints instead an impossibly smooth rectangular stone of pure black, sleeker and shinier than any onyx or tourmaline. Selah stares at it for half a second, unsure of what she’s looking at, exactly. But before she can do anything else, the thief’s hands shoot out to snatch it back up. Their hood falls down around their shoulders, and Selah’s heart catches somewhere in her throat.
Ocher-red hair grown out long, twisted back into thick ropes, wooden beads and glimpses of gold and blue flashing here and there. Stark black lines of keloid tattoo wrapping around lean, well-muscled arms. There’s a scar over her left eyelid that, though faded, hadn’t been there before. Five years older and five years rougher, yet Selah would know that face anywhere. It’s the same one she sees every night when she closes her eyes.
She opens her mouth to call out her name, to tell her to wait, just to say anything at all. But her voice catches.
Tair—and it is Tair, beneath it all—gives her one last look. And is that panic? Regret? Or something else entirely? Then she hoists the hood back over her head and disappears once more into the dark woods.