40
WHEN I recounted what became of the Sacred City, Tyrus met the news with laughter. Pasus went gray.
“I fail to see humor,” Pasus said. “This will lead to chaos.”
“You have long abandoned piety. Don’t pretend to be the aggrieved believer,” Tyrus said disparagingly. “Chaos will only ensue if people learn of this. We won’t let them.”
“There have been rumors,” Pasus said.
Neveni, I thought. It had to be.
“There are always rumors. There will be no official confirmation, Alectar. The Interdict lives, the Sacred City is intact, and if anyone doubts—let them seek the Interdict for themselves and ask him.”
It disturbed me, seeing them discuss it, planning a course together like true allies. Now Tyrus turned his attention to me. Looked me over. “So I sent you to bring back the Interdict. Instead he is dead and the Sacred City is destroyed.”
“Yes.”
Tyrus began laughing again. “How do you not find this funny?” he said to Pasus. Then he raised his hand, and light glinted off a ring he wore. A flick of his finger popped open a gem atop it. “My mistake sending a Diabolic.”
Tyrus nodded as he huffed in the Venalox from within the gem.
“Ask her,” prompted Pasus in a low voice.
“My love, do you or do you not still have the scepter?” Tyrus said.
My eyes narrowed. It made me grind my teeth together, the way Tyrus just obeyed him.
“As I told the Senator, I have it. I’ve sent it into space with a transponder frequency only I know.” It was a lie, but I was certain Pasus was having my ship ransacked, searching for that familiar casing Neveni had stolen. They wouldn’t find it in the book—or so I hoped. “If anything happens to me, it will be lost forever. I’d rather have a reason to give it to you. I want my conditions met.”
Tyrus grinned broadly. “Listen to her,” he said to Pasus. “You’d think she was the one who’d had several years to sharpen her wits. Do tell me the conditions, Nemesis.”
I looked between them. Was Pasus’s power over him still total? I tested it: “I want him gone.”
Tyrus arched his brows, pointed a questioning thumb toward Pasus.
“Yes. Him.”
“It seems absence has not made the heart grow fonder,” Tyrus remarked.
“Not for either of us,” Pasus said. “It seems she imagines we’ve been in stasis while she has.”
“Then some catch-up must needs be done,” Tyrus said. He snatched a handkerchief from one of the Servitors, wiped away the Venalox residue from his nose, and let it drop to the floor. I stared at it. It was the sort of decadent, wasteful, Grandiloquy gesture Tyrus never used to do. “My darling, we have passed a long while and you have not. The time of ugliness is far behind us. Alectar and I are reconciled.”
“He has won the right to the first room?” I said.
Tyrus rolled his eyes. “Alectar, move to another chamber. Go get started. Now.”
Pasus stirred. “Immediately? Perhaps I should . . .”
“Immediately.”
The two men exchanged a long, silent glance. Then, “Of course.” He dipped his head and left us.
Tyrus snared my limp hand, but made no move to draw me in closer. “I know this is difficult for you to understand. My existence became profoundly uncomfortable in the wake of the Tigris. There were still dozens of dead and it was known I had a role in it. Some Grandiloquy wished to have me lobotomized. There were proposals to remove my sex organs for the creation of new Domitrians so I might be executed.” And though his lips twisted into a smile, a shadow passed over his face. “At the time, I was . . . I was far beyond caring. In fact, I may even have cultivated a small rumor that Alectar himself was responsible for the Tigris massacre. His reputation has never recovered from that suspicion. Yet still, he was my shield. He prevented anything too dire from happening.”
That Excess girl’s conspiracy theory . . . Tyrus had crafted it. I just had to shake my head. “There was no mercy in what he did, Tyrus. He needs you alive and in his power. And now he dwells in the first room, like a consort or . . .”
“A member of my family.”
“Family.” Family meant something very different to Tyrus than to most people. I wasn’t sure if he intended to tell me they were close, or that Pasus was still his dread enemy, using that word. Maybe I was seeing a cold war between them, one masked in civility, the sort I had never mastered. He slung himself back onto a chair, legs wide. “He needed me alive. There are many states of existence, Nemesis, and I could have endured much more miserable ones.”
“Than a life of involuntary addiction? Of constant humiliation?”
His eyes grew hard. “You made the decision for me. You decided I would remain here. So yes, that was a preferable alternative. I learned the value of having a single person I could rely upon in that situation, even him. . . . It was better than no one. Once I told him that you were a given in a marriage union, and now I must tell you that exact same thing about him. Do you still love me, Nemesis? If so, then that’s grand. We should just go ahead and get married as we meant to. You do wish to make an exchange for the scepter, do you not? I find the idea most agreeable.”
Agreeable. The word stung me.
“You’re very sure Alectar approves?” I muttered.
“Wholeheartedly. He is your earnest champion now as well as mine.”
I scoffed. No. Pasus knew I was exactly the wife he’d want for Tyrus. The unthreatening wife who would never detract from his power, and now—now that the Venalox had been in use for four years—one Tyrus could look at after three years apart with this detachment. There was no love for me in his gaze. Not now.
And I’d known it. I’d braced for it. I’d hardened myself against this possibility in advance. It still threatened to hurt me.
Dwelling upon my loss would split me apart.
“When?” I said.
“Alectar!” called Tyrus.
And then Pasus returned so abruptly, I knew he’d been listening, waiting for this. I shuddered with hatred to see him. This whole thing bewildered me. I’d known I’d return to a Tyrus who did not look at me the same way. There was an uncharacteristic detachment to him even when he smiled at me. I had never imagined he’d be a friend to Pasus, much less regard him fondly like a trusted friend.
“What about tomorrow?” Tyrus said.
“The wedding?” I blurted. “Tomorrow?”
“So soon?” Pasus said, startled as well.
Tyrus flashed a grin. “Why not? No one can argue we haven’t covered the blood sacrifice. Let’s jump right into it.”
Pasus folded his arms. “And the arrangements . . . Still as we discussed?”
“Exactly as we discussed.” Tyrus drew a huff of Venalox and used his sleeve this time to wipe his face. “It’s over three years since we were engaged. No one can say it’s sudden.” Then with a laugh, he pointed to the window. “Look at all these ships gathered. Shouldn’t we eagerly exhibit ourselves for so vast an audience?”
Pasus turned his gaze to me. “And when can the Emperor expect the coordinates of the scepter?” Pasus said.
Tyrus’s eyes were now locked on my face, waiting for the answer too.
“Is there now support from the vicars?” I said, looking between them.
“I have been making many inroads in hopes you would return,” Pasus said.
“I will do my part if he does,” I said to Tyrus. Then, to Pasus, “And do not ask me questions on his behalf ever again or speak to me if it’s unnecessary. I will hate you with all my heart until the day I die.”
“As will I,” agreed Pasus, “until the day you die.”
Tyrus smothered a laugh, and drew another great breath of Venalox. “You see? Bickering and thinly veiled death threats. Add in some attempts on each other’s lives, and we’ll be a proper Domitrian family at last.”
• • •
I chose Gladdic as my escort for the wedding ceremony, for he was the single person here I had any interest in seeing.
As soon as I walked onto his ship, I saw it resting there on a pedestal.
The bronze bust of the Grandeé Cygna.
I stared at her sightless eyes, perched above me. What would compel a son to display the instrument of his father’s murder like a prized possession? When Gladdic appeared in the doorway, he came to a stop.
“Nemesis! It’s you. I’m so happy to—”
I waved off the courtesies and nodded toward the statue. “Why do you have this?”
He drew a jagged breath. “The Emperor gave it to me.”
I looked at him, really looked at him. There was a hunted, nervous strain to him, like an animal pursued too long by a predator. His eyes looked too large for his face now.
“He . . . he gave it to me in exchange for this ship,” Gladdic said.
“What?”
“I sold him the Atlas for that bust. He immediately sold the Atlas to someone else. He gambles extravagantly when he gets the chance, so he’s probably already squandered it all. . . . He’s told me how kind he’s being to let me stay onboard until its new owner collects it.” Gladdic’s face twisted. “I didn’t exactly secure a bargain,” he admitted.
“Why would you agree to that?” I exclaimed. Then I recalled him also agreeing to stick his hand into the gravity ring. “You’re that afraid of him now.”
“I’m one of his favorite amusements lately,” Gladdic said bitterly. “He took to making me use Venalox with him, since it’s not an enjoyable drug and no one else wants to try it. It was after you left. Daily for a while. Then he grew bored . . . until the day after the news reached everyone that you were alive. . . . He wanted to celebrate. He made me use it, then convinced me to sell him my ship. This ship. For the price of that bust.”
I was speechless.
“Venalox really does something to your mind,” muttered Gladdic, rubbing his head. “It honestly seemed like such a great bargain when he suggested it.”
“Yes, I recall how that works.”
“It’s a bit of a bind,” Gladdic said, voice shaky. “This is what he used to kill my father. I . . . So you know how I feel looking at it. But it’s also the bust of a Domitrian. I can’t not display it. Not without insulting the Emperor. So I have to see it every single day. Every single one.”
I recalled Gladdic sticking his hand in the gravity ring. Tyrus ordered it, and then laughed it off as a joke afterward. It was a cruelty. Very deliberately inflicted. A fraction of the cruelty he’d received himself, but a very clear indication of the damage wrought by the Venalox. The real Tyrus never would have done this sort of thing.
“I can’t change anything that has already come to pass,” I told him, looking into Cygna’s sightless eyes, “but I can promise you, I’ll intervene in such things in the future.”
“Nemesis, you already saved my life once. With the Tigris. I would never ask you to risk yourself over anything so minor. . . .”
“Small things become great ones,” I snapped back. “So I’ll stop the minor offenses, too. And you needn’t thank me for not murdering you.”
He seemed to muster his courage, and then he met my eyes like it was difficult for him to hold them. “I . . . I consider myself . . . I like to think I am a friend to you. So please, listen to me. Things are not the same. He’s not the person you think he is.”
My eyes were on the bust. I had no illusion about Tyrus after four years on that toxin. I knew cruelty when I saw it. I knew there was no possibility the Tyrus I’d left could accept Pasus as a friend. As family. Not without something very essential within him being destroyed first, and the Venalox had certainly done that.
“Please be careful around him.”
“I think,” I told him, feeling a faint amusement, “that you’ve forgotten the sharpness of my teeth.”
“I wish . . .” His voice grew wistful. “I truly wish you would escape while you can. We could go together. We could steal away, on this ship, another, somehow. . . .”
I scowled. “Gladdic, are you in love with me still?”
“I . . . I . . . no. No, I’m not.”
“Good. Because if you were, I’d tell you to stop that. At once.”
He fell silent, and then a reluctant smile broke over his lips. His eyes were still sad, like he was witness to a tragedy in motion. “I am glad to see you again.”
“I came because I need an escort for tomorrow. You are the only person here I don’t despise. Will you do it?”
“Of course I will.”
I stepped away from him, then turned back. “And as your future Empress, I demand a wedding present from you. A bust of the late Grandeé Cygna would do.”
I could take this torment from him at least.
The tears that brightened his eyes made me escape his presence as quickly as possible, for fear that he’d soon need a hug.
I’d made up my mind, and my course was clear: wed Tyrus. Get him alone. Gauge the truth of the situation I’d returned to, and then inspire him to seek revenge with me. And if I could not . . . if he was truly so loyal to Pasus . . .
Then I would devise something new. There had to be some way to salvage this. I would find it if it killed me.