Bloodsong Ch. 06

"Even the . . ." Valeriana had to stop and realign her thoughts. Her rising understanding of what a surreal conversation they were having had made her mind hit a wall. "You . . . actually eat us?"

"Yes," Qurion replied, like they were discussing the price of fish. A closer study of his profile revealed a miniscule uptick of his mouth. "We don't care for how you taste, let me stress that. It's strictly a matter of principle."

Utter terror and absolute incomprehension warred within her.

"What . . . what sort of principle mandates that you eat people?"

"You're not people to us." He declared it without hate. As though he held it so firmly as a fact that the need to attach emotion had been worn down to nothing. "Did you know that in Cynihe, it's your world that tales of horror are woven around? If you deny us rights, if you treat us like animals, you have no room to complain when we return the favor."

"You still don't have to validate a wrongful belief by actually acting like animals."

It might be the most inadvisable thing to come out of her mouth in all her living years. The tightrope they'd walked since meeting frayed where she sat, moving closer and closer towards a snap. If Qurion were to launch himself at her, she'd cry out and run like blazes, but would not find within herself a reason to reproach him. She shouldn't have talked back, shouldn't have tried to argue, should have found some softer way to counter if she truly couldn't help herself.

"Tell me." Qurion's voice rang low. It was easy to pinpoint the breaks where it would have turned to shouting had he given it leave to. "When you were standing in the cargo hold — what did you feel? What thoughts went through your head?"

"I thought that it was disturbing. And sad." Valeriana ran the words through her head twice before speaking them, failing to find any insult or implication which he might object to. They were the truth.

They also sounded like something the Cynihean would appreciate hearing.

She was wrong on at least one of those accounts.

"Disturbing. Sad." Qurion laughed; a disquieting sound. True, as he laughed some of his menace deserted him, but in the aftermath he looked nothing so much as despairing. Anguished, she might even call it. A mood which Valeriana couldn't decide whether she felt more compelled to run from or try to alleviate, although she doubted that he'd ask her to do the latter. "Another question for you: can you guess why, coming here, we stole a ship from Carcera instead of Briseis' sister?"

"Your commander said it had been a mistake? That you had no way of knowing that it would pose a risk?"

"The Commander isn't an idiot. He's also, let's be fair, a bit of a liar. Carcera uses collars to make us dumb and docile. It's possible to recover if those are removed. Hard and time consuming, but possible. The methods Briseis' sister employs are— I've never heard of anyone coming back from what she does. If we'd stolen from her, we'd have a ship full of people to put out of their misery."

He rushed through the explanation as though it pained him to let it take a blink longer than necessary, leaving Valeriana digesting the beginning long after he was finished speaking. For that, however, he allowed her time. Though she didn't look his way, facing her knees with her hair preventing him from gleaning anything off of her countenance, her unease must be evident in her posture, if not her voice.

"I'm sorry."

"You keep using that word as though any of you know what it means." Glancing his way as he snapped at her was a mistake. Qurion had his teeth not quite barred, but showing enough that she could tell that they were as sharp as her own when shifted. "Do you know how the luckless down there were picked out?"

Valeriana hoped for the question to be rhetorical, but that didn't appear to be the case. She would have shrunk back if her limbs had done her the grace of cooperating. Failing that, she had no option but to answer him.

"There's something called a . . . rule of thirds?" The knowledge floated up feathery and almost formless from a Civilization class sat in years ago. It had come up on one of the written tests, she was fairly certain. "They select one child in every three born from a single female or parental unit, once all are above a certain age. Fourteen, I think?" She glanced at Qurion for confirmation and startled at the look he wore. It was awful, though not in a way that made her fear for her own safety. "Is that . . . is it wrong? It's what I learned in school." Probably. It could also be the case that she'd scored poorly on that test.

"It's correct," he replied, words clipped, voice distorted. "But who do you mean by 'they'?"

"Well, us? The Ancillary Council of Cynihe, or . . . I apologize, I'm not good with knowing which part of the government is in charge of what."

Qurion shook his head, though since she was avoiding meeting his eye, Valeriana only realized it two sentences after the fact. She fell silent, waiting. He wore the expression of someone wholly absorbed with sorting through words to find the right ones, and she didn't want to disturb him. Not even to apologize; not when he seemed to take the word 'sorry' as a taunt. Something that left her at a loss, since it was by far the most used one from her personal dictionary.

"No, you see, that would be just run-of-the-mill cruel. Say what you will about Tsikalayans, you have a knack for taking everything to the next level. What you do is leave it up to the parents to decide which of the sons and daughters they've loved and raised gets to have their brain fried into compliance. Two years into adulthood and you have yet to yield offspring? Circumvent the rules by having only one or two within ten years? That's everyone involved taken away on a one way trip to Barashi."

"That's . . ."

"Sad? Disturbing?" Valeriana couldn't tell if Qurion's tone was deriding her or attempting to make light of things. If the latter, it didn't work. The smile he tried to fasten in place kept sliding off. "Most adults do prefer to stay childless and unattached and reap the consequences. Better to live as a mindless tool than live with yourself after you've made a choice like that, understand? But, sure, the fact that we eat you, that's what sticks out as beastly."

"I'm just . . . I didn't mean it like . . ." Her awareness of how absurd it was to have this conversation with him — with anyone — bobbed back up. Valeriana shoved it down with a vengeance. "I'm sorry. I know that saying it doesn't make anything better, but I am. Truly. You're right, it is . . . it is cruel."

He shook his head, managing to appear at once irritated and irate. Though the latter sentiment ought to have overpowered the former and rendered it obsolete, Valeriana could still distinguish them. The irritation was targeted at her. The ire was not, radiating from him and lingering around without aim. Or perhaps just aiming at everything.

"It's unreal, you realize, that I have to explain these things and then see you looking back like a child who just learned where the roast on the table came from. I'm almost afraid to ask, but is this level of ignorance normal? I never got the impression that your kind feels ashamed of what you do, so why hide it from your own?"

"It's not that it's hidden, I knew, I'd just never... thought." She'd always been so much more concerned with what others thought of her. Busy worrying about her own future — Jack's, too, although that often felt like pouring milk in a can with a hole at the bottom — instead of the present of those around her. Slaves had been blips in her inner landscape, their plight never contemplated. "I know that it makes me sound immensely uncaring, or stupid—"

Qurion didn't agree aloud, but neither did he hasten to assure her otherwise.

"—and I won't say another word about. Er."

She resorted to making fluttery hand motions at the empty fish tin, since she had, after all, just promised.

He gave her a slow blink.

"... no. First explain why that's what you got stuck on. You just brought it up again to specify that you wouldn't be bringing it up again. My gut tells me I shouldn't want to know, but I can't help myself. What is it about this particular way of disposal that's ruffling your feathers so much?"

"Uh. Well." 'Because yuck!' would not, Valeriana knew, be deemed acceptable. "To a Tsikalayan, consuming anything capable of speech is considered . . . well, it's not serious on the level of a blood crime, but much worse, more of a disrespect, than simply leaving a body unburnt."

Qurion scoffed, but without venom.

"That so? Thank you for telling me this. I had no idea that there were cultural hang-ups attached."

"Is that not why it's done? I mean, it's disgusting. Why else do it, if not for knowing that it bothers us?"

"For some of us, it's the only meat we get to taste our whole lives." There'd been something almost like levity in how they regarded each other, for a few moments, before his reply chased it away and his shoulders stiffened once more. "There's not a lot of food to go around on Cynihe, you realiz—well, if you weren't paying attention to all the rest, I expect that you wouldn't realize."

"But . . ." Despite knowing herself far from well-educated on such matters, Valeriana had an awareness of Cynihe figuring among the worlds which Barashi used as breadbaskets. "A lot of our food comes from there, so . . . oh."

"Surprisingly, the conclusion you just drew is the wrong one. You'd think we'd be starving as a logical consequence of you depleting our resources, yes? But no, it's the other way around. You deplete our resources and restrict our access to food with the intended effect that we starve. It's a tightly controlled process. After all, we're not wanted dead, only too weak to pose a problem."

"That is—"

"Yes. Now try telling me again that you're not monsters, and that I'm wrong in looking forward to the day your world burns." He'd managed to get a smile to stick. It came with a bitter, glass sharp edge. Valeriana was positive that his face didn't shake it off as it had the others because it more resembled a dead rictus. "Most of us that your kind takes need to be fattened up a month or two before sale, so that they don't appear too scrawny on the auction block. I suppose that's one thing the chosen take out of it. They lose themselves, but at least for once in their life they get to gorge— you're shaking."

"I am?" she echoed, a little bewildered. It wasn't that she hadn't realized, but to her mind she didn't shake any more noticeably than she'd been during the entire course of their exchange. Certainly not so much more as to make it worth bringing up.

"You still are, and it beats me why. After all I've told you, I'd think you'd recognize that if anyone here has a reason to be trembling in the other's presence, it's me."

A peal of laughter bubbled out of her before she could help herself.

"Well. I'm very harmless, really."

"Hrm." He eyed her as though he questioned the claim, which was such a peculiar response that Valeriana was left eyeing him back, a flush creeping up her neck. If his examination yielded conclusions, he elected not to share them. Gruffly, he added: "You can relax. As long as you forego strangling me or collaring me and hanging a sales sign around my neck, I won't feel even the slightest itch to take a nip."

"I wouldn't do that, I—I wouldn't."

"Then we have no quarrel, and neither of us suffers whichever ghastly fate. See? It's this easy. We are a simple people to not be at war with, believe it or not. Don't invade us and take our home from us, and we won't retaliate by baking you into pies." A pause. "That's in a manner of speaking. Though I can't say for sure if we wouldn't go there if there was enough flour."

Valeriana didn't think that Qurion meant for her to be put so at ease that she should crack a smile at that, and therefore didn't risk it. She did relax, not all the way, but enough that some tension vanished from his shoulders in response. She wondered if she had, all along, been unwittingly infecting him with her anxiety. If they would, from here on out, be on better terms than cordiality with a faint tang of stalemate.

She felt divided on whether to hope for that, when there remained one question she needed answered before she gave herself permission to ease up around him. Daring to ask it was already a step forward.

"You said that it's not personal, as far as I'm concerned. I'd just like to know . . . I mean, I believe that you won't try to kill me." A wash of embarrassed, fire red warmth spread from her neck to her cheeks when Qurion made a face that couldn't telegraph 'finally!' more clearly or wearily. "But. Would you like to see me dead?"

He whistled.

"Now that's a question. I don't know. I don't know you. I know that Briseis vouched for you, and that's enough for me to give you the benefit of the doubt, for now." He fell silent while she tried to make heads or tails of her feelings on that answer, but picked back up before she could sort herself out. "The others . . . may or may not be of the same mind. Which is why I wanted you away from that kitchen, earlier."

"Would they have . . ."

"No. Insulted you, at most. But they're good at insulting and you appear sensitive."

Valeriana felt inclined to take offense at his assessment, but then she'd be proving it correct. Because it was correct, unfortunately.

"You like Mrs. Drakma, though. Or at least you trust her enough to extend me a bit of goodwill because she said you could." Qurion frowned, trying to discern what she meant to get at. She chanced a smile, sheepish and hopefully reassuring: "I'm just thinking aloud. Trying to guess what the criteria are for being a Tsikalayan that you don't mind the existence of."

"You could simply ask," he scoffed. "Briseis has been a friend to Cynihe for longer than your kind has ruled there. She aided us in the war that lost us our world, and in every uprising since. That's my benchmark. I'd see every Tsikalayan dead . . . save for those who stand with us instead of trampling us. Not that I think highly of those who sit idly by, either."

"I'm . . . that, I'm afraid." It was bizarre, insane and decidedly inadvisable that she argue for her removal from the list of those he deemed underserving of death, but Valeriana was too put off by the notion of figuring on it unfairly. "I don't work for Mrs. Drakma. Or with her. I'm not a part of her organization, she's just helping me until, well . . . and she must have told you she's trying to get me to join, but I—"

"Why does she have to try to convince you?"

"Because—" Realization struck her like a lightning bolt. It was suddenly so obvious. She felt like a fool for not considering the possibility first of all, when it had been so evident from Qurion's demeanor that he deplored her company. She should have suspected immediately that he only kept it because he'd been told to. "She put you up to this, didn't she? Told you to tell me about these things to make me—"

"Does it matter, if you needed to hear them? If you have the slightest speck of decency within you, if you don't like what you've been shown about the way things are, then don't look away. Listen to Briseis. She's offering you a chance to be less like the rest of you, to make a—"

"I mislike being manipulated." There was this to be said about her family, about anyone who'd ever wanted anything from her: they'd never resorted to subterfuge. They came in and took, or they ordered her around point blank, wasting no time or effort on games. Mrs. Drakma, on the other hand, was 'heed my exact words, on which you'll slip' tossed in with 'read between the lines and also this fine print down here, but only when I say you ought to'. It felt jarring, especially because she did believe that the woman's desire to help her was genuine. "She's so . . . so scheming, but then she'll be forward about the scheming, and I'm hopeless at making sense of her. I see a lot of things differently than I did last week, but I don't see the things she claims to see in me. If I joined her, I'd be—"

'I'd be betraying my world and my people,' was how the sentence ought to have concluded, but didn't. Didn't, because in the end Qurion had said enough, shaken her enough to strip the argument of power.

"I'd be useless."

"That's your reason?" Valeriana wished he'd stop giving her that look of bereft, strained patience that suggested he viewed her as analogous to a toddler who refused to be dissuaded from eating chalk sticks. An impression all but confirmed when he went on. "It's a dumb reason. However little you manage to get done, it's better than doing nothing."

"Me doing something already got one girl killed." A fact that no amount of consoling words from Mrs. Drakma would change, and placing the blame at Lady Marabeth's feet would not absolve her from. Not when every night she smelled a bonfire. Not when all the parts of her that hated her and were forever looking for reasons to do it harder kept her from leaving that day behind. "That was how this started — I still see her in my nightmares. She won't stop asking me for help, but I couldn't help her then, and there's nothing I can do for her now."

"Why?"

"Because . . . she's dead?"

He shook his head and looked up. At the stars, again, or something to her unseen. It took a while for him to speak.

"There's much you can do for the dead. In Cynihe, we don't believe we'll wander the Great Black after we're through with this life. We live on in every deed that those we've touched carry out in our name. It being so, it's our duty to ensure that the ones who have left us live on in deeds they'd take pride in. But—" Here his eyes found hers, the way they glinted causing them to appear as unsettling as their gray counterparts, "—you understand that much, or something along the same lines, already. You wouldn't have a dead girl begging for your help unless you knew, buried down deep, that there's a way to make it matter that she once walked this world. You wouldn't be haunted if you didn't realize that you are failing her. So why do you persist?"

Valeriana dropped her head in her hands.

Twice before she'd had it happen. Twice she'd been assailed by that clear as water, terrible sureness that placed her outside herself, erecting a fortress of ice spires inside her head and burning, in swiping red streaks going straight ahead, the One True Road to Follow. Twice she'd allowed that feeling to command her, rule her, and both times a dead body had been the net result.

Not knowing what to do wasn't the problem. The problem was knowing what the most likely outcome of her actions would end up being.

She badly didn't want the next body to be hers.

"I'm afraid," she replied, instead of sharing all of that. "So, so afraid. I don't think—I'm a coward. I suppose that's what's at the heart of it. I'm a coward."

"No." Qurion sounded almost kind. A fact he seemed taken aback, even embarrassed by, once he realized it. Valeriana wasn't sure if Cyniheans had the ability to blush, but the darkening of his cheeks suggested so. "I know next to nothing about you, but I say you aren't that."

"I've been terrified witless the whole time I've sat here."

"And yet, here you sit." He cleared his throat and went on, sterner, as though trying to make up for slipping. "You owe this dead girl a debt for making your eyes come open. The belief that you'll do better by doing nothing? That's poison. Spit it out, bleed it out, however you do, get rid of it. It serves neither you nor her memory."