Eagles and Swans
Chapter 33: The Liminal
In the spiralling morning grey, Tanio sat staring so intently at the pages of the Morning Herald that he wouldn’t have noticed if a naga had smashed straight through the floor. His eyes were ringed with black, like soot, and he was dishevelled, his coffee table even more of a hurricane-swept mess than usual.
“You’ve got two days of freedom left,” she said, then sighed when his expression clouded. “Don’t waste them in here.”
“I don't think I could enjoy anything right now,” he answered. “But your care means everything. Truly.” Shaking her head, she left the sullen inventor in his armchair.
Some rummaging in the kitchen revealed that her employer hadn’t restocked the pantry since they’d run out yesterday. Apparently he had been so busy sulking around that he’d forgotten they still needed to stay alive. She munched on stiff bread and gulped the old milk down, glad it hadn’t turned sour at least. Very soon, sour milk would be the least of her problems.
*
Mounting her umbrella in the drizzly wind out on her boss' porch, Ruthenia leapt and flew through the rain, over the fields, like a sparrow. The rain rolled off her leather jacket. Her heart raced when the wind twisted her flight into drops and swerves, and once, she even rolled in a full midair spin, the way Ms. Decanda had taught them three months ago.
At the time, watching the woman roll had struck such horror into her that she’d decided, before she’d tried, that she would fall every time. Yet now that she knew she might never be so free again, Ruthenia flew like it was the thing she loved most in the world.
She flew madly, tasting the wind and the drizzle, all this fear and pain scattering like snowflakes, until grey Helika Plaza with its four-swan fountain came into view.
It seemed the unseasonable rain had scared even the most eager of the customers away. The wet black lampposts with their iron curlicues seemed almost alien without pedestrians leaning against them, smoking cigarettes and breathing swirls of smoke into the air.
All the pedestrians stood in the shelter of the ambulatory that passed in front of the shops of the plaza, warming their hands in doorways and pulling their coats tighter against the chill. Ruthenia pulled her jacket tighter around herself.
She slowed to a landing near the start of the eastern row of shops, sighing when the shelter took the pounding of drops off her face. The warmth of the nearest café, the Liminal, soaked into her skin, accompanied by the scent of coffee. Other flavours soon joined the rich bitterness—jams and pies and that famous Astran toast again. She sighed.
The glass façade gleamed with her cold windswept silhouette and the grey of the sky behind. Ynder curling gold-leaf chandeliers laden with Thread lamps, couples and businessmen inside spoke and dined, rosy with health, all unaware of the girl watching them.
“Ruthenia.” She turned away from the glass in the direction the voice had come from.
The Arcane Prince was dressed in black, white, and gold today, and if his equine had come along with him, he must already have put him away in the stables. His sun golden hair hung in a braid over his shoulder.
She hooked her umbrella on her arm, dragging her gaze away before it became too obvious that she was staring. Stopping beside her, he turned to the café. “You like this one?”
Ruthenia gaped. “What?” People passing them by either tipped their hats or stared. “I don't have a hundred argents.”
He took her wrist, and then they had passed through the glass door, golden bells jangling. “I'm not expecting you to pay,” he answered as the air grew warm around her.
The walls were a creamy gold. Light refracted through glass in precise patterns that scattered the brilliance all over the room, and triangles of sunlight glowed on facing walls. Iron brackets held floating spheres of crystal. All across the ceiling, too, glass beads and crystals hung in arcs in the air.
The receptionist’s face went slack at the sight of the entering customers. ”Good afternoon, Your Highness!” he said with a bow, straightening his bowtie with two tugs. “I was not aware that you would be dining here, or else we could have made proper reservations…”
Aleigh shook his head. “Can't I make casual visits?” he replied.
The man’s smile was renewed. “Well, I suppose you are at liberty to do as you please, Your Highness, and you are in luck for we do have vacancies,” he resumed. “Two dining?”
“Yes, and get us a table away from everyone else.” With a nod, the man called for a waiter to show them to their seats. Ruthenia’s gaze wandered about while they wove between tables. Other guests’ gazes flew to the two, mouths opening.
“This place is too much, who even dines here?” she muttered as she caught sight of a full-height mural of swans in flight on the inner wall. More gazes came their way as they passed between the seats. Ahead of them, their waiter gestured them to a two-seat table in a corner, by the glass, where the empty Plaza and its forlorn fountain shone through.
She watched the rain shimmer on granite paving stones, all across the deserted Helika Square. Occasionally pedestrians hustled by, with open umbrellas swelled by wind.
Ruthenia unbuttoned her jacket and draped it over the chair. “So,” she said haltingly as they sat down. “What's new?”
From here, they spoke in hushed undertones. “The fleet leave at six o’clock on Saturday,” Aleigh said. “They will not launch the attack immediately. They intend to circle near the bay until eight o'clock, when they believe Lilin will cease her aggressive mood. They will weaken her with the first round of explosives, and then send Leon into the sea to incapacitate her. Leon will be in the ship leading the fleet. He will dive into the sea carrying the Glaive, and enter her to locate her heart. Once he’s safely retrieved and returned to the vessel, they will release a second wave of explosives meant to complete the task.
“As for the Glaive itself, the blade is capable of cutting through any material, physical or ethereal. It leaves a corrosion that prevents wounds from healing, and it is said that the eternal agony of a Glaive wound is what drives deities to death.”
She frowned. “On the hull, between six and eight…that gives me the perfect window of opportunity.”
He did not answer, only lifted a finger to his lips, then looked up. A hand reached into their visions, presenting them two brown booklets.
“Thank you sir,” she snatched her menu, fingers running over the gold-embossed shop name.
“Do you mean to take the Glaive?” asked Aleigh once the waiter was gone. Her brow knitted. “Yes. I will land on their deck and take it. I will dive into the ocean and cut her free. And once I do it, it doesn't matter what happens to me.”
Aleigh frowned, but said nothing.
“What? What's wrong with that? Do you think that won't work?”
For the longest minute, he was silent. And then he murmured, “I'm starting to understand. You don't see yourself as a person, but as a means to an end.”
“I have no choice!"
"You do have a choice!” he snapped.
“It doesn’t matter what happens to me,” she repeated. “If I can stop one more senseless death by the clergy's vote, then I would rather my life be spent that way, than that I sat aside and let it happen.”
“Please, that doesn't have to be your war to wage.”
“Why are you trying to stop me?”
They fell quiet, neither seeming to know what to follow with.
Their waiter chose to return in the midst of the frigid silence, but quickly doubled back. “May I—take your orders?” his voice came timidly.
Aleigh was first to lift his gaze. “I'll have coffee with cream, and the chocolate berry cake,” he said in a single breath.
“One slice?”
“Two,” Ruthenia answered.
The waiter nodded, turning to her. “Anything else?”
“Uh…” she consulted the menu again, “I’ll have this chocolate” —she twisted her lips at the next word—”or-queil?”
The waiter seemed to know which one she meant. As Aleigh confirmed the orders, her eyes drifted over and she began to study him: wavy golden hair loosely braided over his shoulder, eyelashes glimmering in the lights.
She tore her gaze away when his returned. Breathing out, she began to run her finger along the edge of the table.
“Ruthenia, tell me—what happens if you fail in this mission?”
“Well, if I fail,” she said, “then I will probably die at sea. But all I'd have to do is spoil their attempt on her life, so they never try it again.”
“And what if you succeed?”
“Then she'll be free. And I'll return to my imprisonment. Or jail, since I escaped my arrest.”
“No. You’d have participated in a project in mechanical flight, broken house arrest, and obstructed the military to save a being that the clergy voted to kill,” he answered. “You'd be the face of sacrilege, and they will execute you, Ruthenia. You know how such grand treason is punished.”
“I—well—” Ruthenia swallowed— “That's fine! It's—”
It was death in the name of justice. Of doing the right thing. For Lilin. For her parents.
Her parents? Hadn't they done this, too?
But as her heart began to plummet nauseatingly, she realised:
She didn't want to do this.
She had thought it would come naturally. And it had been easy, years ago, to hold herself as an instrument to some greater plan. That furnace of agony and hatred, stoked by every gunshot, had powered her this far, never winding down even after she had left the streets behind.
But there were people here now. The world was warm, and she had started to like it—to hope for something more than nothing. Cracks had veined through the walls, and now, she no longer yearned to throw herself into that bottomless pit and disappear.
Her heart roared for life. She wanted to live. Free as a bird.
But she'd be a prisoner in two days' time. Lilin would die in five. Or she would die. No, she would die, one way or another. In the sea, or on the plaza.
“I don’t know,” she croaked. “I don't know—I don’t know what I want.” Terror broke through her like spears, and tears spilled when they pierced her. She tried to wipe them off, but more kept coming.
“I’m sorry,” said Aleigh.
Ruthenia blinked the next wave of tears out of her eyes. The café came into focus again, as did her companion's anguished stare.
“No, don’t be, I'm glad you asked, but I'm—” she whispered—voice cracking on the last word— “I'm terrified.”
“It hurts to watch you throw yourself to near-certain death,” his blurry voice said.
“You’re right.” She stared at her hands, and all she felt was the roiling of waters around her, and all she heard were Lilin's screams. “I’ll probably die if I go. And I don't want to die, either. But I have to. I know I can help her. And I'm in too deep to give up.”
“If there’s anyone who could best such odds, it’s you,” replied Aleigh.
“And if I don't?”
“It would destroy me.”
“Stop, please.” With her sleeve she scoured those tears off her face. “There, no more tears. Now you can stop coddling me.”
“I quite like being sincere, thank you very much,” he answered. “Ruthenia, it has brought me immeasurable joy to know you. And it will tear me apart to lose you.”
She hunched her shoulders, grinning through her tears. “As if I’ve ever been more than a nuisance.”
“I'm sorry to say, but you've been a lot more than a nuisance.”
“I showed you how to buy milkshake once,” she said.
“You did.”
Ruthenia laughed. Then the warmth was eclipsed by a thousand terrors. “But after tomorrow, after the fleet sets sail—”
By now, she already knew what she had to do. Her cause was far greater than herself—one that wouldn't die when she did. There were people she loved as much as life itself, and she wanted for them a world where priests and kings could not toy with lives unchallenged. She wanted that for her friends and foes, the ones wronged by the law, the ones puppeted by it—a world where life was more than just a pawn in the political game. And that meant—
“Someone must stand up to this decree,” she said. “So I will. I will resist. That's what we must do until the law bends.”
“Laws don't change for one person, Ruthenia.”
“My mother changed the law,” she answered.
“I wish you wouldn't become your mother.”
Her drink arrived in a glass flute, placed on their tabletop with a clink. Even staring into the swirling cream flowers in the drink, the ribbons of chocolate that curled from within the glass, she couldn't forget that the meal lain before them was the very last they'd share.
Aleigh pushed the saucer of cake across the glass tabletop. “Why don't you have yours first? Let me know what you think.”
She watched him smile sadly, waiting for her to take her share. And she grew devastatingly certain that she was in love with him.
Before the realisation could reach her face, Ruthenia snatched her spoon and began stuffing cake into her mouth.
Seeming not to notice anything, Aleigh began to fish about in his pocket. “Oh yes, before I forget, I have something for you…”
She perked up as he placed a small bevelled black box on the table and slid it across. “What's this?” she asked, lifting it. For its size, it seemed almost too dense.
“Think of it as a reminder,” he answered, breaking eye contact, “seeing as my chances of meeting you again after this are—dismal.”
She ignored the sting of tears when he spoke those words. Instead she pried the lid open, and shook the concealed object out of its nest of rustling paper.
Out slid a glittering golden pendant bearing the image of a bird. She lifted it to the light. It an eagle spiralling around a star, surmounted on a circle.
“What should I do with it?”
He stared at the gift in her hands. “Well...you can wear it, or sell it if you need the aurs.”
Ruthenia felt her throat ache. Why now, when this was the end of it—friendship, alliance, or anything more? She slipped it back into the box. “Thank you so much,” she breathed, and a pang of sadness cut her short. She pushed the box into her coat pocket. "What does it...what does it matter now? I'm going to be dead in a week's time." She began to sob mid-sentence. "I'll be gone."
“You are still here, right now.” He reached out to brush her hand, and when she lifted it from the table, he wrapped his fingers around it. With one hand held in his, she finished her slice of cake, and pushed the saucer back to him.
Then she sipped her drink slowly, letting the flavours suffuse her mouth. Who knew when she'd have anything so good again? Who knew?
They left their empty dishes and glasses on the tabletop, though it alarmed Ruthenia that you could do that without anyone yelling at you. The receptionist greeted them chirpily, and Aleigh offered a compliment as he paid their bill of thirty argents with a cheque.
“Thirty? For just two slices of cake and two drinks?”
“I expected it to come up to more, frankly.”
They left the cafe's warmth and burbling conversation, out into the steady whisper of rain. As the glass door swung shut behind them, she listened to her shoes clack on paving stones.
“I must return to the palace,” Aleigh said, then paused. “You...really are going to go through with it, aren’t you?”
She thought of dying like that—of sinking, cold and dead, into the icy Deeps, or of debris exploding through the water in trails of bubbles, stabbing her through the gut. And she wanted to say no. But she nodded. “Everything is ready to go now—and I—” Her words caught in her throat, and she cried, “Why didn't you cancel your plans? Couldn’t we have made this meeting longer? I’ll never talk to you again after this! Never! No matter what we do, no matter how everything goes—once I leave, we’re done forever!”
Tears were spilling down her cheeks again. She sputtered and choked on all her words—until he gripped her shoulders, and she stood staring right at him. “Oh, Ruthenia…”
She gasped as he pulled her into a tight embrace and pressed a kiss to her forehead—and she sobbed and laughed in turns, as that gentle floral perfume enveloped her. “It won't be forever,” he said, voice trembling. “If anyone could do what no one else ever has, it would be you.”
She threw her arms around him. “I’m not that powerful,” she replied.
“I think you are far more than you realise.”
Her arms tightened around him, and for several dizzy seconds, she wished she could stay here and soak in his existence for the rest of time. But she sank away when she realised she was enjoying it too much.
And so her very last half-hour with Aleigh Luzerno drew to its close. Nothing in the world could change her course now—nothing short of the heavens descending to the world.
“Well, I’ll see you,” Ruthenia said simply, “in the news or something.”
“Likewise,” answered Aleigh, who extended a hand in a small gesture of farewell.
The girl—now no more than a rebel and a criminal—took the Arcane Prince's hand in both of hers, and bowed to kiss his fingertips. This was how she should address him, as a subordinate, and starting today, she was no more a friend to him—him and the Astran government—than she was an enemy.