Chains and Memory (31 page)

Julian didn't need convincing. He doubted that even the surgeons who put the shield in place recognized what they were anchoring it to. While it was possible to lay a magical compulsion on someone, the
geas
was a different order of magnitude entirely. It had lasted for millennia, and been inherited by every descendant of sufficiently strong blood; it had the power to kill when broken. That had been pure legend until the sidhe returned, and even now, very few people knew it was truly possible.

Secret after secret. The secret that removing the shield killed; the secret of the
geas
; the secret that those two things were linked. And finally, the secret the Unseelie woman claimed to share, that the
geas
did more than they had been told.

If it was true, then the world would need to know. But if it was a gambit on the part of the Unseelie, then Julian was not about to assist them in spreading it. Telling those two apart was not something he and Kim could do in the time they spent jogging back to the National Mall. Therefore, caution was the best course.

They reported everything else: the accusations against the Seelie, that they had provoked the riot and manipulated Kim into being shielded. And, of course, the assurance the sidhe had offered for the truth of her words.

“Lying,” Nantakarn murmured, staring off into the middle distance. “That's something we can test, at least.”

It wasn't Julian's place to press, but— “The seer, Shard. If they refuse to let anyone meet with her, that will imply it's true. And if they allow it . . . I suspect that I, at least, would be able tell if she's changed.”

If Shard had been lying to humans enough to cripple herself, then he wouldn't be the only one who knew her well enough to recognize a change. But he wanted to look her in the eye and see it for himself.

He wanted to ask her
why
.

Nantakarn waved this away. “Not my decision. And not something for us to deal with right now, regardless.” He straightened up and dismissed the cone of silence. The quiet roar of agents and Guardians at work came flooding back. “Well done, both of you. Not as well done as it might have been—you should have signaled before pursuing, even if you expected to have backup—but it's more than we would have had otherwise. Olga will take you to file the formal reports. Dismissed.”

Kim offered Julian a weary smile as they threaded back through the crowd. “After enlightenment, chop wood, file reports. Oh, the glamour of being a Guardian.”

~

We didn't hear anything for a while after the riot. Sarabhai issued a public statement decrying the violence, but she didn't accuse either Court of anything. I hadn't expected her to. The investigation into the cause of the attack would be happening quietly, out of the public eye. In the meanwhile everyone assumed it was just the expected tensions boiling over—and, of course, they blamed the authorities for failing to prevent it.

I couldn't say they were wrong. We
should
have prevented it. The security forces at the other end of the Mall should have noticed that group splitting away. Our own forces shouldn't have been swept up in the Unseelie entrancement. I should have had my mind on the job, instead of having epiphanies that threw both my mind and Julian's into turmoil yet again.

When I thought about what the Unseelie woman had told us, I realized there was a gaping hole in her logic. Pretend for a moment that what she said was true, and the
geas
really did compel us to not trust her Court. Why then would she bother to make that offer? I wasn't going to turn to them for help—not unless I changed my mind about trusting them, which according to her I couldn't do.

One thing was certain, though. She was right about the Seelie not removing it.

“I asked Falcon, right before the Unseelie came,” Julian said on our way home from the riot. “He refused. Not for the reason she said—he thinks the shield protects us.”

“We'll just have to persuade him,” I said. “And by ‘persuade,' I mean ‘browbeat.'” I'd managed to push him into giving us information and assistance before, but not by using sweet reason.

That we needed the help of the sidhe, I had no doubt. No one in the mortal world had the first clue how to lay a compulsion of that strength and durability. What were the odds we could take it off again? Oh, sure—maybe if we just whacked at the thing with the psychic equivalent of a hammer until it cracked. But that was guaranteed to kill the target. Even if we were more careful, we'd lose gods knew how many people before we figured it out.

I tried not to think about whether any wilders would volunteer as test subjects, for the sake of the other Fiain.

I tried not to think about whether
Julian
would volunteer.

His silence made me fear he might be considering it. Late one night, when I was curled up tight against his side in bed, I ventured to ask, “What's on your mind?”

His stomach muscles tensed beneath my arm. A year ago, I never would have voiced this kind of question. I'd spent most of our time at Welton striving to respect Julian's privacy—perhaps too well, given his isolation there. Now I felt like I at least had leave to ask, if not the certainty of an answer.

This time he did answer me. It took him a moment, but when he spoke, he didn't brush me off with a noncommittal response, the way he would have done before. “The
geas
. It has me questioning . . . everything.”

I raised my head to look at him. “What do you mean?”

His gaze was on the ceiling, as if he needed that point of stability. “Not the Seelie. At least, not in the way she meant. But—” His lips thinned. “My whole life, I've taken pride in being one of the Fiain. After First Manifestation, the wilders who survived the onslaught of their gifts worked to restore order. They were the first Guardians, before there was a name for it. They founded the Corps, and their successors have been its spine ever since. You've seen the wall at the Corps headquarters, the names of Guardians who have died in the line of duty. How many of the names there are green, for a wilder? We've given our lives and our deaths for the greater good.”

He stopped, and I realized it was a reflexive pause, allowing him to make certain his composure wouldn't slip. “I should have seen it sooner,” he whispered. “The Seelie admitted the
geas
compels us to protect others against magic. But it wasn't until today that I realized . . . that thing I'm so proud of—our history, our tradition—how much of that is us? And how much is the
geas
?”

I tightened my arm around him, as if a mere hug could push those questions away. I wanted to reassure him, tell him he was being foolish and nothing had changed.

But any such easy reassurance would be false. Instead I said, “One soldier is drafted for war; another volunteers. They both die defending their cause. Should we value one sacrifice less that the other?”

“It isn't about what we've
done
,” Julian said. “It's about what we
are
.”

Their culture—their identity. The selfless, driven protectors who gave up so much of their own freedom and happiness for the rest of us.

I was thinking of wilders as
them
, not as
us
. And that was part of the answer right there. “If it were all the
geas
talking, then I should have changed a lot more when my Krauss rating went high enough for it to kick in.”

Julian laid his cheek against the top of my head. “You wanted to be a Guardian even before you were a wilder. How much of a change could there be? And besides . . . even if part of it is learned, something we get from our training and our lives at the Center, all of that ultimately has its roots in the
geas
.”

I squirmed away until I could rise up on one elbow and look down at him. His eyes were pale in the light from the window. “Julian Fiain,” I said, “I do not believe the only thing that makes you who you are is the
geas
. Not even indirectly. I think that if it were gone tomorrow, you'd still risk your life to help other people. And I think a lot of the other Fiain would do the same. Maybe not all of them — and sure, forty years from now you'll have some wilders who would rather pursue careers as florists than throw themselves into the line of fire. But I think most of them will still want to help. Because you're human, and one of your gifts is empathy. You won't stand idly by and let people suffer. Not when you could help.”

His eyes glimmered. Then he reached up and took my face between his hands, holding me there for a silent moment before drawing me down for a kiss.

~

We didn't talk about Julian's fears after that.

We went back to training with Grayson—and if I thought I'd seen Julian's capacity for monomaniacal focus before, now I discovered just how far he could go. He woke before me, sometimes to the point of leaving the apartment before I even opened my eyes; now that we had access to the Aegis Building, he had exactly the kind of practice space we'd been lacking beforehand, and he didn't hesitate to make use of it. It crossed my mind that he was trying to prove to himself that this was something he
chose
, not something pushed on him by the
geas
. But I was wise enough not to say it.

In a sense, he and I were both holding our breath. Sooner or later we would have to act on what we knew . . . but first, we had to know whether that Unseelie woman had told the truth about lying.

I chewed on it from every angle during that time. Even if it was true that lying hurt them, the effect clearly wasn't obvious: they didn't wince or cry out in pain or anything. Otherwise Grayson would have known something was amiss, back when the Seelie claimed to have rescued me from the Unseelie ambush at Welton. So that woman could have told us the truth in general, but still been lying in specific, when she claimed the Seelie were behind the attacks on me.

The more I thought about that, the more plausible it seemed. The best way to hide a falsehood was to wrap it in a covering of truth.

I thanked the gods I'd thought of the
geas
as the root of the shield before she said anything. Had the idea come from her first, I would never have trusted it. But I was willing to take her comment as tentative confirmation—which meant we needed to plan how to proceed.

“I'm inclined to tell Grayson first,” I told Julian a few nights later, over takeout curry. Neither of us had the energy right now to deal with even the easiest of meal prep.

Chewing and swallowing gave him a moment to think. “From a protocol standpoint, that isn't the right course.”

“I know. This is a wilder thing, not a Guardian thing, so we should be talking to someone in the DSPA. But we're probably going to get her busted as soon as we do anything about this, because we can't just wave our hands in the air and pretend we figured out the shield kills all by ourselves.” I dumped another spoonful of rice onto my plate. In the normal way of things stress might have put me off my food, but the energy I was burning these days demanded a steady supply of fuel. “Besides . . . I trust her. She's helped us over and over again, here and at Welton. I'll feel better taking this step if I know I've got her at my back.”

“Don't say anything until we know for sure,” Julian said.

Meaning, until we knew what effect lying had. It might turn out to be very relevant when we asked the Seelie for help in removing the
geas
. “I won't,” I promised.

The problem with that was, it seemed increasingly unlikely that we would get a clear-cut answer. But as Julian had said to Nantakarn in the aftermath of the riot, evasion was a kind of answer in its own right.

He got the message eight days after the riot. “They haven't openly refused,” Julian said as we headed for the Metro. “But they won't bring her out, either.”

Shard. I'd never met her in person; all I knew was that she was a seer, and the one who had foreseen what would happen to me, though not in its specific details. Of all the sidhe, Shard was the closest Julian had to a friend. “I'm sorry,” I said, and threaded my fingers through his.

He held on tight the entire way home.

~

Julian was already gone by the time I got up the following morning. There was a nine a.m. meeting at headquarters, a riot post-mortem; our higher-ups had finished their analysis of the events and were going to tell us in detail how we'd screwed up. I didn't blame Julian for wanting to get some practice in before lining up with the rest of us for the firing squad.

Reluctance made my own feet drag, almost to the point of making me late. When I slipped into the auditorium, Sarabhai was already at the microphone, and we'd run out of seats; I had to stand along the back wall between people I didn't know. By craning my neck, I was able to find Neeya, Toby, and Inola, but not Julian.

Before long I was cursing whoever had thought we could all fit in the auditorium—or maybe people had shown up who didn't have to, in which case I cursed them instead. My annoyance was equal-opportunity, though; I also cursed myself for not getting out the door faster, which at a minimum would have gotten me a seat, and probably would have meant I could sit with Julian. I dearly wanted to scan for his mind and send a few choice comments his way, but I didn't stand a prayer of hiding that in a room packed full of professionally alert psychics.

So I had to stand, on feet that were going increasingly numb, while Sarabhai outlined all of our mistakes. Nobody had yet determined what effect the Unseelie used to hide their presence before they reached the stage, but we'd mostly shielded ourselves against straight-up attacks, rather than the more insidious forms of influence. The problem with shielding against the latter, of course, was that it interfered with sensing other people's emotional states, which would have hampered us in other respects. But, as Sarabhai pointed out, we should have divided our preparations, leaving a few people heavily sealed and ready to alert the rest of us if we fell under an enchantment.