The Scorpion Rules (14 page)

I do not know what made my mother object to the tradition of being painted in white, but object she did, and fiercely, her accent getting away from her until she was rolling
R
s like a fisherman and spitting like a whale. She brought me the royal tartans and a crown to wear. When I objected on the grounds that I was not of age and it was utterly inappropriate for me to dress as a ruling monarch, she brought me the gown I'd worn at the Yule Ball.

That gown. It was taffeta, printed in flowers. Not pastel, dainty blooms but huge sweeps of goldenrod and blue morning glory, ivy that was almost black, roses the red that roses really are. I had worn it to the ball; I had had too much punch; I had flushed and danced; I had been interviewed and told the world, and Elián, that I was not afraid.

Ah, that gown: it turned my head, more than I care to admit. And when my mother had said something sharp and strange—“Blister it, Greta, I want just one picture of you not dressed as Joan of Bloody Arc!”—I had yielded.

But the portrait, when it was finished . . . There were things I liked about it. A lifetime of farm labor had given me muscles and tendons in my collarbones and shoulders; the painter framed them in taffeta and made them look as elegant as one of Cicero's arguments. I liked that. I liked how the set of my mouth looked determined. I even liked my hair, my troublesome Guinevere hair. But these were things I saw later. What I saw first was my eyes.

Cool and empty and blue, very blue. They were cataracted with their blueness. Filmed over as if with ice, or death. I looked hollow.

When my mother saw the portrait, she wept. She held on to me, our skirts swirling together. “Greta,” she whispered. “My Greta, my Greta, my strong sweet girl—”

“Mother . . .” Her fingernails bit into my back, and I could hardly hear what she was whispering above the sudden pounding of my heart. It was: “I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.”

The Abbot's voice jerked me back into the miseri. “I've seen you at the map table,” he said.

The map table, where I had studied the watersheds of the Great Lakes basin. Where I'd read the news dispatches until my hands had bled, watching the Cumberland Alliance and the Pan Polar Confederacy creep closer to war. Elián's nation and mine. The demand for drinking water access to Lake Ontario, which the Cumberlanders could not live without and which the PanPols would never cede.

The Abbot's eyes widened. They were only ovals, but they looked wise and sad. “I know you know what's coming, Greta.”

“A war.”

“I only want Elián to do well,” said the Abbot. “You know it will be better for everyone if he can do well. And after all, you will have to go with him. Better if he doesn't make a fuss.”

“Is it soon?” I said.

The Abbot shrugged, though shoulderless, by turning up a hand and opening the fingers. “I know no more than you, Greta, of the facts on the ground. I only have longer and perhaps more bitter experience of the way such things play out.” He tipped his facescreen just a fraction. Patted one of my knees. “My dear child,” he said. “You are going to die.”

My eyes lifted—I felt as if my gaze were being pulled—toward the bulge in the wall behind him.

The grey room was on the other side of that curve.

The grey room was the central fact of our lives, and yet we knew nothing about it. From the curve, we deduce that it is oval. We deduce that it is small. But we don't
know
.

We don't even know why it is called “grey.”

“Mastery of information has always been your strength and your comfort, I know,” the Abbot said. “I wonder if ignorance is, in your particular case, the kindest thing.”

I said nothing.

“Greta. Would you like to see the grey room?”

My mouth was utterly dry. I could not speak; could not even swallow. I thought my bones would crack like dry branches as I stood up. Still, I stood up. The Abbot stretched to his full height. He followed me as I walked blindly out of the miseri, around its curve, to that unremarkable and ever-closed door.

The door opened.

The grey room.

It was small.

It was oval.

There was a table in it. A high table. Long. Narrow. Metal, faded to the softest grey. Worn leather straps at two corners, and at two midpoints. Wrists and ankles. Four buckles dangling.

Some kind of cage for the head.

The Abbot put his articulated hand on my shoulder, joint by joint.

“Don't worry, Greta,” he said. “I am sure you will do fine.”

I walked out of the Precepture. As if on the arm of a Swan Rider, I walked out with dignity. I walked out well.

And then I just kept walking.

The Precepture sits above the loop of a river, with a ridge at its northern back; with a skirt of lawn and orchard; with terraced gardens above a little alfalfa field and edged by a bright ribbon of water. Across that water is the open prairie. From that direction, the Swan Riders come. We can watch them coming forever.

Everyone was at dinner, and the lawn was empty. I walked across it. The gardens buzzed with desperate insects, counting down to winter. I walked down through them. The alfalfa field was blooming purple. There were little huts for the leaf-cutter bees. There was a rick for the hay. A shed for scythes.

Why did they let us have scythes? Scythe blades are three feet long, and we keep them sharp. We could truly ruin the ceremony of Talis's systems, if we were brave enough to do something with those scythes.

The alfalfa stems tangled and tugged at my knees. It was like walking through a crowd in Halifax, everyone reaching. They grasped and grasped at me, and I went slower and slower and at the river edge I finally fell onto my knees.

I was hot and I was cold. I was shaking.

The grey room had a table with straps. And some kind of cage for the head.

I was born to a crown.
This
was my crown—a cage for the head.

The soil under my hands was sandy. I could hear the river. This was as far as I could go, the edge of the Precepture, the edge of the world.

A proctor rose up from behind the bank.

And a foot hit it.

It happened suddenly: The proctor reared upright—a heavy proctor with a dome of eyes atop it—and even as it did so, Da-Xia skidded into place beside me, panting and crashing to her knees. With a stray foot she hooked the proctor under its body and tipped it backward. It fell.

There was a splash.

“Oops,” said Xie.

I meant to laugh, but what came out of me was a high-pitched sound, like a rabbit dying.

“Oh,” said Xie. “Easy, Greta. Easy.”

She picked me up and I staggered until I found myself leaning with my back to a huge and solitary cottonwood tree. Its stiff leaves rattled overhead like a taffeta gown.

The Panopticon was out of sight in the leaves, and the proctor was drowned. A blind spot. Leave it to Xie to find one, now, when we needed one so badly. “What happened?” she said.

“What?”

“Greta. What happened? What did he do to you?”

“I saw it,” I said. “I saw the grey room.”

Xie was facing me, her hand resting on the trunk beside my head. I heard her fingernails dig into the furrowed bark. “Did he hurt you?” she whispered. A blind spot, but we could not be sure nothing listened. “Did the Abbot hurt you?”

I tipped my head forward. The rough bark of the tree tried to stop me, tugging at little strands of hair.

“Greta?”

Had the Abbot hurt me? Yes. No. The Abbot had never, would never hurt me. But the tree was trying to hold my head back, and they were going to tie down my head.

Da-Xia's gaze broke from mine for an instant. “They're coming,” she said. “They're looking for you, the others. Even Thandi.”

“Elián?” If they took him again—much more would kill him.

But Xie laughed softly. “Especially Elián. Come on.” She wrapped her arm around me and pulled me away from the tree. Her arm around my ribs was strong; her side against my side was warm. I wondered if I felt to her as Elián had to me. If she could feel me tremble. Against her stillness I could tell that I was trembling.
It's too much,
Elián had said.
They're going to kill me.

I wanted to say that to Xie, but there was no innocent remark to hide it in, no blind spot big enough for such a conversation. I wanted to say it, but I couldn't. I couldn't. Tears sprang into my eyes—and Xie smoothed them away with the pads of her thumbs.

My only friend, and I couldn't talk to her. And she couldn't answer me. We could not get close enough together.

Yet we could.

Xie took one step forward and I leaned backward, and I was against the tree again. Then hard against it. Xie's hands pushed against my shoulders. Her knee hit the outside of my knee. She held me there— I felt as if she were gathering me. I looked at her. She eased off. She came up on tiptoe. And she kissed me.

The touch itself, lips against lips, was something small enough to be imaginary. It was a butterfly landing on me. I shivered, and something deep inside me, something that had been frozen and solid, turned into honey.

The words I had wanted to say came out, almost like a sob: “It's too much—”

“It's not,” she whispered. Then she came closer and tucked herself under my chin. How could she be so strong when she was so small? She was warm inside my arms. And suddenly neither one of us was shaking. I could feel her ribs move under my hands. My breathing slowed to match. And for that moment, who we were and where we were, the future and the past, fell away.

“He didn't hurt me,” I said. “He tried to frighten me.”

“The others are coming,” said Xie, and we pulled away from the sheltering tree. Xie hooked a hand round my elbow and drew me out to meet our cohort—and their proctor guards—who were pouring down the garden terraces.

“But I'm not frightened.” I was . . . something different than frightened.

Da-Xia lifted a regal hand to wave to everyone, to show we were all right.

“I'm not,” I said, more firmly. “If a queen is quiet, it is not because she is frightened.”

Da-Xia kept her eyes on the others and answered me softly, a grin in her voice. “Oh,” she said. “That I know.”

I
t had been such a long day. It had been so strange, so full of doors and hinges. But there were still goats to be milked, water to be pumped and poured into the drip irrigators, green beans to be plucked and put into a basket that bit into the crook of my arm. My lips felt . . . raw. Ripe. Ready to be touched. As if even the air that moved past them were new.

But I said nothing about it. The queen was quiet.

We worked into the long orange evening, and went back to our cells.

Still quiet, I sat on my cot and started to pull the pins out of my hair. Xie took off her samue and put on her alb. I tipped my head down so I would not see her changing. My braids tumbled around my face. My head felt different. My whole life felt different. I had defied the Precepture. I had seen the grey room.

And Xie—Xie had kissed me.

I glanced at her sitting on her cot. She was dressed now, wearing a spotless sleeping alb—or at least, she had it pulled over her body. Her bare legs were folded against her bare chest, the alb draped over them. She had her knees pulled up under her chin, and the tops of them peeked out through the loose neckline, dusty gold against the white fabric. The dip between them fell away into grey-gold shadow.

I closed my eyes.

My hands kept undoing braids until my loose hair spilled around me. I suspected I looked less like Guinevere now than some mad thing—Ophelia, maybe, or the Lady of Shalott.

Did all the mythical long-haired princesses meet bad ends? It seemed unfair.

Ends: The grey room. The high and narrow table. The crown and the dangling straps.

My hair was entirely loose now. I had an urge to cut it all off. Why not? Instead I twisted a bit of rag around, tying it into a very un-royal and sloppy ponytail, and got up to scrub my samue. It was spattered with a couple of days of gardening, and badly stained about the knees from my crash through the alfalfa.