“He’s not infected.”
“Can you be sure? He seems to have a reason behind his suspicion.”
“I am. Because you should have sensed her affecting him—felt her skill activate. All manners of social engineer fall under your Domain. If she had latched on to him, then we should have sensed her.”
“But she isn’t confined by the limits of this world.”
“Irrelevant. She is still constrained by Integration and the System itself. Udraal is the same way, and even if they are in league, there are still things they cannot do. It is as the boy wondered: If one possesses such outright superiority, why are we not all compromised and dead?”
“For the pleasure of watching us struggle?”
“No. She is playful, but that is theater. Her assassins are many, and they have not hesitated to kill and replace countless rulers and leaders to further New Albion’s agenda. Her nation is also too stable to allow one person’s whimsy to dictate its fate. She has limits; there is a shape or edge to her Feat or Skill, and we will find it. Finally, we will find it.”
“I see. You intend to use the boy as a lure.”
“No. He is not the lure but the window she gazes through, and an asset she is trying to turn. The lure will be something else—something she cannot resist. He evolved the Dryad, so we send him to the Stormhalts. Have him uncover still-bloodied skeletons of that house since he is already attached to them through their patriarch. This way, we have surface and subtle justifications.”
“And what will that tell us?”
“Many things. If she knows why we are doing this, then Shiv is compromised on a deep level, and he is right to assume his eldritch skill to be infected. Such will make things difficult, but also give us another vector of consideration. If she does not know why we sent him there—and retains no knowledge of the conversations we had with him in the theater—then that means she is only capable of manifesting in certain places or under certain circumstances. That will make pinning her down harder, but it means Shiv is still clean of soul.”
“I see. So. We are using ignorance against ignorance, then. See where she is blind to narrow down where we must search.”
“Yes. But it is not we who will solve this. Shiv has a personal stake, and I think we should give him just the tools and let him proceed. He will evolve. He will develop. And he will get it right. That’s what he is designed for. And the best part of all, Udraal will not intervene so vulgarly on her behalf against his own project like he might against us…”
“Nothing quite like killing one of your enemy’s queens using what they assume to be their pawn.”
—Veronica Chandler and Kathereine the Songbringer
VIII-11
Power and Will
“Come now, Deathless, you must be curious. After all, a Master doesn't kill a Legend without explanation, and there has to be a story behind why Halsur chose Havel with Vincent right there, a Legend that's exponentially better. There's gotta be a story.”
The Faceless Queen's words were lyrical and teasing, but there was something menacing behind every syllable. It was like the noise a blade would make when it rasped in and out of a sheath. Shiv watched her, struggling against two impulses. The first was to ignore her, to see if she would turn away. The other was to engage, for he was curious. But surrendering felt so beneath him. There was a game being played between them, a game of so many layers.
Both choices saw him surrender something: information or pride, and social dominance was displayed so casually, but it was more than that. It was informational supremacy. She seemed to know everything and appeared just when he was starting to question. She led him down the dark path by laying a trail of bait ahead of him, and if he followed, he would be more bound to her bidding than ever before. If he rejected her, well, it was the same thing. If you knew how to affect a person, to constrain their choices, you could estimate their reactions and create calculated outcomes that relied on their emotions. If he said no, then he was a creature of pride, and she would use that against him. If he said yes, he was a creature of interest, and it would be easy to trap him.
“But there's something more than that. Pay attention to her. She appeared and overheard your conversation with Uva. She's tapped into us psionically, but she was absent for most of this family gathering. Only now did she arrive; only now, in the perfect moment to strike when the tension was high, did she manifest.” The Harbinger drew Shiv down another train of thought. There was a limitation to the Faceless Queen's power—there had to be, for there were multiple other instances before this point that also held questions of their own. But she didn't appear then. She was absent until this very moment.
And that led to another inquiry. Was she waiting, or had she planned this all along?
“I was kind of wondering when you might show up,” Shiv said, speaking telepathically as to not give away the Faceless Queen's presence. If he spoke aloud, he would simply seem the schizophrenic talking to shadows that weren't there, or, in the case he was believed, compromising the atmosphere and filling the Stormhalts with undue dread.
There was nothing they could do against a Faceless Queen anyway. This was a game between him, her, and Veronica above, so Shiv committed to the game. He bit down and chose information, forsaking pride but plotting to discover as much as he could about his enemy. Sometimes, you had to lose little by little until you built up enough to win where it mattered.
“Oh, don't mistake me for being a voyeur. I was occupied by other matters. You might think you're very important, Deathless, and you are, but you are just one investment among many.” She moved to reach up and pat him, but something about his demeanor made her hesitate. Shiv struggled not to grin. He sensed a trembling of some sort, a vibrating resonance that echoed from her core. It never stayed stable, and he barely glimpsed any true emotion from its depths, but he knew the taste of tension and budding terror. Better than anyone else, she was wary about pushing him too far—far enough to make him unreasonable and antagonistic.
“This tells her she needs us for something. She is trying to build rapport with us. Influence is not within the confines of her schemes.” But then the Harbinger hesitated. “Alternatively, she could be playing with us. We could be misreading her emotions.”
Could be, might be, but we won't know until we get a better baseline of her behavior. Let’s see what she says and how she reacts.
“I apologize if I seem a little too coquettish for you. I'm simply having a spot of fun, especially when we're dealing with such—” she sniffed, as if tasting something disgusting in the air “—distasteful topics. It's a horrible thing, isn't it? The damage a parent could do to a child. This too is a part of cultural legacy. We inherit more than our families' privilege, positions, and resources. We inherit every sin and disgraceful action they performed. It lingers. It's like a scar, but contagious, passed down from one generation to the next.”
“Good thing that I'm an orphan,” Shiv grunted.
“But you're really not. That chef of yours was more father than most people ever got, and despite being hated, you weren't constantly being exiled and chased into the wilderness. I've seen true ferals, Deathless. You might have thought yourself like them, but the fact that you have the capacity for language and your emotional intelligence means that you are still too close to the heartbeat of your culture. You're just a little colder than normal.” The Faceless Queen drew in a mouthless breath and looked toward Havel. “And I think you can count yourself as more fortunate than poor Havel here, for everything he wanted, everything he was, was shaped by someone else.”
“Roland, his father, his resentment. Yeah, but that was also his choice. At some point, you have to be an adult. At some point, you have to be responsible. Sympathy is not forgiveness.” And Shiv meant that he was growing to like Havel in certain ways, to rely on him in battle and understand him as a person. Still, he'd killed so many. It was his misery, his inability to let go of his past that cost so many lives at Blackedge.
Roland was one matter, but what about Georges? What about the other chefs of the Swan-Eating Toad? What about all the other people of Blackedge? What point was power if you were only going to use it against the weak and uninitiated?
“You say these things because you were shaped by a separate set of experiences. You live in the shadow of other people's sins, their destruction, the ruin they caused, the poison they poured into the wounds of this world. The other people besides have affected you. You are not alone in yourself. You are a bomb magnetizing other bombs. The singularity of tension and conflict, and what you need to understand is that tension and conflict have always existed before the System; they were, and now they are being drawn to you. They ignite and combust this entire world in flaming—literally, figuratively, mentally, physically, psionically, in every aspect—toward you.”
She let silence follow, and the household was still arguing, Miriam screaming at her brother, Veinhult, with Havel between them. His expression was tired, his spirit worn, but his position clear. He was that length between the scales, the point where two sides were balanced. This entire household endured because of him. It did not break because he was still here, and so long as he remained patriarch, House Stormhalt would endure. The moment he was gone, it would tear in two directions, and the death of the house would be all but ensured.
“You know, those two are the parents of your dear friend on campus. Wait, I shouldn't call her your friend, since she doesn't know you exist. An impressive bit of tradecraft, if I must say so myself, pretending to be someone else for so long and with so little training. You were a pretty poor spy early on, but pretending to be someone in similar circumstances to you, you pulled that off admirably. Or maybe you just got better.”
Shiv almost glared at the Faceless Queen. “You leave Maxime alone, or we never talk again.”
“Oh, I'm not threatening you. No, I'm using her as a specific example: You think her mother and father hate each other. No, what they hate is loving each other, because they don't understand each other. They think their wounds are the deepest and truest, while the other was spared the worst of the harm. It's selfish and love for family at the same time. It's an imbalance. Both of them suffered at the hands of their parents, yet they don't even think that suffering in and of itself is human. Maybe if they were both inflicted by the same torment at the same time in front of each other, there would be an equilibrium established in this household, but no, even in suffering it was a scarcity issue. Isn’t capitalism grand?”
“Yeah, yeah, blame the free market for personal fucking atrocities.” Shiv scoffed. “But enough of this bullshit. Tell me what you know. Why is Havel the head of his household? Why did the Endbreaker choose him over everyone else?”
“For the same reason Georges might have chosen you, Shib. Because we see echoes of our own trauma in someone else, in someone younger, and we try to make right what went wrong with us.”
He narrowed his eyes at the Faceless Queen. “Sounds like you're speaking from experience.”
“No, you're just reading too far into things. I have a different set of motivations and behaviors, but do keep digging. I like it. I like a clever, reusable operative.”
“I'm not your operative.”
The Faceless Queen began walking in a circle around him, though Shiv kept his head straight to not draw any suspicion. “No, not right now, but perhaps when the stars align and the pieces of our poor moon are just right up in the sky, you will be. And even if you're not, a little more intelligence and self-control in this world goes a long way, considering all the ruin brought forth by people with too much power and too little wisdom.”
She drew in a long and dramatic breath before holding her hands high—framing Havel between her slender fingers like a picture. “It was almost a full century ago. Havel Stormhalt was just an Adept, and a slowly but steadily developing Adept at that. The thing about Havel is that he's disciplined and reliable. People love working with him. He wasn't some prodigious talent, but the thing about prodigious talents is that you can't drag them using leashes. You have to pamper them sometimes so they stay your animal.”
Shiv huffed. “And that didn't work either. Roland didn't stay anyone's animal but the Starhawk's.”
“True, but Roland is a separate case altogether. Some people are not easily manipulated by anything but perceived honor, and Roland Arrow is nothing but the portrayal of justice and righteousness given form.”
“The portrayal?”
“If he were the true epitomization of these ideals, he would be dead, for Adam would have never bowed to the Starhawk's demands. He would have never burned an entire city in the Abyss just to see his agenda completed. In the grand scheme of the Great Game, a small sacrifice, a pragmatic action, but something devastating to one's own mythology and fate. And Roland Arrow is just hypocrite enough to be an even path-variant, as are you.”
Rather than being offended, Shiv considered Havel, who continued playing his role in the family. Yet the shadows inside of him and his emotional core were sour with the stench of infected misery. He was carrying something deep inside, something tethered to his siblings, like fingers of festering blackness connecting them all together. Their minds were all whirling, and they lied to themselves every time they invoked the name of their father, as much as they lied to each other. With every lie, the Dryad's branches spread and spread and spread. Shiv saw more of Vincent with each passing second: flashes of the man. His features were like a mix between Veinhult and Havel, but his primary emotion was something of outrage, something of frustration, something of fury directed inward, at his own children. It was directed at the fact that they weren't nearly as good at magic as he was, the fact that they weren't as obedient as Havel, or as ecstatically pleasing as Miriam, or even as desperate for his love as Veinhult. All three of his children were pieces of a broken, perfect alloy, and apart, they would never live up to his ideal.
Such was his excuse for hurting them. Such was his excuse for why he was allowed to be such a wretch.
“Havel’s not the same. He pretends, but he pretends on the surface. He doesn't pretend on the inside.” The Faceless Queen shook her head as she continued her oration, blonde hair dancing from side to side. “He pretends, because if the truth came out about why he killed his own father, about how he did it, the name of House Stormhalt would collapse and their position in society along with it. The ruin of their material goods, paired with the destruction of their common familial mythology, would see this home destroyed and see the siblings rendered hollow ruins of themselves, more so than they already are. He is not suffering in silence for nothing. He loves his siblings still, and if he does the right thing and reveals the truth, he will then destroy those he loves utterly and completely.”
She looked upon Miriam and Veinhult as one would a dying animal. “Suicides, both of them, within months, not years. Most of their children will follow. They are fragile, emotionally vulnerable creatures, after all. The same strain that affected their father affects them still, affects everyone other than Havel.”
“And why is that?” Shiv asked.
“Because he is driven by a separate obsession, an obsession to assume the place of his father while lacking the man's talent and power; that obsession was transferred from Vincent over to Roland in the aftermath of the assassination.” The Faceless Queen turned to Shiv and held out her arms in a wide embrace. There was a meaning to that gesture, something more significant than just the theatrical flourish. “I'm going to tell you this story through a series of lies. Havel Stormhalt didn't know what his father was doing to his siblings.”
He did. Images revealed themselves of Havel holding pillows against his head, tears streaming down his face as he tried to block out the screams from both rooms. He knew his mother was in his brother's room, and he knew his sister was alone with his father, and he heard his name break out from them. They probably didn't even know they were screaming for him, but he did nothing. He said nothing. He prayed to the Endbreaker. He prayed and he prayed and he prayed and he offered as much as he could, but what else could he do? He wasn't even an Adept then, just a boy, a terrified boy. His mother and father were the pillars of the family. They were the true powers. They kept them safe from the other houses. They made this fortress city what it was. Without them, who would they be? This was just a proper exchange. This was simply love, just expressed poorly by us all. Maybe he could make his parents understand or…
The Faceless Queen continued. “He realized there was nothing he could do.”
The second revelation followed as the Dryad screamed.
Ten years passed, and the boy holding twin pillows against his head was a battle-scarred adolescent marching amongst his father's troops. He was among the midline, a special detachment of vanguards and mages following him, training him, serving as his bodyguard while also ensuring he got the proper experience. He needed to be a true Pathbearer in the North. They kept him safe, they kept him sharp, and they made him strong. He had served with dignity and honor, and he found himself popular among the soldiers—proclaimed to be the second coming of Vincent.
But their words were charged with affection and nothing else. Havel knew he was a pale shadow compared to his father. He had neither the talent in weaponry, nor the martial skill, nor the magical ingenuity that defined the patriarch of House Stormhalt. When it came to calling storms down from the sky, sculpting lightning in disarray, scalped bolts that struck across thousands of kilometers...
No, his father was the flash, the bright, the power, the ruin cast down from the sky, sent to scour and fry. Havel was but the thunder in the distance, echoing after, a byproduct of what came before.
And through it all, his father continued to valorize him, to push him, to drive him towards evolution. Despite everything, his father wanted him to take over as the house's fist. The ideal son, he proclaimed Havel to be in front of his siblings and the rest of the household.
The ideal son in all things but one.
“But you'll make up for your talent in discipline. You'll show those pampered bastards in the capital. You’ll rival Roland. You will, boy.”
And Vincent would laugh drunkenly as he spat those words. He didn't fully believe them himself, but he pushed Havel because Havel was House Stormhalt's epitome. For whatever reason, he never inflicted the same cruelties upon Havel that saw his siblings marred and broken of character in so many ways. His sister lashed out, promiscuous and personable, choosing to spend as much time away from the household, only returning when she was absolutely forced to.
Havel’s half-brother, Veinhult, was also among the forces, but he stood with his father at the front. For Veinhult was supposedly older and more experienced, higher of Tier and quantity of skills, but that wasn't the truth. Veinhult was simply his father's personal vessel for expression, and everything that was broken inside Vincent was poured over into his eldest son, whether the son could bear it or not.
And when Veinhult screamed, as he did during those days of childhood, the troops learned to lie to themselves, as Havel did, imagining it to be the byproduct of sparring. It just occurred without the other requisite noises, like the clashing of spells or steel; only fist on bone, flesh on flesh, and pleas of mercy besides.
Veinhult might have had the potential to be a proper hero, but he was an incompetent warrior, shaken by his trauma. When things grew chaotic, he would freeze, and he would shrink into himself, no matter how good he was in practice duels or as a mage in formation. He was functionally useless when the pain got too much. He kept it inside himself, but he was a poor vessel, unable to bear all the torments.
His father hated him, as he saw the talent, and he saw that his son would never be able to live up to it.
That simply left Havel.
Havel wasn't spared because he was special or his father liked him more than the others. It's just that his father decided to be pragmatic with him. Shiv's realization came with a near snarl of hatred. There was no surprise Longinus turned into what he did, even if he wasn't some monster, as a man with so many nobles allowed to slake their desires in the most demented of fashions. Of course they would pour their own lore into him. Of course they would project who they were onto him: a good man, overridden by ruined and ruinous worshippers.
The Nihilist: What a disgusting fate. To be defined by the degenerates of society.
The Faceless Queen sighed. “I see it in your face, Deathless. I read it in your eyes. You're figuring out a lot of things at once. Yes, Vincent was part of the reason why Longinus turned out the way he did. And Havel, well, someone needed to be the personified ideal of the house rather than a person. Havel was simply the one that got away. Maybe if Miriam was better with a sword or a spell and was more disciplined, she would be the one, and he would be in her place. But alas, the slightest twist in personality, the slightest divots in self-expression and control, and you avoid what you fall to—certain damnation. All decided by someone else.”
“You believe in fate, don't you?” Shiv asked.
“Maybe not the way you think, but I do believe we're all fated. Fated to suffer in a certain way. Fated to face certain outcomes. Fated and unable to escape because reality is wide and we are only so small. An ant can move things in their environment, but an ant cannot change tides. Not unless the ant was designed to collapse the ecosystem in some way.”
Shiv realized she was talking about him again. There was a reason why she was here, striking specifically now, revealing these truths to him.
“You like Havel because he’s actually a lot like you. You’re both very responsible people in your own ways. He’s just sunken deeper than you because he got swallowed by his emotions. In that sense, I think you can imagine him to be a version of you that never got over his own spite. But this is about more than him. This goes up higher. Because he was the only one disgusted.”
The Dryad roared louder than ever before, for this lie was the greatest.
In the vision, Halsur appeared before Shiv.
Halsur, who looked down in trembling horror at his Avatar every day. Halsur, who was the blood precursor to the Stormhalt line—thought extinguished during the Dust King’s reign—now forced to contend with the vileness consuming his descendants. Halsur, who found himself rendered impotent by his own emotional weakness, by Kathereine chiding him for even thinking about trading a few “Master-Tiers” for a proper Legend, by an oath turned against itself.
“I will stand unbroken above all. Beneath my shadow, none may strike those of my creed, my kith, my kin.”
At some point, as the degeneration of his stolen Divinity set in, the words became more literal than philosophical, and the false god was gelded against his own progeny.
But not the progeny themselves.
Different lies came together and formed an instance of horrid revelation: Havel, far north and snow-coated after barely surviving a duel against dual Master-Tier Frost Giants, staggered away from his fallen comrades. They teleported into an interception; the enemy had a series of elites dimensionally hidden in the aftermath of a raid—and intercepted Havel and his family as they prepared to jump back to Fortress-City Vermind for a reprieve.
The resulting battle was a slaughter gone both ways. The Frost Giants were many and powerful; the Stormhalt House Guards gave themselves utterly to spare Havel an early death, and every brush with oblivion that followed. None of them remained by the end.
One hundred Heroes given for a single Master—a devastating trade. An ironic tragedy unfolded amongst the Jotun in return: They had brought two hundred elites with the goal to strike down Vincent, but none survived the battle. And all that death bought them severe, but less than mortal injuries.
Havel wandered in a delirium, following the only noise he could hear in the aftermath of the slaughter. His boots splashed through the slick, steaming corpses of the fallen—both Republic men, women, and bots and giants alike, caked together by indiscriminate lightning. And though the battle was over, the screaming continued, and there were two voices that shared a hateful song.
Vincent knelt over Veinhult, his hands around his son’s neck, the Legend’s exposed intestines steaming in the cold air. “YOU FUCKING—YOU DID THIS TO US! YOU TOLD THEM! YOU THOUGHT THIS WAS GOING TO KILL ME? STUPID! JUST LIKE YOUR WHORE OF A MOTHER—YOU FUCKING—”
Veinhult’s face was a thing that followed Havel into his nightmares. Red painted his features aside from twin rivers that ran as smears down his cheeks. He struggled against his father, but it was hopeless from the start. His eyes were rolled up toward the heavens, and he cried out for someone to save him—but thought there was no one there.
A few meters away, against a half-split tree, Havel looked on—and soiled himself. Hovering over Vincent, the Endbreaker looked close to vomiting from stress; an unnatural expression for a giant so stern and powerful.
It wasn’t Veinhult that broke Havel and Halsur; it was they who broke each other. In that instant, they looked upon each other, they saw one another—and themselves as emotional reflections. Their self-loathings merged into one, and where Havel lacked the power, Halsur lacked the will. And so Vincent continued strangling his son. And so Veinhult should have died. And so Havel would have come home without a brother, and with a secret to keep.
At least, that was what should have happened.
“No more,” Havel whimpered, sobbing as he decided to be more warrior than his father’s son.
“No more,” the Faceless Queen whispered to Shiv. “The same words Thaen said to Halsur while they were both men—before pulling them into another hopeless fight out of honor alone.”
“And that shook him?” Shiv said. “That Havel was becoming more like the Starhawk in identity?”
“It broke him that for all his godhood, he was still a coward when it mattered. The storm was meant to be unbreakable. But what use was the storm when the enemy was what you loved?”
Havel took up a fallen Jotun’s weapon and crept closer to his father. Vincent, mad with rage and weak from blood loss, didn’t hear, didn’t know.
“But Havel had only recently gained his first Master-Tier Skill at that time. What hope did he have against his father? Even with surprise, he would only waste his own life.” The Faceless Queen giggled.
“But not with a god empowering him.”
“And a Frost Giant’s spear, reinforced with enough enchantments to punch through a Legend’s flesh.”
An image greeted Shiv.
A flash of darkness from above.
A choice for the Endbreaker, to abandon his demented Avatar, casting himself into the body of Havel, who muttered delirious pleas to Halsur to psyche himself up for the coming patricide.
From afar, another perspective appeared—the Faceless Queen watched as if she was there herself, standing over the corpse of a fallen Frost Giant with hands clasped behind her back.
A splash of red became the world. Red, flung out from Vincent’s already breached chest. Red, painting Veinhult’s mangled body as his father shuddered and gasped—and then was rent apart from within as a burst of blackened lightning shredded his organs. Vincent tried to turn, but he was chained still by the Endbreaker’s power, by Havel’s will—for only the god held the strength, and the boy couldn’t mentally bear the sight of his father turning his hate upon him even now.
“Endbreaker—protect…” The idea and words spilled out with his blood, but ended as the crimson continued to flow. Vincent slumped down over Veinhult, and there they lay in a spreading pool of red.
The miracle that followed was Havel forcing himself to stay sane—forcing his mind to turn away from the scene so he could reach the city and compose the proper tale. The Endbreaker could have never done that. He couldn’t have lied. He couldn’t have struck his own blood down.
Havel did. To save his brother. To spare himself. To do something.
And he never admitted his act. Not to his brother. Not to his sister. To no one. Only he and the Endbreaker knew; only they made the choice. And it would go into the dark with the both of them when the time came.
Shiv got the feeling Havel welcomed that.
“Why show me this?” Shiv asked the Faceless Queen. “I get why they did it, but what’s your play with me?”
“No major plot here, dear boy.” The Faceless Queen shrugged. “I wanted you to know, because I like you just the way you are. You live without chains, so keep living without them. Use your grandmother if you have to, but don’t be made into her image.”
“Oh, another familial mythology thing, huh? Don’t want me to become the theater version of myself and drink the propaganda soup?”
And then, the Queen did something peculiar—she hesitated. The silence she held was brief, but it was there—his Reflexes made that clear. And it made a few other things certain as well.
The Queen has no idea what I’m referencing. She wasn’t there in the theater. She didn’t know what Veronica said to me.
And suddenly, this entire detour felt worth it—and Shiv guessed this was a part of Veronica’s plan as well. There was a multi-staged attempt to scope out the Faceless Queen’s limitations.
“Which means Adam’s guess was wrong,” the Harbinger declared. “If she had infested your Garden, then she would know all these things. She would be watching from Backstage and see everything. She was absent up until now. Which means she still moves through the world somewhat like an individual. She knows a great deal, but her presence in the grand unweaving of the lie is literal. She was there in person—watching things unfold. She has limits. There are edges to her power. Rules to define her.”
Dryad of Lies 121 > 126
“Well. As you said before: good thing you are an orphan,” the Faceless Queen breathed. “And in some matters, it is best that you stay that way. Use others. But never be so entangled that you become the used.”
“Sounds close to advice, Queen,” Shiv said.
“Oh, it is. For I am going to be arriving soon, and there are many things we will have to do together. Wondrous, terrible things. And I can provide you with what you need to know—I alone. So. With your greatest power being based in understanding and mine in information, why, I say, let pragmatism take hold.”
“Which of us is Halsur? Which of us is Havel?”
“Neither. That’s the point: This history does not apply to us. We can see and discover it because we are severed—and that is our greatest gift. Existing within context bears a consequence all its own.” She turned away from him and began to walk down the hall. “Anyhow: It’s been fun showing you just how deep the rot goes inside the Republic you pretend to serve. When we next meet, I have a request: Ask me how you can clean the rot, and I will tell you how to take your grandmother’s position from her—as she did from Anthony before her. I might just have a bit of information about her past too.”
Then, with another step, she blinked out of existence, and it was like she never was at all.
“Father would have never let you speak to me like that!” Miriam shrieked, throwing another glass at Veinhult—who let it shatter against his face with a sneer. “Never!”
Veinhult scoffed. “Like you know anything about father’s heart, you vapid whore!”
“Whore? Havel! Are you just going to let him speak to me this way?”
The man in question looked like he was considering what rope he wanted to use on himself.
“And there it is,” the Harbinger hissed. “The price of giving it. She knows you are a creature of curiosity over pride. She knows how to lure us.”
Maybe. But we can play this game. Her against Veronica. Veronica against her. We’re the weapon she’s trying to use against the Republic. She's just arrogant enough to think I don’t see. Or doesn’t think it matters. But it does. But it does. Shiv’s sympathy melted down to a steady bitterness inflicted upon all those around him. Because the weak are used. The weak suffer. And weakness of the heart is something I refuse to afford. I will not be Roland. I will not be Havel. I will not be the Faceless Queen or Veronica Chandler. I see the past, but I’m not going to be dragged along by it.
“So, what is our play?” the Harbinger asked.
Shiv sneered. Simple. We give Veronica a little something the Queen doesn’t know, and then we use the Queen to get a little something over Veronica herself.
“And if they discover your schemes?”
Then nothing, because you want to know who we are in this story? Fucking Vincent. We’re Vincent—and that’s almost enough to make me paint my mouth with puke. Because everyone’s working to keep us pleased, so that we’ll stay useful to them. So fuck it. Let’s learn from the past, and play the great godsdamned game.
“Uva,” Shiv said. “You got all that?”
She let out an uncomfortable exhale. “Yes. But… she heard our conversation earlier. How do you—”
“We don’t talk about the Faceless Queen or New Albion anymore,” he said. “We do this in the dark. You keep your plans; I’ll keep mine. She kept speaking with you in the loop; meaning she was targeting you as much as she was me. So. If information is going to be her method, then silence and non-communication will be ours.”
“That might very well be turned against us.”
“Oh, it will. But you know what: I like our odds better in chaos and instability than I do hers. We live in the fire. She seems like she's spent her entire existence avoiding it.”
Uva hummed. “So. We turn the pan upside done, so to speak?”
“Yep. You go to the Outside and see if she knows what you’re doing there. I’ll head to the capital or Backstage to do the same.”
“And Adam?”
Shiv considered him. “We loop him in after everything we do, but not before; he’s going to hate this spy shit, but he’ll understand. He’s got enough to worry about as it is.”
“It disturbs me to say this, but I miss it when everyone was trying to kill us in the open,” Uva murmured.
“Just the price of peace, sweetheart: All the actual fighting goes into the shadows.”