“Please,” he said, gesturing with ironic courtesy at his cot, “have a seat.”
Even if I’d been on friendly terms with him, I wouldn’t have been very eager to sit on that thing. “I don’t mind standing.”
Although the blood on the side of his head was long gone, in some ways he looked worse than he had that night at the warehouse. I felt absolutely no urge to gloat or rub his nose in what had happened: he slumped back onto the cot with the posture of a man who already knows exactly how badly he has wrecked everything.
My intent had been to open with some smaller talk, but instead I asked, “Why did you do it?”
His gaze remained fixed on the concrete wall behind me. “Which part?”
“Let’s start at the end,” I said. “The poem. Were you expecting to be kidnapped and taken to the warehouse?” I did not say, was that your way of asking for rescue? If so, it was a remarkably poor method.
Aaron’s breath huffed out. “No. I thought, if I was going to leave the country, I might as well set you on Dorak before I went. I knew you’d enjoy flushing him out for the police.” One hand drifted up to touch the bruise on the side of his head, partially hidden by his hair. “Only his thugs got to me before I could finish.”
I bit down on the urge to point out that he might have gotten away free and clear if he’d written his message in plain language, instead of getting clever about it. We both knew why he’d chosen that approach.
With irony so dry it burned, he added, “I do appreciate the rescue, though.”
“What about the rest of it?” I asked. The question was sitting in my throat like a knot; better out with it than in. “Why did you forge the last three tablets?”
“Mrs. Kefford offered me a lot of money.”
I didn’t believe his answer for a moment. She was the one who paid for him to live at the Selwright—a much better place than he could have afforded on his own—but even if living on her largesse was his reward, it couldn’t have been his motivation. “Answer me honestly, or I will stop wasting my time here.”
His mouth twisted, bitter as gall. “Because I wanted to see if I could.”
That, I do believe. The sheer intellectual challenge of it: assembling not only the ideas but the words, testing his knowledge of the ancient tongue by composing in it, just as he’d done with the poem. And the physical details, too, making sure he had the right kinds of clay, the right size stylus, practicing the scribe’s handwriting until he could mimic it perfectly. I’d examined the broken Sacrifice Tablet: there were even faintly scaled marks on the edges, where he must have donned some kind of glove to avoid leaving human fingerprints in the clay.
“I knew you would get involved,” he added, with a faint laugh. “There was no chance you’d stay away. I wanted to know if I could fool even you.”
If he meant that to be a compliment, it was a damned backhanded one. My tone sharpened as I said, “And your behaviour toward me. Helping me in the annex, and leaving me that tablet. Before that, too—not pressing charges when I broke into your hotel room. And that whole business with the cylinder seal—” I stopped before my voice could get too plaintive.
His gaze flickered briefly to mine, before skittering away again. “You know why,” he said softly.
“If you cared so much for my feelings and my good opinion, you would not have done all the other things you did.”
The silence lasted long enough that I began to think he wasn’t going to reply. But then I saw him start to speak—more than once—and so I waited until his chin dipped low and the words came out. “‘I have no use for you,’” he quoted. “That’s what you said, outside the Selwright. It . . . you have no idea how far under my skin that got. I know you don’t want to hear this, Audrey, but I never lied about my affection, or my respect for you.” He smiled a little, as if against his will. “That fragment Lepperton had—I never made the connection. But you did. You . . . you’re the only one who understands. Who feels the same passions I do, and has a mind that can challenge my own.”
I’d known it must come to this, if I went to visit him; I had only myself to blame for winding up in this conversation. And I went through with it because it was necessary: because five years of sweeping everything under the rug has gotten me nowhere. I have to face the fact that there is a mutual attraction there, a genuine bond that sprang up that afternoon in the Colloquium.
It just isn’t strong enough to overcome everything else.
“We don’t feel the same passions, though,” I said. He wasn’t looking at me; I edged one surreptitious half step backward, so the wall could help steady me. “Some of them, yes. For languages—the Draconean language in particular—and for history. For intellectual pursuits. But I don’t just care about the past, Aaron; I care about the future. Their future. You’ve never understood that, or them. And that is why I do not love you.”
His shoulders twitched, even though he must have been bracing himself. There’s no way he didn’t anticipate what I would say. All the same, it struck home.
I waited, letting him sit with the shock of my declaration until the initial sting of it faded. I might not love him . . . but it still mattered a great deal to me what he said in response.
“Do you think it’s possible?” he asked, directing the question at the floor.
“Is what possible?”
I expected him to say for you to love me. If he had said that, I would have walked out the door with a clean conscience, and I truly do believe I would never have concerned myself with him again. Because it would have been the final proof that we did not share as much as I once dreamed—that in the end, his own self-centeredness was too great to overcome.
“Peace,” Aaron said. “Between us and them.”
Humans and Draconeans. “Yes,” I said. “Not easily, and not without stumbles along the way—but yes.”
Aaron shifted on the cot, propping his feet on the edge and leaning his head against the wall. “The epic talks about it. But . . . I think it’s a myth. I don’t think we ever co-existed in harmony, whatever the story says. It’s been one side enslaving or destroying the other ever since we began.”
My throat tightened up. The epic.
A precious relic of the past. But as Kudshayn had reminded me, it was only a relic.
“Maybe it isn’t true,” I said. “Maybe you’re right about the past. But the stories we choose to tell—those matter. It’s important that the Anevrai told a story about harmony, that they went to the effort of writing it on finely made tablets with gold at their heart. Sacred tablets. That says it was an ideal. And even when we fall short of ideals, that doesn’t mean we should give up striving for them.”
He closed his eyes. This time I was the one who broke the silence. “Where are they, Aaron?”
The missing pieces. He laughed quietly, bitterly. “They weren’t just my insurance against Mrs. Kefford, you know. I hid them as insurance against you, too.”
“I can’t give you your freedom,” I said, looking around at the iron bars, the concrete walls. “But it doesn’t matter. I know where you put them.”