Prodigal - Book III

Smile Sweetly

In all these sleek-straight rows they stand, these little tin soldiers, with their flat helmets and blank faces. They line the walls of this wide council room, still and obedient at this sunrise meeting while Isati sits, slinking amongst these generals and noblemen, pretending to fit in. She goes unseen but not unnoticed—their eyes seem to shy just so around her, flit so carefully to the spaces beside her, shoulders just tensing, a loving song to the cold smile that sits on her face.

Turn just a little, she wants to coo, to let them hear the sweetness amongst all that poison. Turn just a little and look at me.

Mother sits at the head, shrouded in the hulking metal shape that stretches over her; the sinuous back of her throne that has frozen, mid-twist, in a tall sculpture above her. This they never understood either—the melting down of all that silver engraved detail, all that opulence, all that excess grandfather had wasted with, and melding it into this, the raw element, the nerve in their Skill.

"It was a total loss, Your Grace," one of them says, but he manages to keep his voice steady. Good for him. Isati wonders how long he'll be able to keep it up; how far into Mother's punishment he'll be able to maintain it.

But Mother is in a forgiving mood; or rather, a mood beyond reprimanding. She's fixed on the board in front of them, with the little figurines and the flat playing field.

"Why aren't they marching in?" she asks, and a frown plays on her mouth. A dangerous frown. "Why has she not attacked?"

These leeches do not know what to say, can't fathom beyond the confines of their poor imagination, the rules in their little books.

What reason could the all-powerful Paragon have for waiting? they ask themselves with sweat slick on their necks. What could she possibly gain from delay?

But the question isn't for them... it could be for her.

She's ready when Mother looks up, and the answer sits easily in her mouth:

"The Paragon doesn't work that way," Isati says, holding Mother's gaze. "She doesn't come in through the front door swinging if there's a back way in."

This is satisfactory, or, perhaps, enough to brood on.

Tell me everything, Mother had hissed all those months ago, when she had returned from the North, frost still glistening on her metal parts. Tell me about the Paragon.

Isati told her all the things she wanted to know; the things she thought were important. Mother never underst—

No. No. Her fists flex on her armrests and she catches the way the man next to her flinches, a shiver of flesh.

Mustn't think that way. Her fingers shake and she curls them into bone-cracking fists. Mustn't wander down those roads.

She reflects instead on those brief snippets, those fractured scenes that had flickered across the Unspace. The Paragon had been in Isati's memory, rifling around there, seeing levers and mechanisms she had no right to see, but in return Isati has seen some things as well.

Curiosity. Ingenuity. Suffering. A face in a cracked mirror, a mask beginning to crumple, alone in the dark.

I can't let them control me.

It had been a shock at first, how familiar the Paragon had felt. How alike. And as the trifling images flitted past, Isati began to understand. Began to see, see in ways she knew her mirror image could not. Not yet.

This mantle, she had realized as the ghost of worries, of burden, and fears laid themselves across her shoulders, is uncomfortable.

All Isati had wanted was an opponent, sunlight rising on the horizon, but this, this is the dark song that thrums in bloodstreams, the unheard beat that drums deep beneath all this inconsequence, refusing to yield to all the sniveling and parroting and proffering. She understands, and Isati shivers with it.

The thing next to her notices and it's easy to smash him down, to bury finely garbed but weak flesh and cracking bone down onto the cold table. He is one of them, staid and proper, and for a moment she feels thirteen again, thirteen and alone in a court full of liars and schemers—simpering serpents who slither and notice.

Her hands are silver liquid, cleaved and shackled in sutured steel, and they crinkle and tinkle with his whimpering gasps. This, this is power. This is control.

The others whimper, these people who would have owned her. Controlled her. They had wanted to bury her with the rest of them, to pull her down with them in the fertilizer soil to rot together in these neat little rows, these clean lines. In their vision, the world would turn on, and all would be as it should, all would be as it was for centuries upon centuries upon centuries. She would fit inside her small, allotted plot.

The man beneath her fist cries, huffy and keening as the thing above him is not what he had demanded, but something greater, because while they schemed and played their games she changed. The fertile womb had run dry as tears of malice and joy had run wet across her face. She would be what they needed, not what they wanted.

"Isati," Mother commands, her voice ice, and Isati lets this one go. Acquiescing, because this is what Mother needs. A monster still on its leash.

When the bloodied nobleman looks up her smile is sweet. Her smile is false.

A/N: I love writing this maniac.... underneath my desk, where she can't find me.

She's gone, right? I can come out now?

Chapter notes: Isati meets Allayria for the first time in Northern Jarles in Partisan's "The Flesh That Shivers."