The Steel Remains

Kaad gathered his robes about him. From somewhere, he mustered a sneer. “No, Master Ringil. Like all your kind, the consequences of what you do are borne by others. From Gallows Gap to the cages at the eastern gate, it is others, always others, who pay the carriage for your acts.”

Ringil twitched forward a quarter inch. Held himself back.

“Now you’d really better get out,” he said quietly.

Kaad went. Perhaps he saw something in Ringil’s eyes, perhaps he just didn’t see any way to salvage value from the situation. He was, after all, a political animal. Gingren hurried after him, one furious backflung glance at his son in lieu of words. Ringil stood still a couple of moments after they’d gone, then slumped under the gathering weight of the comedown. He leaned flat palms on the table in front of him, gazed at the emptied flagon there.

“Wouldn’t have thought it was still that hot,” he murmured, and chuckled a little to himself. He looked around for the serving girl, but she hadn’t reappeared. He squinted down toward the door out to the garden, where the light was now getting bright enough to hurt his krin-stunned pupils. He thought about going to bed, but in the end, he just sat back down at the table and sank his head in his hands instead. A fading trace of the drug whined about in the back of his head.

Gingren found him there, unmoved, what felt like hours later.

“Well, now you’ve done it,” he growled.

Ringil wiped hands down his face and looked up at his father. “I hope so. I don’t want to have to breathe the same air as that fuck again.”

“Oh, Hoiran’s teeth!What is it with you, Ringil? Just for once tell me, what the fuck is wrong with you?”

“What’s wrong with me?” Suddenly Ringil was off the stool, scant inches out of his father’s fighting space. His arm scythed out, pointing eastward. “He sent Jelim to die on a fucking spike!”

“That was fifteen years ago. And anyway, Jelim Dasnal was a degenerate, he—”

“Then so am I, Dad. So am I.”

“—fucking deserved the cage.”

“Then so did I!”

It screamed up out of him, the dark poison pressure of it, the same nagging ache that had driven him up the pass at Gallows Gap, like biting down on a rotten tooth, the pain and the sweet leak of pus behind it, the taste of his own hate in his mouth, and a trembling that now he found he couldn’t stop. Gingren saw it, and wavered in the blast.

“Ringil, it was the law.”

“Oh lizardshit!” But abruptly the force of his rage was no longer there, the krin drop was crushing it out, falling on him harder now with every waking second, bleaching away his focus. He went back to the stool and seated himself again, voice flung dull and disinterested back over his shoulder at Gingren where he stood. “It was a political deal, and you know it. You think they would have hung Jelim up at the eastern gate if his surname had been Eskiath? Or Alannor, or Wrathrill, or any other name with a Glades punch behind it? You think any of those raping sadists up at the Academy are ever going to see the sharp end of a cage?”

“That,” said Gingren stiffly, “is not something we—”

“Oh, fuck off. Just forget it.” Ringil dumped his chin into one cupped hand, defocusing vision of the grain in the table’s wooden surface as the comedown leaned in on him. “I’m not going to do this, Father. I’m not going to argue about the past with you. What’s the point? Look, I’m sorry if I fucked up your negotiations with the Chancellery.”

“Not just mine. Kaad could have helped you.”

“Yeah. Could have, but he wasn’t going to. He just wanted—you both just want—me to stay away from the Salt Warren. The rest is just distraction. It isn’t going to help me find Sherin.”

“And you think thugging your way into Etterkal is?”

Ringil shrugged. “Etterkal took her. That’s where the useful answers are going to be.”

“Hoiran’s teeth, Ringil. Is it really worth it?” Gingren came to the table, leaned on it at his son’s shoulder, leaned over him. His breath was sour with stress and lack of sleep. “I mean, one fucking merchant’s daughter, barren anyway, and too stupid to look to her own welfare in good time? She’s not even a full cousin.”

“I don’t expect you to understand.” Any more than I understand it myself.

“She’ll be soiled goods by now, Ringil. You do know that, don’t you? You know how the slave markets work.”

“Like I said, I don’t expe—”

“Good, because I don’t.” Gingren thumped the table, but with a despairing lack of real force. “I don’t understand how the same man who helped save this whole fucking city from the lizards can stand there and tell me that getting back one raped and brutalized female is more important to him than protecting the stability of the very same city he fought so hard to save.”

Ringil looked up at him. “So it’s about stability now, is it?”

“Yeah. It is.”

“Want to expand on that?”