The memory of pain made her fleetingly angry. “Pain and anger,” she said. “Those we keep.”
“And curiosity. And laughter. And determination. So you see, it isn’t all hopeless.”
“It seems so sometimes,” she said, remembering the pincers at her fingers, the wedges driven beneath her toenails. “Ah, gods, Tharius, but it seems so.”
He buried his face in her hair so she would not see his tears, thinking to himself. “Pity. We haven’t lost pity. Which is why we go on plotting, always plotting. Oh, gods, when will the plots be thick enough to clot into action!”
She moved in his arms, as though aware of her pain. “You shouldn’t be here,” she said.
“Because of Martietf? He wouldn’t say a word to anyone.”
“No, not because of your musician friend, love. Because you shouldn’t be here. You shouldn’t be showing any interest in me at all. Someone may be watching the corridor to this suite, to see if you come and go-or come and stay.”
“You are thinking in township terms, Kessie. Those of us here at the Chancery no longer have the habit of thinking in terms of sexual misconduct. We are beyond scandal.”
She hid her face in his shoulder, very white at his words. “I know. Stupid of me.”
“Yes, my dear. Stupid of you.”
“Do you ever … are you ever sorry?”
“Sorry to have outlived my passions? Yes. Sorry to have time, still, to do what we are trying to do? No.”
She shuddered, trembling at his words, fearful of what they were trying to do. In the past, the cause had seemed the only righteous way to live, and it had not brought her pain. Now it had brought her more than she was ready to bear. “Still, love, they may wonder at your interest in me. What am I, after all? Superior of a Tower. There are thousands of those.”
“I made my interest very clear,” he said, folding her more closely in the robe. “I said before the questioning started that it was shameful treatment of a loyal member of the service. I’ve said it in the interim, several times, and I’ve capped it by demanding they recognize your courage by providing you with care and attention until you can be restored to duty.”
“Which I could have been yesterday, or last week.”
“Not true, Kessie. You may have come here the direct route, by flying. The road back is not so easy.”
“Easy! By the true God, Tharius, I hope you didn’t think that was easy!”
“You lived through it,” he said, caressing her. “That’s the important thing. You lived.”
“I lived because I dragged the most ambitious and viciously self-serving Awakener in my Tower into my problem and linked his future to mine. He’s one I should have rid the Tower of early on. I didn’t. I saved him, for just such a need. As a stratagem it worked, but I’m not proud of it, Tharius.” She trembled again, and the slow tears gathered at the curve of her eyes. She blinked, driving them back, willing that he would not see her so weakened. “Now he is loose out there, a Laugher. And I am among those who sent him.”
“You lived,” he said again. “That’s all that matters.”
She had begun to feel real pain again, but it was too soon to take more of the waters of surcease that Tharius had provided. “Tell me,” she whispered in an attempt to distract herself from her pain. “Tell me how far we have come?”
He looked around carefully, being sure they were not watched or overheard, a movement made habitual through a hundred years of conspiratorial conversations. “The cause has members in over five thousand Towers,” he murmured at last, like a litany, well learned, often rehearsed. “One-fifth of all Towers. Over half of them include the Superiors of those Towers. We have strong lay groups in ninety percent of all the towns. Over half the signal routes are ours, at least on some shifts. I am now informed within a day or two of things happening anywhere on Northshore.”
She concentrated, remembering conversations held long ago. “The cause is about where we planned it would be, then. Somehow I had thought it lagged.”