Chapter 106 Authoritarian
LUCA
The room still smelled like her.
It always smelled like her now, lavender and moonlight and something warmer underneath that I’d never managed to find a word for. Some combination of her power and her presence that had soaked into the stone and the fabric and the air over the weeks we’d been living here.
I’d noticed it differently when she was in the void. The way a smell can make something worse because it insists on continuity when continuity has been broken.
Now she was back and the smell was hers again, not a reminder of her absence but just — her.
She curled up on the bed without ceremony, still dressed, pulling a blanket around her shoulders. I settled beside her, not quite touching, giving her whatever space she needed.
“Tell me something that has nothing to do with the council,” she said.
“What kind of thing?”
“Anything. Something from before. You’ve been alive for eight hundred years. There must be things that have nothing to do with politics.”
I thought for a moment. “There was a baker in a city that doesn’t exist anymore. Somewhere in what’s now the Eastern Territories, when it was still three separate kingdoms. He made a bread with something in it, I never found out what, some spice or combination of spices that I’ve spent six hundred years trying to recreate.” I looked at the ceiling. “I’ve bribed chefs. I’ve commissioned research. I once offered a significant amount of gold to a culinary historian who I thought might have records from that period.”
“Did they?”
“They had records from a different city, a different century, completely useless. But they were very happy about the gold.” I felt Arya’s warmth settle against my side, the weight of her leaning into me. “I think about that bread sometimes. Like it’s an evidence that the world keeps losing things. Good things. Small things. And no one really marks the passing.”
“That’s sad.”
“Not really. It’s just time.” I glanced down at her. “What would you want someone to remember about you? If centuries passed.”
She was quiet for long enough that I thought she might have fallen asleep.
“That I tried,” she said finally. “Not that I succeeded, or that I was powerful, or that I built something that lasted. Just that I actually tried. That I meant it.”
“They’ll remember that.”
“You can’t know that.”
“I can. I’m the one who’s been alive long enough to know what endures.” I pressed my lips to her hair. “The ones who meant it people remember. Not always the names or the details. But the fact of the trying. It gets into the bones of the world and stays.”
She made a small sound that might have been agreement or might have been sleep beginning to take her.
I stayed where I was and let her rest.
Through the bond I could feel her settling. The tight anxious buzz that had been her constant companion since the void gradually softened into something closer to genuine calm. Her breathing evened out. Her grip on the blanket loosened.
I stayed awake.
Not from anxiety this time. Or not only from anxiety. More because I still found it remarkable that she was here to watch over. That I had something so precisely worth watching.
Eight hundred years was a long time to wait for something remarkable.
\-----
ARYA
My subconscious felt there was something urgent waiting for me, pushing me. I reached for Luca before I finished opening my eyes. He was there. I breathed out a sigh of relief but it only lasted a second when I realized the feeling must be coming from some place else.
Just then, there was a knock on the door. Luca immediately sat up, like he hadn’t been sleeping just moments before.
“What time is it?” I managed.
“Late afternoon.” He was already moving, the eternal soldier, centuries of battle-trained reflexes kicking in before conscious thought could. He opened the door.
Caspian stood on the other side, his expression was the carefully neutral one that meant he was holding something serious very tightly in both hands.
“I apologize for interrupting but it’s kind of urgent.”
I sat up. “What is?”
“We need both of you immediately.” He glanced between us. “A communication came through the council’s secure channel approximately thirty minutes ago. It appears to be a threat. But it’s structured in a way we’ve never seen before.”
“Let me see it,” Luca said.
Caspian handed over a tablet. Luca read it, his expression going through several things I couldn’t fully track, and then handed it to me.
The message was short. Clean. Written in a formal register that suggested someone educated, deliberate, careful with language.
‘To the Council of the United Territories:’
You have imprisoned someone who does not belong to you. You have built your movement on a foundation you do not fully understand. You believe you have achieved peace. You have achieved only the illusion of it.
Return what was taken, or we will demonstrate what the taking has cost.
You have fourteen days.
The Reclaimed’
I read it twice, my brows furrowed when the name didn’t ring any bells. “The Reclaimed. That’s a new name.”
“We have no previous intelligence on it,” Caspian confirmed. “The communication channel it came through was authenticated, and it went through the proper council verification protocols, which means whoever sent it either has access to those protocols or has someone inside who does.”
“Mordecai,” Luca said.
“My first thought as well. But the cell monitoring has shown no communication attempts since his imprisonment. He hasn’t had access to—”
“He doesn’t need access to anything if he has followers who’ve been prepared in advance.” I handed the tablet back to Caspian. “He’s been planning this for centuries. He would have built in contingencies. Communication protocols that activate automatically if he doesn’t check in. Followers with independent instructions.”
“Return what was taken,” Luca repeated. “They want him released.”
“Or that’s what they want us to think they want.” I stood, working through it. “If the goal is actually chaos. If what they really want is to destabilize us during the election period, which I believe is their target, threatening Mordecai’s release is brilliant. It forces us to either look weak by capitulating or look authoritarian by refusing.”
“A third option,” Caspian said. “We find them before fourteen days and remove the threat entirely.”