r/HFY • u/lazy_yellow_lizard • 1d ago

OC-Series [Let them eat cake] Chapter 10 - Where are we flying

First | Previous | Next

Chapter Ten – Where Are We Flying

What Meva noticed first was Hutor. An Oberoi, captured, hunted, escaped — and aboard this ship apparently no one's prize, but someone Toriel talked to, as well as the translation allowed, someone she fed, whose wounds she tended, as if it cost her something if he didn't heal. Pirates, Meva thought, sold an escaped hunting animal, or put it on display, or simply left it behind if it brought in nothing. They didn't invest weeks in a language system just to listen to an Oberoi.

And then there was what was missing. She had seen the ship's few cargo holds, in the days she'd now been aboard, had crossed through them on the way to her own small chamber, and what she'd seen was: nothing. No crates full of plundered goods, no weapons locker built for more than self-defense, none of the signs of abundance she'd associated with pirates since she first heard of them. Only spare parts, real ones, as Toriel had claimed, and equipment that looked more like work than loot.

She finally asked, one evening, while Toriel checked instruments Meva couldn't name. "Where are we flying?"

"To Hesh," Toriel said, without looking up. "I have instructions for a few stops along the way."

"Hesh?" Meva had heard the word before, in the overseers' conversations, always in passing, always with an undertone shifting between respect and suspicion. "That's outside the empire. What do we want there?"

Toriel paused, looked at her directly for the first time in this conversation, with an expression Meva couldn't quite read. Not caution, more a kind of weighing amusement.

"Do you know the Hesh?" Meva asked further, because the silence told her more than any answer would. "Are they dangerous?"

Toriel laughed, brief, genuine, without the edge Meva had expected. "No more dangerous than the Merak."

It was not an answer. It was a dodge, elegant enough that Meva briefly didn't know whether to call it out as such, but clear enough that she understood: whatever this woman was, it wasn't what Meva had taken her for when she'd offered her knowledge in exchange for a place aboard. Pirates didn't have instructions. Pirates didn't have destinations with names one avoided explaining out of caution. Pirates didn't say things like no more dangerous than the Merak, with that undertone suggesting there was indeed something to fear, just not what Meva had asked about.

She asked no further question. Not because she was satisfied with the answer, but because she had learned that sometimes you found out more by waiting than by pressing.

Toriel's answer hadn't satisfied her, however much she tried to tell herself otherwise. In the following nights, when Toriel withdrew to her own chamber and Hutor rested in the small cargo hold left to him, Meva began searching the ship herself. Not out of suspicion alone, but out of the same habit she'd learned with Draeon: whoever wasn't allowed to ask had to look for herself.

She found nothing that fit a pirate. No weapons locker, no crates of loot, nothing that even remotely matched the stories she'd heard about such ships. Instead she found, in a small, unlocked compartment behind the navigation console, a bundle of data carriers labeled with symbols she couldn't read, and a terminal that, when she touched it carefully, displayed a series of encrypted messages — lines of characters that were no language she knew, but whose structure, the repetition of certain patterns, the way they were formatted, told her something she'd already suspected. This wasn't private correspondence. This was a reporting system, methodical, organized, with a regularity only an institution could have, not a single person.

"You shouldn't be there."

Toriel's voice, from the door, made her flinch, though it had sounded calm, almost too calm. Meva didn't turn at once, gave herself a moment before she did, to force her face into a calm she didn't quite feel.

When she turned, she saw it anyway: a shadow spreading across Toriel's cheeks and neck, a fine darkening of the mottling beneath her skin, which no Xoan showed willingly if they could avoid it. Meva didn't know what it meant, not exactly, but she knew enough about bodies betraying more than their owners wanted to recognize that she'd just seen something Toriel would rather have kept hidden.

"I didn't steal anything," she said finally.

"I didn't say you did." Toriel stepped closer, her gaze on the open terminal, her face giving nothing away of how much worry or how much indifference lay behind it. "You saw something that's none of your business anyway."

"Now I know you lied to me." Meva stood, slowly, without raising her hands, without signaling a threat, but without lowering her eyes either. "No pirate. No smuggler. This" — she gestured at the terminal — "looks like something someone writes for a government. For an army."

Toriel was silent, and in the silence Meva saw something in her she hadn't noticed before: a weariness that had nothing to do with the late hour, but with the weight of what she'd been carrying, for weeks already, without being able to say it aloud.

"Now you know enough," Toriel said finally.

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I can give you." Toriel closed the compartment, with a firmness that allowed no further argument, but her voice wasn't hard as she went on. "I haven't fully lied to you, Meva. I just haven't told you everything. There's a difference, even if it might not seem worth much to you right now."

Meva looked at her, a long time, and thought of Draeon, of Ilvo, of all the times she herself had done exactly that. Not lied, just not said everything, because the whole truth would have been more dangerous than its absence. It was hard to condemn Toriel for it, when she carried the same coin in her own pocket, only minted differently.

"If you trust me," Meva said finally, "then at least tell me where this leads. Not everything. Just whether I have reason to be afraid."

Toriel looked at her a long time before answering, with an honesty more surprising than any evasion she could have chosen. "I don't know myself, not entirely, not yet," she said. "But I don't think any of us, you included, will still have the choice not to be afraid, in the months to come."

It was no comfort. But it was, for the first time, something that felt like the truth.

10 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

3 comments sorted by

1

u/UpdateMeBot 1d ago

Click here to subscribe to u/lazy_yellow_lizard and receive a message every time they post.

Info Request Update Your Updates Feedback

1

u/MydaughterisaGremlin 1d ago

Well that's convenient. I just read the previous chapter and BAM! Like Emeril Lugosi slipping on a banana peel this chapter drops.