"Glain has no use to anyone," Brendan said. "I convinced Da to offer her a post with us. She won't take it-I know that-but I had to try."
"And when she doesn't accept?" For answer, Brendan tipped the knight over. "Does Da really believe I'll ever forgive him for any of this? Ever?"
"No, not really. But he'll keep you locked up until it's over. He thinks that once they're all gone, once the thing's settled, you'll-and I'm quoting him, you understand, so don't take a fist to me-you'll come to your senses."
///
"He's the one who's out of his mind. And you haven't told me about Morgan and Wolfe. What's he planning to do with them?"
Brendan set the knight upright again and finished putting the rest of the pieces on the board. He was playing black, Jess realized. Somehow, he wasn't at all surprised that his brother had let Anit have the advantage.
"This is where it gets interesting," Brendan said, and sat back to look directly at Jess. "I'm taking them to Alexandria, the two most valuable prizes, as a gesture of good faith directly to the Archivist. We're making a deal to sell ten thousand original volumes to him at an extortionate price. They're the sweetener."
"Why?" The question tore out of him, bloody and raw. He meant why to everything . . . why was he born into this family, why would his father betray him so badly. His brother.
Brendan deliberately mistook the meaning of it. "Because these are ten thousand obscure texts no one is going to want anyway, and it buys us time to print up the real treasures with your miracle machine. Once we start selling those, we'll need the warehouse space to store our profits. And it keeps the Archivist pointed away from us, until we're ready."
"I mean, why is he sending you, you idiot. You're his heir." That was half a lie, but Jess knew the rest of it had no answers. Or rather, the answers had always been right in front of him.
"No," Brendan replied quietly. "You are his heir. His firstborn. I'm just his manager. His assistant. His bullyboy he sends in to solve a problem. You're the one he's always wanted. And now he can have you, because sooner or later, the lure of those books coming off the press will draw you. We both know that. That's the business you're inheriting."
It struck Jess with a sick little thrust that Brendan was saying that he was being sent to negotiate with the Archivist because it didn't matter if he lived to return. The old saying he'd once heard his father say, so jovially, came back in a rush. I still have an heir and a spare. And the other men around him had laughed.
Brendan was the spare.
Anit silently got up from her seat and offered it to Jess. He hardly knew what he was doing when he sat down across from his brother and began to move the pieces. Playing from instinct, and with foreknowledge of what his brother liked to do.
He won in six moves.
"You need to eat hearty," Brendan said as he tipped his black king forward on its face. He looked up, and their gazes locked, and Jess, on impulse, extended his hand. They were, on occasion, capable of this kind of communication, silent and instinctive; for all they were different, they were made of the same body, two halves of the whole. And Brendan knew exactly what he intended to do. Maybe he had from the beginning.
His brother took his hand and shook. They both stood and embraced. Jess understood precisely what Brendan had just said. He understood the magnitude of the sacrifice.
Anit looked from one of them to the other, mystified by the fact that they were both smiling. "What? What are you going to do?"
"Nothing," Jess said. "We're going to do nothing at all. It's the only way to win."
When he left them, Anit had departed for her ship, and Brendan had stretched out on the divan and fallen soundly, immediately asleep-a skill Jess had once had and wished he could recapture. I have to sleep, he thought. His body had a weight and drag and ache to it that only rest could cure, but there was so much to think of, and so much to dread.
He slipped into his room and locked the door behind him and was stripping off his shirt in the dark when he heard a small rustle of cloth and froze. He reached for a knife he'd concealed in his boot, and for the control of the glow by the door, and was already moving forward to engage the enemy when the light's glow rose like false dawn and spread over the young woman lying asleep in his bed.
He stopped, staring at her. Knife still in his hand. Mind gone entirely still, for the first time in what felt like an age. She had that effect on him, he realized; she created silence in the noise. Peace in the storm.