Gregor knew his response, the answer he had to give her before she even begun her plea but could not find the strength to stop her impassioned speech. Words hung on his lips, waiting to be pushed out into the air. Not until the Nü stopped speaking, not until there was a vacuum of dialogue could he finally respond.
"I am truly sorry, but your old life is gone; that is the price of your freedom. You have seen the hidden hands that shape the world, you know of techniques practiced and studied in secret for over five decades. Your body was spared, but your life is now the Empress's."
Onion felt her heart well up and her extremities grow lifelessly cold. "Then I have not bought freedom as you say. I have bought an existence, nothing more."
"That may be true. That may be the right way of it. Perhaps. You will have as much freedom as any in the world truly. Tell me, when you traveled with your brothers, were you free to leave then? Perhaps physically you could walk away, as you could do now, but your chances of survival would be quite slim. No ability in the language, no skills that could help you survive. Do you even know how to gut a rein properly without spilling its poisonous bile and contaminating the meat? Or did you survive on the coin you brought in, as most mercenaries in these parts do?"
"That is entirely different!," Onion shouted back, "I wanted to be with my brothers. I wanted to be close! I..."
"Freedom has nothing to do with desire.", he whispered, bringing the conversation back to a manageable decibel. "That you wanted to be where you were stuck was only happy coincidence. If 'want' is all you require, then want to go to Pho-Boteth. Want to become bei'thal. Or want to work in the University. I can't know what you are most suited for, but there are opportunities for limited choice under the Empress."
How can someone you've never met lay claim to your life? Onion thought, but she was beyond explaining this to Gregor. He was right, of course, freedom was never her objective. Perhaps of any Nü she ever knew, Rejnev was the only one to have that desire. But he could not understand the power of each person's spider. He could not see the strands of the web, and how they bound the Nü close to each other. She could not feel the web of this 'Empress' and she certainly was not caught in it.
Since the annihilation of her brothers, and double and again with her encounter with bei'Anita, she had been cast adrift. No dew-kissed thread was there to guide her to her place in the world. Her life now was one in a state of constant shock. Gregor's words of ownership to her own desires had a flavor of sage advice now, considering her position, but that acknowledgment could come only through hollow rationalization now. She could not make herself "want" anything.
So the Nü suppressed the cloying helplessness sticking to her mind, and echoed the words she knew he wanted to hear, "I see. Very well, if this was the life that was to be for me, then I shall make it my life, damn this spiderless empress. Then what is our trajectory? I would know our path that I might be the one to lay my feet on it." she uttered, though a hint of futility pervaded her breath. The lips are far easier to convince than the heart.
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