Winter's Orbit

by Everina Maxwell

  “Am I on Carissi Station?” he said. His eyes went to the screen. The tiny yellow flowers on the bank looked like the ones that grew in the hills around Bita. Someone must have captured the vid on Thea.

  “I’ll tell you, you wouldn’t have liked being put on a shuttle back to Iskat in the state you were in, Your Grace,” the orderly said. “You’re in the station’s med suite.” He was taking some form of reading from the diagnostic unit at the head of Jainan’s bed. “How’s the pain? Any blurriness of vision?”

  “It doesn’t hurt,” Jainan said. “Does anyone know where I am?”

  “Blurriness of vision?” the orderly said, and waited expectantly until Jainan shook his head, causing himself a stab of pain. “Well, I’d say there must be fewer people who don’t know you’re here. You’ve got two Internal Security guards out in the waiting room, another guarding the suite door, palace agencies harassing my manager, and a visitor list as long as your arm.”

  “Kiem?” Jainan said. “I mean—Prince Kiem?”

  “I couldn’t say,” the orderly said. “Now, do you think you could drink some water?”

  “Am I under arrest?” Jainan said. “Has anything happened on Thea?”

  “Under…? Nobody told me anything about that,” the orderly said. But Jainan could see him reassessing Jainan and his security arrangements with a sideways glance. Jainan also saw the moment when he resolved that his superiors would have told him if his patient were a dangerous criminal, and the professional upbeat manner returned. “I wouldn’t worry, I don’t think so. At least you’ve got all the bits of your brain in working order, how’s that for luck? How about that water?”

  So he wasn’t under arrest, but Internal Security had people outside his door. Fenrik couldn’t have succeeded in starting a war; the orderly would surely have heard. “Yes,” Jainan said, though his stomach felt like a shriveled, nauseous lump. He needed to be functional. As the orderly got up and fetched a plastic cup from a tray, memories piled into Jainan’s head, feeding the sense of urgency pumping through him. “I would like to see Kiem, please.”

  The orderly handed him the water. “Drink that for me,” he said encouragingly.

  Something inside Jainan snapped. His fingers curled around the cup. “I have had enough,” he said, in a voice that surprised even him, “of being treated as if I am incompetent. Last time I saw my partner, he was tackling a man with an incapacitator gun. Please show me the visitor list so I can ascertain if he is alive.”

  The orderly seemed taken aback. “If you’ll just calm down there, sir,” he said, in a quelling voice, but he was already reaching over to gesture the bedside screen awake. “We’ll get you that.”

  Kiem would have found some way to soften what Jainan had just said. Jainan raised the plastic cup to his mouth mechanically. “I appreciate the water,” he said. “Thank you.”

  This seemed to mollify the orderly. “There we are,” he said as the names flashed up. “It’s visiting hours, so if any of them are still around, your readings are stable enough to see someone.”

  “Thank you,” Jainan said. He scanned the list.

  Kiem’s name wasn’t on it. The omission was like a hand clenching at Jainan’s throat. He spun down to the bottom with the screen’s clumsy sensor and then read it over again, but unless Kiem had given an alias, he hadn’t requested a visit. Were Jainan’s memories of him from the Tau field even real? A beeping noise started up next to the bed. Jainan realized it must be his heart rate monitor.

  “Steady there,” the orderly said, checking the tube going into his wrist. Jainan swapped hands and spun back up the list.

  He told himself it didn’t mean anything final. The situation was complicated; Kiem could have been instructed not to visit him. And surely everyone on Carissi Station would have heard if a member of the royal family had died, just as they would have heard if combat drones were dropping on a Thean city. He glanced at the orderly, who was frowning over his readings.

  He needed more information. He took a deep breath and looked down the list again. He needed someone who would help him.

  Nearly every name was someone he knew. Bel. Gairad. Professor Audel. Bel again—she seemed to have called every hour. The Thean Ambassador, and the Deputy Thean Ambassador, and others from the embassy. He realized, with a light-headed feeling, that he could call on any of them, and they would tell him what they knew and help him find out more. He didn’t understand how he suddenly had so many options.

  But it was obvious whom he should talk to first. He lifted his head. “Could you see if Bel Siara is still waiting, please?”

  The orderly left him in private. After much less time than he expected, a familiar face appeared in the doorway. “Welcome back to the world of the conscious,” Bel said.

  Jainan’s neutral mask fell away in relief. Even Bel wouldn’t be using that sardonic tone if Kiem were in danger, but he asked just to make sure. “Kiem’s alive? General Fenrik hasn’t made a move?”

  “Oh, Heaven, of course Kiem’s alive,” Bel said. Her professional Iskat accent was back, Jainan noticed. She hadn’t sounded like that when he’d last seen her. “Alive and operating like there’s a time bomb under his feet. No military strike on Thea either, not since we told the Emperor what General Fenrik was planning. She isn’t pleased. Are you out of danger? I’m guessing you are, since you’re talking, but the medics were making grim faces at me right up until yesterday.”

  “Yes, I’m fine,” Jainan said. “You’re not hurt? You took—” He faltered. Some of his memories were still blurry, but he could piece them together. He hadn’t been hallucinating when Aren shot Bel.

  “He missed anything vital,” Bel said. “I’d bet most of the palace officers have never seen real action. I was fine by morning.”

  Jainan looked at where his wristband should have been, then at the time display on the screen, and had to conceal his shock. It was the day before Ressid was due to land; the Unification Day ceremonies began tomorrow. He had been unconscious for three days. “I was told I’m not under arrest.”

  “You’re not,” Bel said. “But Kiem definitely is.”

  Jainan’s hand clenched in the bedsheet. “Kiem is? Why have they arrested Kiem?” The tube in his wrist tugged in its bandage, and he realized he was leaning forward. “I was the one they accused! What is Aren going to charge Kiem with? Sabotaging his own flyer? Aren was the one who killed Taam! He was the one who tried to kill both of us!”

  Bel held up a hand. “Saffer’s also under arrest. Sorry. I’m not explaining well. It’s been a long few days. Let’s take this back to the beginning.”

  She did have the look of someone operating on too much stress and no sleep. Jainan felt a pang of guilt and looked around for a chair. The bench the orderly had sat on was bolted to the wall, so he drew up his legs, leaving a space on the bed. “You should sit down.”

  Bel looked down and paused. Jainan realized it was uncharacteristic of him to let anyone who wasn’t his partner that close, and felt his throat close up in embarrassment before Bel unceremoniously dropped the folder she was carrying on the end of the bed and made herself comfortable next to it. “Tell me if I’m on your feet. How are you really feeling, by the way?”

  “Fine,” Jainan said. Bel raised an eyebrow, and he gave ground. “My head hurts. It’s not too bad.”

  “Ye-es.” Bel said. “You know prisoners who spend too long in that thing tend to suffer permanent brain damage?”

  “That’s very reassuring,” Jainan said. “I’m glad we all went through this, or I might never have experienced your tactful bedside manner.”

  “You should hear me when Kiem thinks he has a cold,” Bel said. She brought a foot up, resting her shoe on the bed, and slung her arm around her knee as she apparently collected her thoughts. “So. They found where Fenrik had stashed the stolen remnants, but the treaty is still on shaky ground, and the deadline is tonight. Even though the Emperor told the Auditor that Saffer killed Taam, the Auditor
still says Thea doesn’t have enough indications of population consent. He might be talking about the newslogs.”

  “The newslogs,” Jainan said, with some dread.

  “Saffer—may he run out of air on a junkship—threatened to leak the story to the press, and he did. All the Thean newslogs are running articles about how you were kidnapped. Some of them even picked up the Tau field angle. The entire planet is up in arms about what happened to you. It was technically a war crime.”

  Jainan didn’t have time to think about that. The Resolution deadline was tonight. “The Auditor has his remnants back,” he said, frustrated. “What’s the problem? Is the Thean embassy refusing to sign the treaty?”

  “No, at this point your embassy says they’ll sign anything,” Bel said bluntly. “But everyone on Thea is furious and the newslogs are out for blood. If the Auditor needs implied popular consent, Saffer has managed to royally screw us all over. You can’t change the opinion of a whole planet in six hours.”

  Jainan needed allies. He needed Kiem. “Why is Kiem under arrest?”

  “He broke into a classified facility.”

  “To get me.”

  “Yes,” Bel said. “Well. That’s where it gets a bit murky. They’re reading all our communications, so we don’t write much. He said to tell you he’s sorry.”

  Jainan’s tongue felt dry. Kiem clearly hadn’t told anyone about Taam and Jainan’s history. “You’re free, though?”

  “I’m out on Imperial sufferance,” Bel said. “And only because Kiem confessed to all the actual crimes and sent the Emperor a clemency plea for the rest of us. The Emperor now has the real version of my career history,” she added. “Kiem says, and I quote, ‘It probably tickled her.’”

  “The real version,” Jainan said. He struggled to pull up his tattered memories of the Tau field. “Kiem said something about … raiders?”

  “Raider,” Bel said. “Singular. Ex-raider.” She was watching him carefully.

  Jainan felt a long-ago stir of suspicion rise again and take shape. “That’s how you knew the leader of the Blue Star group.” Bel nodded, only slightly. “Why are you pretending to be an aide?”

  “I’m not pretending,” Bel said sharply. “I wanted to go straight. I applied for this job, I got it, and funny thing, being in the center of the Empire’s power base means any of my old colleagues who might want to argue find it very hard to get to me.”

  “So it’s for safety?”

  “No,” Bel said. “Well, a little. But no. I’m good at this job. I enjoy getting respect that doesn’t come at gunpoint, and I don’t want to make a living out of screwing over merchants and freighters. I don’t like shooting people. I was born on a Red Alpha ship, you know, I didn’t pick it.” She added, defensively, “I like it here. At least I get more career options than ‘raider captain.’”

  “And all those times you solved our technical problems—?”

  Bel spread her hands. “I didn’t hurt anyone.”

  Jainan longed to press his knuckles into his eyes but held back. Kiem apparently knew all this already. And Bel had saved their lives, and there was really no time for this. “Thank you,” he said, at last. “I did wonder how Kiem had broken in. It makes much more sense now.”

  “Don’t get arrested again,” Bel said. There was an odd undercurrent of relief to her voice. Had she really cared what Jainan thought of her? “I can’t get an Imperial pardon twice.”

  “No, I do see that,” Jainan said. “Can’t I at least take responsibility for the break-in? This whole mess is”—my fault—“not your fault. Either of you.”

  “Kiem said you might say that,” Bel said levelly. “And I would like you to know that if I could travel back five years with a burn gun and put a six-inch hole through Taam’s torso, I would also have been able to solve everything. It’s Taam’s fault.”

  It took a moment for Jainan to reply. “I know that.”

  “Apart from the part where you got tortured,” Bel said. “That was mainly Saffer. Fenrik’s still walking around, by the way. I suppose if you start imprisoning Imperial stalwarts it sets a bad precedent. I haven’t heard what the Emperor is going to do with him. Someone is very anxious that I don’t do anything illegal right now, which includes bugging the Emperor’s private message branch.”

  That roused Jainan from his tangled thoughts about Aren and Taam. “You should certainly not do that,” he said, then caught the gleam in her eye and realized he had risen to the bait. The side of his mouth quirked involuntarily.

  The visitor’s light by the door beeped insistently. Jainan automatically reached out to sign it open when he saw Gairad’s face on the screen, then hesitated and glanced at Bel. “Do you mind? She’s clan.”

  “You might as well,” Bel said. “She’s been camping out in the waiting room. She came on the rescue mission, you know.”

  “Pardon?” Jainan said as the door slid open to admit Gairad.

  She looked somewhat the worse for wear. There was a healing bruise on her face and an inexplicable gel cast on her arm. She put one hand on the door frame—the other was hampered by the cast—and said, like she was hammering the words out of a punch press, “Will you please stop almost dying?”

  “What happened to your arm?” Jainan said, alarmed. “Why were you with Bel and Kiem?”

  That seemed to take some of the wind out of Gairad’s sails. She touched the gel cast with a mixture of embarrassment and pride. “I hit an Iskat soldier.”

  “Punches badly,” Bel said. She sounded darkly amused. “Fractured her wrist. I’ve shown her how to do it better.”

  “That was highly irresponsible,” Jainan said, not sure which one of them he was talking to. His mind was still reeling at how many people had been involved in finding him. Both Kiem and Bel had been strangers two months ago, of course, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that Ressid might have something to say about Jainan putting a junior clan member in danger.

  “We found the weapons,” Gairad said defensively. “Jainan, Iskat is trying to cover up the whole Kingfisher invasion. Even the Ambassador says to keep it quiet. That’s not right. And what’s going to happen with the Resolution treaty?”

  Jainan tried not to show the urgent fear driving the wheels in his mind. “It will be fine,” he said. “The palace will release a statement. Nobody saw the abduction. It can be passed off to the newslogs as a misunderstanding.”

  Gairad stood in the middle of the room, rocking back and forth on her toes and staring at him. There seemed to be something else. “Didn’t anyone tell you?”

  “Tell me what?” Jainan said.

  “Bel says it isn’t true,” Gairad said. Her expression had clouded. “I don’t believe it, if it helps.”

  Jainan couldn’t tell if the spike of nausea was part of the field aftereffects or not. “Bel,” he said, “please tell me what is going on.”

  “Take a deep breath,” Bel said. “There’s a nasty rumor that’s making the whole thing worse. I suppose Aren thought the abduction wasn’t enough to screw up public opinion.”

  “What rumor?”

  “That Kiem’s the one who was violent to you.” Bel said.

  She said something after that, but Jainan didn’t hear it. He had to stare at her and follow her lips until his brain started to make sense of what he heard again. “… after you had that argument at dinner, it’s muddied the waters, and a couple of anti-royalist newslogs on Iskat got hold of it somehow…”

  He ceased to hear her again. He felt as though his skin had been stripped away and every particle sleeting through the universe could now hammer into his exposed flesh, tearing away what he used to defend his core. His fingers were numb; his muscles no longer worked.

  “Jainan?”

  Jainan realized Bel had spoken to him more than once. With an effort, he cut short the fugue state that wanted to take hold of his mind. “Oh,” he said.

  “Shut the hell up,” Bel said, jabbing something beside his bed. The beeping
that had filled the air stopped. “Jainan? Didn’t mean to give you a relapse. Kiem’s denied it, of course, but nobody knows about you and Taam. It’s hard to explain away some of the evidence without—you know.”

  Without telling the truth about Jainan and Taam’s real relationship, which Kiem wouldn’t do. Of course. “It’s not a relapse,” Jainan said. Oddly, his head now felt very clear. “Bel, could I ask a favor of you?”

  “Break you out of the med room?” Bel said, only semi-facetiously.

  “Not quite,” Jainan said. “I would like the contact details for the Emperor’s Private Office.”

  Bel raised her eyebrows. “Going straight to the top? It didn’t work so well for Kiem. She’ll just tell you to keep everything under wraps.”

  “I understand,” Jainan said. He did, that was the thing. It was a delicate matter. “I don’t plan to ask her to do anything. I would also like you to contact a visitor for me.”

  Ten minutes and a few calls later, Bel and Gairad had gone—Gairad to reassure Professor Audel and Bel to message Kiem. Jainan waited in bed, keyed up to unbearable levels, and jumped as the door chimed.

  “Your Grace?”

  “Hani Sereson,” Jainan said. He held himself as straight as he could, sitting up in bed. “I hoped you were on the press list. Do come in.”

  The journalist gave him a blinding professional smile and sketched a bow. “I must say, I didn’t think I’d ever hear from you like this.” Her eyes flicked over his body and the drip in his wrist with a hungry shimmer of silver. “We heard you were ill. All of us were wondering if you were well enough for the ceremonies.”

  “I’m saving my energy. Forgive me for not rising to greet you,” Jainan said. “And thank you for coming on such short notice.” He opened his hand to indicate a chair Bel had brought in from the corridor.

  “Believe me, no journalist would turn down a message like the one I just received.” Hani sat down and crossed one leg over the other. “I do hope you’re recovering well from … well, it looks like you’ve been through some kind of ordeal.” Her hand hovered over an expensive mic button, which she detached from her collar and left to float in the air between them. “Do you mind if I record this conversation?”