Despite my knowledge of his nearness, I felt surprisingly unselfconscious as I picked my way across the stony shore. Afternoon had shaded into a beautifully clear evening. Rikasa’s two moons hung in the sky as if placed there for my enjoyment alone. I spread my towel across the sun-warmed foot of the boulder and stepped in. The shallows were cool, the deeper pool shockingly cold. I floated for a while, then swam across to the rock ledge on the far side, finding the current strong but not frightening. Keeping close to the ledge, where the water was still, I worked my way upstream to let the current carry me back to the beach on my return trip. I looked over to gauge the angle and saw Hathan sitting on the boulder, his arms clasped loosely around his knees. I wondered how long he’d been there. Unhurriedly I crossed the current a second time. The sun had shifted, and the pool below the boulder was illuminated now by a shaft of tawny light that caused the scattering of crystals on the river bottom to sparkle. I took a deep breath and dived down to collect a handful of blue gems. Then I climbed to the top of the boulder and sat down, next to Hathan but far enough away that I was in no danger of dripping on him. The warmth of the day lingered, and I didn’t yet need my towel. I tossed the crystals one by one back into the pool.
“One more day on Rikasa,” Hathan said when we had been sitting quietly for a while.
“How many other planets have you visited?” I asked.
“Other than Vardesh Prime, you mean?” He considered. “Four. Five if you count Earth, but I don’t—yet.”
I looked again at the sky. The white moon was nearly full, the gold one, above it and slightly offset, a delicate crescent. Like so many things I had seen since leaving home, they were exquisite and impossible, too perfect to credit. “I never even thought I’d visit one.”
“It isn’t the one we promised you.”
“I wouldn’t have missed Rikasa for anything,” I said firmly.
He nodded. “After this, I think, you’ll start to feel ivri avanshekh.”
“Maybe.” I couldn’t explain, even to myself, the mingled anticipation and dread that filled me at the thought of seeing Earth again.
The evening wind was beginning to stir, ruffling the surface of the pool. I shivered. Hathan stood up. “We should get back to camp.” Then his expression changed. He tilted his head slightly.
“What is it?” I asked.
He listened a little longer, then nodded once, decisively. “We’re not alone.”
I followed his gaze toward the wooded point where we had made camp. At first I couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary, but after a moment a running figure emerged from the trees, then another and another. I counted eight in all. They jogged down the beach in our direction, their steps light and perfectly synchronized. They had covered half the distance to the boulder when their leader threw up a hand. The group halted as one. They’d seen us.
An instant before, I had been perfectly at ease. Now I was acutely conscious of our isolation and my near-nakedness. Our situation was innocent, but to strange eyes, it wouldn’t look that way. Shame washed over me, and I knew from the warmth in my face that it was flooding with telltale color. Why hadn’t it ever occurred to me that we might encounter one of the other teams on the course? After all, there were twenty-five of them, and they were all converging on the same spot. As the group advanced again, now at a walking pace, my embarrassment gave way to fear. Was this a chance meeting, or had they tracked us here? And to what end? There were eight of them and only two of us. And, as the Flare had made abundantly clear, I didn’t count for much when it came to self-defense.
Hathan stood up and began to climb down from the rock. When I rose to follow, he said, “Don’t come down.”
I settled obediently down again, leaning back on my hands, attempting to look nonchalant: just a girl in a bikini catching some rays at the local swimming hole. An image for which the strangers coming toward us could have absolutely no context. My pulse raced as I tracked their approach. Hathan stood a little in front of the boulder, his stance alert, hands relaxed at his sides. He was preparing to fight. To protect me. He must have been picturing this exact scenario when he insisted on coming with me.
As the strangers approached, I recognized a smaller figure toward the back. I said eagerly, “It’s Reyna!”
Hathan said, “I see her.”
“Seven against three,” I said under my breath.
“Seven against two.” I looked at him. Without turning his head he said, “If things take a bad turn, you go into the water. Head downstream. I’ll signal for help and buy you as much time as I can.”
It took all the self-possession I could summon to keep still as the Echelon squad drew up to us and stopped. They raked us with their gazes. After what seemed to me an interminable silence, one of the men in front said, “Well, isn’t this cozy. If this is what hosting a human representative looks like, believe me, they’ve been advertising it all wrong.”
“Sign me up for the next round,” the man next to him muttered. They both laughed.
Resolving to steer the conversation in a safer direction, I called a cheerful “Hello!” in Vardeshi, using the neutral salutation exchanged among equals. “Anyone want to go for a swim?”
Hathan added, “Voluntarily or otherwise?”
The Echelon officer at the front opened his hands, indicating the absence of weapons. “Stand down, Fleet. We don’t want any trouble.”
“Good,” I said, matching his battle-hardened tone. “Neither do we.”
There was more laughter. I was fairly sure it was at my expense. I didn’t care.
The man who had spoken first turned his head to the side. “Orders?”
Relief flooded me as Reyna said coolly from the rear of the pack, “Fifteen-minute rest. Packs off.” She added, “You can come down now, Eyvri. There won’t be any trouble, not with a human in the mix. No one’s looking to earn the blue medallion today.”
“The what?”
Hathan angled his hand across his throat, mimicking the slice of a blade.
“Oh,” I said, enlightened. “Good. That’s a relief.”
As I scrambled down, Reyna came forward, unsnapping her own pack. She dropped it on the stones at the base of the boulder. “Where are the others?” she inquired, as if they might be huddling together just out of sight in the shallows behind the boulder.
Hathan glanced across the water and up, toward where the Perch blazed with reflected sunset fire. “Drinking senek on the terrace, I imagine. If they’ve managed to tear themselves away from the showers.”
“They went on ahead?”
“Not exactly.” He offered a precis of the afternoon’s events.
At the mention of my token, Reyna said interestedly, “You earned a challenge token? How?”
I explained. When I’d finished, one of the women on the Echelon team who was filling her water flask nearby murmured audibly, “Too easy.”
“If it’d been any harder, I’d be at the bottom of the lake right now,” I snapped.
“In that case,” she said, “it sounds about right.”
Reyna checked her flexscreen. “Even with the token, it’s two hours past the deadline. You’re probably out of time. I’ve never heard of a challenge ring worth more than three hours, and that was an exceptionally rare case.”
“Oh?” Hathan said aridly. “Rare, was it? Any humans on that team?”
I said, “It’s never been about the time, anyway. I just want to finish the damn hike.”
“So do I,” Reyna said with a certain bitter humor.
“Speaking of which,” Hathan said, “you’re running late.”
“Our route was mostly exposed. The weather has been … inconvenient.” She glanced out at the water. “How’s the climb on the other side?”
“Easy. For one thing, it’s dry.”
“Good.” Reyna turned her attention to me. “Come on. Let’s go for a walk.”
The grammatical structure of the invitation excluded Hathan. Surprised, I
said, “Okay.”
Reyna turned and strode down the beach in the direction from which she and her companions had just come. They shifted aside to let her pass. I stepped into my sandals and followed. When we were out of earshot of the others, she said conversationally, “I’d say I could take Hathan’s place, or stay behind with the two of you, but I can see that the offer wouldn’t be welcome. And all this time I thought it was Saresh you wanted. My mistake.”
My heart thudded in my chest. I said as casually as I could, “What are you talking about?”
Reyna shot me a sidelong look. “Please. From what I’ve seen, our cultures have similar notions of privacy. I wouldn’t undress for someone I didn’t want.”
I abandoned my pretense of misunderstanding her. “I’m wearing a swimsuit. Which he’s seen before. Him and everyone else on our team.”
“That’s different. You weren’t alone then.” The shadow of a frown crossed her brow. “Whose idea was that, by the way?”
“His. But”—I hesitated—“it might not mean anything.”
“It might not. Or it might. Either way, nothing will happen unless you make it happen.”
As always, Reyna’s absolute matter-of-factness put me at ease. The conversation should have been surreal. Instead it felt necessary and surprisingly clinical. I said, “How do you know?”
“Put yourself in his place. He’s made two very public mistakes with you already. Now you’re alone with him, under his protection. A subordinate. A diplomat. He’ll be careful. No matter what he wants.”
Recklessly I asked, “Can you find out what he wants?”
Reyna glanced back down the beach to where Hathan stood talking with the other Echelon officers. “Not in such a short time. And not without being obvious about it.”
“Damn.”
“I could have,” she said, something suspiciously like laughter in her voice, “at virtually any time in the last six months, if you’d asked.”
I said irritably, “If I’d known you’d be so laid back about it, I would have. But I didn’t think there was any point. Sohra told me your people don’t sleep around.”
“Sohra was being diplomatic.”
My anger faded at once, replaced by curiosity. “What’s the nondiplomatic answer?”
Reyna stopped, picked up a handful of stones, and began tossing them into the swift-moving current at the center of the river. “That affairs happen. Typically during the engagement period, not after, and typically in couples with birth houses of equivalent rank. Usually one or both lovers is Fleet or Echelon. Think about it: it’s the perfect scenario. You’re away from your fiancé for months or years. If you’re discreet, no one knows. If you’re not, no one cares. It doesn’t affect the marriage.”
“Because nobody falls in love,” I said.
“That’s right.”
“Would you do it?”
“Me? No. I have too much to lose.” Without waiting for my question, she went on, “Hathan doesn’t. Takheri House is ranked higher than Garian. And his family is important in the pro-alliance movement. Sidra won’t throw that connection away without good cause.”
“You make it sound like a math problem,” I said.
“Because that’s what it is. Eyvri, do you remember what I told you before? On Elteni?”
I did. Her words had been in my mind more and more often since our arrival on Rikasa. “You said there’s no empirical right or wrong. There’s only what I want. You’re wrong, you know. There is most definitely a right and wrong in this case. And what we’re talking about is just plain wrong.”
“Perhaps,” Reyna allowed. “But it’s only one night. And you’ll never have another chance like this one.”
“What makes you think I have any chance at all?”
Without shifting her eyes from the horizon, she said, “For one thing, he’s looking at you right now.”
The shiver that went through me was hot and cold at the same time. I went still, then reached up to brush a strand of hair away from my face, resisting the impulse to look back down the beach. Why was it that the conscious decision to act natural instantly excised all ability to do so?
Reyna said, “You lose nothing by asking.”
“That is absolutely not true.”
She looked her inquiry.
“We’ve worked hard to come back from the Flare. We’re okay. We might even be friends. If I ask and he says no, it’ll ruin what we have.”
“Two months from now, there won’t be anything to ruin.”
She had thrown her last stone. By unspoken accord we turned and walked slowly back along the beach. Reyna’s companions were stowing their water flasks and picking up their packs, making ready to depart. To leave me alone again with Hathan. I felt exhilarated all over again at the thought, and terrified too, in a way I hadn’t before.
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
I sighed. “I have no idea. What would you do?”
“Me? I’d wait until he fell asleep, then strip down and crawl into his sleeping bag.”
“Jesus Christ,” I said with feeling. “Straight to the nuclear option, huh?”
“In my experience,” she said with a trace of a self-satisfied smile, “it tends to produce results.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet it does. How about a less drastic approach? What would Sohra do?”
“Sing him a song, maybe?”
I made a face. “I tried that. It didn’t go well.”
“In that case,” Reyna said, “You should consider that the nuclear option may be the only one you have left.”
We rejoined the others near the boulder. Hathan was standing with two Echelon officers, a man and a woman. The latter was sketching out a possible approach to the Perch, her hands nearly as expressive as her words. Hathan was listening attentively, but as Reyna and I stepped into the little circle, he glanced from her face to mine with an expectant air I didn’t understand.
Reyna, bending to adjust something on her pack, missed the look entirely. She straightened, lifted the pack, and slipped it on. As she did up the fastenings, she said to Hathan, “Are you short any supplies? We can leave you whatever you need. We’ll be at the Perch in another two hours.”
“One,” said the man next to her.
Hathan looked at me. I shrugged. He said, “We’re fine.”
“Until tomorrow, then,” Reyna said with a nod that included us both. “Khavi, you’d better rest up for those long duty nights ahead, because I appear to be poised to win our bet.”
“You mean the bet I won earlier today when I crossed the finish line before you?”
“So you say,” she murmured. “And yet here you are.”
“Here I am,” he agreed. “If you’re content to win on a technicality, so be it.”
“I’m content with anything that gets me a full night’s sleep. I’ll see you at the top.” Raising her voice, she called, “Team Ekhran, move out.” She led the way down the beach to where a scattering of smaller boulders formed a haphazard line of stepping stones across the current. Without hesitation she stepped onto the first boulder. The seven members of her squad followed her across one by one. When they reached the far side of the river, they ran up into the trees, a line of darting shadows in the twilight. Within moments they were lost to view.
When we were unquestionably alone again, I said, “I’m sorry about the bet. I completely forgot about that.”
Hathan said, “It doesn’t matter. Another day in the woods is worth a month of starside night duty. I’m sorry they were so crude.”
“They weren’t that bad.”
“Still, I feel a need to redeem us as a species. Maybe this will help.” And with no more warning than that, he grasped the hem of his shirt, pulled it up over his head in a single fluid motion, and dropped it on the pebbles at our feet.
My stomach turned over. What was happening? “What are you doing?”
“Taking you up on your offer.”
“My . . . offer.” M
y voice trembled.
Hathan jerked his chin at the river. “Let’s go for a swim.”
“A swim? Seriously?”
“Seriously.” He read my skepticism and added, “Consider it my personal contribution to the alliance. We’ve put you in enough strange situations over the last year. I think I can handle a little cold water.”
“Great,” I heard myself say. “Okay. Let’s go for a swim.”
He reached for the fastening at his waist. I looked quickly away, horrified and elated, wondering if perhaps this was all a delightful dream from which I would shortly be awakened by Zey shouting into my tent dome that it was time to get up. I closed my eyes. I didn’t hear any shouting. Instead I heard a rustle of fabric as Hathan removed his pants and another as he dropped them on top of his shirt. When I looked back, he was standing with his hands at his sides, entirely still in that uncanny Vardeshi way, less like someone suppressing the impulse to move than like someone who has never felt it. My peripheral vision told me he still wore the Vardeshi equivalent of underwear, but I sensed that he would have been equally at ease wearing nothing at all. He didn’t try to cover himself or fill the silence with laughter or meaningless talk. He simply waited, his eyes steady on my face. The dignity he brought to such an intimate moment transported me somehow past its awkwardness. I had the sense that he was permitting me to look at him. And so, after a hesitation, I did.
For the most part, he was as I had imagined him. Fleet uniforms were relatively form-fitting, after all, and I had had ample time to study him covertly. The lines of his body were those of a slim human man built to slightly smaller scale. But no amount of imagining could have prepared me for the androgynous beauty of his uncovered form. Studying the long slender limbs that tapered to narrow wrists and ankles, I felt renewed awe at the strength they contained. My eyes were drawn inevitably downward to the region of his body that was categorically masculine. The briefest of glances suggested that proportions there were comparable to those elsewhere. The fact was reassuring, absurdly so, given how unlikely it was to be a matter of personal relevance to me. And hadn’t Daskar essentially told me months ago that, in her considered medical opinion, our peoples were most likely physically compatible? Still, I told myself, it was good to have proof. For the future. In case I ever found myself dating an unattached Vardeshi man. In case I ever found one, period.
Bright Shards (The Vardeshi Saga Book 2) Page 36