“You are not finished, are you?” Drake asked.
She shook her head. “The bleeding is stopped, the surrounding tissue healed. He is resting. Next I will remove the object, which will be painful. He will have to rest again before I begin to repair the nerves. He will need all his strength for that stage.”
“He is a very strong man,” Brander said.
“Yes. And it helps that we began so quickly.”
She glanced at Drake, remembering almost against her will those horrible moments when she feared she would be too late to save him. He had been so battered, so broken, barely holding to life, indeed surrendering that hold in the seconds before she had begun to call him back. Her son held her gaze for a moment, and she knew he was thinking of the same thing. That would ever be between them, those moments when she had poured everything she had and was into saving the son she had had to abandon to create the man Ziem needed.
“You will be able to restore him?” Brander asked.
“I believe so, for the most part. Judging by how he responded to what I’ve done so far, I think he will tolerate removing the shard. But the pain of the final stage, where he must feel every damaged nerve, could drive him to insanity. It has happened.”
“I think Paledan’s grip on sanity is very fierce,” Brander said, his tone half-wry, half-admiring.
“Yes,” Drake agreed, then looked back at her. “But I would think having to accept what is happening, what you are doing to and for him, might shake that grip a bit.”
“He is more . . . flexible in his thinking than I would have expected,” she said.
“Their way, or this way to the chopping block,” Brander said sourly.
“Which will contribute to their eventual downfall,” Iolana said. Both Brander and Drake went still, and she answered before they asked. “No, this is not something I have foreseen. But I have read much history, and it is as inevitable as the night.”
“And Paledan is not a stupid man,” Brander said.
“He asked me, if something went wrong, to let—or make—him die.”
“I am not surprised,” Drake said.
“Nor I,” agreed Brander.
“There is more. He said, if that were to happen, that we should . . . disguise it. As an accident.”
Drake drew back sharply. “He specifically said that?”
“Yes. His concern seemed to be what the Coalition would do if they thought he had died at our hands.”
Drake stared at her for a long moment, then exchanged a glance with his second, who seemed as startled as his leader. She thought she could read what they were thinking.
“You are wondering how he cannot see how wrong they are?”
They both turned to look at her. “In a way, yes,” Drake said.
“I think he does, on some level,” she said. “But he has had no choice but to accept, in most of his life. The most alive part of that intelligence has been rechanneled by force. Yet even the Coalition has not been able to quash it completely. He is just very, very good at disguising it as something in the Coalition interest.”
“Yes,” Brander said. “He spoke of that to me once.”
Drake looked thoughtful, and Iolana thought she could guess at what he was thinking. And so she risked saying, “There was something else, out there, when you asked if he was trying to save his reputation.”
Drake focused on her then. “What?”
“It came to me with a certainty I have only felt with my most vivid visions. He wasn’t trying to save his reputation, he was trying to use that reputation to save Ziem.”
Both Drake and Brander stared at her.
“Why in hades would he do that?” Drake almost snapped.
“Anything more is only speculation on my part, interpretation, which is always the most questionable thing.”
“Have you ever been wrong when it really mattered?” Brander asked, a little less intense than Drake, a bit more of genuine curiosity. He shared that with the man she’d left in her cave.
“Only once,” she admitted, “and it was when I did not understand what I was seeing.” Her mouth quirked. “It was when I was carrying the twins.”
“And that”—Eirlys’s voice came from behind her—“would be enough to confuse anyone.”
That broke the intensity completely, and Iolana smiled at her daughter who, to her continuing joy, smiled back. “Where does it stand? When will you need me?”
“Not until the last stage. If you can stay close, I will likely need you fairly soon, once I begin on the nerves. It will be very difficult. And,” she said, looking at Drake, “I may need you—or rather the Raider—as well.”
Drake lifted a brow. “He will be mobile that soon?”
“Doubtful. But the pain will be tremendous, and he will want to give up.”
Drake looked puzzled, but Eirlys said, “And he will not, not in front of the Raider.”
“Exactly,” said Iolana, pleased at Eirlys’s quick understanding.
Drake nodded after a moment. “I will be ready. Now, what was your speculation? Why would he risk himself for us?”
“He is . . . fascinated by Ziem. Against his will for the most part. I think . . .” She hesitated, and this time it was the Raider who told her to continue. “I think he has never had to deal with the people he has helped conquer before. Not personally, face to face. He was ever at the head of a conquering force, and able to ignore that those he dominated were, in fact, people.”
“I didn’t think the Coalition allowed such feelings,” Eirlys said.
“They do not. Especially on their home planet, where he was born. They are trained from near infancy to quash or control all emotions. I do not know if he has the capacity left for the kind of feelings we experience, I only know he does not, as a matter of course, experience them now.”
Eirlys stared at her mother. “That is even worse. I thought perhaps after generations they had somehow managed to eliminate normal emotions. But that they are still born with them but are forced to crush them . . . I cannot imagine.”
Iolana could, she whose emotions had always run high, so high she had had to learn something of quashing them when they interfered with sound thinking.
“When I met him on the bridge, I sensed this. And so I gave him a tiny bit, just a taste of normal emotion. By way of an . . . experiment.”
Drake frowned. “Why?”
“I was curious.”
“That sounds like our visitor himself,” Brander said dryly.
“What happened?” Eirlys asked.
Iolana smiled, almost sadly. “He thought he was ill. That I had given him some fast-acting disease. Or poisoned him.”
They all stared. “This, with only a little?” Eirlys asked. She nodded. “That is . . . almost sad.”
“Yes,” Iolana agreed, hard though it was to include that man and pity in the same thought.
“Well, if we ever need to completely immobilize him again once you’ve got him on his feet, you can just make him take the whole blast,” Brander said with a raised brow.
“It is more a matter of letting him, not making him. I cannot give what he lacks, only unleash what is now blocked by sheer force of will. He would be . . . vulnerable,” she said. “Although I could not promise for how long. He is very strong-minded. And,” she added, “I find it significant that he chose not to . . . be of the Coalition when he came to meet you.”
Drake brow creased. “Significant?”
“When you said to him he might be better off with the Sentinels, there was something,” she began, then stopped, shaking her head. “I am not certain. And perhaps I am linking it to something else that it should not be linked to.”
“Which is?”
She hesitated. “This is not something I have Seen,” she cautioned. Dra
ke nodded. “Have you noticed,” she asked, “that he speaks of the Coalition as ‘they?’ Not ‘we’?”
“I have, frequently,” Brander said. “And wondered.”
“I cannot say with certainty it means anything, but when you said that to him out there, Drake, he reacted. Not in surprise but in . . . recognition.”
“Recognition?”
“As if . . . it were not a foreign thought to him.” When they all fell into stunned silence, she hastened to repeat, “As I said, I cannot be certain, nor have I Seen anything in the way of a vision, to give me this idea. It is only a feeling.”
She caught a flash of movement at the entrance to the cavern, and looked. Grim. When he saw she had seen him, he nodded, then disappeared.
“It is time?” Eirlys asked.
“Yes,” she said. “You will be close?”
Eirlys nodded, as did her brother.
As she turned to go, she heard Drake mutter, “I hope I don’t regret this decision.”
She looked back. “I am glad my son is not so hardened he could leave a man he admires to die in such a way.”
“But I may yet wish I had ended it then.”
“Or you may be glad you did not.”
She left, not even certain of what had made her say it.
Chapter 22
“YOU LOOK,” PALEDAN said to the boy he had awakened to see sitting a few feet away, a blaster in his hand, “as if you’d like to use that.”
“I would,” the boy said, his expression grim.
“Then why don’t you?”
“Orders.”
That, Paledan understood. “We all must follow our orders.”
The boy grimaced. “I am not like you. I do not follow orders because I am part of your machine.”
He let that slur pass, in a way he might not have had he been mobile. “Then why?”
“Because they came from the Raider, and I would die before I would have him disappointed in me.” The boy’s face took on an expression of hatred that seemed harsh in one so young. Even Coalition cadets rarely looked like that, for hatred was an emotion that brought on mistakes, and so was not allowed until they were old enough to channel it. Then he added, “Even if I wish I could blast the entire Coalition to Ossuary.”
“You would not be the first to wish that,” he said dryly.
For a moment the boy—and he did not miss the statement being made that a mere lad was enough to guard him in his current state—looked surprised. Then the dark expression returned.
“What do you expect? The Coalition killed my father, and your evil beast Jakel brutalized and murdered my mother.”
“He is no longer . . . my beast.”
“I know. But he was.”
“Yes. He was a tool that occasionally was of use. But the kind that always might turn on you.”
“Is that why you gave him to us?”
He found, somewhat to his dismay, that he quite missed being able to shrug in answer to a question he did not have or wish to give answers to. But he was saved from having to do it now by the return of the tall, gaunt man they called Grim.
“You may go, Kade,” the man said.
The boy sighed. Paledan thought he saw the faintest trace of a smile at the corners of the stern man’s mouth. “You might want to see if the Raider’s third needs a break from guarding that beast.”
The boy brightened. “Jakel? I would give much to see him in that cage!”
The boy darted out, just as Iolana Davorin came in.
Iolana. She had given him leave to use her name, yet he found it difficult to even think it. But the Spirit, that title uttered almost reverently by the boy, was even more impossible.
“Are you feeling better?” she asked.
“That depends on your basis for comparison.”
“Perhaps it should be if the boy who just left here had gotten his wish.”
“In that case,” he said dryly, “there is little question I am feeling better, since he wished me dead.”
“Not you, specifically. What you represent.”
“And yet he did not do it when he had the chance. That says much about the esteem he has for your son.”
“He is but one of many who would follow my son into hades, were he to ask. Which he would not.”
He frowned. “Sometimes a commander must ask such of his troops.”
“My son would not. He would go himself, and let them decide whether to follow. He rises or falls on his own merits as a leader.”
“That,” he said slowly, “would be a foolish tactic for anyone less than the Raider.”
She laughed, that lovely, silvery sound again. “Now, if you are recovered enough, we will begin the next stage. And again, I still must know, so you must be awake and able to speak.”
He looked at her as she fastened the sleeves of her robe out of the way. Noted again the scar on her arm, and the other on her temple. “Did someone do this for you, when you were injured?”
He didn’t really expect her to answer, and was a little surprised when she did, and easily. “Grim did what he could, but we had not yet learned everything that could be done. And the physical pain was as nothing next to the anguish in my heart.”
“You mean . . . emotions.”
“I mean the agony of knowing I had done irreparable damage to my children. That in my own grief I had caused them even more.”
She could have been speaking a foreign language he had no knowledge of. In his world, one did what was necessary, and it ended there. Yet he could not deny what echoed in her voice, a pain as real as the physical. It was a weakness, he knew, that had been taught for as long as he could remember. And yet that she felt so much fascinated him.
She fascinated him.
“And even coming to know that it was necessary for Ziem did not ease that anguish,” she added.
“Necessary?” he asked as she echoed the word in his thoughts.
“For my son to become the man he must be to do what had to be done, and to keep him alive long enough to do it.”
He stared at her. The idea that occurred to him seemed impossible, yet he somehow knew it was true. “Your other children,” he said slowly. “Caring for them . . . held him back.”
“Long enough,” she said. “I think even you would agree to that.”
“A boy could not have done what he has done.”
He acknowledged it even as he thought what an unusual woman this was, to have been brought up on this world of tight bloodline connections, yet to nearly sever that line between herself and her own children, for the sake of that world.
“You did this . . . purposely?”
“Not in the beginning. Then, my choices were selfish, driven by the loss of half my soul. It was only after that Ziem showed me how to use it for her good.”
“You speak of your planet as . . . almost sentient.”
“Do I? Clearly it is not, although my world has much to teach.”
“And you have learned it?”
She shook her head. “I will never learn everything Ziem has to teach. But is that any reason not to try? Now, if you are ready?”
“What must I do?”
“Endure,” she said, and there was an undeniable touch of regret in her voice.
She had, he thought a few minutes later, understated things. He had never, even at the time of the original injury, felt such pain. It had begun as a singeing heat, but now felt like acid eating away at him, and if her intent had been to torture, it could be no worse.
She asked him questions, and it took a great effort to answer them with some kind of reason. And the pain got steadily worse.
“We can pause, give you a slight respite, but it will be as bad when we begin again.”
> “No.”
“As I expected, but I felt I must offer.”
“Why,” he asked between harsh breaths, “would you care?”
“If for no other reason than I feel an echo of your pain. It is . . . more extreme than I thought it would be.”
He did not realize she would feel this. It changed things, somehow. He did not know what to say, doubted he had the breath to spare to say it if he did.
“Is that not what you expected? A selfish reason?”
“Yes. No.” He meant them both, but could not get out the words to make it clear.
“I think I am flattered,” she said, as if she’d understood he’d meant yes, he would have expected it, but not from her. “But you say you do not.”
“Flattery . . . implies . . . falsity.”
“That can be true. It is also often the tool of some who wish to cajole something from you.”
He had not expected that. “I—”
A particularly sharp, hot pain slashed through him, stealing his next words from his mind as well as his lips. As it faded, she spoke, as if nothing had happened.
“In some, however,” she said, and he made himself focus on the words— because they were all that kept him from dwelling on the agony coursing through him in a hot, searing trail down his back, “there is a tendency to interpret any praise as false flattery, when in fact it can sometimes be genuine.”
“Rarely.” He had to clench his teeth to get it out.
“Do you consider the acknowledgment from your superiors that you are very, very good at what you do flattery?”
She’d again caught him off guard. Not that his guard was particularly high at this moment, when every passing second seemed to bring a new level of pain.
“That,” he said, having to pause for a breath, “is different.”
“Why?”
“That . . . is . . . verifiable.”
“I see. So by the same standard, compliments on your looks or bearing are not flattery, then.”
The pain was obviously affecting his hearing. “What?” was all he could manage.
“I meant that you have your reflection to verify your appeal, just as your record in battle confirms your skill.”
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