The small green ball was indeed unfurling, and the moment it was free of his grasp the thing burst outward and upward into a graceful spray of fronds, which also, impossibly, turned from green to a bright, flaming red before his eyes.
He stared at the thing. He had heard of life forms on various worlds who were able to change their own coloration to blend into the background, to hide from predators, but he’d never heard of a plant that could change like this, so quickly. As if it were a sentient creature, or one with a nervous system to react with.
“It is—”
“A fireplant.”
“Appropriate name,” he said, shifting his gaze to the twins.
“If you—”
“Stroke one—”
“From the bottom—”
“To the top—”
“It will—”
“Hug you.”
He blinked. Now, surely, they were making up stories. He felt the urge to glance at their mother—ah, perhaps that was the way he should think of her, it put her a step further away—but immediately had the thought that if he did it would lessen him in the twins’ eyes to look to someone else for assistance with them. And oddly, he did not wish that to happen.
Slowly, he lifted his other hand and ran a finger along one of the fronds, as instructed. And when he had nearly reached the top, it actually did curl downward, wrapping around his finger.
He stared at it for a moment, both startled and bemused. What bizarre things this misty world held. Then he looked up at the twins, who were both grinning at him.
He felt such an odd sensation, unfurling inside him much as this frond had, a warmth and . . . softness. He wondered if this was an effect of the plant, not poison but perhaps a drug of some sort.
“Children?”
Her voice was soft, and in it he heard that undertone he’d often heard when Ziemites spoke to those connected to them by blood ties. Love, he supposed they would call it on this world where they clung to such things.
The twins glanced at her, then at the plant he held.
“We must—”
“Put it—”
“On something—”
“Now that it is—”
“Starting to turn—”
“Green again.”
He hadn’t noticed that the red at the very tips of the fronds, including the one still wrapped around him, was indeed fading. For an instant he wondered wryly if it would surrender his finger, but he retracted it easily. And the ability to do even this much was still a wonder to him, and he felt another rush of that same warm sensation. This time he did look at Lana, for he could no longer deny that he owed this, and much more, to her.
Lux held out the small, carved wooden cup she carried. He deduced from that he was supposed to deposit the plant in it. He slid it off his palm so that it landed upright in the cup. The green was spreading now as the brilliant red faded.
“You cannot—”
“Touch it now because—”
“It will burn.”
He blinked anew and stared at the rather benign-looking plant. “Burn?” he asked.
“Your skin.” It was Lana who answered this time. “After it opens and the red fades, it begins to produce a secretion that will blister painfully if touched.”
“Effective defense,” he said.
“Yet some of our creatures feed on it. They know that in the sphere stage it is safe.”
He had just enough time to wonder at that when the twins asked her the very question he would have.
“How do—”
“They know?” They looked as if this had only now occurred to them.
“That,” their mother said, “is a very good question. Can you think of a way?”
Nyx frowned, but Lux looked merely thoughtful. Then they exchanged a glance that had him again wondering if they somehow communicated without spoken words, especially when they started again.
“I think that—”
“Maybe one tried—”
“To eat it at—”
“The wrong time—”
“And they learned.”
Iolana smiled at her amazing, bewildering offspring. “Excellent deduction. And then?”
The two looked puzzled. Then they looked at him, as if checking to see if he understood what she meant.
“I think,” he said to them, “that she means that then the one who learned somehow conveyed this to the others.”
Their expressions brightened. “Oh. You mean—”
“Their mother—”
“Won’t let them—”
“Eat it.”
“Something like that,” he agreed.
“That is what mothers should do.”
There was a trace of sadness in her voice, and he supposed she was thinking of how she had not been there for these two. It was, he gathered, among the strongest of bonds on this world.
The twins looked at her for a moment. Then Lux said, “Drake says you had to choose between what you wanted and what was best for Ziem.”
For the first time he saw her utterly disconcerted. Her eyes, those amazing ice-blue eyes, widened as she stared down at them. He wondered if part of it at least was because it had been a full sentence from only one of them.
“Yes,” she whispered.
It was Nyx this time. “And Eirlys says you will probably feel bad about it forever.”
“Yes,” she repeated. “Forever.”
The two exchanged glances, then nodded at each other.
“That is—”
“Enough then.”
He heard her take in a quick, audible breath as they shifted their attention back to him. “We will—”
“Go find more—”
“Interesting things—”
“For you.”
They darted out. Iolana stared after them. She looked stunned.
He was feeling a bit the same. Not at the twins, but at himself, and his reaction to them. He felt no longer just intrigued. He had long ago admitted he looked forward to their interactions, but until this moment he had not realized that it mattered to him that they trusted him. Even, perhaps, liked him.
And the liking of other people had not mattered to him in a very, very long time. If it ever had.
“Are you . . . all right?” he asked as she continued to stare after the two who had scampered out the exit he could not see but obviously they knew was there. He also knew where it had to be, and were he stronger he might attempt an exit himself. But even as he thought it, he knew it was not true. Not yet.
“Lana?” he said when she didn’t respond.
At last she turned back to face him. “My relationship with them has been . . . difficult.”
I promised to look after my children by the simple act of bringing them into the world. I did not keep that promise.
He might not understand the concept behind those words she had spoken, but he did understand the value of a person’s word.
“They seemed . . . accepting, just now,” he said; it required thought to come up with words for these intricate relationships he knew nothing of except descriptions in Coalition research.
“Yes,” she said, glancing the way they had gone. “Yes, they did. A first.”
When she looked back her smile was as bright as the sun of Lustros. And when that thought formed, it took him a moment to recognize the jab of aversion he felt was to the linking of this woman in any way to the place he’d come from. She was too brilliantly, flamingly alive for that regimented, controlled world. She would never be allowed.
“They are . . . unique.” Just as you are. Another bane to the Coalition.
“They are very special.” She just looked at him for a long moment
, as if she were considering something. “And yet twins are not treasured, on your home world,” she finally said.
He nearly laughed. “Treasured? On Lustros they are considered a mistake, to be rectified immediately.”
“By slaughtering the smaller of the two.”
“Yes.”
“And what if the smaller one is—or would have been—the smarter one?”
“Then it’s for the best.” He sucked in a breath, startled at his own words.
“So it is more difficult for an intelligent child to smother that intelligence to fit into the Coalition mold? That must have made it very difficult for you, then.”
It was, he supposed, a measure of his current weakness that the compliment pleased him more than the insult to the Coalition bothered him. Perhaps his condition explained all the strange thoughts and feelings he’d been having since he’d awakened in this impossible mirage.
When he didn’t speak, she went on cheerfully, as if she hadn’t noticed. “Tell me, Caze, can you imagine Nyx without Lux?”
It took him a moment to suppress the odd combination of shiver and heat that went through him every time she used his name. It was ridiculous; it meant nothing. No one used his given name, so naturally it sounded . . . odd to him when someone did. Except “odd” was not the word for it.
But he wondered if perhaps she had inadvertently revealed the crux of Coalition thinking on the matter of twins. Perhaps it was not only that they thought of them as defective, but that such inseparableness, such loyalty between two people could not be allowed, not when all loyalty must be toward the Coalition.
“No,” he admitted finally. “I cannot. They are at times like one being.”
“Especially when it seems they do not require the mundane methods of communication we do.”
The short laugh broke from him before he could stop it. But she had said exactly what he had thought, more than once.
“So it would seem,” she went on, as if laughter was not unexpected from him, which in itself seemed important somehow, “that they have progressed beyond we lesser beings, does it not?”
He saw where she was going, now. “You are saying Lustros is making a sizeable mistake.”
“You disagree?”
He let out a slow breath. “I never questioned the policy. Until I met them.”
She studied him for a moment before saying, “You have shown you can change your mind. When not doing so becomes the impossibility.”
“Yes. But as I said, they are unique.”
“Are they? How can you know that?”
She had, he had to admit, a very valid point. And he didn’t know how to refute it. So instead he said, “From what I understand of maternal ties on this world, every mother thinks her children unique. You do not?”
She shook her head, almost sadly. “Evading again?” He didn’t bother to deny it, for she was correct, but he also wanted an answer. And after a moment she gave him one. “I, perhaps more than any mother on Ziem, have the gift of children who are unique.”
“A warrior the likes of which I have never encountered before, a woman who has all creatures at her command, twins who communicate without speaking and have an unerring knack for trouble, and all of them utterly fearless? Yes, I would agree.”
As he’d spoken, her eyes had taken on that brilliant gleam, lit as if from within. “I thank you for that, Caze. For there is no better way to compliment a mother than to compliment her children.”
He could not doubt that she meant it. And yet it somehow wearied him. “I do not understand the . . . treasuring of these kinds of bonds. How do you think, make decisions, without their needs interfering?”
“We do not,” she answered simply. “And often their needs obscure all else. It takes a great deal to eclipse them.”
“Such as overwhelming grief?” he asked, thinking of her death plunge. “Does that not prove my point about blood ties? How can it be worth it when the loss of one destroys you?”
She leaned back in the chair, tilting her head slightly as she looked at him. A loose strand of that fiery hair slid to one side, and he felt an odd tingling in his fingers that he belatedly realized was a desire to touch that hair, to tangle it with his hands as he . . .
Kissed her. Stroked her. Took her.
He was so stunned by both the realization and the need that it was a moment before he could refocus on what she was saying.
“—each of us must decide. I can only say, and only now, when I am some distance along, that the soaring joy and utter rightness of the truest of love is worth any price.”
It took him a moment to be certain he could speak normally. “Even when it brings the kind of pain that drove you to make that leap?”
“Yes,” she said. “For it also brought me my children, and they yet live.”
In control now, he gave her a warning look. “Perhaps not for long, if they continue on this path.”
He saw the admonition register. And she asked another of those questions he could not truly answer. “Tell me, Caze, is it better to die for a cause you know in your blood and bone is right, or simply because you are told it is what you should do?”
“The Coalition equals right.”
She gave a roll of those dramatic eyes. “Oh, now you’re quoting things that are probably etched on Coalition meeting-room walls. That’s beneath you, Major. Perhaps you need to rest.”
“Perhaps I do,” he said without inflection.
“I will send Grim in, should you awake and need anything.”
“More likely to prevent me from trying that invisible exit myself.”
“That as well,” she agreed cheerfully.
And when she was gone, he was face to face with the fact that what bothered him most was that she had again reverted to calling him “Major.”
Chapter 34
WHEN SHE WALKED into his quarters she saw that Drake wore an expression that boded no good. Pryl, Kye, Eirlys, and Brander were all in the room, and none of them looked any happier than her son.
“What is it?” she asked.
They all looked at Drake. Leaving it to him to tell her. The only question was, was it her son they ceded the right to, or the Raider? When she met his gaze, she saw both of them in his eyes.
“The Coalition is building new cannon emplacements.”
For a moment she was puzzled, for they had expected the fusion cannon to be replaced ever since the Sentinels had taken it out. Then it struck her; the emplacements themselves had not been damaged in the raid.
“New, in addition to the existing two?”
He nodded at Pryl, clearly the source of the information. “Two more.”
“Where?” she asked.
“Southeast of the landing zone, and north of Zelos,” Pryl said.
“Which means,” Kye said grimly, “they have everything from the mines to the Racelock and the low valley to Halfhead covered.”
She frowned. “But that also means a lot more frequent moving of the replacement cannon, if it is between four locations.”
“That’s where the really bad news comes in,” Eirlys said, giving her mate a sideways look.
Iolana looked at Brander, who shrugged. “I was passing—”
“Just strolling along,” Eirlys said dryly.
“Exactly,” Brander returned evenly. “I went past the one they’re building north of town, and noticed something.”
“Because that’s what you do,” Iolana said to him, smiling.
His return smile was fleeting, and he went on. “Then I went by the old emplacement to the south. They were working on it, too, even though it had not been damaged.”
“Doing what?” she asked.
“Removing the releasable fastenings and replacing them. With perm
anent ones.”
She frowned. Making all four emplacements permanent made no sense, unless. . . . Her gaze snapped to Drake. “Exactly,” he said, his voice as grim as Kye’s had been.
“Four?” she asked, feeling breathless. “There will be four active fusion cannons?”
“As a measure of your success that’s pretty impressive,” Brander said sourly to Drake. “As something to look forward to, I’d prefer skalworm eggs.”
“With four cannons, all but one within range of Zelos, they could destroy it completely,” Kye said.
“What is left of it,” Pryl said gruffly.
Iolana had never wished more than at this moment that her vision would work to order. But it never had, and likely never would. The images came when they would.
“Do you suppose he ordered it?” Eirlys asked. “Major Paledan? He had to know of it, of course, but was it his decision? Or High Command’s?”
All eyes in the room went to Iolana. She had no answer for them; if he had, it was not in the forefront of his mind.
“More importantly,” Drake said, “will he use them?”
“Not unless his hand is forced,” she said.
“You sound very certain,” Brander said.
“I am.”
“You have Seen this?” Drake asked.
“In a way. He carries an image in his mind, of all of Zelos reduced to smoking rubble.”
Eirlys sucked in a quick breath, and for a moment Iolana met her daughter’s eyes. They held a combination of recognition and realization; she had seen the image as well, when they were healing him, but perhaps hadn’t realized what it was.
“So he’s thought of it,” Kye said.
“Pictured it. And it not only gives him no pleasure, it disturbs him. He would not—strongly would not—wish to do it.”
“You know this?” Pryl asked.
“I felt it, too,” Eirlys said suddenly. “I did not recognize . . . what the destruction was, but I felt his distaste.”
“Is it enough to stop him?” Drake asked softly. “If he is ordered?”
“I do not know,” Iolana said.
“It would take a great deal to make a man like that disobey direct orders,” Brander said.
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