by Kate Elliott
“An alien power.” He shrugged, shifting again; this time her hand slipped onto his thigh. She did not remove it. “You wouldn’t know of them.”
“The Kapellans.” As she had with Heredes, she found it entertaining to surprise Kyosti and to watch his face as he strove to suppress that surprise. “I do have a model sixteen eighty-five composer, you know.”
“So you do.” With his free arm he pulled her halfway around to face him more clearly. “Lily,” he began. Their legs tangled; she let one slide between his, and her hand crept up to rest on his chest. Under her hand the cloth had shape and texture, like raised reliefs, that she could trace with her fingers.
“Lily,” he said again, but the tenor of his voice had changed.
Abruptly, staring up into his face, she felt like she was about to lose her footing, as if the ground was slipping away beneath her, an avalanche in Unruli’s storms. “Is that all you’ve ever been, a terrorist?” she asked hurriedly, as if the question was her last stable anchor on unstable ground.
He laid a warm hand on the back of her neck. “By profession, I am a physician.”
“Why did you come with us,” she murmured, “back at Nevermore?”
“Because I fell in love with you.”
She laughed, low and short, and, giving in at last to impulse, traced the curve of his lips with one finger. “That’s not true.”
“How do you know?” he said, the barest undertone. “How can you possibly know?” He pulled her closer to him, arms tightening to bring her into full contact with him. She was alive to the smallest movements of his body against hers, sensed almost like a touch the fresh, enticing scent of his skin.
“I’m not his real daughter,” she whispered.
His eyes had lost utterly any lethargy they once held—they were brilliantly vital now. “Born or adopted. It doesn’t matter.”
“To you or to him?” Her hand rested in his hair; although it appeared coarse in its wild disarray, it was fine under her fingers. She drew them through it with sudden intensity, reveling in its texture.
He stopped breathing; at last let out his breath in a long exhalation. His eyes had narrowed, at the same time entirely focused on her and yet slightly removed, as if the strength of his emotion had forced him to a distance before he could completely encompass it.
“To anyone,” he breathed. He shut his eyes and kissed her. Lily, with what vestiges of rational thought remained to her, could reflect that this final statement, at least, had been uttered with complete sincerity.
“Damn it,” he said a timeless moment later, “how do you unfasten this?”
She laughed, because impatience was so unlike him. “I’ll do it,” she said, discovering that her own impatience made the task more difficult than it should have been.
Later, lying quietly together on the couch, she said as much to him.
“Ah, well,” he murmured in her ear, one languid hand stroking her back, “patience is its own reward. Or is that virtue?”
Lily smiled, but she was too relaxed to make the effort of replying. Instead, she pressed herself closer against him, finding the angles where her body fit in along his, and promptly fell asleep.
He woke her sometime later with a gentle shake that dissolved into a long kiss.
“Much as I regret the necessity of suggesting this,” he said finally, “I think we should put our clothes on.” Five peremptory raps sounded on the door, and he quirked an eyebrow as if to say, You see what barbarians our hosts are.
Lily twitched a lock of blue hair away from his eyes and, disentangling herself from him, sat up and gathered up her clothing.
“Kyosti,” she said as she pulled on her boots, “are you really a doctor?”
“Yes. My specialty is triage. Why do you ask?”
“Just curious.” She ran her fingers through her hair to give it some semblance of neatness, and opened the door.
Adam entered. “Well,” he said expansively, eyeing the even more unruly mess of Kyosti’s hair. “I hope you got what you needed, sister.”
“I got no better than I deserve,” she replied, unable to keep a certain smug satisfaction out of her voice. “Though I have a few questions I wouldn’t mind asking you, brother.”
He grinned with the most outward display of friendliness she had seen from him. “I came to see if you wanted dinner.”
“I’d love some,” said Lily.
It was a lavish meal. A liquor Adam called cognac came with dessert.
“You eat well on this ship,” Lily remarked.
Adam shrugged. “Mother, being a connoisseur, is kind enough to see that it rubs off on the rest of us. When the most famous chef in the League refused her offer of employment, she kidnapped him.”
“Is he still here?”
Adam gave a speaking look at their empty plates and the single pastry remaining on the dessert tray. “Of course. Much happier than he was before. But then, Mother has always had a way with men.”
“I suppose,” said Kyosti, not quite dismissive. “I grant La Belle has presence, but I’ve never felt any desire to become obsessed with her.”
“No offense intended,” Adam replied, “but you aren’t an artist.”
“No offense taken,” answered Kyosti, “being, as I am, no better and no worse than I should be.”
“Do you mean Heredes—that is, Taliesin—isn’t the only one? Of her—ah—men?”
Adam burst into laughter. “No, really, sister, what notions you have. You are speaking of La Belle Dame, are you not?” He poured a second glass of cognac for her. “Of course not. But of course Father was the first. They were very young when they met, before she sent him out as her champion into the world. And he is the only one she ever bore children by. That means more than Mother, certainly, would ever admit to. But he’s not her only one, by a far road.”
Kyosti, with a single finger, turned Lily’s head to face him. “‘She found me roots of relish sweet,’” he said in a low voice, as ardent as if he were making love to her again, “‘And honey wild, and manna dew, And sure in language strange she said’”—he leaned into her until his lips brushed her cheek—“‘I love thee true.’”
Lily could only gaze at Kyosti. Beneath that lazy confidence, beneath the apparent fearlessness, the act he played of apathy and tired cynicism, was a vehemence that both flattered and frightened her.
“You’re very well read,” said Adam, amused.
Kyosti flicked Lily’s cheek with his finger, dismissively affectionate, and picked up his glass. “After all,” he replied with a shrug, “I spent a long time in prison. But tell me, I thought only the League was investigating the navigation routes to this area.”
“The League isn’t the only one who has an interest here.” Adam, when he was concealing information, definitely resembled his father. “We were on the trail of chameleons.”
“Out here? By the Mother, Anjahar will have a fit.”
“What are chameleons?” asked Lily,
“Your Kapellans, my love,” said Kyosti. “And you don’t want the trouble they’ll bring.”
“I’m still not convinced I want any of you and the trouble you’ve brought,” retorted Lily.
Adam slapped her on the shoulder. “That’s my spitfire,” he said. “You’ll fit right into the family.”
“Thank you,” said Lily demurely.
“But come along and meet the crew. The Mother alone knows how long it’ll be until we see the parents again, and as your hosts we must keep you entertained. And of course, everyone wants to meet Taliesin’s daughter.” He rose, glass in one hand. “And the Hawk,” he added, saluting Kyosti with his drink. “Is it true that you’re the only person besides Mother to have saved Taliesin’s life? That you carried him through five kilometers of the burning and decompressed space station you’d just blown up and then operated with only a laser pistol, a Swiss army knife, and a six-year-old Kapellan girl to assist you? Or is that just another one of those stories?”
“Did you say there was more of this cognac?” asked Kyosti. “It’s very good.”
How long they spent on the ship Lily was never quite sure. She met a great many people and drank too much; took on a wager to spar a great, hulking brute of a mercenary, laid him out in two passes, and drank more, mostly toasts to the victory; found herself alone in a cabin with Kyosti, who had acquired an entire new outfit that he insisted she remove from him piece by piece in order to examine it in more detail, which led to a long, pleasant, but ultimately muddled interlude after which, back in the hall again, she sat listening with one ear to some rather loud music and with the other to Adam regaling her with stories of his eventful childhood with an ungovernable twin brother—and slowly, she came to realize that she was wearing half her clothes and half Kyosti’s. Another drink was urged on her.
“—which reminds me,” continued Adam, “of the time Father had rigged the entire Boots Seven system’s chain of vector charts to malfunction in ascending order when triggered by the exit signals of the Kapellan cruiser fleet, sending them to Mother knows where, or nowhere, so they’d never get to the Ringworm front, and Deucalion decided it was immoral to kill alien life-forms and sabotaged the sabotage, and Father had to run the entire malfunction manually while holding off enemy fire with only a Melep unit and that woman Motley to help him. And when he got hold of Deucalion afterward—”
Later, standing on one of the tables but adamantly refusing to dance because she had a very clear feeling that Kyosti—who, lounging in a chair at her feet, appeared to be half-asleep—would think it undignified, she saw over the heads of her singing cohorts the door into the hall open and Heredes enter. She lost her equilibrium and fell to her knees. Kyosti started up to steady her. He saw she was staring past him, and he turned.
Heredes strolled up the hall, each footstep a damper on the volume until, as he stopped in front of Lily, the entire hall was quiet.
“Ah. Lily.” He put his hands on her shoulders and bestowed on her cheek a fatherly kiss. She stared foolishly at him, terribly embarrassed, but unable to act to prevent it. “I’m glad to see you’ve been enjoying yourself.” The look he shot Kyosti as he swung Lily down to the floor had the consistency of pure venom. When Lily collapsed against his side, unable to keep her footing, the ship tossed and turned so, he scooped her up into his arms. “But I fear we must go now. Captain Bolyai is doubtless eager to resume his trip. You may follow, Hawk,” he finished with withering courtesy.
“I’m sorry, Daddy,” said Lily in a very faint, very small voice, and she passed out.
12 The Mercenary’s Tale
LILY’S FIRST COHERENT THOUGHT when she woke was that it would be a mistake to attempt to sit up. She did open her eyes, but shut them immediately because the light was so bright. She was on the top bunk in Heredes’s cabin. Murmured words; she felt a hand on her shoulder.
“Drink this, Lily,” Heredes said. She lay passive under his ministrations. The cool rim of a cup pressed against her lips and she drank. Finished, she attempted again to open her eyes—this time seeing Heredes’s face close to hers, his expression tolerably amused. “Do you think you can sit up?” he asked.
She straightened up, but the sight of the vast gulf between her feet and the floor made her nauseous. Color shifted below, and Kyosti stood up beside Heredes.
“She shouldn’t be up here,” said Kyosti with awful disapproval and, closing his arms around her, he swung her with deceptively gentle strength down to the lower bunk. She shut her eyes again. He held her, her head cushioned in his lap. “She should eat something,” Kyosti added.
There was a long pause. Lily’s head pounded.
“I will thank you,” said Heredes finally, his voice taut, “to take your hands off my daughter.”
Kyosti did not stir, except to caress Lily’s waist. “Your true colors are beginning to show, Gwyn,” he replied with admirable calm. “But I feel it only fair to tell you that Lily and I mean to be married.”
Because her head hurt her so, she thought perhaps she had not heard him correctly.
“Hawk, I will only say this once.” Heredes’s voice had the terrifying hauteur of a master challenged by a presumptuous clown. “First, you cannot marry a young woman who knows nothing of the worlds you would perforce be taking her to, who knows nothing of your antecedents.”
“It isn’t I who have kept her in ignorance,” interposed Kyosti reasonably.
“You know very well what I refer to. Second, by the laws of the Reft, she is underage.”
“At twenty-five?”
“Majority here is not reached until thirty, or for a woman, the birth of a child if that comes first. In this case, it hasn’t.”
Kyosti shifted beneath her. “And when have I said we would marry under the laws of this region?”
Despite her nausea, despite the drums beating noiseless patterns on the inside of her forehead, Lily could perceive through her skin the tension in the room.
“Third, and most important”—Heredes’s voice was tight, under his breath, his anger utterly compelling—“I forbid it.”
“How quaint of you,” said Kyosti.
“Get away from her or I will—” He broke off.
“Kill me?” prompted Kyosti. “And after all we’ve been through together. My, my.”
Heredes’s voice dropped almost to a whisper. “Do you think this is a joke, Hakoni? It isn’t.”
Lily felt Kyosti’s smile by the way his arms tightened around her. “Who to know better than me? You’re too late, my dear Gwyn. Too late. Do you understand?”
The room held utter silence. At that moment Lily knew incontrovertibly that the only reason Heredes did not strike Kyosti was because she was lying between them. She opened her eyes.
“Get out,” said Heredes. His eyes, fixed on Kyosti, were terrible. “Get out of here.”
Kyosti did not move.
Lily broke away from his embrace, lunged to her feet, and staggered. “What’s wrong with you two?” she cried, realizing abruptly that if she did not keep speaking, she would throw up. “I told you I wouldn’t bond with you,” she said to Kyosti. His surprise swept all trace of artificiality from his face. “You don’t have any claim on me. You never have. And you”—shifting her gaze to Heredes caused her to trip over her own feet—“whatever other authority you may have over me, you have no legal authority, and certainly no right at all to dictate what love affairs I might choose, or not choose, to have.” Her walk to the door was more stiff than the offended arrogance she might have wished for. She managed a final withering sweep with her gaze. “Is that clear?”
She left, to what she hoped was stunned silence. It was, therefore, disconcerting to hear Heredes start to laugh as the cabin door slid shut behind her.
She barely made it to Jenny’s cabin before she threw up. Aliasing, with a minimum of fuss, cleaned her up and disposed her comfortably in the bottom bunk. Gregori sat by her feet while she ate bland crackers and drank three cups of juice, and Bach sang a slow, two-part canon. By the time Jenny came in, Lily felt much better.
“Had a wild night out, I see,” said Jenny cheerfully, chasing Gregori off the bunk and sitting herself on the spot he had vacated. “What was La Belle Dame like?”
Lily shook her head. “I’m not even going to try that one. Indescribable.”
“That’s cruel, Lily.” Jenny took a refill of juice from Aliasing and handed it to Lily. “They must have entertained you somehow, to leave you in such a condition.”
“Well,” Lily began tentatively, “while Master Heredes negotiated with their captain, we went to the mess hall, and got into an argument, and then—” She stopped, blushing at two very different recollections, one quite clear, the other confused by drink. “Twice,” she said, as if appalled to have made this discovery. “He seduced me twice.”
Jenny laughed. “I see you met and made quick work of one of them. Was he quite
handsome?”
“He wasn’t—” Lily faltered, suddenly irritated by her own confusion and by Jenny’s laughter.
“He wasn’t a pirate.” Aliasing’s soft voice quieted them. She was curled up on the floor, legs concealed as always in a swirl of skirt, her thin, brown arms propping her up. Even in the small cabin she appeared tiny but exotic against the drab walls, like some luxury item found unexpectedly in a poor household. But her gaze had a sympathy of expression that evaporated Lily’s annoyance.
“Oh,” said Jenny abruptly, understanding, and she reached out to pat Lily’s hand. “It can’t have been that much of a surprise, surely, the way he’s been hanging after you.”
“I just don’t see,” said Lily with sudden heat, “what gives them the right to squabble over me as if I were a piece of property.”
“Well, Lily-hae, what do you expect from a couple of foreigners? And males, at that? But you’re in good hands now.” Jenny rose with efficient grace. “If we squabble, at least it won’t be over you.”
By the next cycle Lily felt completely recovered, although she avoided Heredes. Kyosti avoided everyone, and Lily did not seek him out because it was easier, just now, not to have to confront herself yet with the true scope of her feelings about him. Heredes, however, sought her out for a workout.
“I’m sorry I yelled at you,” she said as they stretched out afterward.
“I’m sorry you got so drunk,” said Heredes.
“Hoy. So am I,” replied Lily with a smile.
“That isn’t quite what I meant.” He paused. “Lily.” His hesitation made him appear almost vulnerable. “About Hawk—” She waited, uncomfortable and defensive now, but at last he only sighed. “Never mind. You’re quite right that I have no right to dictate to you in such matters. But just remember, Lilyaka.” His gaze was clear and direct. “You can come to me if you have any trouble, any problem.”
“I know,” she said, and they both smiled.
She spent a few more sessions on the bridge, and finally they were only a single window away from Central.
She and Jenny, having just sparred, put the rec room’s furniture back up and sat down to enjoy carbonated water brought over from the mess.