Royal: A Sci-Fi Romance (The Jekh Saga Book 5)

by H. E. Trent

  Brenna smiled and settled into the chair next to him. “That’s what you guys always say, and then you succumb to the gluten siren song.”

  “I think we all had better restraint before the Terrans came.”

  Brenna’s smile fell away and she focused her gaze on the tea box. She never knew what to say when they started dancing at the edges of tough conversations.

  She’d always feel guilty about being there, even if she really had no place else to go. Jekh had been her home since she was a child.

  She could see Herris breaking off a corner of his brownie in her periphery, so she took one, too. Half of one, really. She’d been too sedentary as of late. She didn’t like the way her body looked anymore and needed to do something about it.

  The water in the kettle came to a fast, hard boil. She started to push her chair back, but Herris patted her hand at the table edge.

  “I’ll get it.” He pulled the plug from the converter and wriggled the adapter out of the kettle. “Not as efficient as our water dispensers, but not terribly slow.”

  “What were those like?”

  He expelled a dry chuckle as he poured hot water over her tea bag. “Dreadfully expensive. That’s probably why the Merridons didn’t install one here.”

  “But you had one?”

  He grimaced and, after filling his own mug, set the kettle on a heat pad on the table. “Before.”

  “Oh.”

  He had to have been a very young man “before.”

  He must have guessed she was trying to do the math, because he touched the back of her hand and said, “It seems I missed my birth anniversary again this year. I turned forty.”

  “Huh,” she whispered. “Forty.” The Beshni brothers were about the same, and Trigrian was close. She wasn’t sure about Headron. Forty in Jekhan life expectancy was the Terran equivalent of around thirty-five. They lived longer due to the Tyneali components of their genetics.

  “Well, happy belated birthday,” she said, offering him a twitchy smile.

  “I think I tried to ignore it purposefully.” He worked his ruddy thumb along the curve of his mug’s handle. “My youngest was born on the same day.”

  His youngest child, she understood on a delay.

  The child he’d been scouring Jekh to find for the better part of two years.

  The only one he could still hope had survived.

  Brenna didn’t know what to say, except a whispered, “Oh,” and she stared down into her tea and watched a few loose leaves float on the surface.

  They sipped and nibbled in silence for a while. At some point, the sun had started to come up, casting new and interesting shadows in the kitchen. Highlighting Herris’s gauntness. His tiredness. His exhaustion was different from hers. Hers was self-inflicted. External forces had thrust his on him, and he just couldn’t rest.

  Maybe he never would.

  Her mug was empty. She pondered having another serving of tea but didn’t want him to think he was required to sit there and keep her company while she finished.

  He fidgeted with the corner of his napkin, looking out the wide picture window. “I think…I should work.”

  “Hmm?” The statement seemed out of the blue and lacked context.

  “I have a trade,” he said.

  “That’s right, you do. And you’re good at it, from what I’ve heard.” Or, he had been good at it. Herris probably hadn’t made a pair of shoes in two years.

  “I haven’t wanted to,” he said softly. “Helping on the farm wherever I’m needed is soothing. I don’t have to make decisions, and as long as my hands are busy—”

  “You don’t have to think.”

  He nodded and pressed his mug between his palms. “But the skill is…necessary here, I think.”

  “You’re right. There’s no shoemaker in Little Gitano. Everything is imported.”

  “And the mixed children need better shoes. The Terran ones may be no good for their feet. Jekhan foot physiology is…” He grimaced. “More complicated.”

  “Huh.” Brenna gave it some thought. Differences in anatomy might have explained some observations she’d had. “I noticed that Kerry is always complaining that her feet hurt. I figured she was just being three. She complains about almost everything.” Everything and nothing, as Courtney tended to say about the child’s rants.

  He shook his head and pressed the heels of his palms against his eyes. “Perhaps Courtney and Murki will let me make a pair of shoes for her. I’m out of practice and would like to keep my renewed efforts close to home.”

  “I doubt they’ll tell you no.”

  He put his hands down and folded them atop the table. He looked at her, expression grim, or maybe that was just typical Herris. He had gorgeous dark auburn hair and the darkest eyes she’d ever seen on a Jekhan native. Some of the richest-hued skin, too—a sandy, brownish red. If the light had been different, he could have passed for South Asian or Latin or a member of any number of heat-loving cultures. On Jekh, he was rare. She’d been there long enough to know that.

  “Where are your people from?” she blurted and then cringed. She should have been better than that. People from Earth sometimes took that question the wrong way.

  He didn’t seem offended, though, merely contemplative. After a few seconds, he responded with, “I don’t think you’re asking what street in Buinet they dwelled on.”

  She couldn’t be sure, but she thought that tiny twitch at the corner of his mouth was the tease of a smile.

  “There are always rumors,” he said, casting her a sidelong look.

  She nodded, perhaps too enthusiastically, to encourage him to go on. He didn’t generally speak so much and her curiosity about him spiked more by the day. She wanted to know his secrets—things that no one else on the farm had the privilege of hearing.

  “When I was growing up, the whispers were that perhaps the Terran ancestry in my family is a bit more recent than for many.”

  “You’ve never tried to find out?”

  “I didn’t think it mattered. The Tyneali would probably never confirm it without creating a whole host of new problems.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There were always stories that the Tyneali held some Terran breeding stock in reserve—that somewhere on this planet is a cache of pure humans, and occasionally, the Tyneali would release some into the Jekhan population.” He really did smile, then, as if the topic was just too inane. “Perhaps that was the case many ages ago, but I don’t believe it still is. If I have any recent Terran heritage of peoples outside the usual gene pool, my supposition would be that those people were brought here much more recently.”

  “Now you’ve got me curious.”

  “Oh?”

  “Is that bad of me, that I want to know? It’s like a mystery. If you found out, we’d have a better understanding of what the heck the Tyneali were doing in all those years they were supposedly so hands-off. Maybe they weren’t really ignoring you. Maybe they were just messing with individuals rather than the group as a whole.”

  He raised a brow. “If you’re so curious, I’ll find out for you.”

  “Oh! No, don’t do that. I mean, it’s one thing if you really want to find out, but don’t go getting yourself poked and prodded for science unless you want to be.”

  He turned his hands over. “My curiosity might make me persuadable. At the very least, I could ask Dorro what I would need to do to find out.”

  “Just don’t do it if you’re only doing it because I brought it up. I don’t want you to be mad at me later if the test ends up hurting or something.”

  “I don’t think anyone’s ever been mad at you in your entire short life.”

  Sighing, Brenna put her hand over her eyes and rolled them behind it. She was used to having so many of the people on the farm see her as a kid, but the treatment was getting wearying. She was a grown woman, well past the age of majority, and having men see her as some child in constant need of rescuing was tiring.

/>   “I assure you.” She dropped her hand after straightening her glasses. “Plenty of folks have no good feelings toward me, my father included.”

  “And for that, I’m sorry.” His voice was quiet, his fingers tight around the outside of his mug.

  They let the silence envelop them again. Less uncomfortable than before, fortunately. They both looked out the window. The view was Brenna’s favorite on Jekh. She liked seeing the sun come up over the crops in the morning. She liked the quiet stillness of the farm before the bustle of the day started, and the peace of nature doing its work.

  The country suited her. It might have suited her just as well back on Earth if she’d been able to stay with her mother after the divorce. The community was so much different than anything she’d experienced in Buinet or in her city “back home.” It was engaged. Although getting together was harder for neighbors, they still managed to be more connected than Brenna had been with the people who’d lived in the same building as her in the city.

  “I understand why my brother fled to the country now,” Herris murmured as if he were reading her thoughts.

  “Yeah. Takes a certain kind of person.”

  “And the right time for that person.”

  She nodded. He understood. He may not have talked much, but when he did, he understood.

  She turned toward him, about to ask about shoemaking, when Restaden shuffled into the kitchen still in her sleeping wrap and slippers. She went straight for the chiller box.

  “Good morning,” she said cheerfully, humming a merry tune behind the appliance door.

  “Good morning, madam.” Herris pushed his seat back from the table. He gathered his mug and the brownie container.

  “What are you doing?” Brenna asked her.

  “I told Courtney and Trigrian and the rest of them to sleep in and that I would make the breakfast.” Restaden pulled out a big crate of leftover dishe bread that Headron must have put away for some reason.

  Brenna suspected she knew what that reason was, but she didn’t want to get her hopes up. She hadn’t had dishe pudding in ages. As far as breakfast foods went, it wasn’t healthy by any stretch of the imagination, but the heavy concoction would certainly give a farmhand the power he or she needed to get through the grueling morning.

  “You just got here, and you’re working already?” Brenna giggled. She put the kettle back on the kitchen island and swatted some crumbs off the table.

  “Working is what I do,” Restaden said. “I’ve always worked. Had no choice.”

  Rajan came into the kitchen a moment later and quickly earned a scolding tut and a sharply issued edict in Jekhani.

  Rajan, standing in the doorway in sleep pants and with his hair knot sagging sloppily toward one side, rubbed his eyes. He muttered something back to her in Jekhani and let out a breath. To Brenna, he said, “I just wanted a cup of tea. Excuse my appearance. I’ll get it and go back to the room.”

  “Oh. Um. Well, don’t mind me.”

  She knew that by Jekhan standards, him appearing with his hair nearly loose was a pale shade of scandalous, but the fact he was wearing so little in the way of clothing was what made Brenna’s cheeks flame.

  The air conditioning in the house didn’t always click on when it was supposed to. Some nights were hot, and they shed clothing accordingly. They just generally didn’t let themselves be seen like that.

  She followed Herris’s example and, averting her gaze from both Rajan and his quibbling mother, grabbed her mug and carried it toward the sink.

  “The kettle is on the island,” Herris said to Rajan, who stopped in mid-eye-roll at his mother to look toward the sink.

  Apparently, he hadn’t noticed Herris was there, judging by the way he scrambled to fix the pinning of his hair.

  Herris set his mug in the rack, gave Brenna’s upper back a brisk rub, and leaned in. He whispered, “Thank you for the conversation. Get some sleep. Hmm?” and took his leave from the kitchen.

  It dawned on her too slowly that she should have said, “You’re welcome.” She’d been too stunned by the fact that anyone would thank her for running her mouth.

  Rajan got out of the way of the door and let him pass.

  Restaden set a container of juice on the counter along with a creamy, cheese-like substance typically used as a binder in dishe pudding. She plopped her hands onto her wide hips and glowered at her son.

  He put up his hands and moved quickly to the kettle. “Just the tea, Mother, and then I’ll go and put myself together.”

  She spat some more of that rapid-fire Jekhani at him.

  He cringed, let out a breath, and then performed a shallow bow in Brenna’s direction. “I can not apologize enough for any disrespect I’ve unintentionally shown you.”

  “Uh. You’re fine, really. Don’t feel bad. I’ll just… Um. Save me some breakfast?” She cleaned her mug in record time and then hurried past both to seek refuge in her bedroom.

  Brenna could hear Restaden scolding again and Rajah’s emphatic groan of “I heard you, Mother,” just before she shut her door.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “Thank you very much for the ride. I don’t know how to repay you, but…” Autumn offered the Jekhan farmer a shrug and as big a smile as she could manage without feeling foolish, and wrapped her fingers around the door handle.

  The old man chuckled and set his hover truck lower to the ground for her descent. “Don’t worry about money, but since you’re here…” He tilted his head toward the Beshni Farm sign at the gate and chuckled again. “If you can talk to Headron about putting aside some more pastries for me, I won’t be averse to it.”

  His wife, the Terran woman in the back seat, sighed. “Pilin.”

  He turned around. “Yes, my love?”

  “Must you be so brazen?”

  He shrugged. “It’s not for me. It’s for Tarchen.”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “Truly!”

  She leaned forward between the seats and put her hand on Autumn’s shoulder. “Ask the McGarrys to give my regards to their grandfather, please.”

  “I’ll do that. Thanks again for the ride.”

  “No worries. Like we said, we were heading out to the dairy, anyway.”

  Autumn hopped out of the truck and waited for Cree to jump down from the bed.

  “Whee!” Cree’s hair was a wild, pale mess, having been windblown all the way from Little Gitano. There were bits of foliage and plenty of dust in it, so it was a good thing Cree had never been overly fastidious.

  Pilin drove away after his wife moved into the front seat.

  Autumn hitched her bag strap higher up her shoulder and shook her head at her sister.

  “Hey, don’t worry about me.” Cree knocked a leaf off her Jekhan-style tunic. Already, she’d adopted a “Do as the locals do” philosophy. “Worry about yourself. Push the button, woman.”

  “I’ve been doing nothing but worrying about you for weeks, and I’ll worry even more now.” Autumn squinted at the sign posted to the right of the gate, indicating that she should ring the bell to have someone unlock it. If she didn’t do that, she’d have to scale the fence, and she’d watched enough television back on Earth to suspect that was a bad idea.

  Cree shrugged and jammed her hands into her pockets. “Hey. I’m fine.”

  “Right, fine.” Autumn pushed the button and placed herself in front of the camera. “Legally adult now, but not fine.”

  Their father still hadn’t quite put two and two together about where Cree was. As far as he knew, as indicated from the last email he’d sent her, she was still at her elite boarding school in Connecticut. Cree’s mother, however, had started to quietly panic. Cree had never disappeared for that long before, and Cree’s friends had started sending her frantic messages that she should check in soon. They’d known more about where Cree was going than Autumn had.

  Cree shrugged and leaned against a fence post. “They’re not going to send me away. Even if I did come here under
what, I admit, were sketchy circumstances, I voluntarily put myself in that single’s site and I applied for a work permit.”

  She had. No more than a minute had passed after midnight on her eighteenth birthday had she gotten herself to the computer at the lodge and put in the appropriate forms.

  “You’re not staying,” Autumn said.

  “Why not? You’re here.”

  “You know why I’m here,” Autumn said through her clenched teeth as the camera’s light flicked on and the speaker squealed.

  “Yes? Who are you?” came the too-loud query. An older Jekhan woman appeared on the tiny monitor to the right of the camera.

  Autumn didn’t recognize her. The woman hadn’t been at dinner that first night. “Um. Autumn Ray? I’m looking for Luke. Luke Cipriani.”

  After sitting around waiting for the proverbial other shoe to drop, she decided to take matters into her own hands. She wasn’t getting sent back to Earth without a fight. Certainly, there was something they could negotiate on. Everyone needed something, and Autumn had a tremendous network to tap.

  The woman narrowed her eyes. “Luke?”

  “Um. Yes. The…”

  “The Italian one who swears a lot.” Cree put her head on her sister’s shoulder and grinned.

  Autumn gave her a subtle bump with her hip.

  Tact, woman.

  “One of the male ones,” Cree added cheerfully. “The older one of the brothers, not the giant one.”

  “Ah!” the woman said, then she turned and muttered something to someone in the room.

  Brenna leaned into the frame. Her eyes went round behind her glasses lenses and dark eyebrows shot up.

  Oh hell.

  Autumn pinched the bridge of her nose. She’d been hoping to have a discreet conversation with Luke about their arrangement, but apparently, the entire damned farm would know of her presence before she even had an opportunity to get in shouting range of him. And she had no way of knowing what Luke had told everyone. They were probably going to treat her like Typhoid Mary.

  “Ah, let’s see.” Brenna notched her teeth into her lower lip and leaned in closer to the terminal. “If you want to unlock,” she said to the older woman, “you press this and then this.”