The Price of Desire (The HouseOf Light And Shadow Book 1)

by P. J. Fox

  Fortunately for Kisten and his allies, there were certain advantages to this posting that Karan had not considered. First, that Tarsonis contained the largest deposits of beryllium and iron ore of any planet in the empire—and that several of the other mines, on other planets, were almost tapped out. Karan or, more properly the cadre of sycophants who advised him, had been lulled into a false sense of security by the fact that Tarsonis was entirely dependent on outside aid. They imagined that, by accepting the posting, Kisten was putting his head in a noose. He’d be at their mercy for food and other supplies; all they had to do, to control him, was pull that noose tight.

  What they didn’t know was that Kisten had no intention of relying on help of any kind from home. His plan was to take full advantage of the grace period that came after any such posting, ordering supplies and stockpiling them—and supplementing them at the same time with supplies from the rim worlds. He and his brother both had cultivated a number of contacts over the years, against the day when such a situation might arise. In the meantime, he’d devote every spare resource to helping Tarsonis become self-sufficient. And then, when the navy had no beryllium to power its propulsion units, many in the senate would find that they could no longer turn quite such a blind eye to Karan’s activities.

  It was a risk, but it was part of a plan; a much larger plan that he and Keshav, and others, had set into motion.

  But as he shaved, he found his thoughts returning to Aria—Aria, whom he planned on bringing into what amounted to a warzone. Why? He finished the thought that he’d begun earlier: no one ever talked to him like she did, because they didn’t dare. But Aria didn’t see the commander, or the prince; she saw the man.

  And if he wanted her to like him, he had to make her like him. None of the tricks he’d used in the past, with other women, would work here. This realization came with a strange sense of ambivalence; in truth, he preferred to keep his distance from men and women both and the idea of revealing so much of himself to another human being was distinctly unpleasant. But, he told himself, this was a woman whose regard was worth winning. And he wanted to win her regard—which shocked him most of all.

  If nothing else, he would not let her defeat him.

  The idea of her rejecting him out of hand was insupportable. She knew nothing—nothing at all. Not about him, or his culture. He’d rid that pestilential woman of her naïve, self-serving convictions and her—her crusading if it was the last thing he did. This need, he decided, wasn’t love; he’d been insane to ever liken it to love. It was war.

  As he turned the door handle, Kisten entertained himself pleasantly with thoughts of shocking the little minx who, despite having had some unimportant little man friend on Solaris—he suppressed a spike of jealousy—was obviously inexperienced. So much the better.

  Stepping out of the bathroom completely naked, he found himself face to face, not with Aria but with Garja.

  She shrieked, clapping her hands over her eyes, and Kisten felt supremely stupid. He couldn’t retreat to the bathroom, he had no clothes in there. What in God’s name was wrong with him, acting like this? Bleakly, he concluded that he must have a brain fever.

  The door hissed open and Aros, having heard the shrieking—which had devolved into laughter—stepped inside. Whereupon he, too, threw back his head and howled. Determinedly ignoring them all, Kisten strode to the bureau and began pulling drawers open with force. Still laughing, they left him to his own devices.

  Ten minutes later, having managed to clothe himself in a more or less reasonable fashion, Kisten emerged from his cabin to find Garja waiting for him. Aros had vanished on some other, presumably more important errand. “And where has Aria run off to?” he asked, wondering simultaneously why Garja wasn’t with her and why the question should be so embarrassing.

  Garja’s face turned worried. “She’s not with you?”

  All thoughts of kissing and towels and revenge fled, replaced by a cold dread that clutched at his entrails. “No,” he said slowly.

  Abruptly, Garja burst into tears.

  NINETEEN

  “I thought she was with you!” Garja wailed, wringing her hands. Aria, it seemed, was missing and had been since last night.

  “With me?” he repeated, momentarily confused. “When?”

  The maid was now wringing her hands.

  “Tell me,” he demanded. His words came out harder than he’d intended but they had the effect of a slap, stunning the slave out of her hysterics.

  “I haven’t seen the Mistress since before dinner last night, when I helped her to dress.” Garja was being careful in how she referred to Aria, clearly unsure of what term of address was appropriate and anxious not to give offense. Aria wasn’t Kisten’s consort and she wasn’t his property, either. She did not appear to be a courtesan. That left little room for her in their highly rigid society. No wonder Garja was confused; Kisten himself was confused.

  Aria had never come back to the cabin at all, then. As to why no one had thought to alert him, the answer was depressingly clear. He cursed his failure to consider what should have been obvious. The men under his command neither knew nor cared where Aria was; she wasn’t their responsibility. And after spending their adult lives navigating the treacherous waters of court politics, his staff cared about nothing so much as saving face—his and Aria’s. They’d all assumed, of course, that he’d hidden her away in some love nest and was bending her to his uses. No one in his right mind would mention that, let alone a slave.

  “It is known,” Garja said carefully, “that you keep other rooms aboard ship….”

  Kisten once again cursed himself for a fool. One of the things he liked about life in space was the relaxation of certain otherwise rigid rules—rules that served no purpose other than to make people’s lives miserable. Garja would never have dreamed of shaming her mistress by observing that she might have spent the night with a man who was not her husband, even if it meant risking her safety. Safety was nothing compared to honor.

  Dismissing Garja, he called Aros back to discuss organizing a search. Something small that wouldn’t attract attention. He shouldn’t have been so worried; there weren’t all that many places one could hide aboard a ship, even a ship as massive as Atropos. But still, he couldn’t dispel the pit of cold dread that was forming in his stomach. She’d been so upset….

  Aros was resentful of the intrusion onto his duties by another man’s personal life, but accepted the assignment with adequate grace. Aros avoided personal entanglements to the point where Kisten had wondered, on more than one occasion, if his friend was still a virgin. Aros was in love with the navy; with duty and honor and all the other gods that men worshipped. He still cherished illusions about the higher calling of human nature, illusions that he’d lose eventually—perhaps on Tarsonis. But in the meantime, he listened to Kisten with the slightly quizzical patience of a man who thinks that another man has lost his mind.

  And then, turning on his heel, Kisten set off to look for her himself.

  He did keep other rooms aboard ship. He wasn’t under the mistaken impression that anyone thought him a celibate, but nor was he naïve. Growing up at court had felt like growing up under a microscope. He’d learned to guard his privacy jealously, not because he was ashamed of his actions—he wasn’t—but because his privacy was all he had.

  He strode down the aft central hall, expression murderous. Soldiers and civilians alike leapt out of his path. He did not need this. He had the admiral breathing down his neck and someone else was coming aboard from the civil service. He’d be expected to host both men at dinner and doubted if he’d be able to hold his temper through course after interminable course of lectures on the importance of training the noble savage in the True Faith.

  Kisten was a religious man, after his own fashion, but he considered religion to be a personal affair. Moreover, he doubted that even Admiral Zamindari labored under the impression that the current government saw religion as anything other than a tool of social
control. He’d like to see Aria consider these issues, he fumed, while she was off having vapors about the fact that he’d kissed her. God forbid that, in exchange for saving her life, a man should expect a little gratitude! He punched the button for the lift. When he found her, he decided, he’d strangle her himself.

  Except his plans were somewhat thwarted by the fact that she wasn’t in any of the obvious places. And when he’d checked in with Aros, he’d learned that neither of the search teams had found so much as a trace. Even on a diplomatic showpiece like this, he found such a result hard to credit. Where could she go, that no one would see her?

  She hadn’t gone to see the girls. Visiting them, Kisten had made no mention of her disappearance but, instead, had explained his arrival as something of a check-up and a chance to discuss their possible future plans—about which all were opinionated. They’d taken coffee together and then, in the presence of a female chaperone, he’d talked to Hannah alone.

  That task having been dealt with, he’d checked the cargo holds. The aspens and flowering dogwoods were untenanted, and according to the man assigned to patrolling it no one had been in or out since the botanist from the university came to check on some of his samples six hours ago.

  She hadn’t been in either mess, the ship’s library—or, apparently, anywhere else. Where could she go…?

  An icy fist clenched his heart, bringing him up short. What if he hadn’t found her, because she wasn’t here to find? He’d treated it as an impossibility that she could leave the ship, but there were escape pods and shuttlecraft and as one man had proved just last night—no. Once again, he saw himself raising the harpoon to fire; and with that vision came another, of Aria. Suddenly it was her he saw, floating off into the void of space; her eyes widening in terror as she realized what she’d done.

  Abruptly, he turned and walked back the way he’d come.

  Kisten assumed that Aros had checked the ship’s logs, but he was going to check them again, himself. Aros was a more than competent officer, but there were some things that couldn’t be left to others—and a terrible idea was growing in Kisten’s mind, one he knew Aros hadn’t had. Because Aros hadn’t been the one forcing himself on a frightened little girl.

  He took the aft port lift down to the cargo holds and, turning, crossed over to the central hall. Soon he was back where he’d been the night before, this time discussing the ship’s log with an Ensign Singh. Kisten could access the log from anywhere on the ship, like all senior officers; he’d returned to this particular shuttle bay only because the cargo-level shuttle bays were only used, as a rule, when the ship was being resupplied and so he wasn’t likely to be interrupted.

  Singh had been on duty for several hours and had seen nothing.

  Kisten gazed through the window at the dead, featureless gray of the airlock. His voice was deceptively calm. “First, check all log entries pertaining to all shuttle bays.”

  Singh read back a list of entries, the last being Amal Nibodh’s unauthorized exit. “So that makes six in all,” he finished.

  Kisten considered the information in silence. “Now,” he said slowly, “I want you to cross-check those entries against the ship’s engineering records.” He waited, silent, as Singh did so. If God was kind, the ship itself would describe the same series of activities as the log.

  “Yes, everything matches up—”

  Kisten felt the tension drain out of him. Thank God.

  “No,” said the ensign, holding up a hand, “wait.”

  Kisten’s blood ran cold.

  “According to the ship herself, there have been seven—seven complete airlock cycles.” Singh frowned, puzzled. “But there’s no record of this last one, which occurred around midnight.” Singh pointed to the screen. It had occurred, in fact, right at the same time that Kisten was thinking about how Aria was just some woman and he’d be better off without her.

  The further he investigated, the more worried he became. The seaman apprentice responsible for guarding the shuttle bay in question had been absent from his post, one of the colonists having come to pay him a friendly visit. They’d spent an hour together in a supply closet and when he returned, nothing seemed amiss. Thinking that Kisten’s visit had been in reference to his obvious dereliction of duty, he’d poured his heart out before thinking to ask how the commander knew when his own direct superior didn’t.

  Kisten regarded the man in silence while he struggled to control himself.

  Seaman Apprentice Navroop was horrified to discover that someone had been in the airlock while he’d been fooling around. That such a thing might be possible, or even probable had never occurred to him. “You hadn’t,” Kisten asked acidly, “considered the possibility that on a ship of three thousand souls where there have already been several murders that there might, indeed, be another murder? Or a suicide?” What better way to dispose of evidence—or guarantee that there’d be no second thoughts?

  Aria had vanished and someone—or something—had left Atropos at roughly the same time. The realization hit Kisten like a shot to the gut. While he’d been dreaming up ways to punish her for not wanting to kiss him, she’d been lost or hurt—or dead. He’d known that she’d been upset, of course, but that upset? Was it possible that she hated him that much, to the point where she’d commit suicide to escape him?

  He sent for the master chief and a few minutes later that venerable man arrived, his face still haggard from lack of sleep. Kisten explained what he wanted and then, after announcing that he’d be in his office, turned on his heel and left. He’d catch up on some paperwork, drink a few cups of coffee and perhaps eat—breakfast? Lunch? He wasn’t sure what time it was but, really, it didn’t matter all that much.

  Now, there was nothing to do but wait.

  TWENTY

  He’d been so concerned with his own problems that he hadn’t considered Aria’s at all. Indeed, he’d dismissed them as invalid—because, when it came right down to it, one woman’s emotional vagaries were insignificant next to the problems facing him and his crew. And soon, he’d be responsible for fifty million people instead of only three thousand.

  Which, of course, hardly meant that she had no right to her own wants and needs. He glanced at the omelet in front of him, thought again about how much he disliked eggs in space, and sipped his coffee. You could tell when you’d been in space too long, or so the joke went, because they started serving you scrambled eggs—at least, if you were an enlisted man. If you were an officer, your scrambled eggs were mixed with freeze dried chives and renamed an omelet. In the last twelve years, Kisten had sampled just about every most revolting food in the galaxy, from boiled hamster on a stick to MRE sugar cookies. He chuckled, in spite of himself. And he’d thought the food at boarding school was bad.

  It occurred to him, as he put his feet up and stared out the window at the perpetual night of space, that Aria had no way of knowing what kind of man he was or indeed what his intentions were toward her—and he’d done damn little to show her either. Yes, she’d returned his kiss, but she’d hardly had much choice; he was a foot taller than she was and outweighed her by a hundred pounds. As someone of whom other people were afraid, he’d never had much cause to consider what it must feel like to be in her position.

  But was it possible to misjudge a situation that badly? His success with women over the years had been not inconsiderable and he liked to think that he could tell whether a woman found him attractive. Then again, Aria’s situation was confusing enough that she might not know how she felt—about him or anything else.

  Under the circumstances, he concluded, he couldn’t blame her for feeling like a tavern doxy. He’d taken her into a cargo bay and forced himself on her, and the fact that he couldn’t stop thinking about her didn’t alter the fact that she was terrified of him and convinced that his people were incapable of love. If he wanted her to feel differently, he knew, he’d have to make her—if he could get her back.

  His thoughts returned to his household
staff, and a greater bunch of ninnies he’d never encountered. And Garja—God, did she ever stop weeping? For a martial people, the Bronte were going soft.

  He was sure that, when Aria found out, she’d blame him for the fact that her maid was having vapors. Irritatingly, she might have a point. Of course, he hadn’t meant to terrorize the poor thing but ever since he’d first heard Aria’s voice, he’d been acting completely out of character. He never remembered being so mad, or wanting to put anyone in their place so badly. Even when he’d been banished from court, he’d taken the blow philosophically. The Bronte were a long-lived race; he had time.

  But this…this! The fact that Aria didn’t understand him, refused to understand him drove him insane. He didn’t know when he’d decided this—possibly just now, as he stared at his congealing omelet and thought about all the delightful curries he’d undoubtedly never eat again—but he’d prove that minx wrong if it was the last thing he did.

  What had made him first sit up and listen, weeks ago, was Aria’s observation to Naomi that she’d had a wonderful evening but this wasn’t it. They’d been having dinner in the ship’s tiny mess. Captain Dahn’s inglorious vessel had started out life as some kind of Kediot freighter, undergoing a number of supposed improvements along the way. And, for a hunk of worthless space debris, it was reasonably fast and maneuverable. Too bad Dahn himself was a terrible pilot—and a fool. But Aria hadn’t complained about such unenviable quarters, only made fun of them. And when she wasn’t doing that, she was thinking up ways to keep her clearly restive charges from murdering one another.

  When Isabelle announced that Autumn just had to listen to her about some trivial thing or other, because she lived for others and wanted only the best for them, Aria had quipped that she could spot those others by their hunted expressions. Isabelle replied that Aria had delusions of grandeur, being little older than herself and far less intelligent, and Aria had smiled—Kisten had known she was smiling, he could hear it in her voice—and remarked that delusions of grandeur were more useful than delusions of adequacy. After that, there had been no more trouble from Isabelle.