“I cannot offer you protection,” Asiyah told him, when he pointed out the risks. “And I do not think you need it as badly as you say.”
Cross-Costa had arrangements with private security, it was true, but, “A couple of hired truncheons aren’t going to keep me in one piece if Ngdoze decides she wants me in several.”
That got him a shrug. “That is your affair. Now that DePaul is safely on his way to Gedda, I will appreciate a swift show of your gratitude before you, also, leave the country.”
He should have been more careful with his telephone calls. Cross would quarter him if she ever learned how widely open he’d left that flank. In fairness—he hated when that phrase was applicable to his own actions, because it always accompanied some idiocy that could have been avoided—in fairness, he had been somewhat distracted. Still was. There had been packing to do, arrangements to be made. And that was just the logistics. The rest of it—the hiss of soap against stubble, sunlight slanting through eyelashes lowered in sleep—he couldn’t possibly approach head-on. And certainly not until everything else had been dispatched.
“If it was us I was writing up in the racing form,” said Cross, “I’d give better numbers. But you’re gonna dump my rear and go sailing off to Amberlough for what, the season?”
“I’m not sure,” said Aristide, light and brittle as spun sugar. “I haven’t planned so far ahead.”
“I wish I’d ever gotten knocked so hard my brains fell out the back,” said Cross. “I guess DePaul’s still got the tackle for deep-sea fishing after all this time.”
The secret had yet to be whispered that could be kept from Merrilee Cross. Aristide let the uncouth comment slide, though it scraped off a layer of skin. Daoud, however, did not.
“Ms. Cross,” he said, crisply as creased waxed paper, “perhaps we should focus on the positive parts of this situation. For instance, I believe our business interests in Amberlough are due for an expansion?”
“Indeed,” said Aristide. “Since we’re losing Ngdoze, Otiuno, and the rest, it seems an excellent time to focus on our Geddan offices and ventures. Jamila is too clever to languish doing busywork.”
“Well, I won’t miss Otiuno, that’s for sure.” Cross ground out her cigarillo in the overflowing ashtray at the center of the table. “He never did pay on time. And Jamila’s last cable said she’s got a good lead on a company that can move our goods inland. If you’re gonna leave me here to get hacked up, might as well make some money over there for my heirs and assigns.” Cross sucked her teeth. “It ain’t a bad idea.”
“Contrary to your belief, my brain still resides safely in my skull.” He tapped the arm of his spectacles with one finger, then straightened them on his nose.
“The idea,” said Daoud, “was mine.”
The scolding caught Aristide off guard, and the apologetic grin he aimed at Daoud felt more like a wince on his face.
Cross raised an eyebrow, but only asked “When do you leave?”
“Two days,” said Daoud, sliding into the opening she had left for Aristide. “It is a fast ship, and the canal has been reopened. You should dock in Amberlough City early next week. I have cabled Ms. DePaul; she will meet you in the city for the ceremony.”
“And what about Mister DePaul?” asked Cross, picking an errant piece of tobacco from her tongue. “I don’t trust you past your jess if that tow-headed turncoat has a hand free to haul down his zipper. Stones, I wouldn’t trust you even if he was in shackles. Maybe less.”
Aristide was still composing a response behind his shaved-thin smile when Daoud asked, “And if I went with him?”
“What?” Instantly, Aristide had reason to wish he’d hidden his outrage better. It wasn’t that the younger man looked hurt; rather that he looked a tad too smug for Aristide’s liking.
“If you are doing business in Amberlough,” said Daoud, “it seems you might benefit from the services of your secretary. And it may set Cross’s mind at ease.”
“Queen’s sake,” said Cross. “Take a camera and film it. I want to see how this plays out.”
Aristide plucked a cigarette from his case to stifle a sharp remark. Once he’d lit it and taken a steadying drag he said, “You aren’t worried about being short another hand, in the face of Ngdoze’s rage?”
“What’s he gonna do against her muscle?” asked Cross, jutting her chin at Daoud. “Strong gust’d blow him over.”
Daoud did his best to look innocent, but Aristide had taught him to shoot a pistol and seen him put the lessons into practice. He might be a bantam, but he could fight outside his weight class.
“Surely there’s not room left on the ship.” He was making poor excuses, now.
“You have a very large cabin,” said Daoud. “I am certain it will fit a cot.”
“I’m a grown man. I don’t need a chaperone.”
“I’m your business partner,” said Cross. “And I think you do.”
“Equal partners, Merrilee. You’re neither my nanny nor my boss.”
“It sounds like you need somebody to break the tie,” said Daoud, and Aristide saw the irony ten miles out.
CHAPTER
SEVEN
Takeoff from Kenaipha was delayed due to weather, which meant Cyril spent a disagreeable several hours in the ramshackle airfield bar, eating handfuls of pastel, candy-coated almonds. There was no proper food.
Aowamma’s final destination was on the island, and she left him to his drinking with a warm farewell he only managed to return in character. When she left the airfield, van Weill went with her.
Hyrosia in the winter was a bleak place: mostly rain, some sleet, incessant wind. Awful weather for flying. Finally, near dawn, they had a brief respite.
Few people were traveling to Dameskill Regional from Kenaipha; more than the meager five who boarded would have surprised Cyril. The pilot, who greeted the passengers as they climbed the stairs, made tasteless jokes about the likelihood of a crash. Several people turned green. Cyril settled into his seat without complaint and promptly fell asleep, thanks to the auspices of several stolen pills. Given the pharmacopeia in Aristide’s washroom, he wouldn’t miss them.
Cyril only woke as they thudded to the ground at Dameskill Regional. Outside the window, the downs rolled away into gentle hills. The grass was brown, the trees bare. In his memory, Dameskill county was green, and smelled of hay and strawberries in the sunshine. This felt like touching down in yet another foreign country.
But it felt right, too. Freshly mown fields beneath scudding clouds and a blue sky? That was the domain of a different man. A boy, even. How often had he come back to Carmody since school? And it had never been an idyll, then; it had been an imposition. Fraught holidays with aging parents. Then one funeral, and another. A miserable week lying low after the election in Nuesklend.
That was his last memory of the place: dogged by his failure and treachery, wandering empty rooms, sniffling and sneezing amidst the dust sheets as a late spring cold snap froze buds from the fruit trees. No family, no staff. Even the groundskeeper was away—with the remaining DePauls scattered, she only came up from the village one week out of three. Cyril hardly remembered the house lived-in.
A small cluster of cars had gathered in the field that passed for a runway. Unlike the other four passengers, Cyril didn’t put his forehead to the window; didn’t peer into the gray evening, growing grayer, to look for friends or family or a chauffeur. It would all be on him soon enough.
Likewise, he let the other four shuffle out ahead of him, wrapping their mufflers more tightly as the bitter wind made its way into the airplane cabin. As if it hadn’t been freezing already.
He didn’t have an overcoat, or hat or gloves. His joints had gone stiff in the chill high altitude, his fingers and toes numb. As a consequence, the cold bothered him very little now. And without a coat he cut, he realized too late, a somewhat more striking figure at the head of the stairs than he would have preferred.
Lillian, standing at the
front fender of a shining black car, put her hand to the hood and took a step back when she saw him. She didn’t cover her mouth, or gasp that he heard. She might merely have been shifting her weight. But even a decade out, he knew his sister. This, in her, was a dead faint in a lesser being.
She wore a tightly belted camel coat, the collar turned up against the wind. In the last photograph he had seen—she had been holding Stephen on one knee, both of them in summer clothes—her hair had been cut in a chin-length bob. Longer now, it was swept into a twist at the back of her head, drawing her features up so she seemed to stare haughtily down her nose.
All she needed was black robes and a pair of spectacles, and it would be his mother standing there, ready to pass judgment.
She met him at the bottom of the stairs and first took his face between her palms. This close he could see that her hair, like his, had begun to show threads of platinum white. Her red-rimmed eyes were framed by fine lines. Powder covered her dark circles poorly.
Someone else might have said she looked tired. But Cyril had seen tired. He had been tired. Still was. Lillian needed a week of good sleep, and food put in front of her. Cyril needed to lay down and die.
“Lady’s name,” she said. Her hands fell from his face to his shoulders, and then her arms were around him.
He fought his initial impulse—block a knife to the belly, bend to throw her over his shoulder—and simply let her hold him, though he could not make himself relax. The crook of her neck smelled of geranium perfume; the fabric of her collar like cedar and, faintly, mothballs.
“You’re so thin,” she said, fingers closing on his arms. “And holy stones, you must be freezing. Is that all you have? No overcoat?”
“I have a bag with socks,” he said. “A few shirts. No other clothes. It was warm in Dadang.”
She smoothed the wrinkles her grip had put into his sleeves, then held him and looked at him again. Fading daylight caught in a tear gathering at the corner of her eye. Before it fell, she squeezed him once and turned briskly to her driver.
“Martí,” she said. “Is there a blanket under the seat? Will you get it out and air it, please? Yes, just give it a shake.” Then, not quite looking at Cyril, “There’s poached chicken for dinner. But if you want anything else … that is, if Bradley can get it. Given a little notice, of course, anything’s possible, but the market these days … you understand.”
Rationing. Ruined infrastructure. Mistrust. Hoarding. He understood.
“Poached chicken is fine,” he said.
That was when she started crying.
* * *
It was dark by the time they passed through the gates. Cyril’s memory supplied the curve of the lane, and the headlights proved him right. He had not forgotten how suddenly the house appeared from behind the hill.
He had forgotten how, at night, the lights of the windows reflected in the rippling water of the Dameskill where it ran along the lane. He had, in honesty, forgotten the Dameskill, and the sound of it rushing over stones where they broke the shallow surface. When the car stopped and Martí came to open his door, he mistook it at first for radio static.
The driver eyed him with the reserved curiosity of domestic staff, and he knew he would be a topic of much discussion downstairs. Maybe he already was. Though, Lillian would have been discreet; Martí might not even know who he was. If any of the old guard were still in the butler’s paybook, she’d find out quick enough, but that seemed unlikely bordering on absurd.
He wondered how many people Lillian could afford to keep on, if it was poached chicken for dinner and that a luxury. And if she could afford it, how many was it seemly to employ, if she didn’t want her neighbors to talk? Or did they talk already?
What was life like, for Lillian in Gedda? Did the DePaul name carry authority anymore, or had his bad behavior stripped it of that? From what little he’d bothered to ask Aristide, and the equally scant information Ari volunteered, it was public knowledge that he’d thrown in with the Ospies, and also public knowledge he had thrown them over in turn. Public knowledge, but also old news, eclipsed by bombings, strife, and civil war.
“I told Stephen he could wait up to meet you.” Lillian flexed a nervous hand inside her glove, pressing the opposite thumb into her palm so the leather creaked around it. “I hope that’s all right.”
“How old is he now?”
“Thirteen. And a nightmare. He…” Her gaze cut to him, sideways. Since that moment at the bottom of the airplane stairs, she hadn’t been able to face him eye-to-eye. “He’s in some trouble at school. It … well, it was familiar ground. Sometimes he reminds me of … you know.”
She’d better hope he didn’t turn out anything like Cyril, unless she looked forward to losing him one way or another.
The front doors swung open. A silhouette on the doorstep half-bowed. Cyril stared beyond the butler—too young to be someone he remembered, or who remembered him—into the front hall.
The tile was the same: white and cobalt, with small gold accents. But it was chipped in places now, and not kept as clean as he remembered. There had been potted palms when he was young: one beneath each archway. Without them the marble looked austere. Each pillar bore a lily-shaped sconce, though some were broken. The chandelier, unchanged, glimmered at the end of its chain. At the far end of the hall, made giant by perspective, a Y-shaped staircase curled up to the second-floor gallery.
Golden light spilled down the broad front steps to touch his shoes. They didn’t quite fit. Blisters, at least, felt familiar.
“Cyril,” said Lillian, his name catching behind her teeth as though she had forgotten how to say it. She had reached the top of the steps, and paused in the unwinding of her scarf when she saw he had not followed. “Come inside. Your teeth are chattering.”
He hadn’t realized how the chill had gotten into him. In the sweltering north of Liso he’d forgotten what it was, to feel the cold. In the shelter of the house, bare degrees warmer than the night, tension wanted to leak from him. He wouldn’t let it. Without that ache of fear in his muscles, they might not hold him up.
She led him—Where? What was around this corner?—to the library, yes, and paused at the door to knock. In her own home? Well, he supposed she wanted to warn whoever was in there she had come with him in tow.
Who was in there? Just Stephen? But why would he wait alone in the library, which they had as children always been forbidden?
He heard her murmur a sentence in Porashtu, and then an answering low voice, muffled by the door. Not a child; a grown man. Nerves crept up the nape of his neck. He didn’t like going blind into a room. He didn’t like the empty hallway at his back.
“Here he is,” said Lillian, swinging wide the door. Cyril didn’t know if she meant the announcement for him, or for his opposite number in the library.
The man on the sofa wore a quilted smoking jacket over a green flannel suit, and red velvet slippers over thick socks. His long, black hair was gathered into a messy knot at the back of his head, from which several tendrils of loose curls had escaped. A thick beard, closely cut, traced the line of his jaw and bracketed finely curved lips haunted by the echo of a habitual frown. The same frown had put deep furrows in his brow.
Firelight warmed his face on one side, bringing out rich clay red in the dark brown of his skin. Where the sharp angles of his cheek and nose cast shadows, only the gleam of his eye showed.
“Jinadh,” said Lillian, “this is my brother. Cyril, this is Jinadh. Stephen’s father. My husband.”
Jinadh unfolded from the sofa and came to Lillian’s side. He put out a hand to shake. Cyril missed the moment he put his own hand into Jinadh’s proffered one. The man’s palm was dry and warm, his grip firm. It was a good handshake, and it was the only thing that anchored Cyril to the moment.
Lillian was married. There was someone living at Damesfort who was not him, nor her, nor their parents. Someone who did not fit into his memories of the house or his own family. Cyril was r
elated to this man, and the only thing that connected them was this handshake.
As though anything else felt closer than that; as though the rest of the world weren’t at an arm’s length, and him clinging to it by strength of habit and his fingertips.
“Where’s Stephen?” said Lillian.
Jinadh’s mouth fell into the frown Cyril had seen lurking. “I sent him to his room. He was being … difficult.” The lilting cadence of Porashtu colored his Geddan, putting even more emphasis on the euphemism.
“We agreed—” Lillian bit off whatever she had been going to say, and began again, more placating. “Perhaps tonight we can be lenient?” Cyril felt the change in her focus, her weight shifting slightly in his direction.
Jinadh’s frown deepened, and he made no secret of looking at Cyril. Still, he said, “Well enough,” and untied the cord of his smoking jacket. “I will go tell him.”
After he left, Lillian scrubbed her palms down the front of her skirt. “So. That’s Jinadh.”
“He’s handsome,” said Cyril, for want of anything more diplomatic. He suspected, from that exchange, that they often fought. But maybe it was only nerves.
Lillian blinked as though he’d spoken in a foreign language. Then said, “You needn’t worry about dressing for dinner. We’re certainly not going to.”
“I wasn’t,” he said. “Remember? I don’t have any clothes.”
* * *
From the head of the table, Lillian stared across a surreal landscape. Everything was as it should have been for a guest—what was left of the good china, the freshly polished silver that almost matched—and the dining room was as it always had been. Even the occasional brush of Jinadh’s elbow, as he dined left-handed to her right, was familiar.
But Stephen had gone from her left hand to the foot of the table, and her brother sat in his place.
Her brother, who she had kicked under this very table when he talked back, or tried to make her laugh in front of company. Who tonight, when Bern bent over to offer a dish of stewed greens, started so violently he nearly upset his glass. Her brother, who had been dead until this week, or as good as.
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