The Falcoran’s Faith

by Laura Jo Phillips

  “Aye, Admiral,” Graysan replied.

  “Miss Meyers, do you see any other...oddities...out there that we should be aware of?” Tristan asked.

  “I’ll look,” Faith replied, risking a glance at Jon. He seemed all right now, though she could still feel his anger. She wasn’t all that happy with Tristan herself, but she didn’t want them angry with each other over her. She remembered how difficult it had been whenever she and Grace had been angry with each other, and assumed it would be the same for triplets. She went back to the far edge of the viewport and stared into space, looking for holes, thin spots, Doors, or anything else unusual. She yawned tiredly, wondering what time it was. It felt like she’d had a very long day, though it could be high noon for all she knew.

  “Prince Garen has agreed to send a scout through,” Gray said a little while later. “He asks that we wait here for it.”

  “Of course,” Tristan replied in a casual tone, but Faith felt his impatience.

  “Miss Meyers, you must be tired,” Jonathan said. “It’s nearly midnight, Badia time. Why don’t you go get some sleep?”

  Faith glanced at Tristan to see how he felt about that, but he seemed to be ignoring her. “I think I will,” she said after a moment. “Call me if you need me for anything.”

  “Of course,” Jonathan replied. Faith gave him a tiny, almost smile before leaving. Twenty minutes later, she checked the lock on the cabin door one last time, then climbed into bed and turned off the light. The bed was even more comfortable than she’d expected, which was a nice surprise. It had been a very long day and she was physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausted, so it took only moments for her to go to sleep.

  “Hey Faith, you ready to go?”

  Faith turned to smile at Cinthy Kick, the only friend she’d made at the museum since starting her student internship a few months earlier. Most of the regular employees were far older than herself, and so serious all the time that Faith didn’t know how they managed to keep themselves awake throughout the day. The other interns were younger versions of their permanent counterparts who spent their spare time staring at the art on the walls, which Faith didn’t understand. It wasn’t like anything was going to change. A five-hundred year old painting of something called a can of soup wasn’t going to look any different today than it had five hundred years ago. Luckily, she only spent two days a week at the museum, guiding groups of school kids through a set series of exhibits. The kids were always fun, which was the only reason she kept the job.

  “I just need to get my purse,” Faith replied as she walked toward her locker. “Where we going tonight?”

  “How about Club Bruno?” Cinthy asked.

  “That’s fine,” Faith said with a shrug as she grabbed her purse and closed her locker.

  “Sometimes, Faith, I think you’re too easy going,” Cinthy said with a laugh.

  “Now you sound like my sister,” Faith said. “She’s always telling me that I need to grow up and find something I care about enough to take seriously.”

  “I always thought identical twins were alike inside as well as out,” Cinthy said.

  “Not hardly,” Faith replied with a grin. “About the only thing Grace and I have in common is our reflections.”

  “Too bad,” Cinthy said. “My brother and I have lots in common and we aren’t even the same sex. Speaking of Eric, I need to run down to the basement real quick before we go. I have something I forgot to give him. I won’t be long.”

  “You want me to come with you?” Faith offered. Cinthy’s older brother, who worked at the museum as head guard, possessed the masculine version of his sister’s beauty. He was always a treat to look at.

  “No, thanks, Faith. Why don’t you wait in the lounge? I’ll just be a few minutes.” She turned and hurried away before Faith could argue. Faith watched after her for a moment, then turned and wandered toward the employee lounge, her shoulders slumped in disappointment.

  Forty minutes later Faith was trying to decide if it would be rude to go ahead to Club Bruno on her own. She’d tried voxing Cinthy, but her vox was either turned off, or she was ignoring it. She had just decided to try one last time before leaving when the lounge door opened. Faith looked up, expecting to see Cinthy, but it was her supervisor, Julie Henders.

  “Hello Faith,” Mrs. Henders said. “Why are you still here?”

  “I’m waiting on Cinthy Kick,” Faith replied. “She went down to the Basement to talk to Eric.”

  “Thank goodness she’s still in the building,” Mrs. Henders said with obvious relief.

  “Is something wrong?” Faith asked.

  “She checked out a vault key and forgot to return it again,” Julie said. “I guess I better go down there and get it.”

  “I’ll do it,” Faith said, standing up and reaching for her purse. “I’m bored just sitting here anyway.”

  “You sure you don’t mind?” the older woman asked. “You’re not on the clock.”

  Faith nearly rolled her eyes at the not so subtle hint that she wouldn’t get paid for running an errand. “I know, Mrs. Henders, but I don’t mind,” she said. “I’ll go straight down there, and I’ll come back in a few minutes with either Cinthy, or the key.”

  “All right, Faith,” Mrs. Henders agreed. “I appreciate it. I have to run up front for a moment, but I’ll be back here in three minutes.”

  “Sounds good,” Faith replied. She left the employee lounge and headed toward the back of the cavernous building with a bounce in her step. She’d let Cinthy know she’d meet her at Club Bruno, grab the key, and then she was out of there. Both the cargo elevator and the employee elevator were busy, so she took the stairs down three flights to what the museum called the Basement.

  The Basement actually consisted of an enormous street level warehouse, and three underground floors of storage. The exhibits in the museum proper represented a tiny fraction of what the Basement contained in it’s maze of humidity controlled and hermetically sealed vaults.

  Faith reached the bottom of the stairs and pulled open the door. She walked past the elevators which, strangely, had large crates blocking the doors open. Faith frowned, then shrugged. They were probably loading stuff into them to take upstairs.

  She opened the door into a big room where deliveries were accepted and stacked before being sorted and catalogued. She walked along a narrow aisle between the towering crates, aiming for the voices she heard coming from the back of the room where the wide rolling delivery doors were located. She started to call out when the content of the conversation she was hearing suddenly registered.

  She was so shocked that she kept walking, straight up the aisle and around the corner. She stopped in plain sight of Cinthy, Eric, and three uniformed museum guards, a mixed expression of surprise and disappointment on her face.

  “Faith, what are you doing here?” Cinthy demanded sharply. “I told you to wait for me in the lounge.”

  “Mrs. Henders sent me to tell you that you forgot to return the vault key you checked out,” Faith said, her eyes taking in the black ground-truck backed up to the loading dock, already loaded with several large crates stamped with the museum’s seal. A ground-truck that she knew for a fact belonged to Eric. “But you didn’t forget it at all, did you? You’re stealing from the museum.”

  “So?” Cinthy said, tossing her long blonde hair over her shoulder carelessly, though her blue eyes were icily intent. “What do you care? This museum has so much crap no one will realize anything’s missing for years. We’ll be long gone by then, and so will you.”

  Faith shook her head, wondering if Cinthy thought she was an idiot. She was easy going, yes. But she wasn’t a criminal, nor was she about to stand by and let them rob the museum blind while she did nothing. She noticed that Eric and the three guards, Rick, Jeffers, and Todd, were all watching her warily. She turned around, but Cinthy stopped her.

  “Where are you going, Faith?” she asked.

  “Back to the lounge,” Faith replied
.

  “Are you going to tell anyone what you saw?”

  Faith turned back to face the woman she’d thought of as a friend. “If I say nothing, then I’m as guilty as you are.” She looked up at Eric, then the other guards. “You guys get paid to keep these things safe, and here you are stealing them. Do you really expect me to just let this slide? Pretend I didn’t see it?”

  “That’s exactly what we expect,” Eric said, speaking for the first time.

  “Yeah, I can see that,” Faith said with a sigh. “I’m sorry, but I don’t think I can do that.”

  “Too bad,” Cinthy said. Faith looked from Eric to Cinthy, surprised at the expression of cold fury on the other woman’s face. She started to say something when suddenly her stomach exploded in pain so intense it blotted out everything else. She tried to scream, but couldn’t force her lungs to take in air. The pain became impossibly bigger and more intense not once, but twice more. Then, finally, her lungs filled with air, and she screamed.

  ***

  Jonathan watched Faith leave, then waited until he was sure she’d had plenty of time to fall asleep. “Tristan,” he said as soon as he’d checked to be sure the three of them were alone, “we must talk.”

  “Yes?” Tristan asked absently, barely looking up from his vid screen. “What’s the matter, Jon?”

  “You,” Jonathan replied.

  Tristan’s head came up. Gray left his station at the far side of the room and came to stand beside Jon.

  “What do you mean?” Tristan asked.

  “You are the eldest,” Jon said. “Never have I considered not following your lead. Until now. Your behavior in front of our Princes this morning was both inexcusable and embarrassing. Worse, your treatment of the woman who is our Arima is so deliberately rude and offensive that I can no longer stand by and watch it.”

  “She doesn’t want to be our Arima, Jon, in case you weren’t listening,” Tristan said.

  “Nor do you want her to be,” Jonathan said. “Your denial of her is, evidently, acceptable. Her denial of us, on the other hand, is an insult you cannot bear. Why do I see a double standard here?”

  “I, too, am confused,” Gray said. “Miss Meyers’ status as our Arima is not an issue. We have agreed never to claim a female. She has no interest in being claimed. Why, then, are you so angry with her, Tristan?”

  “I am not angry with her, specifically,” Tristan replied. “Though the physical effects we are now suffering due to her presence are uncomfortable, I realize she is not to blame. However, she is a woman, and women in general are not to be trusted.”

  “Because one woman treated us badly, we must condemn all women?”

  “We have good reason not to want a woman in our lives, Gray, as you well know,” Tristan said, stubbornly refusing to answer the question.

  “And how do you know that she doesn’t have an equally good reason for not wanting men in her life?”

  Tristan opened his mouth, then closed it. He had not considered that. He hadn’t considered anything but his own feelings. “You believe she has such a reason?”

  “Yes, I do,” Graysan replied. “Further, I believe she was hurt, and much more severely than we were.”

  “What makes you say that?” Jonathan asked.

  “Her fear,” Graysan said.

  “When was she afraid?” Tristan asked.

  “She has been afraid constantly from the moment we first laid eyes on her,” Graysan said. “She hides it well when she isn’t covering it with anger, but it’s still there. Do you mean to say that neither of you noticed?”

  “I confess that I have struggled diligently not to notice anything about her,” Tristan said.

  “I have blocked emotions for so long that I find it difficult to understand much of what I feel from her,” Jonathan said. “Nevertheless, Tristan, unless you can assure me that you will change your manner toward Miss Meyers, I intend to contact High Prince Garen in the morning and ask that she be removed from our care for her own well being.”

  Tristan opened his mouth, intending to tell his brother that he thought that was an excellent idea, then froze as the sound of a high pitched scream reached them. A woman’s scream. And Faith was the only woman on the cutter.

  As beasts of the sky, the Falcorans’ strongest magic was Air, and they used it to cross the cutter from the auxiliary control room to Faith’s cabin so fast that they would have been little more than a blur to human eyes. They moved as a unit, Tristan leading, Gray and Jon flanking him, all of them rushing to their Arima’s aid by pure instinct, without giving a second thought to what they were doing. They were at her cabin door in less than a minute.

  The next scream was filled with such terror that for a moment they were unable to move, think, or breathe. Then Tristan used Air to crush the lock on the door and blast it open at the same time, not even noticing the loud crash it made as they all flashed into the cabin and surrounded the bed. But, aside from the twisted, sweat soaked sheets, the bed was empty. They stared at each other in confusion, uncertain what to do next.

  When the next scream began, Tristan leapt over the bed, using Air to yank the closet door open before he reached it. There, curled into a tiny ball on the floor of the closet, was the shaking, sobbing, figure of their Arima.

  Tristan hesitated for one fraction of a second, then deliberately shoved aside the heavy armor built of anger and resentment that he’d nurtured for two long years. He reached down and lifted Faith into his arms as gently as he could, shocked at how little she weighed, and how thin she was. He cradled her carefully against his body, sensing that she was very fragile. How had he not noticed that before?

  The question fled as Faith opened her mouth and screamed again, a sound that seemed to rip his heart in two. He began crooning softly to her, realizing that she was still asleep and in the grip of some horrible nightmare. He looked up into Gray’s eyes, then Jon’s, and saw the same play of emotions on their faces that he felt within himself.

  Using Water magic, he carefully nudged Faith into a deeper, sounder sleep where nightmares could not reach her. He felt her body relax in his arms and sighed with relief.

  “Jon, get a cool cloth for her face,” he said softly. Jon turned and vanished into the bathroom. A moment later they heard an odd, strangled sound and looked up to see Jon standing in the bathroom doorway, an expression of confusion and worry on his face.

  “What is it?” Gray asked.

  Jon shook his head as he started to dab at the sweat on Faith’s flushed face.

  “What did you see in the bathroom?” Tristan asked, allowing himself to study Faith for the first time. Her face was, like the rest of her body, fine and delicate. She had a rosebud mouth, a straight nose, and expressive brows over the large hazel eyes that were now closed. She also had dark circles under her eyes, and her skin was so pale that it was translucent. He could even see the fine tracery of blue veins beneath her skin.

  “There are towels over the mirrors,” Jon said. Both Tristan and Gray stared at him. He’d spoken in a whisper, but it wasn’t the flat, emotionless monotone they had become accustomed to. Instead, there was fear and worry in his voice.

  Gray walked the two short steps to the bathroom. A moment later he came out, his eyes dark with the same worry Tristan saw on Jon’s face.

  Tristan looked down at the woman in his arms. What could possibly be so horrible that she couldn’t bear to look at her own reflection in a mirror? Whatever it was must be hidden by the oversized t-shirt and cotton shorts she wore since, apart from the fact that she was too thin, he saw nothing to explain an aversion to mirrors. In fact, he thought that she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen though he had no intention of admitting it.

  He looked up again, meeting Gray’s gaze, then Jon’s. After a moment Jon shook his head. “No, we can’t,” he said. “That would be a gross violation. If we want to know her secrets, we must first earn her trust. We cannot steal them from her.”

  Tristan knew t
hat Jon was right, but he also felt an almost desperate need to know what had happened to her, or been done to her. She was in a deep sleep from which she could not awaken until he released her. If they looked beneath her clothes, she would never know. What harm would it do?

  When he realized what he was thinking, what he was actually considering doing, it brought him up short. What was wrong with him? When had he become so callous? Was he now so thoughtless, so selfish, that he thought nothing of violating this woman for the sake of his own curiosity? He was thoroughly disgusted with himself.

  “We should put her back into bed,” Jon said. “We can let her sleep this way for the remainder of the night, then awaken her in the morning. She need not know we were here, that we saw her this way.”

  Tristan nodded and turned back toward the bed. Jonathan and Gray straightened the twisted sheets and he laid her down, surprised to find that he was reluctant to release her. Gray covered her with the sheet and for a moment they stood watching her sleep. Then they turned and left the room, closing the door gently behind them.

  They made their way back to the auxiliary control room, all of their senses trained on Faith in case she had another nightmare, even though they knew it wasn’t possible. Tristan raised his hands to his face and inhaled the scent of warm orange blossoms, causing his body to tighten to the point of pain. He lowered his hands slowly, amazed that the scent was not the result of perfume, shampoo, soap, or anything else artificial. It was Faith’s natural scent.

  “What are we going to do?” Tristan asked, forcing himself to keep his hands at his sides.

  “Do?” Gray replied. “As you’ve already made clear, we will not claim her. Therefore, we have no right or responsibility to do anything other than the task appointed to us by our Princes.”

  “Whether we claim her or not, we cannot ignore the fact that she lives in fear,” Tristan argued. “I will not soon forget the sounds of her screams.”

  “Do you still wish to deny her as our Arima?” Jonathan asked.

  “Don’t you?” Tristan shot back. “Are you ready to forget what was done to us?”