Promised

by Caragh M. O'Brien

  “I’m going to have to deal with him,” she said. “I want to understand what’s between him and you. You just said I could tell you anything. You can tell me, too.”

  “It isn’t something I can just explain,” he said. His voice was different, tighter.

  “Just try me.”

  He pressed his hands between his knees. “I don’t know. Maybe this’ll give you an idea,” he said. “Back when I was about ten, my father’s old teacher came to visit for an overnight. He had a little wooden puzzle box that went missing. When the Protectorat found out, he got angry. Embarrassed, I guess he was. We were supposed to be on our best behavior, and it was obvious that one of us kids had stolen it.”

  “Did you get blamed?”

  He shook his head. “I was afraid I would, but they found it in my brother Rafael’s things that night. He was about six, but he was old enough to know better, and he’d lied about it, too. That put my father over the edge. I was certain he was going to beat my brother, so I refused to leave the room when my father ordered me out. I thought I could protect him somehow.”

  His voice tapered off. She waited, picturing the two brothers, the littler one cowering behind the older boy. Leon ran a hand back through his hair, and then leaned forward and pressed his hands slowly, carefully together.

  “My father didn’t hit him.” Leon’s voice was dead calm. “He yelled at him and scolded him. He threatened him, but he never hit him. He never even touched him.”

  She watched his profile. “That’s a good thing, isn’t it?”

  “Of course it is.” He angled his profile upward, toward the night sky. “My father never hit Rafael or my sisters. It was only me he hit. You see, until that night, I thought all fathers hit their sons.” Old hurt and confusion crept into his voice. “I thought what he did to me was normal.”

  Gaia hugged Maya more tenderly. “Did he hit you often?” she asked softly.

  “No. Two or three months could go by with nothing, and then he might hit me twice in a week,” he said. “It wasn’t consistent. Once I ruined his favorite watch and he barely mentioned it. Another time, I dribbled milk down my chin when I laughed at the dinner table, and he took a belt to me. That was a bad one.”

  “I’m so, so sorry,” she said. “Didn’t Genevieve do anything to protect you?”

  “I think she intervened a lot, actually,” he said. “I think she’s why he went for longer stretches without touching me. But what could she really do? Tell somebody?” He leaned back slightly, bracing a hand behind him again. “I’m not sure why I’m even telling you this. I know plenty of other kids whose parents were hard on them.”

  “That doesn’t make it right,” Gaia said.

  Leon shrugged. “You get used to it.”

  But Gaia knew she never could have. Her parents had never been anything but gentle with her, even when they disciplined her. “It’s the contempt that would get to me,” she said.

  “‘Contempt,’” Leon said, as if testing the concept. “I suppose that’s what it was.”

  “Did being advanced have something to do with it?” she asked.

  “Possibly. Adopting me was his first wife’s idea, not his,” he said. “He never made any pretence about hiding that, but he went along with it. He used to say I ought to be able to rise above my nature.”

  “Like you were innately bad? That’s awful,” Gaia said.

  “More inferior than bad. And he had a point.” Leon seemed to relax slightly. “I was a liar, much worse than Rafael. I liked seeing how much I could get away with. It was always worth it. I was lousy at school and sports, except running, and I never raced when my father could see me. That way I didn’t have to care that he never showed up. The one thing I was good at was getting the twins to laugh. I could play with them for hours, and they loved that.”

  She smiled in the darkness, thinking of how sweet he was with Maya. “I can imagine.” The moonlight dimmed, and she looked up to see the crescent glowing through a slow-moving cloud. “Was Fanny your mother’s name? Your first adoptive mother?”

  “Fanny Grey, yes. Why?”

  She recalled how the Protectorat had said it would hurt Fanny to know Leon had taken a different last name. Passing that along to Leon would serve no good. “I just remember you used her name.”

  “Yes, after I was disowned.” His boot made a shifting noise on the step. “I’ve sometimes wondered if I was his biggest failure,” Leon said. “I think he tried to overcome his prejudice against people outside the wall by raising one of us himself. Then it turned out he couldn’t stand me, and I was right there, in his family, spoiling everything.” He brushed a bug off his knee. “Who was he going to blame for that?”

  She took his theory another step. “And then the mess happened with Fiona. I think I see, now.” The Protectorat had naturally blamed Leon. He’d been looking for the worst in him for years, and Fiona’s death provided the final proof of how evil Leon was.

  She suddenly understood a comment the Protectorat had made to Genevieve a few hours earlier: “He had his hands on her.” The Protectorat had been agonized by the idea that his other daughter Evelyn was still vulnerable to Leon, because the Protectorat didn’t believe Leon was innocent. Leon had played on that.

  A shiver rippled through Gaia.

  Leon turned to her. “There’s so much I wish I could undo with Fiona,” he said quietly. “I still feel like it’s my fault she killed herself. I don’t think that’ll ever completely go away. But it’s better than it was. I can see now that I did the best I could. I was hardly more than a kid myself, and selfish, but I didn’t know what she was going to do.”

  “You are the gentlest person I know,” Gaia said.

  He let out a laugh. “I wouldn’t say that.”

  “With me, you are.” That, she realized, was the kernel of Leon right there. She could trust him about herself completely and knew he’d be loyal to her forever, but she couldn’t count on how he might be with anyone who crossed him, or ever tried to hurt the people he loved.

  “Gaia, I don’t want you to ever underestimate my father,” he said. “He is absolutely, completely, irreversibly ruthless. I want you to be ready for that. This isn’t Sylum here.”

  “I know,” she said, touching her ear and remembering she still needed to properly clean her cut. “But I have to think of an approach that’s going to be right for all of New Sylum. We can’t just blow up something. We have to build trust and a long-term alliance with your father. That’s much, much harder to do.”

  “You aren’t hearing me. You still need to be able to mount a counterattack,” Leon said. “What if he tries to arrest you again or assassinate you? You must see that anything’s possible. It’s your responsibility to be prepared.”

  He won’t assassinate me, she thought. He needs something from me. She had an image of Mabrother Iris’s piglet in its pen, and had the feeling she was missing something he’d been trying to tell her.

  “What sort of thing would you do to prepare?” she asked.

  “I’d take a team into the tunnels and sabotage the power grid and the water system.”

  “Sabotage them how?”

  “With explosives on timers.”

  “And how would you do that?”

  He shrugged. “I’d get a couple old friends to help me.”

  She realized he’d been planning this. “You sound like a terrorist.”

  He hesitated. “No. I’d just set things up to use for self-defense. I could do it without putting any people at risk. We have to be prepared, Gaia,” he said. “The Protectorat wouldn’t hesitate to hurt us if he had to.”

  “This is not how we’re going to operate,” she said.

  “You don’t have to authorize an actual offensive, Gaia, but it has to be ready. The Protectorat will respond to pressure if he finds we can nail his resources. It’s no different from when he turned off the water for Wharfton,” he said. “Don’t be naïve. Please. By the time you want to use violence,
it’ll be too late to set it up if we don’t start now.”

  “You don’t understand,” she said. “Remember what I said. When you threatened Evelyn, your father was ready to go berserk. I saw him. Threatening him only escalates the problem.”

  “You have to remember, too. My threats got you out of the Enclave, didn’t they?”

  He had a point. Gaia ran her fingers into the hair over her forehead. “Tomorrow,” she conceded. “We’ll work on it tomorrow.”

  “That could be too late.”

  “It’s just a few hours from now,” she said. “It won’t make a difference.”

  “I’ll go talk to Peter now and set things up,” Leon said.

  “Please don’t. Please just be with me. Do I have to beg you?”

  She swiveled toward the door of her parents’ home to listen. All was quiet within, and a faint glow in the window suggested a fire in the fireplace had burned down to embers.

  He shifted on the step, and his grave features eased slightly. “That’s a change. At least you didn’t order me this time.” He leaned nearer to kiss her. “Where’d you get berries?”

  “I didn’t have any berries.”

  “Let me see.” He kissed her again. “You’re right. It’s more like apple pie. Let me see.”

  She smiled slowly, kissing him back, and lingering when he took his time. “We have to get to bed,” she said. “It’s late.”

  “Fine by me.”

  “Bed. As in, fall asleep.”

  He changed his angle to kiss her in a different direction. “But together, right?”

  “Um,” she began. He really did have a nice mouth. She probably hadn’t told him that in so many words, but it was easy to forget her problems while he was—

  She backed up. “There won’t be any privacy in there,” she said.

  “Don’t you have a romantic little chicken coop out back?”

  She laughed. “I am not going in some chicken coop with you.”

  He gave her a last, light kiss and swiveled to his feet. He held out his hands. “I think rejecting me cheers you up. Give me that girl.”

  “Be careful. She’s asleep. And we should be quiet.” She didn’t want to disturb Myrna, Jack or Angie. Gaia passed her sister to him. Then she stood and opened the door to her old home.

  CHAPTER 11

  the dna registry

  MYRNA SILK TURNED FROM the fireplace with a poker. “I thought I heard voices,” she said. Barefoot, she was dressed in a long gown with a shawl around her shoulders. Her white hair fell in a short, silvery braid, grown out since her time in prison. “I’m glad you’re safe, Gaia. Are you hungry?”

  “I ate at the tavern,” Gaia said. “We didn’t mean to wake you.”

  “I sleep light, listening for patients.” She hung the poker on the hook by the fireplace, and Gaia did a double-take. It was the same gesture she’d seen her mother do a thousand times, but Myrna wasn’t her mother.

  That was the first of many changes, obvious and subtle, juxtaposed with the unchanged. In the corner where Gaia’s father had kept his sewing machine and fabrics, a pair of bunks had been built into the wall to accommodate Myrna’s patients. Jack lay on the lower bed, asleep. Above, Angie was curled in a ball, snoring softly. across the room, a built-in ladder with smoothly worn treads still led up to the loft where Gaia had slept as a girl, and her parents’ double bed was still on the right, half hidden behind a damask curtain. Their quilt was gone. In the dim kitchen area to her left, an apron was hooked on the back door.

  Gaia’s sense of normal began to tip. The table and two straight-backed chairs remained, but the rest of it, her father’s sewing things, his banjo, the rocker, the family’s games and books and knickknacks, were all gone. Instead, medical supplies were neatly arranged in a new system of shelves and drawers. Translucent tubing was coiled in lengths and hung on hooks beside the window. Gaia looked instinctively along the mantel to the place where her parents had always kept two candles for Jack and Arthur, but the spot was empty.

  Yet the place smelled the same, of worn, polished wood and rich, slow cooking and fresh honey butter. It shouldn’t have been possible, this aching mix of familiar and alien. She glanced back at Leon, surprised to find her vision misting.

  He laid little Maya in the middle of Gaia’s parents’ bed, and now he pulled Gaia into his arms for another embrace. He felt more familiar to her, more right than anything else. “Get some sleep,” he murmured. “You’re home.”

  * * *

  Gaia awoke at daybreak to the sound of water sloshing on the porch and a tinny, tapping noise that recalled her father shaving. In the middle of the bed, Maya was still sleeping, an arm thrown out in relaxed abandon. Gaia fingered the curtain aside a bit to see Myrna in the kitchen, neatly dressed in blue, her hair in its usual loose bun. Gaia glanced at the bunks to find them empty, and then shifted her gaze upward, toward the loft.

  “They’re already gone,” Myrna said.

  “Where to?”

  “Jack’s out back with Angie. Leon was gone before I woke up.”

  A soft breeze stirred the white curtain over the sink, and daylight brought a brighter feel to the cottage. Gaia looked toward the open back door, wondering if the water urns were located on the back porch as usual. She was still covered with grit from the trail and longed to wash up. She also needed to get down to the unlake and check on New Sylum.

  “You don’t have a spare shirt I could borrow, do you?” Gaia asked.

  “I suppose I do,” Myrna said. “Funny. Last night after you were asleep, Leon asked if he could wash out his shirt.”

  Gaia smiled. “He doesn’t like being dirty. It was unavoidable during the exodus. How long did you stay up talking with him?”

  “Not long,” Myrna said. “He seems different, though I can’t say I ever knew him well.”

  “What do you mean?” Gaia reached for a hair brush and started on her tangles, being careful around her sore ear.

  “He always struck me as an arrogant boy,” Myrna said. “And later there were the rumors after his sister’s death. I can see he’s got character, though, so either I was wrong about him or he’s changed.”

  “You liked him enough to take care of him after he was tortured,” Gaia pointed out.

  “Yes, well. That was for you, I suppose.”

  Surprised, Gaia looked at Myrna more closely.

  The older woman smiled ironically. “Who’d have guessed the old bat had it in her?” Her gaze shifted and she frowned. “What happened to your ear? Let me see.”

  Gaia held the brush in her lap and stayed still while Myrna inspected her cut and then fetched a cloth to clean it carefully.

  “That’s a nasty little gouge,” Myrna said, but she didn’t ask any more questions.

  “Remember Cotty? From Q cell?” Gaia asked. “She once told me I could count on you.”

  “Cotty’s a fool,” Myrna said mildly, her voice near to Gaia’s ear. “They let her out, finally.”

  “She said you were married once. Is that true?”

  Myrna leaned back. “You gossiped about me. When was this?”

  “I just wondered,” Gaia said, starting to blush. “I’m sorry. It’s none of my business.”

  “Keep that clean,” Myrna said, with a brief pat on Gaia’s shoulder. “What Cotty said is hardly a secret. I fell for a younger man. He liked to cook. He fed me well and made me laugh. We married just a few weeks after we met.”

  Gaia found it hard to imagine Myrna being swept off her feet. “What happened?”

  Myrna put away the cloth and sorted through her supplies as she spoke. “It took me only a few days to realize he’d married me for my money. It took me six months to divorce him and another six months to realize he’d had a girlfriend the entire time. He played me good, he did.” Myrna rubbed her palms together. “He owns a sauna parlor now on the west side of town and does quite well for himself. A charming story all around.”

  “I’m sorry,” Gaia said.
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  Myrna’s eyebrows lifted ironically. “You can spare me the pity. I was stupid. I’ve paid for it. Never again.” She stepped to the closet where she pulled out a faded brown blouse with dainty stitching down the front. “Try this. And here’s some fresh soap. Dab a bit of this on your ear after you’re done with your hair.” She handed Gaia a small pot of salve, too.

  “Thank you,” Gaia said.

  Gaia fetched a basin, filled it with cool, fresh water, and cleaned up behind the privacy of the curtain. She washed her hair last, relishing the sensation of scrubbing the weeks of grime from her scalp. She toweled the water out of her ears, combed out every last tangle, and dabbed on the salve. When she tried on the borrowed blouse, the fit was a little loose, but she liked the dainty buttons. She adjusted her locket and monocle over the neckline and slid the curtain aside.

  “I feel like a new person,” she announced.

  Myrna eyed her critically without comment, then turned to the tea kettle. “Is it true you’re planning to marry Leon?”

  “Yes.” Gaia slung her damp hair over her shoulder and checked on Maya once more before moving forward to the table.

  “He told me you carry the anti-hemophilia gene and your blood is Rh O negative,” Myrna continued.

  “So?”

  “It made me think of your mother,” Myrna said. “Tea?”

  “I should really wake Maya and bring her down to Josephine and check on things in the unlake before the DNA registration starts.”

  “Oh, sit down for once. They can manage another ten minutes. You’re not that important.”

  Gaia laughed and reached for a chair. Myrna passed her a mug and set out some fruit, yogurt, and rolls.

  “Your mother miscarried quite a few times, didn’t she?” Myrna asked.

  “Yes, after I was born.”

  “She must have been Rh negative, too,” Myrna said. “I’m guessing your first brother was negative, too, so there was no problem. Then your second brother was positive, and that pregnancy started your mother’s antibodies to any other fetuses that were also positive. That’s why she miscarried so frequently after her first two babies, but you were okay because your blood and hers were compatible. Both negative.”