“One of my lovers? What, do you think I keep a stable?”
“Take Michael. He’d love it.” All the high fashion and good food, Michael would think himself in the best dream.
Karish appeared scandalized. “I’m not sleeping with Michael.”
Oh. Not that either of them had ever said they were lovers. I’d just assumed it from their interactions. They were all over each other every time they met, and Karish never called Michael anything but “Michael, my love.” Could anyone blame me? “One of the others, then.”
“This is fascinating. Who do you recommend? Who else do you think I’m sleeping with?”
The little edge snapping off each of his words warned me to clear off. Karish had always been touchy when it came to talking about his lovers. Which was fine. It was none of my business. “The point is, I’m not going. The place will be crawling with aristocrats.”
“Including Her Grace.”
“Just another reason to refuse to go.”
“An option I don’t have.”
I glared at him. He learned too fast, that one, and was nowhere near above manipulating people to get what he wanted. “You bastard.”
He grinned, knowing he had won. “You can’t wear the gown you wore in Erstwhile, lovely though it was,” he said, speaking of the dress I had worn to meet the Empress the previous year. “That’s a winter gown.”
“I hate you.”
“You’ve left it very late. My fault, actually. I’d originally planned on going alone, else I would have given you more notice. But you’ll be able to get a gown in time if you put enough pressure on the tailor and get your name put at the top of the list.”
“I really hate you.”
“Do you want to practise some small talk?”
“There’s a special place for you in hell, you know.”
He blew a kiss at me. “You know you think I’m adorable.”
Aye. He knew it, too. That’s what made him so dangerous. The prat.
But I would have my revenge. “Ready to experiment?”
He groaned. “We’re not getting anywhere with that.”
“We don’t stop working on this until it’s fixed. That’s the deal.”
“What if it doesn’t get fixed?”
“But Taro,” I widened my eyes at him, “you promised me it would.”
“Do you have to remember every single thing I say?”
“The sterling words of the beautiful Lord Shintaro Karish.”
“Please shut up.”
“I will when you do.”
I couldn’t be sure, and I certainly wasn’t going to admit it to anyone, but I suspected I was the cause of the blizzard that hit us that night.
Chapter Sixteen
I arrived at the Lion by order of my mother. Not the first time that had happened, but something about the note, the stiff formality of it, gave me an uneasy feeling. I really didn’t want another Erin incident. I had told my mother there was no possibility of anything happening with Erin, but she hadn’t shown any inclination to listen to me so far.
He didn’t appear to be in the private dining room, but that didn’t mean anything. He could be coming by later, as he had before.
“Oh, Lee,” my mother said in deep disapproval. She was seated in the settee, sipping a sherry.
I shrugged. “It started raining on the way over.” So I was soaked. If Erin was on his way over, he wouldn’t be getting “something pretty to look at” that night.
He wouldn’t have anyway. Some little demon had prompted me to wear loose brown trousers and a brown shirt, both of which I loved to wear for the sheer comfort of them. I did recognize, however, that they looked hideous and were too big for me.
My mother’s gaze flicked over my clothes, but she made no comment. Maybe she was finally learning.
She sent Celia away for towels and a robe and I stood near the door and watched my mother fiddle with the flatware on the table and avoid looking at me.
I decided to just dive in. “Are there going to be any surprise guests tonight, Mother?”
She stopped fiddling long enough to look at me. “If there are, it’s not due to my arrangement.”
The maid returned. I took a towel from her. “Is something wrong?” What had I done this time?
“You should get out of those wet clothes, Dunleavy,” she said.
She’d called me Dunleavy.
I took off my wet clothes and gave them to the maid, quickly drying off and donning the robe.
“So how was your day, dear?”
About to get bad, I had no doubt. “It was all right.” I wrapped my head in one of the towels. “Karish expects me to accompany him to that party thing Lord Yellows is holding for Prince Gifford.”
“Of course he does.”
There was no of course about it. “I have to get my hands on some kind of ball gown. I’m relying on you to help me choose something.” That should make her smile, a chance to order clothes for me.
But she didn’t smile, or demonstrate any other symptom of enthusiasm. She sat down at the table. “I won’t be able to help you, Lee. I’m going back to Seventh Year. I’ll be leaving the day after tomorrow.”
I frowned and fought the urge to ask her to repeat herself. I’d heard her the first time. “You just got here. I thought you were staying a few months.”
Mother fiddled with her fingers, examining the paint on her nails. “You know I love you, Lee, don’t you?”
This definitely bad. “Aye.”
“And I know you love us.”
“Good.” I waited. “But . . .”
My mother took a deep breath of her own. “I don’t know exactly how to say this, so I’ll just say it.”
Really, really bad.
“Do you remember when you left for the Academy?”
“No.” She knew that.
“You were four.”
“Yes.”
“You were four. And we packed you up and took you to the Academy. You understood that you would be living there from then on. That you wouldn’t be seeing us for a long time.” She finally looked up from her fingers, looked at me, and I was surprised to see tears filming her eyes. “You didn’t seem upset.”
I had no idea how to respond to that. What did it have to do with anything?
“You didn’t cry. You didn’t cling. You put on your best company manners and politely said good-bye.”
Should I be resenting the fact that my mother apparently wished to see me in emotional distress?
“The Head Mistress assured us this was perfectly normal. Shield children don’t feel things, express things, as other children do. It didn’t mean you didn’t love us. We shouldn’t take it personally. But it was hard not to. It was hard.”
There was no point in becoming angry, but I was. I couldn’t help what I did or didn’t feel as a child. I didn’t even remember.
“Then next time I saw you, it was about two years later. You were only six. But you were so reserved. So well-mannered and . . . distant. You were happy to see us, of course, but not . . . I don’t know . . . not as excited as I would have expected a child to be on meeting her family for the first time in years.”
That was so unfair. “We are taught . . .”
“Yes, I know,” my mother interrupted me with a tone of impatience. “The Head Mistress explained it all to us. It is essential that you learn to keep yourself under control. It is an essential part of your role. It is a threat to yourself and your Source and to everyone you will eventually be protecting, to let your emotions run free. Except no one could tell me why, exactly. Why it was so important for Shields to be so restrained, any more than any other professionals should be while performing their tasks. Or why, if you’re naturally less emotional than the average person, it would be so dangerous to let you display what you did feel.”
Because that wasn’t quite right. It wasn’t like the sky would fall if I let it out when I got angry or scared or anything else. It was merely that it was my job to s
tay calm while I was working, to counteract the impact of a Source who wasn’t expected to be calm, ever. It was a matter of balance.
“I understand that it was important for you to learn to be calm and in control,” said my mother. “But can you understand how hard it is to have your own child treat you like a mere acquaintance?”
Obviously I could not, being as I was all child-free.
“But it wasn’t just that.”
There was more? Oh, joy.
“The rules, the values you were being taught, they were so different from what we would have had you learn. Not bad,” she said hurriedly, seeing something in my face. Seeing more than I could interpret myself. Because to be honest, I didn’t know what the hell I was feeling. “Just different, and nothing of what we would teach. About bartering. About trading. About sizing up your opponents. About how to make a customer feel he’s better than you so he doesn’t notice how much you’re overcharging him. But no one was better than you. Or below you. Because you were outside such considerations.”
I frowned, because now I was intellectually confused as well as emotionally. “I wasn’t ever going to be a holder or a—”
“That’s not the point!” my mother snapped. Then she sighed, closed her eyes, and rubbed her temples for a few moments. “I knew you were never going to be a holder or a trader. I knew that as soon as I realized what you were.” And there was a bitterness in my mother’s voice. “I’m not claiming that what I felt made sense. But here was my daughter, my little girl, being taught to believe in things that I would never understand.”
But she had three other children who would be learning exactly what she wanted them to know. Kaaren was a holder, Dias and Mika were traders. She had exactly what she wanted in them. The family assets were well looked after. What was wrong with having one child who did something different?
Mother took a sip from her goblet. “From the day we left you at that school,” and she said the words—that school—as though they tasted badly on her tongue, “you didn’t need us.”
And I made no response to that—not that she appeared to be waiting for one—because it was kind of true. I guessed.
“Someone else was teaching you what you needed to know, taking care of you, disciplining you—”
“Kaaren and Mika and Dias all went to Whitewood,” I reminded her. Everyone who could afford it sent their children to board away. It was considered normal and healthy not to have children becoming too dependent on their parents. It was the way of things.
“I’ve already told you it isn’t the same,” she said sharply. “We got to see them for months out of every year. They knew us, knew what we expected. You treated us like strangers.”
I took a sip of wine. This was just all so irrational and so damned unfair. There was nothing I could say. It wasn’t like I’d had any control over it. I hadn’t made any of the decisions. She was blaming me for things I wasn’t responsible for.
“Kaaren and the boys, they need me,” my mother went on. “They come to me, they ask me for advice about their work, and how to smooth over disturbances with their partners and companions. I can’t understand your work, and I know I would be the last person who should advise you about any aspect about it. But don’t you understand? That’s what makes it so hard. It’s like you’re living in a different world than the rest of us, with these strange rules and rituals and objectives that I can never be a part of.”
Aye, Mother, that’s what being a Shield is about. We don’t have a choice in the matter. We have to do a job that no one else can. But there are no strange rituals involved, no howling at the moon, no secret handshake. Our objectives are pretty obvious. Keep the planet from being torn apart. And if you don’t like how we’re trained you’ll have to take it up with the Triple S council.
“There’s nothing I can teach you, Lee. About anything. You don’t care about any of the things I consider important.”
“Like clothes,” I asked her.
I saw her clench her teeth. “One’s clothes reflect one’s character.”
Bilge. If that were true, there’d be no such thing as fashion. People would just wear whatever the hell they wanted. I liked nice clothing well enough, but I didn’t care to spend the time to get it. What did that say about me except that I didn’t care to spend time on clothes? And I’d seen Karish look the part of a useless mindless lordling. It didn’t mean he was one.
“You seem to resent any input I try to have in your life—”
“Like trying to arrange something between me and Erin Demaris?” Damn straight, I did. “You thought you had the right to do that?”
She raised her chin. “Yes,” she declared. “That is a parent’s role.”
“Maybe in—”
“Yes!” she interrupted, loud and harsh, so I shut up, though I didn’t like it. “I was wrong to do so. But that makes it worse.”
What?
“Trying to bring Erin into your life was a disastrous mistake.”
Disastrous might have been overstating the case a little. “He is a fine man, Mother, it was just—”
“I know there is nothing wrong with Erin.”
Ah. Then that meant there was something wrong with me. It appeared my mother was not yet finished running down my character.
“But it’s because I didn’t understand what you have with Taro—”
Now it was my turn to interrupt. “I don’t have anything with Taro, mother. Not like that.” And yes, my tone was sharp. It was one thing for strangers to think I was sleeping with Karish. They had nothing but rumors to work with, and if they thought someone like Karish would settle for someone like me, it was almost a compliment. And while it irked me that the other Pairs thought I had no discipline, I couldn’t really blame them. Karish acted like we were lovers, and I didn’t do much to stop him. But for my own mother to think so little of me, to think I would so forget my responsibilities that I would have sex with my own Source, that was disappointing.
“I’m not saying you’re lovers, Lee. I know you’re not.”
Oh. Good.
“But you don’t believe that’s the only kind of connection you can have with a man, do you?”
“Of course not.” I was not an idiot. “There is the bond—”
“I’m not talking about your . . . Pair bond.”
Zaire, would the woman please stop interrupting me?
“It’s not your Pair bond. It has nothing to do with your Pair bond. Well, maybe it does, but that’s not it.” Mother stopped, pulled in a breath, and started again. “I’m not claiming to know everything about the Triple S, Lee, but I have met a lot of Pairs in my time. I went out of my way to meet them, after we realized what you were. We wanted to know what you were getting into.” She frowned in memory. “Some of the partners despised each other,” she said. “The tension in the air was so strong, it seemed to catch me in the throat. I felt like I couldn’t breathe. And I worried about you ending up in a Pair like that. It seemed so unhealthy, almost destructive. But most of the Pairs weren’t like that. The partners were just friends, or colleagues. They just went about doing their business, and most of the time you wouldn’t know there was any connection at all between them. Just two people who worked together and probably didn’t think of each other much when they weren’t in each other’s presence. Just like regulars.”
And we didn’t appear that way. That, at least, was something I could explain. “I know we seem more . . . wrapped up in each other than a lot of Pairs, Mother. But that’s just because of circumstances. All that mess last year, it forced us into each other’s company a lot more than most Pairs require. And I know Taro touches me a lot, but it doesn’t mean anything. He just—”
“Of course it means something,” she said irritably. “It’s his way of making sure people are giving him their attention, and that they don’t forget he’s there.”
For a moment I was startled out of my own irritation. “What?”
She rolled her eyes with i
mpatience. “Think about it, Lee. You’ve said yourself that he flirts with absolutely everyone, that he’s always oozing charm and touching people. Why do you think he acts the way he does? I don’t know all the details, but he obviously felt isolated and neglected when he was a child, and he hated it. He needs people to know he’s there, to remember he’s there. He flirts with people because it’s sure to get everyone’s attention. He hangs on to a least one person in the room because he can be sure at least one person will remember he’s present. It’s obvious.”
Oh, Zaire. I put my hand over my mouth. She was right. It made perfect sense. It was obvious. And I had missed it. While my mother had picked up on it after only a couple of meetings. I had wondered why she had taken to kissing him and stroking him. It didn’t seem at all like her.
I felt sick.
“But it’s not that, either, Lee,” she said, oblivious to or ignoring my reaction. “You’re just different with him than you are with anyone else I’ve seen. You snipe at each other, you tease each other, and you were ready to go for his mother’s throat the other night.” She reached across the table, grasped one of my hands and held it in both of hers. “I’ve seen you with a lot of different people over the years, Lee. And never have I seen you so . . . natural with anyone as you are with Taro. You relax a little. Laugh more freely, express anger more easily.”
Really? I was sure he would be shocked to hear it.
“And he adores you. You can see it.” I didn’t squirm, but I wanted to. She was reading more than was there. “Your opinion means the world to him. And he didn’t really start to break down the other night until he felt his mother had slighted you too much. And no, I’m not claiming some grand dramatic love. But there is a real, strong connection there, more than with any other Pair I’ve seen, and I think . . . I don’t think any other relationship is going to be able to compete with that. Your Source will always come first with you. Another man will have to be willing to accept that. I doubt many would be.”
Karish and I were not freakishly obsessed with each other. “Most Pairs have relationships outside the bond. Riley is married. And Hammad.” And dozens of others I couldn’t name right then.
The Hero Strikes Back Page 20