Destroyer

And whether they had allies still in any position of authority—such, at least, were the questions Bren himself was sure he would ask, and might yet ask, if the young man didn’t come back with the answers. Certainly information flowed both ways up there, and meanwhile Banichi and Jago, with their own electronics, became very quiet, staring straight ahead of them, of course following all of it from their seats, and absorbing everything.

The details of the shuttle’s operation, however, were not among the things Bren needed to ask anyone. Having translated the shuttle plans and most of the flight operations manual, with the assistance of his staff, and having trained the translators who had mediated the finer details of the actual operations, he knew the facts down to the length of the Jackson runway; he knew that it was 20 feet shorter than the original plan, he knew the names of the grafting bastards responsible, and he really had not rather think about that old issue right now.

He decided to divert himself with his computer, with, eventually, a nap, at least as well as a sane man could sleep on a vessel hurtling deeper and deeper into the gravitational grip of a very unforgiving planet toward a runway that wasn’t quite what they’d designed.

A shuttle with all its fail-safes was still better than parachutes, he reminded himself. He had, at least, never landed the way Jase had, and the way his ancestors had landed on Mospheira in the first place—by parachute, in a little tin-can capsule. For their ancestors it had been a one-way trip, when they’d rebelled against the iron rule of the old Pilots’ Guild and decided to commit themselves to an inhabited planet, since by then it had been well-established the ship was not going to find its way back home at all. Phoenix, the same ship on which they had just voyaged, had dropped into some anomaly of space-time, or suffered some never-revealed malfunction, and popped a station-building expedition out first of all at a deadly white star. They’d gotten away from that by the skin of their teeth, only to be told, by the ship’s masters, that they had to refuel and commit to more voyages, after which, they began to comprehend, their use was to refuel the ship again and again—living a graceless, gray existence under the rule of a band of men who’d, yes, somehow survived the previous disasters, men who’d somehow not volunteered to sacrifice a thing when the better elements of the crew had given their very lives to get them free and out to this lovely green world and safer sun.

The colonists, finding there was an alternative where they’d arrived, had desperately flung themselves onto an innocent planet whose steam-age civilization naïvely assumed they’d arrived from their moon… had assumed, assumed, assumed, until they went to war with each other and every human still alive ended up in an isolated enclave on the island of Mospheira.

Hence his job, when he wasn’t being Lord of the Heavens. Hence the paidhiin came into being, the translators appointed to interpret not only words, but psychology—to prevent two species who’d originally thought it was easy to understand one another from pouring their technology and their concepts into each other’s heads until the system fractured.

One of a long line of paidhiin who’d served the system, trickling humanity’s advanced technology into atevi hands at a sane pace, trying to make humans live lightly on the planet and not offend atevi beliefs and traditions—he’d tried, at least, to keep the faith.

But had he?

Therein lay the guilt… guilt that in recent hours burrowed itself a wider and wider residency under his heart, laying its foundations the moment he’d heard Tabini had gone down, and growing to a whole suite of rooms when he’d heard Geigi lay out the reasons for Tabini’s downfall. Too much tech and too much change too fast had brought—not war with humans, this time—but an internal calamity to atevi, the fall of the aiji who’d pushed, lifelong, for more tech, more tech, more tech… and made too-quick changes in the atevi way of life to take advantage of it. At some point the paidhi was supposed to have said no, and not to have been so accommodating. That had been his job, for God’s sake. It was why all prior paidhiin had not been so snuggly-close with the atevi leadership. Tabini had had the notion of making his people the technological equals of humans in their island enclave—a technological equality they’d all conceptualized as a good rail system, air traffic crossing the continent, maybe even a computer revolution, in his lifetime.

But then long-lost Phoenix had shown up from deep space, and ownership of the abandoned space station had become an issue. Tabini had been determined to secure it for his own people, entirely understandable, and he had been convinced that if humans got it up and running first they’d never relinquish it to atevi, no matter the justice of their claims. He’d had to move fast to take over leadership not only of the space station… but of the crisis humans confessed they’d precipitated out in deep space.

Step by step, Tabini had waded into hotter and hotter water, all for the sake of protecting his people from the changes humans brought, and the paidhi, who should have said no, wait—stop—

To this hour the paidhi just couldn’t figure what else he could have done.

Average atevi, who, like Banichi, had only just figured out the earth went around the sun, or why they should care, had suddenly become critical to the planetary effort to get back into space. The mainland had the mineral resources and the manufacturing resources to do what the ship could not: supply raw materials and workers to get the space station operating again… and, most critically, the planet had the pilots to fly in atmosphere, an art the spacefarers had flatly forgotten and had no time to relearn.

Atevi had been able to get their manufacturing geared up to handle the crisis. The island enclave of Mospheira had still been debating the matter when the atevi’s first spacecraft lifted off the runway and blasted roof tiles off the eaves of Shejidan.

Change, change, and not just change—change proceeding at breakneck speed through every aspect of atevi life. Mines and factories were opened, sudden wealth created for some districts, with shortages of critical materials and extravagant plenty of new luxuries: Mospheiran society, wrangling over regional advantage and company prerogatives, hadn’t been able to do it, even with the technological advantage. Atevi society, where a strong leader could dictate where new plants were to be built, could balance the economy of regions against regions, equalize the supply and demand—and in so doing, created new values, new economy, new emphasis on manufacturing instead of handcrafting of objects valued for centuries, not even to mention such radical notions as preserved food, instead of food auspiciously and respectfully offered in season, with awareness of one’s debt to the natural world…

Cultural change, religious change, upheaval in the relative importance of provinces and districts, not according to history but according to the mineral wealth and the siting of some new critical facility, partly by the aiji’s grace, partly by the questions of where nature had put the resources. It had all worked. It had been a toboggan ride to a brave new tomorrow, and Tabini’s brilliance had kept everyone prosperous, kept himself in charge, abandoned not a shred of his power and put down every attempt to unseat him…

And had the paidhi objected? He’d superintended Tabini’s rush to modernize, confident Tabini’s management of the economy was going to preserve the traditions as well as create new professions, new Guilds. He’d known he was riding the avalanche, and he’d thought he’d steered Tabini to safety. When the crisis came that called them out to Reunion, he’d left Tabini never more powerful, the Association never more prosperous, the atevi economically and politically equal to humans in every regard, even in relation to the ship-humans on the station. He’d left a people possessed of shuttlecraft and every functioning facility to land and service spacecraft, even building a starship of their own, while Mospheiran humans, across the straits from the mainland, dithered and debated and never had accomplished more than those modifications to the airport at Jackson that would serve as a reserve landing site in emergency… give or take the twenty feet of runway that couldn’t get past certain special interests and the Jackson Municipal Golf Course.

Humans on Mospheira had continued to have mixed feelings about the space station, that was the problem underlying Mospheiran politics. Some were extremely enthusiastic about going back to space, but more were suspicious and resentful of their cousins on the ship. And like the atevi, Mospheirans had mixed feelings, too, about the changes, the haste to turn the entire economy into a space-based push for technological equality with the ship-folk, the trampling of, well, fairly old, if not ancient traditions of Mospheiran life.

He’d foreseen all the objections. He’d hoped both Shawn Tyers, the President of Mospheira, and Tabini-aiji, head of the aishidi’tat, the atevi government, would weather all the storms of discontent at least until they’d been able to get back from their mission to Reunion and report that all this sacrifice and striving had produced a result worth having.

He seemed to have won the bet in the case of his old friend Shawn Tyers, though Shawn’s political survival when he had left had seemed more precarious. Shawn was still in office, despite the volatile politics of the island and all the pressures bearing on him.

He had been disastrously wrong, however, about the atevi side of the equation. Tabini had seemed unassailable, delicately and deftly maneuvering around difficulties, as he always had, having secured the help of such unlikely individuals as his own grandmother, the aiji-dowager, a unifying power of the far east, who might have threatened his reign. He’d begotten an heir, Cajeiri, with an Atageini woman, the Atageini, historically speaking, posing one of the greatest threats to the stability of the aishidi’tat. He’d gotten the crotchety, traditionalist head of the Atageini clan on his side. He’d put down one bad bit of trouble arising in the seafaring south and west, and engaged the gadget-loving western Lord Geigi firmly on his side, in the process, Geigi’s influence being a firm bulwark against trouble in all that curve of western coast. What more could he need than those several allies? Nothing had looked remotely likely to shake Tabini from power.

But Geigi had gone up to orbit, managing the atevi side of the station, while the son of a conspirator, allowed to prosper—Tabini, lately influenced by strong Mospheiran hints that it wasn’t proper or civilized to assassinate the relatives of people who’d tried to kill him—repaid Tabini with treachery.

Spare Murini, he’d asked Tabini. Take the chance. He’d been sensitive to the international, interspecies situation—been sensitive to any perception on the part of Mospheiran or space-faring humans that atevi were less civilized or in any way threatening to humans. Attached to the atevi court, he’d begun to take such accusations of atevi barbarism personally; he’d begun, hadn’t he, to want his atevi to have the respect of his species?

There had been a danger point, if he’d only seen it. But he hadn’t read the winds. He had committed the oldest mistake of joint civilization on the planet—getting distracted by one issue, modernizing too fast, worst of all ignoring atevi hardwiring and ignoring the point that what humans might call barbarism was part and parcel of atevi problem-solving.

What had he tried to promote among atevi? Tolerance of out-clan powers. Therefore tolerance of foreigners. How could an enlightened ruler kill the son of a traitor, simply because of his relatives?

And now that unenlightened son of a rebel, driven, perhaps, by that emotion of man’chi which humans weren’t wired to understand on a gut level, had quite naturally, from an atevi view, turned on the aiji who had spared him.

How much of the aishidi’tat had fractured when that happened? How much pent-up tension in the power structure had just snapped? Classic, absolutely classic atevi behavior.

And what could a human do to mend the damage, when the human in question had made the critical mistakes in the first place, and given his atevi superiors bad advice?

Ilisidi might, with some justification, ask for transport for herself and Tabini’s heir back to her homeland, bidding the paidhi to stay the hell on the island. She might justly tell the paidhi to give her no more advice, certainly not of the quality he’d given Tabini. She hadn’t yet mentioned the word blame, but he was sure she knew a certain amount of this situation was indeed his fault.

And there were no few atevi on the mainland who’d like to explain to him all the mistakes he’d made, he was quite sure of it. By now many of his loyal staff, maybe even Banichi and Jago themselves, were quietly questioning moves he’d made, things they’d accepted.

Now that he had an enforced time to sit and think, not even tea sat easily on his stomach, and sleep, as tired as he was, did not come, no matter how he tried, so the hours stretched on and on, in blacker and blacker thoughts. He ate a bite or two of his supper and found no desire for the rest. He drifted, belted to his seat, in a cabin never quiet—the shuttle had too many fans and pings and beeps for that—but that held a kind of a white, shapeless sound, and permitted far too much calculation.

“Bren-ji, you have not eaten,” Jago observed, loose from her seat for the moment, drifting close to him.

“Later, Jago-ji,” he said. “I shall have it later.”

At the moment he wasn’t sure he could keep another bite down.

But self-blame was a state of indulgence he could not afford. Until Ilisidi did, for well-thought reasons, tell him go to hell, he had to get his wits working and do something constructive, if he could only figure what that was.

So he decided he had best shake the vapors, satisfy Jago, and eat the damned sandwich, bite by bite. Deal with the situation at hand, avoid paralyzing doubt, and try to think of first things first. Try to learn from the mistakes. That was the truly unique view he could bring to the situation. At least he’d had experience in mistakes. He had a very good view, from the bottom of this mental pit, of what they had been, and what not to do twice.

Dry bite of tasteless sandwich. One after the other.

If atevi affairs were to get fixed, the fix had to start from the top of the hierarchy. That was the very point of man’chi. He had to find out what had happened to Tabini, the foremost atevi who’d trusted him, and set things right in that regard, if he had to shoot Murini with his own hand.

There was an ambition worth having. Too late to utterly undo the damage, but at least, if he took Murini out of the picture, as should have been done in the first place, he could free the people of a leader completely undeserving of man’chi, of anyone’s man’chi—in his own admittedly human estimation.

He hadn’t asked himself, in those fast-moving days when the space program had been his only focus, why humans felt guilty if they didn’t spare their enemies, but, more importantly, he hadn’t asked himself why atevi had generally felt extremely guilty if they did. He’d been feeling all warm and smug in his accomplishments in those days, too warm and smug and convinced of his own righteousness ever to ask himself that question… like… do atevi have an expectation of certain behavior on all sides, that might be worth considering?

The human word gratitude had always translated into Ragi, the dictionary blithely said so, as kurdi, root from kur, debt. But what did it mean, derived from the word debt? A feeling of debt for an undue kindness? Good debt or bad debt?

And how was that to translate into atevi actions not within, but across the barriers of man’chi? There was the problem.

And translators previous to him had never questioned whether application of gratitude across man’chi lines was possible—had never taken any within-and-outside-man’chi applications into account because translators before him had never been in a position to see atevi cross those boundaries. Translators before him had never dealt with an aiji as extraordinary as Tabini, whose ambitions had crossed those boundaries and placed him into situations where inside and outside man’chi critically mattered. He hadn’t seen it. Bang! Right in the face, and he hadn’t seen it. None of his predecessors had suggested there might be a problem with the word, that concept, that assumption.

Welcome home, Bren Cameron. Welcome home, on the day all the mistakes suddenly made a difference. Bring the computer up, open the dictionary paidhiin had spent centuries building, and put a significant question mark not only beside that word kurdi, but add a note that every emotional and relational word in the dictionary deserved a number one and a number two entry, an inside meaning and an outside meaning. He’d let his dictionary-making duties slip, thinking they didn’t matter so much as his flashier, newer ones. Lord of the Heavens, he’d become. But where was the clue to his problems? Lurking, as always, in the dictionary, right where he’d begun.

The shuttle made its insertion into atmosphere on a route they’d never used before, so everything was tense. The station confirmed they had clearance from their landing site at Jackson, and from Mospheiran air traffic control in general—it was another worry, that some lunatic Mospheiran with an airplane might take exception to their landing or just, in great admiration, take the unprecedented chance to see a shuttle landing. Both sides of the strait had their patented craziness, and a man who wanted to think about such things could fret himself into deeper and deeper indigestion.

Jago noticed it, and inquired again: “Are you ill, Bren-ji?”

She had put away a fair amount of the offered pre-landing snack, and for answer, he simply gave her his dessert, a prettily wrapped bit of cake. “Would you, Jago-ji? I fear I may weigh my stomach down.”

She knew him. She knew he was worrying. She likely knew he was scared spitless. She floated across the aisle and back a row and shared her acquired pastry with Banichi. Then the two of them gave him analytical looks, and put their heads together and conferred.

The conference drifted up the aisle—literally, as Banichi and Jago floated forward—to Cenedi. Dared one wonder—or worry—that his anxiety might then drift over to the dowager, and reach the eight-year-old heir?

Bren felt his ears grow hot, a flush of thoroughly human embarrassment, and he shot Banichi and Jago a fretful look, trying to get them to desist from advising Cenedi. He signaled Jago, who pretended not to see. Now they were worried because he was worried, and because he had not informed them why.

His bodyguard was a delicately balanced, edged weapon. It was outright wrong to handle such an instrument with anything but precision and caution, and he had leaked human emotion into their situation. He had upset their calculations of the risks, not told them the nature of his worries, possibly tipped them toward distrust of the Mospheirans they might have to deal with.

Well, he could at least patch that problem. He insisted, caught Jago’s eye, and when she had drifted back to him:

“Have no concern for my surly disposition or my appetite, nadi-ji. Flying always upsets me. I particularly dislike it when there may be missiles aimed at us. Imagination quite thoroughly upsets my stomach. But I have confidence in our landing and great confidence in Mospheirans on the ground.”

“Do we rely securely upon the Presidenta?”

She was still ready, ready as Tabini had been, along with all their security, to take his word as truth, when his judgement was necessarily at issue in this whole business, whether he was at all reliable in his estimates of his own people, when he’d been so badly mistaken in reactions on the mainland. But there was no room for second thoughts. Gravity had them. They were headed irrevocably for Jackson, with no other landing site in the whole world available, carrying the most precious cargo atevi had, in the dowager and the (at present) bored, over-sugared, and over-stressed heir of the aishidi’tat.

The paidhi needed to get solid control of his own nerves, that was what. He could only think so many moves ahead, or go crazy trying to calculate the variables to a nicety. There was no calculation possible at present, except that they had to get down and get transportation to a place where they could gather more information.

“We may rely on Shawn,” he said. “The Presidenta remains a strong associate, reliable and, as far as I know, firmly seated in his power. I wish I might tell you the next steps we shall take, but I have been reluctant to discuss any specifics with him, for fear of interception by some less well-disposed party. We shall land, I suppose we shall spend the night near the landing field to consider our options and gather information, and by some means, in the morning, I expect, we shall cross to the continent as rapidly as we can. I trust the Presidenta will arrange a boat—that would be my preference.”

“Safer,” Jago agreed. “Slower transit, but one believes all of us agree. There will be surveillance, but surely more boats than planes go about the strait, particularly under these circumstances. I shall present it to the others.”

“Do so, Jago-ji,” he said, and she sailed forward, pulled herself down to a secure place in the seats forward and spoke gravely to Banichi and Cenedi, who had continued their conference, and doubtless were committing certain key things to memory. It seemed likely a plan was in formation up there—even, likely, a plan as to what they should do if all the paidhi’s assurances fell apart entirely and they were met with gunfire or treachery at highest levels.

The paidhi was out of his element in martial affairs. What his bodyguard was doing up there was certainly more constructive than what he was doing, sitting back, fretting, and nursing his indigestion. High time he opened his computer and set about his own reasonable preparation, raking up details of officials on Mospheira, recalling those in various offices, down to their contact numbers and home addresses. He did that, reminded himself of accesses to certain lords on the mainland, then unbelted and drifted up near the dowager. Floating there, tucking down somewhat into a vacant seat, he asked her in detail about various lords on the mainland, with her estimation of their web of man’chi, and that of their households, to whom they paid allegiance, and of what history, with what marriages and inheritances, reestablishing his command of that mathematics of trust and old grievances.

Certainly young Cajeiri listened with more personal interest than a human child might have mustered, absorbing a set of old, old feuds and seemingly pointless begats, marriages, and business dealings of people he’d never met, most of them now dead. His young lips clamped tight on questions he by now knew not to ask, wisely declining to interrupt the conference of his elders, eyes sparking at this and that name he might remotely know, or a light of understanding dawning at a particular reason this clan avoided that one.

When Ilisidi began enumerating the members of the Atageini household, and included two sisters of Cajeiri’s mother, and an illicit affair and illegitimate child in the extreme youth of Damiri’s youngest sister, Lady Meisi, his young eyes grew as round as moons.

“Who, mani-ma?”

“Deiaja.”

“She is my cousin, mani-ma?” Cajeiri exclaimed—Cajeiri having resided under great-great-uncle Tatiseigi’s roof, not so long before their mission launched.

“And being half Kadigidi, and ill-advised, she is a scoundrel of a youngster,” Ilisidi said darkly, “and a thoroughly bad influence, I have no doubt.”

“She brought me cakes,” Cajeiri said, “when great-uncle said I had to stay in my room. I never heard she was my close cousin.”

Ilisidi had lifted a brow at the business of the cakes, and actually seemed to muse on that small point for an instant before she frowned darkly. “One may read the winds of decades in a tree. Young, it bends to every fickle breeze. Old—it leans increasingly to the persistent summer winds of its growing seasons. Have you never marked this tendency in trees, young aiji?”

“I never have, mani-ma.”

“Do so in future,” Ilisidi said sharply. “Consider the winds that continually blow in the Atageini household, from what direction, and how strong. Grow wise.”

“I should rather have had Artur and Gene come down with me! I might rely on them more than the Atageini, at any time!”

Oh, damn, Bren thought, inwardly bracing himself for a very wintry wind, indeed. That small rebellion was certainly not well considered, coming amid Ilisidi’s remarks about childhood and growing.

“And so you do not trust Deiaja as much these days as once you did.”

“You say we should not rely on her. But the Atageini… ”

“The Atageini remain questionable.”

“Not my mother, mani-ma!”

“Children arrive into such difficult situations. Being born to patch a rift, one necessarily spends years at the bottom of it, looking up and seeing far less of the landscape than one might otherwise see. A wise child will take the word of those with a wider view.”

A young jaw clenched. “Can I not trust my mother, mani-ma?”

“Do you trust me, young sir?”

“You are the aiji-dowager. I suppose you are still the aiji-dowager, mani-ma, even if my father is—my father is—”

“I remain the aiji-dowager and shall remain, so long as I draw breath, young sir. As you will be the sole occupant of that untidy rift so long as you live: plan on it, and get as many reports from those who saw it form. As you grow taller, you will see more of the landscape. Do you understand me? Need I make it plainer, and leave less to your imagination?”

“No, mani-ma, one need not.” A duck of the imperial head, a momentary downward glance. And up again, with a thrust of the bottom lip. “But I could absolutely rely on Artur and Gene, mani-ma. They are very clever.”

“They are humans, boy.”

“You rely on the paidhi-aiji, mani-ma, so I could rely on them!”

Time for the paidhi-aiji, a bystander, to duck his head, cling to his seat, and above all not to think unhappy thoughts about what grief the dowager’s reliance on him had brought to the world.

“Impertinent youth, to dare compare two untried boys with the paidhi-aiji.”

“They may be reliable, mani-ma, when they grow up,” Cajeiri protested.

“When they have grown up,” Ilisidi said, “and when you have acquired an adult mind, great-grandson—then give us your mature opinion. Until then, profoundly apologize to the paidhi-aiji.”

Bren looked off toward the staff consultations, quite sure he would surprise an unseemly sulk if he glanced toward Cajeiri. He waited for the dutiful, soulless, “One apologizes, nandi.”

And didn’t hear it.

“Bren-nandi was eight, once, and he grew to a more fortunate year, mani-ma. So even did my great-grandmother.”

“Impertinent boy!”

“But it is true you were eight once, and you grew up wise and clever. So they might, and I might.”

“Too impertinent by far,” Ilisidi said. “Wait until we stand again on solid ground, young gentleman. Then we will see if substance accompanies that sauce.”

“Yes, mani-ma,” Cajeiri said, and added, under his breath and with a forward glance: “One does respect the paidhi-aiji at all times.”

“One is grateful, nandi,” Bren ventured to murmur, as Ilisidi waved the imitation of a blow toward Cajeiri’s ear.

“Intolerable,” Ilisidi said. “And growing more impertinent by the day. We shall be glad to deliver him to his father.”

Fortunately phrased, auspicious wish. He personally took heart from the notion that the dowager, knowing her own people, and with her own ambition, had not given up on finding Tabini alive.

Nor, apparently, had she given up supporting him.

But he had gathered all he was going to for the moment. The mood was broken.

And somewhere in the exchange of names, the gathering of reference points and names he had not thought of in years, he found himself sunk back into those referents as he went back to his seat. The dowager’s analogy of standing in a rift was apt. He had been brought in to bridge a rift of his own—and was it entirely his fault if even Tabini, who had a thoroughly atevi set of instincts, had misjudged a situation in relying on him so much? They’d known what they were doing was dangerous, hastening the trickle of technology into a spring flood in response to trouble on the island, incursions onto the mainland, and—and the arrival of the ship from its centuries-long absence. In the press of events, a good number of atevi had come to agree with their actions. Even the dowager, prominent among the environmentalist and traditionalist element, still approved what they had done, to the extent of going into space herself and attempting to assert atevi authority over their own world and its surrounding space.

He found himself traveling down old, old mental channels instead of meeting blank walls. This lord and that lord might be relied upon to thus and such a degree, as in past crises, and if that lord stayed loyal to the Ragi atevi, so would this other lord, very likely, give or take a cousin married across a certain dubious clan boundary—

It all grew familiar to him again, like putting on an old, comfortable coat. They weren’t advancing into unreadable chaos. They were coming home—home, whatever its current condition, and there were resources he would be so busy laying his hands on, he wouldn’t have time to panic. They had resources with them, for that matter, and if saving the mainland government meant setting Ilisidi at the head of the aishidi’tat until they could find Tabini, there were northern and central and eastern lords that would approve that stopgap measure in a heartbeat. There were lords he was sure that would approve any aiji at all who wasn’t a usurping duplicitous Kadigidi backed by detested southerners. There was a solid center to the aishidi’tat that would accept compromises of every sort to gain the reestablishment of a solid, known power in place of Murini, who had no majority, only a coalition of powers that sooner or later would cut his throat and fight for power of their own, taking everything down to chaos with him.

Oh, yes, count on it: each and every one of the lords of the west would have a grand plan how to avoid chaos in the south. Each and every plan would favor their own interests—altruism did not run strong outside man’chi—but atevi also had their ways of coming to a workable arrangement, pragmatic in the extreme, and faster-moving than the Mospheiran legislature on its best behavior.

The lords already knew what had to be done to establish a lasting order: put power back in the hands of a non-regional authority, a clan with no particular regional axe to grind, which was exactly the position the Ragi atevi had satisfied, in the person of Tabini-aiji, wherever he was—or in the person of his heir or a regent for that heir. It was Tabini’s line that had been able to build the aishidi’tat. It was only Tabini’s line that could hold its neutrality in regional disputes—or at least, convince the participants of that neutrality.

He felt better, thinking of that. Tabini, for one thing, would not have had every hand against him, only a critical few. He would have had support. He likely still had.

He called Banichi and Jago, with Tano and Algini, into proximity, to trade what they had gotten from Cenedi for what he had gotten from the dowager, and thereby to point up certain lords as likely and certain others as dubious in their usefulness.

“Most of all,” he said, “and key to the situation in the central provinces, we need to ascertain what position the Atageini have taken.”

“Not forgetting we must also arrange something to protect Atageini interests, and Lord Geigi’s province in the west, nandi,” Banichi said. “They will have been under attack already.”

“And to ascertain the position of the aiji-dowager’s neighbors to the east,” Jago added.

Ilisidi’s neighbors, to the far east, were a band of hidebound conservatives who had been dubious enough they had any reasonable place in the aishidi’tat in the first place, and who had acquiesced to it because Ilisidi had dragged them into it and linked their interests to her influence in the government.

“They may have grown doubtful and restive in her absence, nadiin-ji,” he said. “But she is back, now. They may need to be informed of that fact. Perhaps convinced of it.”

“One thinks,” Tano began to say. But the steward had just appeared from the cockpit.

“Nandiin,” that person said, “we are entering the rough part of our trip. Kindly secure all items and take safety measures.”

Belt in, that meant, and get the computer safely into the under-seat locker. They were going in.

Their conference broke up. Jago came to sit by him, a comfort in a landing process he truly, truly dreaded.

And one he only wished had become routine.

They were about to come in over the western sea, which meant driving through the coastal weather systems, over a very worrisome central mountain range, itself a breeder of weather, to a landing at a short municipal airport on the opposite coast of Mospheira, an airport the crew had never seen before except in maps. Which was twenty feet shorter than it was supposed to be.

“Jago-ji, a message for the pilots. Remind them courteously that the runway is shorter than at Shejidan.” He gave her the precise measurement in atevi reckoning, and watched as she sailed forward and delivered the warning.

“They have the chart, Bren-ji,” Jago said, settling back in beside him. “The numbers agree.”

“Very good, very good, nadi-ji.” He briefly touched her hand, swore he was not going to grip it, white-knuckling the whole way down. He was going to relax.

Engines kicked.

God, God, God, he hated descent.

Chapter 5

Tires squealed. Bren thought about that unapproved twenty feet of runway and clung, white-knuckled, to the armrest, Jago beside him. He did not grip her arm. He refused to. They’d made it over the mountains. They couldn’t crack up now.

Big reverse thrust. Was that planned? Bren held his breath. Even Jago had put a hand to the seat in front of her, and imposed an arm between his face and the next row.

“The short runway,” he breathed, feeling their speed considerably slowed, seeing, on the monitor above the baji-naji emblem, that unlikeliest of sights, the skyline of Jackson beyond the end of the runway.

That skyline. His family. Obligations unsatisfied. Old enemies. The Heritage Party. Gaylord Hanks. Deana.

His mother. His brother, Toby. He hadn’t transmitted the letters. He had them both on his computer.

They reached a stop, still on the runway, but he couldn’t see pavement. He dared draw a whole breath.

“We have arrived,” the pilot said from the cockpit. “Nand’ paidhi, we have need of translation.”

They needed him. Someone needed him. The pilots spoke Mosphei’ enough for routine problems, and had gotten down by means of computers talking to computers, but he immediately had a critical job to do, and he ought to be in the cockpit, if he could get his shaking knees to bear his weight. It felt as if he’d eaten a very heavy meal, or suddenly gained twenty pounds—he probably had gained twenty pounds, being back on Earth. He saw that flat horizon on the screen, and it looked strange to him, after two years. Every horizon was going to go the other way to his eye, possibly disturbing his balance. That, he suddenly realized, was what had felt so strange about the Jackson skyline. It wasn’t a picture on his computer screen. It was real. His body knew it was.

He levered himself out of the seat, walked—walked down the aisle toward the baji-naji emblem, past his fellow passengers gathering their personal items, passed through the cockpit door.

Lofty windshields showed the whole flat earth in front of the shuttle’s nose. He shied from the sight, took an offered com plug from the copilot, stuck it in his ear—it both received, off the bones of his skull, and transmitted, and he heard the accents of his own homeland talking to them, advising them of routine details, the approach of a tow truck, the query whether they’d need any special assistance. They would have to sit still in a period of routine cool-down. Hazmat personnel would approach, going over them with instruments. Mospheira wished them a welcome in, the first shuttle landing in history.

He relayed. He answered. The shivers attacked him and slowly dissipated in the scurry of various agencies assisting and trying to get the Jackson main runway clear of their presence, because while they sat cooling down, planes were in a holding pattern over Bretano and Sutherland, maybe not even knowing the reason they’d been held up.

He settled down to wait with the crew, translated arrangements for the tow, and balanced on an armrest as the tow moved them off the runway onto a taxiway. Then there were arrangements for the ladder to move in, and advisement a bus would pick them up.

But Mospheiran military security cut in with their own arrangements, and an advisement that the President was waiting for them.

Shawn? Bren found his heart beating harder—anticipation, now, anticipation of a meeting he hadn’t had in years with a man he’d used to deal with, oh, three and four times a day when they’d both been in the State Department.

“I do understand,” he said to them. “Please understand I have the aiji-dowager with me, with her own security, and her grandchild of eight years, never mind he’s as tall as I am, who’s very tired and very stressed and should be given allowances. I’ll inform them as I’m informing you, weapons will be in evidence on both sides, but peaceful intent is understood and expected, in all good will. Please don’t anyone encroach on the dowager’s space, and particularly understand you are dealing with a young boy, no matter how tall he is, and with very protective security. Our security likewise will maintain watch over our baggage. Expect this.”

A hesitation. A slight hesitation.

A new voice. “This is Colonel Brown. We understand your situation. We’re instructed to accommodate atevi customs in all particulars. Come on out as soon as ground ops gives you clearance.”

“Thank you, sir.”

The shuttle ticked and popped and boomed, cooling down. Beside him, the crew were busy checking readouts, making changes on the touch-screens and with the switches, setting everything, presumably, for the shuttle to be shut down and held. It would have to sit, under guard, and it had to remain accessible by the crew, a point he raised with Mospheiran security. It was their only way back to space until they could ascertain what might have happened to the other shuttles grounded on the mainland, with the very survival of equipment, maintenance staff and crew far from certain.

“No problem, sir,” the answer came back. “That’s understood.”

No problem, no problem, no problem. Shawn had given orders and obstacles fell down as soon as they came up. He felt he could draw a breath.

And pay courtesy where it was due.

“Excellent job, nadiin,” he said to the crew. “Thank you. One requests you will come with us wherever they assign us, share quarters with us, and maintain yourselves ready to return to space, as soon as we can clear up the difficulties. The Presidenta’s own men will put a constant watch on the shuttle. You need not worry. I say so in utmost confidence.”

There were respectful nods, quiet acceptance. “One request, nand’ paidhi,” the pilot said, “if it were possible to send regards to our households on the mainland when you cross over.”

“One would be extremely pleased to convey such sentiments,” Bren said fervently. These several young men had been stuck in orbit, away from their own parents, wives, associations, since the trouble had stranded them, while the aishidi’tat underwent a violent upheaval, and, as the only shuttle crew likely current in operations, they would be handed the first mission back to the station once conditions permitted it, a shuttle prepped, what was just as scary, by inexperienced Mospheiran ground crews, unless they were fortunate enough to smuggle atevi maintenance over here. “With my personal regards and I am very sure, with the aiji’s, we will look to your households. One absolutely understands your situation, and I convey the extreme respects of all of us. We will by no means forget you.”

“Nandi.” There were bows, expressions of gratitude, that kurdi word, all around, and he left the cockpit with the sure determination to do something for these men—work some miracle to reward their devotion, their professionalism, their man’chi to the program.

“The Presidenta himself has come to meet us,” Bren reported to the dowager, who, amid the debarcation preparations of her staff, pursed her lips and looked satisfied as well as—dared one surmise what she would never admit—absolutely exhausted?

“Excellent,” she declared. Cajeiri, standing at his seat beside her, looked to be both frayed at the edges and brimming with questions, all of which were desperate, but he asked not a one of them, except, “Shall we go out soon, nand’ Bren?”

“As soon as the hull cools, young sir. We have two constraints: the need to be across the straits quickly, so that our enemies have little time to organize a reception, and the need to gather as much information as possible from sources on Mospheira, who have come here to meet us.” Not only Cajeiri, but the dowager was listening. Ilisidi was patient only because it was her question as much as Cajeiri’s. “One hopes the Presidenta will provide informational files we can take with us. But we must accept the Presidenta’s kind hospitality for the night, to recover our equilibrium on the earth. Walking is not as easy to deal with, as long as we have been in space.”

“An extreme inconvenience,” Ilisidi muttered, frustrated and doubtless feeling the change of gravity in all her arthritic joints, not to mention added labor for her heart. “Sit down to wait, great-grandson. Cease fidgeting.”

“Mani-ma.” Cajeiri sat.

Bren found his way aft, where staffs were in last-moment conference, where he could pass on his own immediate information to Jago, who turned up to gather it.

“The dowager is not in favor of long delay,” he said quietly, speaking frankly. “Nor am I. But we must acclimate to the world, if only for a few hours, and get some sleep, and I hope for a great deal of organized information that may be useful to us, from the local government. The Presidenta, Shawn Tyers, is meeting us. One would not be surprised to have Yolanda Mercheson pay us a visit, she being on this side of the strait, and likely very interested in a return flight.” He glanced anxiously toward Cenedi, who represented the dowager’s interests and rarely disputed her opinions or her wishes. “I very much fear for the dowager’s well-being if we attempt to ignore our physical limits and press ahead too fast. I know we risk losing the advantage of surprise, but if we risk her health—we risk everything.”

Jago nodded, leaning on the seat, eye to eye with him. “This is in his mind, too, Bren-ji, be assured. That, and we all entertain the hope you mention, of resources here.”

“We shall sleep in a secure place, I have no doubt of the Presidenta’s hospitality. They have had enough domestic stress that they are no strangers to security requirements.”

“I shall inform the others,” she said.

So that was handled. Bren went back up the aisle to gather up his small amount of luggage, his computer, his duffle with changes of clothes and other items Narani had packed for him. The rest of their luggage was back in the cargo compartment, and there was a fair amount of it, their staffs’ gear, not to mention the clothes and items the dowager had brought.

“Nandiin,” the pilot said, appearing in the doorway, “they are moving a scissor-lift to the hatch. One believes they intend us to debark.”

The language barrier persisted. But they were cooled down sufficiently, it seemed, and checked for hazardous leaks. He gathered up the baggage he would handle and piled it in his seat, then went forward to attend Ilisidi and allow her the proper precedence down the aisle to the hatch.

“About time,” she said. Cenedi had also gone forward, and attended her, offering his arm, but the notion that the dowager was about to meet human notions of hospitality… that was daunting. He was in charge of that, he feared. Every courtesy would necessarily come through translation.

The steward moved aft to open the outer hatch. Banichi and four of Ilisidi’s young men had stayed back there, two of the latter to see to the baggage, the rest to attend the door when it opened, Bren was sure.

Ilisidi walked down the aisle, with Cenedi, lips tight, and young Cajeiri came close behind, with two others of her bodyguard carrying her personal baggage.

So Bren fell in, carrying his own bags. Tano snatched them as he passed, and fell in behind him, with Jago and Algini.

The hatch opened. Air wafted in. The dowager and her party exited onto the quaking lift platform, and he followed, flinching at the flat world. A wave of malodorous heat from the shuttle walls warred with cool and fresh wind off the sea, air as moist as the shuttle’s atmosphere was dry and cold. The side nearest the shuttle felt like the breath of an oven, baking their backs.

And the blue and gray horizons dizzily went on forever, with Mt. Adam Thomas drifting like a vision above a haze in the distance, real, and solid, in flat perspective that warred with recent reality and yet quickly seemed right to memory, if not the inner ear. He stood near the dowager, as their security piled their baggage onto the lift. He gave one hand to the rail and offered one to her vicinity, if not touching her, just as the lift started into motion.

She stood fast, jaw set, stubbornly refusing assistance, even from Cenedi. Cajeiri caught her arm, clever lad. The platform shuddered and descended.

Vehicles came into their view, airport emergency vehicles, and with them was a gray limousine with the presidential seal, along with its own entourage of black security cars. Emergency crews waited near their vehicles, and a cluster of suits and uniforms stood to the fore. Bren spied Shawn’s familiar face, saw with a little shock that he’d gone gray, in so short a time in the presidency.

The lift bumped to the ground. Cenedi put himself at Ilisidi’s side as they walked off the edge, Ilisidi using the cane carefully but decisively, Cajeiri on her left, as they reached the tarmac. Bren followed, set himself decorously to the side, bowed.

“Aiji-ma, allow me to present Shawn Tyers, Presidenta of Mospheira.” Change of languages. “Mr. President, the aiji-dowager and her great-grandson Cajeiri, son of Tabini-aiji.”

Shawn gave a measured little nod of his head, a meeting of equals—Shawn had spent his days in the State Department and no one could have a firmer grasp of the protocols, the little dance of who was introduced to whom first and to what degree heads nodded or eyes lowered. Host nation for the island enclave, atevi took slight precedence in any encounter—few encounters as there had ever been on this soil, since the War of the Landing.

“Welcome, nandiin,” Shawn said, in Ragi—carefully, and fortunate in number. He had run State, and the paidhi’s office. Then in Mosphei’: “Tell the dowager that that’s the safe limit of my command of the language, but the delegation is most cordially welcome for as long as they choose to stay. We have safe and appropriate quarters at the airport hotel, should she wish, and cars to take them there.”

He rendered that: “The Presidenta most happily welcomes you and offers transport. Will the dowager, he asks, be pleased to accept his hospitality and refreshment in appropriately arranged quarters nearby, for however long his guests may please to advantage themselves of his hospitality?”

Ilisidi considered the offering—Ilisidi, whose aged bones were doubtless aching with earthly gravity. “Tell him this is our shuttle. Let him by no means mistake that fact.”

He bowed. And rendered it: “The dowager accepts with utmost gratitude, and requests Mospheira set a round-the-clock guard over the shuttle, which she regards as a vital atevi asset. Only crew should have access, at their pleasure, also round-the-clock. Crew will attend us to the hotel, along with our security. They will lodge there and come and go as they please, escorted by your security as far as the shuttle perimeter.”

Shawn understood exactly what the dowager meant. He smiled, graciously enough, and gave a slight nod. “Understood.” He swept a gesture at his own bodyguard, toward the waiting cars. “Everybody.”

Everybody was not so easily rendered, when it came to fitting tall atevi into human-sized conveyances, along with their carefully-watched baggage and equipment. There was the bus for the airport crew, and that also went into service for baggage and shuttle crew transport, accompanied by two of Ilisidi’s young men.

The rest of them eased into Shawn’s limousine—no great problem for himself and Ilisidi and Cajeiri, near human sized, but only Cenedi could get in besides, in the facing seats. He settled beside Shawn himself, leaving his aide to ride beside the driver. Banichi and Jago, Tano and Algini, together with the rest of Cenedi’s men, all parceled themselves out into other cars, having to duck their heads uncomfortably, and the vehicles whipped off at considerable speed down the frontage of airport buildings and onto a road leading outward.

“Most happy to have you safe,” Shawn ventured, filling an awkward silence in the crowded vehicle.

Bren translated, improving it to: “He expresses all possible felicitations on the dowager’s safe return.”

Ilisidi frowned and muttered, “Has he any useful news?”

“She asks news,” he rendered that surly utterance. “I fear she won’t consent to stay here more than the night. She wants transport to the mainland, and information that can set her on the other shore as well-prepared as possible. I have to concur. Our enemies won’t waste time setting up opposition to a landing.”

Shawn absorbed that. More than the gray hair—he’d added a few lines in his face in the last two years.

“Does she intend to confront Murini-aiji militarily?”

“Not aiji,” Ilisidi said sharply.

Shawn quickly inclined his head, a slight apology. “Pardon.”

“She doesn’t acknowledge Murini’s claim,” Bren said quietly. “No offense on either side. The dowager will do what makes sense in atevi terms. I doubt she knows yet exactly what, though contacting allies figures somewhere in the plan. Crossing, preferably by boat. Quietly. Inserting our group onto the mainland. Quietly. Then all hell may break loose as we secure a foothold, or we may proceed more quietly. We don’t know. That’s where information would come in very handy. Have you possibly heard from Tabini-aiji?”

“No. Unhappily, no. Ms. Mercheson made it here. I’m sure she’ll want to report, but I don’t think she knows any more than I do.”

“What of the central provinces, the Atageini?”

“We don’t know the details of who’s allied to whom,” Shawn said. “We only know who’s come out in public as supporting Murini—mostly southerners, and the Kadigidi in the central association. For the rest, we don’t know who’s fence-sitting and who’s biding their time.”

“We have Lord Geigi’s information, which we’ll share with you, but it’s not current.”

“I have a file for you,” Shawn said. “And our current codes.” Shawn hadn’t entrusted this item to an aide. He reached into his own inner coat pocket and handed him a small data reader. “I don’t trust your old accesses. Don’t use them. This is up to date. Accesses that can get that computer of yours into whatever it needs. Guard it with your life.”

“Runs by itself?”

“D-socket. If it can get a phone connection, it can get to Red Level. Your new codes are activated as of this hour. I trust you haven’t let the old ones loose in any unreliable places.”

“No. I haven’t.” It was far better than he’d hoped for. A profound trust, when he’d technically stopped working for Shawn years ago. “And won’t. The file is in it?”

“Yes. The information we have is thin, from a couple of north shore sources. For God’s sake, protect it. The recessed point on the back—that’s the security wipe. Punch that and everything’s gone.”

“Just thank God it’s got one.” He put the small black unit into his pocket. Miniaturized to a marvel. “The Presidenta has given us a great courtesy, extreme access and all his best information, nand’ dowager, contained in this small item which will connect us to him through my computer.”

That drew a deep inclination, a regal bow of the head. “Say to him that we shall remember this great courtesy, nand’ paidhi.”

“She is—” He began to say grateful, and, with a little coldness at heart, hesitated on that word. “Very favorably impressed.”

The car braked outside the service entry to the airport hotel—the utilitarian service entry, pavement spotted with grease and a couple of trash bins brimming over, was not where he would have presented the aiji-dowager and the heir, but there they were, the human notion of security, and not that far off atevi requirements. He hastened to get out, wanting everyone under cover as quickly as possible.

“This is the appointed stop,” he called out, as Banichi and Jago exited the car behind, with the other vehicles pulling up close. “We shall take a lift inside, among common folk of no likely ill intent. Above all, no deadly force, nadiin-ji.”

Atevi security and ordinary airport hotel guests, many of whom might have had their flights cancelled by the unannounced shuttle landing. And security wasn’t his only worry. He turned his attention to the aiji-dowager getting out. She waved off his assistance, used her cane, anticipating Shawn’s exit from the other door, and by now his security, her security and Shawn’s security were all over the entry, taking possession of cars, service entry, and, just inside, the hotel kitchen, with startled staff. Shawn’s security held the door for them as atevi security entered. Somewhere a pan dropped, a horrid racket, and the perpetrator lived.

“Service lift, sir,” one of Shawn’s people said, and they reached it, dispersing security, human and atevi, along their route, and then folding it in behind them, with the exhausted shuttle crew bringing up the rear with all the baggage.

“That will all come with us,” Bren said sharply, when Shawn’s people tried to hold it at the lift in favor of people first. “Shawn.” Forgetting himself. “Mr. President, we need those bags with us at all times.”

“Absolutely,” Shawn said, waving off his own men’s efforts. “Rely on them, Jim. They’ll manage.” Shawn’s men were doing a splendid job so far, not coming between Ilisidi’s security and Ilisidi, and managing to hold the door of the lift for them, so that even the dowager found no reason to scowl.

Inside, with the dowager, Cajeiri, her security, Banichi and Jago, with baggage, plus Shawn and his aide and two of his men, the first load as the lift ascended, under key… up and up, to a destination which proved to be, indeed, the penthouses, not altogether unexplored territory to his eye. He’d been here for official meetings and the like, had stayed in more than one of the several suites, each with a formal room between. Comfortable rooms, large beds and a grand view, even by the dowager’s exacting standards. He’d had a relieved sense of where they were likely going when Shawn had said hotel, and the place had been, as Shawn had assured him, suitably arranged. There were flowers by the lift, flowers in the formal room, harmonious, even kabiu: suitable for high-ranking guests. Remarkable. University and the current paidhiin-designates had probably swung into action. And very, very welcome. The dowager drew an easier breath. Everyone did.

“The southern suite, nandi,” Bren said, motioning to the right—he was able to recommend it, having lodged there before, himself—“has an extraordinary and pleasant view.”

Ilisidi walked forward slowly, absorbing the environs, Cajeiri close beside her, Cenedi and Banichi to the fore. Bren opened the door of the suite.

“Perfectly adequate,” Ilisidi said, on a mere glance inside. A note of exhaustion had thinned her voice. Cajeiri’s arm had became a constant support under her hand, like the cane on the other side, and one might suspect a haystack in a barn might have sufficed at the moment. The view was wasted. “We shall sit, nand’ paidhi. We wish to sit down.”

“She is extremely tired,” Bren said.

“Not surprisingly so,” Shawn said, and motioned toward the sitting room that ended the corridor in a half-circle of broad windows, blazing daylight. “The hotel has laid a buffet, tea, fruit, and sandwiches, if it can pass her security. Mine has watched it, start to finish. If it doesn’t suit, she can order any service she may wish.”

“Nand’ dowager,” he said, extending an arm in that direction, “chairs, tea, fruit and sandwiches in the sitting room, provided as a courtesy by this establishment. The Presidenta’s security has passed it and swears to its safety.”

“Excellent,” she said, and forged grimly ahead, her cane in one hand, Cajeiri’s arm under the other, Cenedi in close attendance, as they walked into that sunlit room. The window held a broad view of the mountains, snowy Mt. Adam Thomas framed in the lesser peaks, its flanks shaded with a skirt of cloud in an otherwise blue sky.

Home, that mountain said to him, as nothing else on Mospheira. The buffet spread below, table upon table of elegantly offered food, tastes they had not enjoyed in a very long time.

And even with hot tea and the longed-for chair at hand, Ilisidi lingered standing, gazing at that view… Ilisidi, who loved the world and its natural state.

And whose species had owned this island once, before humans came.

She settled slowly, painfully, into a chair which faced that view. She gazed on it, while her staff moved to bring her tea and offerings from the buffet.

Shawn gave a little bow and settled in a chair and Bren sat, staff doing the serving—staff and Cajeiri, who sampled an item or two then contentedly served himself a heaping plateful of little sandwiches and sweets.

Shawn cannily said not a word of business, nor did he. No one, in fact, spoke, or disturbed the dowager’s contemplation of that view for some minutes after tea and refreshments were served. The air they breathed here was unprocessed air, rich with moisture, with smells that had nothing of the machine about them. The food offering they had was simple, the world’s exquisite flavors, and Bren luxuriated in the tastes of smoked fish and cheese and fresh fruit, wonderful things, with hot tea. He found his hands shaking with fatigue, and he both wanted every detail of what Shawn had to say, and dreaded hearing it, most of all having to cope with it and make decisions. He already had a wealth of things packed into the back of his mind, an overstuffed baggage of personal and national emergencies and anxieties, things he hoped, in part, Shawn’s files covered without overmuch coming at him in conversation.

The dowager finished. Definitively set down her teacup. “Thank the Presidenta,” she said, “nand’ paidhi, and ask how fast he can get us to the mainland.”

“Nandi. Mr. President, the aiji-dowager very much appreciates the hospitality and asks for your assistance in reaching the mainland safely and as soon as possible.”

“Tell her we’re honored by her sentiment, and we could try by air, but there are air and sea patrols out from time to time. There is no safe landing site for a plane except perhaps up in the north, or out on the southern peninsula, Lord Geigi’s territory.”

He translated that.

“A boat,” Ilisidi said, “and the central coast, south of Mogari-nai.”

He translated. And added: “You could shadow us by sea.”

“We could,” Shawn said, “and it has advantages. Murini’s people don’t have a firm grip on the coast and might have trouble positioning agents.”

“He offers all assistance, aiji-ma, and offers the protection of patrol boats, with, no doubt, air, if we need it.”

A wave of an aged hand. “More tea,” she said. “The details are for Cenedi to determine.”

“She takes it under advisement,” Bren said. “She does favor the idea. Our security staff will consider our options.”

“Then I won’t linger long,” Shawn said. “I can’t manage any lengthy visit without extensive noise, unfortunately, and I’ve got a press conference to manage. You have your contact numbers. Your access is active. Your phone installation on this floor is State Department, secure. If I stay much longer, the news is going to speculate outrageously, as if it hasn’t, already.”

“Hardly possible to stop air traffic at Jackson and stay unobtrusive, I know.” Unbridled news access was one great drawback of their landing site. But the drawbacks on the mainland were far worse. “The shuttle crew will continue to come and go to the spacecraft. They’ll need extremely good and determined security for it, or we’ll have the curious out there taking souvenirs.”

Shawn’s mouth twitched. “Absolutely.” He rose, a slight breach of etiquette, but one Ilisidi passed with a nod. “My respects, nandi. Bren, I’ll be out of here before we have news cameras in the lobby; I’ll go do a media show over by the shuttle, answer questions—distract the mob and promise them more at my office. The story I’m giving out is that you’re all here in refuge, you plan to enter into extensive consultations and gather essential items before returning to the station—the shuttle will have a showy pre-launch checkover, under close security. That’ll keep them busy.”

He could imagine the controversy in the legislature, motions proposed, resolutions offered, all the usual fears of atevi taking over the island they’d used to own, radical notions of appropriating the shuttle as human-owned, if they could. Most of all, Mospheirans feared getting dragged into an atevi conflict, with dark memories of the only war they’d ever fought.

“You’re going to have your hands full,” he said to Shawn.

“That’s what I do for a living,” Shawn said wryly, and offered a hand to him, a warm, old-times handclasp, before a parting bow to the dowager and the heir. “Good luck to you, nand’ dowager.”

“Baji-naji,” Bren rendered it: the flex in the universe. Things possible. Things falling by chance and fortune. Without chaos and upheaval, the universe stagnated.

“Baji-naji,” she repeated, the only answer, and nodded graciously, even going so far as to rise, painful as it was, and with Cajeiri’s help, to respect the withdrawal of their host.

“Ma’am.” Shawn was truly touched. He bowed very deeply, and took his security with him, except a pair of marines that stood by the lift.

“We take the Presidenta for an ally,” Ilisidi murmured, “despite the opinion of certain in the legislature.”

“He is that, nandi. As good a one as we could possibly ask. He has among other things established a cover for us, as if we were conferring here, and as if we plan to return to the station.”

“Clever gentleman.” Ilisidi nodded approval, leaning on her stick. “Well, well, but we shall want quiet passage across the straits.”

“As soon as we can arrange it, nand’ ’Sidi,” Cenedi said.

“Do so.” She gazed past them, as she stood, looking toward the windows, toward the view of whitecapped mountains. “Tell me, nand’ paidhi.”

“Aiji-ma?”

“What mountain is that?”

“Mount Adam Thomas, aiji-ma.”

She stood staring outward a long, long moment at the mountain that he’d regarded as his, his, from his first childhood view of it.

“A grand view,” she said. “A very grand view.”

Curiously, Bren, thought, he had never heard any ateva literature mention the loss of the island and its special places, places important to them. But atevi were not given to mourning the impossible and the unattainable.

“Noburanjiru,” Ilisidi said. “Noburanjiru is its name.”

Grandmother of Snows. Center of an entire atevi culture, now displaced to the mainland, lodging generally on the north coast, where they were fishermen. It was the mountain where he’d learned to ski, where he’d spent as much of his off-time as he could—and couldn’t, these days. Hadn’t been up there for years. He had a vision of his own, white, unbroken crust, above the snowline, a view that went on for miles.

“Well, well,” she said, “I have seen it. I shall rest. Perhaps I shall have a nap.”

“Assuredly,” Cenedi said to her, in the surrounding hush, and offered his arm. “Assuredly, nandi.”

Her chosen rooms would have that view, too. Bren was glad of that—glad, in a regretful sort of way—because atevi, lifetimes ago, had ceded something precious and sacred, to stop the War that was killing both nations.

Humans built lodges up there. Built restaurants and ski lifts that he increasingly suspected didn’t belong up there, when atevi of Ilisidi’s persuasion would have made pilgrimages.

He was home, after a fashion—he was home, and had not, in the haste and the normalcy of these people around him, even thought of the view outward, Jackson, and what it held… the buildings, the traffic, as normal to him as breathing, and as alien as the face of the moon these days. Ilisidi would never see that side of human Mospheira. He remained a little stunned, thinking of that fact, her reality, and his: he felt dazed, as much of the voyage down had involved a strange mix of feelings, fear of falling and mortal longing for the earth; knowledge of the textures, the details of the place he’d lived, and seeing them—a sense of remote strangeness. He was home and he wasn’t. He wasn’t the same. He never could be. That mountain up there—he saw it through atevi eyes, and the memory of the ski resorts lodged in his heart with a certain guilt.

Ilisidi left the sitting area, then. Everyone stood quietly as Ilisidi walked, leaning on her cane, and her great-grandson’s arm about her, toward her suite. Two of her young men went after her, to see to her needs. She looked at the end of her strength. It was the first time ever he’d seen her falter. And it scared him.

Scared them all, he thought.

He let go a slow breath, cast a glance at his own staff, asking himself whether tomorrow would be far too soon to move, and wondering how much strain the return to terrestrial gravity might have put on Ilisidi’s frame and on her heart. And every day they delayed—the danger of interception grew worse.

Of all hazards he had taken into account—Ilisidi failing them was one he hadn’t reckoned on.

But the aiji-dowager was also the one of them able to wave a hand, say, See to it, and repair to her bed to cope with the change in gravity. The paidhi and her staff had to plan the details, where to land, what to do next.

He felt drained.

He went and got a fruit juice, and indicated to staff that they should make free of the table.

Staff closed in, and for a few moments food was piled onto plates and those platefuls demolished. They were all bone-tired, all famished, sleeping only by quick snatches ever since the ship had arrived. They’d suffered the hours of docking, hauling luggage, attending meetings, and catching the shuttle, and the way down had been one long planning session, reviewing maps, reading reports. Now they were down, they were alive, they had a few hours to catch their collective breaths, and all of a sudden even atevi shoulders sagged, and conversation died in favor of refueling, massively.

Bren found his own moment of quiet, in sheer exhaustion, and decided he might pick a suite for himself—the one next to Ilisidi’s, he thought, still in his chair. He desperately wanted to go make a personal phone call. State-secured line, Shawn had said. He could take five minutes, five minutes to call, to find out—

But in the moment he got to his feet to go do that, Banichi got up, set down his plate and went back down the hall in that very purposeful way that said something disturbing was going on in the hall. Jago and Cenedi and then others set their meals aside. A stir near the lifts, Bren observed, rising. A young woman in sweater and trousers had come up on the lift. An amber-haired young woman he’d, yes, very much expected to see before too much time had passed.

Yolanda Mercheson. Jase’s former partner. The woman who’d taken over his job as paidhi-aiji, advisor and translator to Tabini-aiji for the duration of his mission in space. Staff knew her very well, and made no move to stop her as she arrived, giving a little nod to Banichi and Jago, who were old, old acquaintances.

“Bren,” she said. She didn’t offer a hand. It might be protocol, since he was in atevi dress; or it might just be Yolanda, who was not the warmest soul in creation. She didn’t bow, either.

“Yolanda.” He did offer his hand, and received a decently solid handshake. “Glad you made it out.”

“Did all I could,” she said in shipspeak, her native accent, near to Mosphei’, but not the same. “Situation blew up.” Defensively, brusquely, as if she’d very much dreaded this meeting with him. He felt obliged to say the civil thing, that it wasn’t her fault.

He felt obliged, and became aware that he entertained a deeply-buried anger at Yolanda. She was competent. But she hated the planet. Hated Mospheira. Hated the atevi. Hated everything that had dragged her into the job, and away from the shipboard life that Jase, equally unwilling, had been drafted into. “Doubt I could have done better,” he told her, obliged to courtesy, and tried not to blame her for what he subconsciously laid at her doorstep. There was no question that fault in this disaster must be widely distributed, that he had set up the situation she inherited. He’d left her in charge, having no one else to rely on, and he couldn’t blame Yolanda if his ticking bomb blew on her watch. He might have stopped it; perhaps arrogantly, he clung to the belief he could have done something better. But she couldn’t. And hadn’t.

On her side, Yolanda probably equally resented the fact he’d set her up in an untenable situation, knew she’d not been able to keep the forces in balance, and blamed him.

So he shook her hand gravely and offered her tea, which she refused—atevi would never refuse such a peace offering, but she wasn’t atevi and aggressively didn’t observe the forms, not with him.

Angry. Oh, yes. No question she was. Angry and defensive, in a room full of atevi all of whom paid her the courtesy of a bow, whose government she’d failed, utterly, within months of taking up the paidhi-aiji’s duty.

“I had a briefing this morning from Captain Ogun,” she said to him. “Seems the Reunion business is settled, to your credit. Congratulations.”

“Fairly settled,” he said. It wasn’t settled, not by half, and he didn’t miss the bitterness in that congratulations. “We’re not alone in space.”

“Is what isn’t settled out there coming here?”

“It may well,” he said, meaning aliens of unpredictable disposition. “But we’re talking to them. We’ve gotten them to talk.”

She drew a breath and let it go. “You’re talking to them.”

“We have the very beginnings of a civilized exchange,” he said. “We have every hope it’s going to work out.” Looking at her, he saw the unhappiness in her expression, the intensity of feeling she awarded to nothing but news of her ship. “With luck, we’ll solve this one, and get you home.”

Bullseye. Politeness on either hand flew like cannonshot, right to the most sensitive spots.

“Did the best I could, Bren.”

What could he say? I know you did? That was, in itself, a damning remark. He settled on, “It was a hellish situation. One I’d pushed to the limit. Beyond the limit, apparently. You don’t have to say it.”

“Tabini didn’t indicate to me there was any trouble. But he wanted me to go to Mogari-nai.”

“Did he? Just before this blew up?”

“The night before. I didn’t get time to go. Well, I did, actually. I was supposed to leave at dawn, from the lodge in Taiben. That’s what didn’t happen on schedule.”

“So he was warned.”

“Maybe. But it was short warning. The Taiben trip was in a hurry from the beginning, no apparent planning, just pack and go. And for some reason, after we got there, I was supposed to get to Mogari-nai, and he didn’t explain.”

“Have a cup of tea, have a sandwich and come back and sit down. We need to talk.”

She looked somewhat relieved at the reception, and did pour herself a cup of tea, then came back and sat down in a chair next to his, a little table between them, staff continuing their depredations on the buffet on the other side of the room.

“I brought you a report,” she said. “Everything I have. Everything I could think of.” She pulled a disk from her belt-pocket and laid it on the table. He reached, took it, and pocketed it himself.

“I’m going to have a lot of reading.”

“I know the President was just here. I’m supposing he’s told you everything he knows, which is mostly what I told him. And what we still get from fishermen on the north shore.”

“How much of our business is hitting the news?”

“Plenty. The shuttle landing. The news has been following the crisis on the mainland, with all sorts of speculation. There’s a lot of nervousness. There’s talk of war.”

“Damn.” He wanted to change to Ragi, so that what she said would be available to the rest present, who hovered around the windows, blotting out the mountain view and the daylight, keen atevi ears doubtless hoping for information. But if she was more comfortable in shipspeak, so be it. It was more important that she spend her mental energy entirely on recollection, and that her vocabulary be completely accurate.

“The President asked me to come here. So did Captain Ogun.”

“You’ve been in routine communication with the station.”

“Frequent communication. I’m spending my time mediating with President Tyers, these days. Trying to do something about the earth to orbit situation. Trying to persuade your people to spend their money on shuttle facilities, not missiles. With only partial success.”

Not wholly surprising. She hadn’t told him anything he didn’t already know. He hadn’t intended to do interviews, most of all wasn’t in a mood to coddle Yolanda’s upset mood. He wanted to lie flat on his bed for an hour. Wanted to make a phone call. Wanted to think about their immediate situation. But he was obliged to salve ruffled feelings, assure Yolanda he was on her side, offer appropriate sympathies, because the woman wasn’t happy and never had been, not by his experience.

“I regret to say,” he said quietly, “the shuttle is grounded. We have to get the mainland not to shoot at it. We have to get it prepped, and crew alone can’t do it. We consider ourselves lucky to have gotten down in one piece.”

A little compression of her lower lip. A crease between the eyebrows. “I understand that.” When it was the dearest wish she had, to be on that shuttle homebound as fast as they could possibly turn it around. I’m not a fool, that tone said. “But by your leave—and the President’s, and Captain Ogun’s—I’d like to take up residency on this floor, next to the shuttle crew. To translate for them. To be here, with a military guard, to make sure the shuttle stays safe. I have my luggage.” To be on that shuttle when first it lifts, he read her intention. He didn’t disagree with that. And it was fait accompli. She nodded back to the lift, where, indeed, a single bag stood.

Living on a world for two years, and that was the sum of what she’d accumulated. The sum of what she valued on the planet, he surmised uncharitably.

He’d brought down an entire entourage, with enough baggage for a small war; but then, Yolanda had always been a solitary sort. She had formed a liaison with Jase and broken it off, bitterly, when Jase got an appointment she wanted. And that was it, socially, for Yolanda. Pity the atevi shuttle crew.

“We won’t be here,” he said. “But if you could get a communications system set up in this place, something between us and Ogun, if you talk to the crew and make sure the local authorities keep the shuttle under guard, that would be extraordinarily helpful.”

“No problem. I’m gathering the President gave orders. I can be eyes-on for the immediate area.”

Good, he said to himself. Yolanda cooperative could be useful. He dared the harder question. “What happened, with Tabini? What do you think triggered it?”

Her lips went to a thin line. “There was no one trigger, that I was able to figure. No reason, but Murini’s ambition, and a public brouhaha over funding and districts. I think it was a long-running plot. It organized, got people into position over a period of months… maybe starting with your leaving, when they could talk a bit more freely about human influence. When the blowup came, like I said, we were already in the country. I was all packed to get to Mogari-nai. I was to leave in the morning, just to go out there, as if somehow I was supposed to get some special message from Ogun, or be in position to pass him something. But I woke up in the middle of the night with shooting going on in the hallways. The staff—your staff—threw me into atevi-style clothes, got me into a stairwell, and got me out into the garden, then to another stairs, and down to the outside. After that it was a lot of dodging and clambering around in the woods. The two men I was with got me as far as the garage, passed me to a woman who drove me off through the woods—I wasn’t trusting her much, but she got me to a farm, and a service truck, which drove all night into the country. And after that, after that, it was just a succession of farm trucks and small waystops.” A deep breath. Roads were far from extensive in the open country. There would have been detours, roundabout approaches. “At a certain point,” she said, “at a certain point the driver left the truck and didn’t show up for hours, and I just pulled my hood up and walked down the road. I walked three more days before I got to the coast, mostly walking at night. Trying to be mistaken for a kid, if anyone spotted me. Finally I stole a truck that was unattended at a rail depot. Learned to drive the thing in a few klicks. I got to Mogari-nai, and they told me Tabini and Damiri had disappeared, that Murini was claiming they were dead, and he was setting up as aiji in Shejidan.”

Yolanda hadn’t had an easy time of it. No question. He couldn’t blame her in the least.

“Any evidence what did happen?”

Shake of the head. “The contact got me down to the harbor, and put me in a boat with a woman to run it, and that was all. Later I gathered from independent radio and shortwave, that Ragi atevi were in confusion, certain lords assassinated, or claimed to be assassinated… ”

“Who’s gone?”

“Parigi. Celaso.”

Two stalwarts of Tabini’s court.

“Others had scattered from Shejidan to their estates,” Yolanda said, “which was probably how I got away—that they were tracking everybody at once, and I wasn’t the most dangerous to them. Instead of following me, they were probably chasing Tabini, and he was probably leading them in circles in the woods. Me, I just opted for Mospheira and made it. Once we lost sight of land I was seasick.”

He made a dutifully sympathetic face.

“But just after I got aboard—the boat had a radio, and we got radio messages that went out of there to Geigi’s people and up north, and back to Shejidan, trying to rally help for Tabini. I wanted the boat to turn around. But the woman running it pretended she didn’t understand me—she spoke some kind of dialect I had trouble with—and we didn’t communicate, and I didn’t think I could take over the boat in the middle of all that water. I just had myself, and my com unit, but I couldn’t reach the ship, because Mogari-nai just shut down, and all I was getting was Jackson and Bretano.”

“They’d have been onto his heels fast, if he did appear at Mogari-nai. He wouldn’t have lingered there, only long enough to send out advisements to Ogun and Geigi and to his own supporters on the ground.”

“That’s what I told myself. That’s the reason I didn’t make a try to take over the boat. But there’s been nothing else like that since. And they’re claiming it wasn’t the aiji talking from Mogari-nai, that it was one of his staff, and they’re claiming the station has launched capsules down by parachute, to infiltrate the countryside, would you believe? That’s a complete lie. But they’ve hyped that to the skies and put a bounty on supposed foreigners. Which I think is their way of covering their people searching every barn and warehouse and arresting the individuals they’re looking for, all Tabini’s supporters. It’s not going to make it easy if you’re going over there.”

“Lovely,” he said. The countryside overrun with searchers after every vestige of Tabini’s administration, all transport become suspect, Assassins of the Kadigidi man’chi out on the hunt in the central regions and those of the Marid Tasigin in the south. He looked unintendedly at Banichi, and particularly at Jago, who understood far more of shipspeak and Mosphei’ than she commonly let on. She might have followed the gist of it much more closely than Banichi, and neither of them looked happy with what they heard.

“I wrote all the detail I know in that file,” Yolanda said. “I’ve had my evenings to sit and rehearse the whole mess, for months now. I think it’s complete. I was waiting for you. I’ve been waiting.”

He never could warm to Yolanda. He came as close as he had ever come, counting what she had done. That bit about turning the boat around to go back to the mainland he wasn’t sure he wholly believed, but then again, Yolanda was tough at unexpected moments, tough as nails, if she wanted something; and she might have gone back to rescue Tabini and Damiri—if her linguistic skills had been up to it. But with some of the north coast dialects, and maybe with the boat’s owner being deliberately obtuse, she had ample excuse for failing. Seasickness. Vertigo. Terror. Jase had gone green when he’d realized what a distance of water was under their feet, aboard a small boat.

“You’re of course welcome to stay here,” he said. “They’re clearly feeding us well. And you’re behind double security. You can relax.”

“First time, frankly, that I’ll sleep the night through.”

“Trouble here in Jackson?” He would be surprised. There were rabble-rousers, and Yolanda, solo, didn’t know to what extent she was protected.

A little diffidence. “The Heritage Party has surfaced again, causing all sorts of hell. Both our names have been tossed about, with no good intent.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“They’re demanding Mospheira’s officials up in orbit take over the station, which of course the captains aren’t going to have happen; and Lord Geigi isn’t going to have happen, and I doubt those people up there would even contemplate doing. But down here, you and I are representatives of the agencies the Heritagers think deprived them of their rights, that caused all this on the mainland. We’re the devils. They’re the light. Send ten cred to their fund to keep their message on the air and write your representative so the President, who’s in league with the enemy, doesn’t call up the home guard to shut down the program and arrest Gaylord Hanks.”

“God.” Gaylord Hanks, whose daughter Deana had gotten herself an appointment to the paidhi’s office and proceeded to create a small war on the mainland. She’d died in the effort to create absolute mayhem, one of the things which had surely contributed to the current situation—and Gaylord Hanks undoubtedly carried a personal grudge for his daughter’s fate.

“So I don’t open my mail,” Yolanda said with a deep, shaky sigh, “or maintain any office where I can be reached. I don’t feel safe in Jackson or Bretano. There’s no private apartment I can get where I feel safe, if you want the truth. And if you wouldn’t let me stay here, I’d get a room downstairs.”

It didn’t make him feel easier for his own family, or for his being in the news again.

“Well,” he said, “the fix for it all is on the mainland. Where I’ve got to go.”

“Anything I can do,” she said, not meeting his eyes.

“Take care of the shuttle. And count on the shuttle crew to support you.”

“I heard the dowager was with you. And Tabini’s son, too?”

“Both, yes. The dowager’s resting. Cajeiri’s gone to lie down, perforce. Exhausted, though he won’t admit it.”

“You look more than a little frayed around the edges yourself.”

“I’m fine.” That was a lie, too. But he didn’t at all do the physical work the crew and the staff had done, not to mention Ilisidi, or a boy whose high energy came in frenetic spurts. “I’ll brief the staff on what you’ve told me, particularly as soon as I have a chance to sit down and go through the notes. Is there anything but that bag you’d like to send after?”

“That’s all. I’ll take lunch, gladly enough. I’ve got my computer, I’ve got my com unit. I’ll trust if the crew’s here, they have some kind of a link up to the station, too.”

“They do. No problem with that.” He suddenly found himself flagging, done, physically exhausted at the thought of having to go over all the details again with Banichi and Jago. Which he probably should do, nonetheless. Events might come rushing down on them, leaving no leisure for explanations. He might forget things. But he wasn’t sure, now that he thought of it, that he had the energy to last another hour, or that he could make sense in either language. The dowager had had the right idea, heading for bed while there was a chance, and before the news spread.

He put a hand on the chair arm, pushing himself to his feet. Yolanda rose. “I’ll see to the things I can,” she said. “Don’t worry about what’s happening here.”

“My staff… they’re done in, themselves. Good thing we didn’t plunge off for a crossing forthwith… Nadiin-ji, have you followed any of what we said? Mercheson-paidhi felt more at ease in her native language, for precision of expression, and says she believes Tabini-aiji was warned only by a few hours, not knowing the threat was so close. She was supposed to precede him to Mogari-nai, was hastened out during a violent attack, sent on to Mogari-nai, and with no further explanation, she was hastened onto a boat. She heard then that Tabini-aiji had also arrived at Mogari-nai—but his few radio transmissions ceased from that source within a few hours and now she has no notion what may have happened there.”

“One did follow a certain few details, nandiin,” Jago admitted. “And if Mercheson-paidhi will repeat her information for us in Ragi, we shall take notes.”

“One will gladly do so,” Yolanda murmured, with commendable courtesies, “with apologies, Jago-ji.”

Maybe he looked as ready to fall on his face as he felt. He hated to leave his weary staff to endure one more briefing, but murmured a courtesy of his own and let Jago take Yolanda back down the hall, presumably to retrieve the duffle she had abandoned to the military guard near the lift.

“One might sleep,” Banichi said, touching his arm. “One observes you have not slept much on the flight, Bren-ji.”

“I never sleep on airplanes,” Bren muttered. Which was not quite true. But it wasn’t restful sleep. Banichi could sleep under the most amazing circumstances, and doubtless had, at least for an intermittent hour or so. So, likely, had the rest of them. And it was true they looked fresher than he felt. “An hour or so,” he conceded. “I take it as good sense.”

“Undoubtedly good sense, nandi,” Banichi said, as alert and bright as he was not.

But it was not bed he had first on his mind. He picked the other suite that had a view of the mountains and betook himself to that, immediately to the phone.

He knew his mother’s number. He both longed to call it and dreaded the call, not knowing what might have been the outcome of her last trip to hospital, two years past, not knowing if she had lived through that crisis. He had a choice of her number, or his brother Toby’s, up the coast, on the North Shore.

He decided on fortitude, and called his mother’s number, not even trying to think what he would say to her after his desertion, beyond hello, I’m back.

But the number, the lifelong number, was no longer working.

He clicked the button down, severing the connection, desolate. Even if she’d gone to some care facility, she’d have retained that lifelong number. And now it was just silence on the other end. And he knew he’d failed her. She was gone. Just gone. And he wouldn’t blame Toby for not speaking to him.

There was a lump in his throat. But he didn’t take for granted, ever again, that there would be time, that there would be a second chance. He rang Toby’s number. And it at least rang. And rang. And rang.

And clicked. “Toby Cameron here.”

“Toby, thank God.”

“Bren?”

“I’m on the planet.”

“I know you are, you silly duck. I’m downstairs.”

“What?”

“Downstairs in the hotel, in the lobby. The guards won’t let me upstairs.”

“My God.” He slammed the phone down and exited the room so fast his bodyguard and Ilisidi’s jumped to alert; and so did the marine guards down the way. He stopped half a beat.

“My brother,” he said to Banichi, and was off down the hall to the military guard. “My brother’s coming up. Toby Cameron. Tell the people down there to let him into the lift.”

The guards looked dubious, but one of them called down on his personal unit. “John? Have you got a Mr. Cameron down there?”

He didn’t hear clearly what the other side said, but the guard said, “Send him up,” and Bren folded his arms into a clench to keep the shivers at bay, not wanting to pace while the lift came up, but not knowing anything else to do with himself. His own bodyguard attended him, close at hand—they might be why the guards had folded. He thought so. He hadn’t been coherent.

The lift ascended. Stopped. The door opened. Toby was there, Toby, in a casual jacket, sun-browned, scrubbed and shaved and anxious to see him. He flung his arms around his brother, Toby gave him a bone-cracking hug, and they just stood occupying the lift doorway for a moment, until it beeped a protest and they broke it up and moved into the hall.

“So good to see you,” Toby said, holding him by the arms.

“How did you know?”

“Oh, it’s been all over the news. Amateur astronomers saw the ship had come back. Then the morning news said the shuttle was coming down. That you were on it. Indefinite whether you were coming down at Bretano or Jackson—I reserved a ticket to Bretano from here in case, but I bet on Jackson, and I brought the boat over. I saw you come in as I was coming into the harbor.”

“I can’t believe it. Damn, it’s good to see you.” His bodyguard knew Toby. Knew him well. Word was spreading to the few staff that didn’t know him, he was quite sure. “Come on. Come sit down.”

“The President was here, I gather.”

“Met us when we landed.” He had Toby by the arm, unwilling to let him go, and walked him down the hall toward his chosen rooms. “A quick move, up there. We weren’t sure we wouldn’t be shot at coming down, if we didn’t. At least that’s how we understand things stand.”

“It’s been dicey. Things have gone completely to hell on the mainland, by all reports.”

“I’m getting that impression.” He showed Toby into his suite, offered a chair. “Tea?”

“I’m fine,” Toby said. “No fuss.” A small silence. “Bren, we lost mum.”

He dropped into the other chair. “I’d tried to call her. Before I called you. But the number’d gone invalid. I thought that might have been the case.”

“Not long after you left,” Toby said. “About a week.”

He didn’t think the news would hit him that hard. He’d expected it. He’d known it had probably happened, two years ago. But he still felt sick at his stomach, guilty for the last visit not made, a skipped phone call, on a day when he’d had the chance and ducked out to get back into orbit. There’d been so many emergencies. There’d been so many false alarms. He’d put so much off onto Toby. Handle it, brother. Brother, I need you. Brother, I can’t get there. Can you possibly?

“She asked about you,” Toby said quietly. “I said you’d called.”

“That was a lie.”

“It was what she needed to hear. And I knew you would have called, if you could. I just glossed that bit.”

“You glossed everything, the last number of years. You glossed the whole last ten years. I don’t know what I’d have done without you. I didn’t know whether you’d be speaking to me when I got back.”

Toby shook his head. “You should never, ever have thought that.”

There was another small silence. Breathing wasn’t easy.

“So did you do it?” Toby asked. “Did you get the big problem solved out there?”

“We got the problem to talk to us,” he said, got a breath and chased the topics he lived with. “And this isn’t for public knowledge, Toby. I think it’s going to get into the news soon, but I don’t want it to spill yet. We established relations with a species called the kyo. They weren’t at all happy about the ship poking about in their business—they blew a bloody great hole in Reunion Station and they were all set to finish the job, except we talked them into just taking possession of it and letting us get the population off. They’re technologically ahead of us in some ways, they’re dangerous, and we got the station population safely out of their territory, humanity pretty well disengaged from them, the local Archive destroyed, which was another part of our job, but they did get the station itself, they got every other record aboard, and they’re watching us, even though they’re negotiating and probably studying us. They could show up here. I don’t know when.” He didn’t say what else the kyo had told them: that there was something more worrisome still on the other kyo border. That information was deeply classified information, and he wasn’t sure when or if he was going to let that detail hit the evening news.

And God help him, even while he was trying to figure how to explain things to Toby, his hindbrain was working on a plot to use that restricted information to scare hell out of certain factions on the island and among the atevi on the mainland. There was no decency at all in the automatic functions of his hindbrain. He just went on calculating and finagling, while trying to tell his brother as much truth as he thought he could, about something that had already cost their family dearly.

“Sounds like you’ve been busy the last two years,” Toby said, understatement.

“Busy. Busy with a ship full of refugees who still don’t know how serious their situation was.” That led into the kind of trouble said refugees might pose the current local station population, and that was a topic he didn’t want to get into. “How are you?” he asked, the thing he truly wanted to know. And the next painful question: “Did you get back with Jill?”

“No,” Toby said. Just, no, when there were two kids involved, and Toby’s whole life. “I gave her the house, the kids, I kept the boat… ”

“I’m glad you kept the boat.”

“She sold the house. Couldn’t stand to live in North Shore any longer.”

Bitterness in that. Jill had been the one who wanted to live on North Shore, far from their mother, which had led to their mother’s deep unhappiness and isolation, and a lot else that had gone wrong, with him living on the mainland. But apparently that effort, like everything else, hadn’t worked out for Jill.

“Are you happy?” Bren ventured to ask.

“Actually—yes. I am happy,” Toby said. “What about you?”

He didn’t live the kind of life where he expected to find that question coming back at him, as if he could sum everything up in the fact he owned a boat, or a house with a white picket fence. Or a wife. Or kids. He’d just never gone that direction—had skittered all over the map with his life, from obscure, ignored atevi court official to Lord of the Heavens, and was lovers with Jago, for what physical needs he had. No children there. Nor ever going to be.

He supposed he was happy. He was alive. Banichi and Jago were. Toby was. He’d be happier at the moment if he thought Tabini was, which he wasn’t at all sure about. He’d be happier if he didn’t have the business on the mainland looming ahead of him, and the prospect of everything their return might bring down on a peaceful countryside. But—

“Happy,” he said. “I think I’m happy. Happy being back. Happy seeing you again. Happy to have all my people safe. Except the mainland’s in a mess. And there are people I care about over there who have their neck in a noose—increasingly so, as the news of our landing spreads.”

“I take it you’re going across.”

“Fast as I can.” He couldn’t even apologize for the desertion. “I have to.”

“I brought the boat.”

He blinked. Twice. “No. I couldn’t possibly—”

“She’s small, she’s quiet, she has full instruments, and I know the atevi coast.”

“Damn, Toby.”

“Look, it’s a family outing. I’ve been waiting for this fishing trip for two years.”

Toby’s humor broke out unexpectedly, and it got right through his guard. He missed a beat in their argument, and Toby said, with a slap on his shoulder,

“Deal, then.”

“For God’s sake, no, it’s not. We’re arranging for the military to run us over there. People with guns and engines to stand off an atevi patrol boat. Or an air attack.”

“Noisy. Let the navy just keep a radar watch and be noisy somewhere between them and us. We’ll make it in when no one’s looking. I’m even provisioned, if you don’t mind hot dogs and chili. I can set you ashore with food in hand. I’ve got a whole box of survival rations. Where precisely do you want to go?”

He had no intention of listening to Toby. But he envisioned Toby’s fishing boat, the sort that was ordinary traffic on the waters of the strait, then envisioned, as Toby said, a noisy military move.

And, unhappily, he knew which he’d rather be on, given the certainty their enemies would have intercepted the news broadcasts which had detailed their landing. There was more than enough time for Murini’s crew to position Assassins on the coast, people who moved quietly and secretly, more than enough time for the Kadigidi to toughen the surveillance around Lord Geigi’s estate. That around his own, he was sure was constant and thorough. A military escort bringing them in on a fair landing on the coast could do nothing to protect them. Only secrecy and surprise could do that.

“You’re wavering,” Toby said, reading his face. “You’re wavering, brother. I have you.”

“Damn it, lend me the boat!”

“Lend you my boat, so you can run her in and abandon her on the mainland?”

“And leave you safe on shore this side of the strait.”

“While you wreck my boat? No, thank you, brother! I’ll get you there. I’ll get you there and get out again with my boat, with room to spare. I’ve made a fine study of the tides and the shallows over the last dozen years, with that nice set of charts I picked up over at your place. I know what I’m doing. I’ve got charts our military doesn’t have.”

He gazed at Toby, at a face he’d so longed to see. “No.”

“I know the risk,” Toby said. “You’ve done what you want with your life. You’ve made the grand gestures. For God’s sake, give me the chance for mine.”

Got him dead on. He sat there a moment not saying anything.

“So,” Toby said. “We’re going.”

“Toby. If anything should happen to you—”

“Sure, sure, mutual. When do you want to leave?”

He made his career persuading the powers of earth and heavens. And his own brother nailed him.

“It’s not a done deal. I have to talk to Banichi.” Meaning Banichi, Jago, and the whole atevi contingent. “Not to mention the dowager.”

“You think she’ll want to come ashore on a Mospheiran navy ship? How would that look?”

Got him again. He heaved a slow sigh. “I’ll see if Shawn will give me a few boats for a screen and a diversion.”

“I’ve no doubt he will. But it’s not our problem. We can leave after dark, just get everybody into a couple of vans and pull up at the dock. My crew had her at the fueling dock when I left. We’re at dock C, number 2, easy to pull up and get right aboard.”

“Your crew. Who else have you snagged into this crazy venture? Not one of the kids, for God’s sake.”

“Barb.”

His heart thumped. “God.”

“You aren’t involved with her any longer.”

“No,” he managed to say. “No.” Barb, who’d been his lover for years, who’d broken with him, married and divorced Paul Saarinson, taken care of his mum with a daughter’s devotion, and pursued him with a forlorn hope of renewing their relationship, right up until he left the planet… and now she’d gotten her hooks into Toby? He started to say: It’s certainly over on my side… and then had sinking second thoughts, that it wasn’t a very good thing to say to a brother who might, God help them, have gotten himself emotionally involved with Barb.

Toby was entitled, wasn’t he? Toby knew very well what the relationship between him and Barb had been, and wasn’t, and then Jill had left him, and he could picture it: Toby and Barb both had been taking care of mum when he’d left, two desperately unhappy people in an unhappy situation—

“You’re not upset,” Toby said.

“I haven’t got a right in the world to be upset.”

“You’re damned right you don’t,” Toby said, with the slightest amount of territoriality, serious warning, one of the few Toby had ever laid down with him.

“I’ll wish you both the happiest and the best,” he said, “fervently.” And he thought to himself that if Barb made a play for him on that boat and hurt Toby, he’d kill her. “I’ll behave. Absolutely. Nothing but good thoughts.”

“Good,” Toby said, and took his promise at that, and the deal was done.

It was a quick council following, Toby describing the yacht’s speed under power and under wind, for their staff’s benefit, and Tano suggesting precisely, if they were going in by boat, where they might hope to put in unseen—the northern coast, a region which, though not Ragi, would hold no sympathy for the south, and Tano had connections there. It was a region of independent fishermen, practicing kabiu—seasonally appropriate—catch, people whose small boats supplied the tables of the wealthy and philosophically conservative houses, and who were not greatly interfered with, in consequence, in any political upheaval.

“We shall be one boat among many,” was Tano’s summation of the matter.

One boat among many. They would be relatively unarmed, vulnerable to spies and ambush both on the approach and after they landed, but that would be their situation wherever they went on the mainland.

The particular beach, Naigi, was the recessed shore of a region where Toby had fished before, a stretch of small islands and stony reefs. Tano had been there. There was a consultation of maps, a discussion of neighboring villages.

It was not a place inviting to boats of deep draft, another good point.

Yolanda arrived in the conference. “I’ve provided a short list of names in that area,” she said. “I have no way of knowing whether they’re still reliable.”

“The worst thing,” Banichi said, “will be to make a move and hesitate. It would lose lives of those who may attempt to support us. We are here. We have transport, nandi. We should go.”

There was a simple way of looking at it: if anyone did attempt to organize anything on the mainland in their support, they could not leave them exposed and unsupported, and they dared not go asking for support in every possible place, for fear of Kadigidi assassins moving in on the situation.

“We should move as soon as possible,” Banichi said, “and get as far from our landing as possible. If the dowager agrees.”

Cenedi agreed, and went and waked the dowager, who, Cenedi quickly reported, ordered them to gather only their necessary baggage, and by all means, depart as soon as the night was dark enough.

Plenty of time, then, to reach Shawn, not by phone, but by the services of one of their marine guards, who simply went downstairs with a sealed note, got into a car and took the twenty-minute drive to the Presidential residence.

Shawn interrupted his supper with his wife to send a message back by the same courier: The escort will act with all prudence and cooperation. The shuttle is under marine guard and will remain so around the clock, come what may. Give whatever orders you need regarding supplies and support. This man has his instructions, and the authority to do what you need. Good luck, Bren, to you and all those with you.

Meanwhile they had done their re-packing, unnecessary personal items stowed in Yolanda’s care, the shuttle crew briefed—and privately informed of Yolanda’s limits of authority.

The only remaining difficulty was getting over to the marina, and for that the marines were ready: four large vans and an escort turned up at the hotel service entrance, out between the trash bins. Marine guards stood by to assure their safety from the curious in the hotel—no few curtains parted on floors above, letting out seams of light, but they proceeded in the dark, except the lights of the vans, and they packed in as quickly as possible, Toby accompanying them and all their baggage piled aboard, for the brief transit from the hotel to the waterfront.

Masts stood like a winter forest beyond the dark glass as they turned in at the marina gate, the dockside floodlit, boats standing white on an invisible black surface, as if they floated in space. The vans ripped along past the ghostly shapes of yachts some of which Bren knew—the extravagant Idler was one, and the broad-beamed and somewhat elderly Somerset—the Somerset had used to take school children out on harbor tours, happy remembrance, incongruous on this nighttime and furtive mission.

The vans braked softly and smoothly, at the edge of a small floating dock.

Toby led the way out of the van, led the way down the heaving boards toward a smallish, smartly-kept vessel among the rich and extravagant, a boat rigged for blue water fishing, not cocktail gatherings. It was not the boat Toby had once had, Bren saw, but a new one. The Brighter Days, was the name on her stern. A ship’s boat rode behind her, at separate tie.

The dowager walked down the boards with Cajeiri and Cenedi, using her cane, but briskly, with a fierce and renewed energy—a curious sight for her, surely, to find such a large gathering of lordly boats: one or two was more the rule on the atevi coast, yachts tending to tie up at widely scattered estates. But for all that, it might have been one of the larger towns on the other side, with a working boat, a fisherman, bound out under lights, a freighter offloading on the shabbier side of the harbor, in the distance.

And the city lights, the high rises—nothing at all like that on the mainland, where tiled roofs gathered, all dull red, showing very little light at night except the corner lanterns on streets as winding and idiosyncratic as they had been for a thousand years.

Towers, glittering with lights. Streets laid out on a grid, relentless, as strange to atevi eyes as the architecture of a kyo ship.

A long journey, there and here. And another, in the dead of night.

Toby reached the boat first, ran aboard and ran out a little gangway, with a safety rope, no less—on the old boat it had been a thick, springy plank. Bren moved up close behind, not sure whether he would dare lay a hand on the aiji-dowager if she should falter, but ready to help if she did.

No need to worry. The dowager waved all of them off and crossed onto the deck quite handily. It was Cajeiri that had to make a grab for the rope, and Cenedi grabbed him instantly and pulled him aboard.

“New boat,” Bren said to Toby in going aboard.

“My great indulgence,” Toby said. “The marriage was going. We split the investments.”

“Very nice.” The whole of Toby’s finance. Everything was in this boat. And Toby lent it to a hazardous effort that could get it shot up, could take him and all of them to the bottom. He walked the afterdeck, looking apprehensively around him—and, next to the boom, had a sudden thought of Cajeiri and that lethal item. “Young sir.” He snagged the heir unceremoniously—the boy seemed a little dazed. “This large horizontal timber is the boom. When the ship maneuvers, this may sweep across the deck very fast without warning. You may not hear it. It might sweep an unwary person right overboard or do him mortal injury. Kindly keep an eye to it at all times and stay out of its path.”

“Shall we spread the sails now, nandi?” Cajeiri asked, bright-eyed in the dark, with a whole boatload of unfamiliarity about him—but he had seen all those movies. “Do we have cannon?”

“We have no cannon. We have our bodyguards’ pistols. And whether we spread the sails—there are two—that depends on the winds, young sir. We have an engine as well.” Then he lost his train of thought completely, seeing Barb come up the dark companionway onto the dimly lit deck, a trim and casual Barb, with her formerly shoulder-length hair in bouncy short curls. She wore cut-off denims and a striped sweater—every inch the Saturday boater.

She saw him. And stopped cold.

“Good to see you,” he said as they confronted each other, a lie, but he was trying to be civil. “Toby told me you were here.”

“Bren.” As if she didn’t know what to say beyond that. Meanwhile Toby was trying to communicate in sign language and mangled Ragi where things had to be stowed, and Bren gratefully realized he had a job to do, directing duffles into bins and nooks, explaining where life-preservers were located, where the emergency supplies were, all the regulation things—and indicating to Ilisidi the stairs down to a comfortable bunk, a cabin of her own.

“A seat,” Ilisidi said, contrarily, “on the deck, nand’ paidhi. We enjoy the sea air.”

And the foreign goings-on, he thought. Those sharp eyes missed nothing, not even in the dark, where, one had to recall, atevi eyes were very able. They shimmered gold in the indirect light of the deck lantern, like the eyes of a mask, and the fire died and resumed again as she swung a glance to her great-grandson. “Boy! Stay away from the rail. Find a place and sit down!”

A sheltered bench beside the companionway, against the wall, a blanket for a wrap against the wind that would be fierce and cold once they started moving, although, Bren recalled, the dowager favored breakfasts on the balcony in Malguri’s ice-cold winds. She inhaled deeply as he settled her into that seat, her cane nestled between her knees, pleased, he thought, pleased and somber in the occasion. He had no wish to intrude into those thoughts, and went to help Toby.

No chance. Toby bounded ashore to unmoor them, tossed in the buffers as Barb started up the engine, a deep thunder and a rush of water. Toby hopped aboard, hauled in the gangway with an economy of motion and took the wheel as the boat began to drift away from the dock, bringing them away with a smooth, easy authority.

A team. Clearly. Bren stood against the rail, watched the water in front of them, the white curl of a little bow-wave, the space between the moored yachts reflecting a slight sheen of the few marina lights as they moved down the clear center of the aisle. Masts shifted past them, lines against the light.

Their own running lights flicked on. The bow light. There were rules, and they didn’t make themselves conspicuous by the breach of them, though their own lights blinded them and it would have been easier to steer by starlight. Barb had moved forward, past the deckhouse, to take up watch in the bows, and stayed there until they nosed into the open waterway.

Now Toby throttled up, and they ran the outward channel, just a fishing boat getting an early start, to any casually inquisitive eye.

They passed the breakwater, a tumbled mass of broken city pavings, and now Toby kicked the speed up full, getting them well away from the marina, well out into the dark. Wind swept over the deck, cold as winter ice.

Banichi and Jago had found a place to sit, on the lifejacket locker. Tano and Algini had gone forward, likewise some of Ilisidi’s men, and Cajeiri, leaving the bench seat near the companionway, immediately worked his way forward, too, into the teeth of the wind and the chill, staggering a little, this child who had grown accustomed to dice games in free fall and tumbling about like a wi'itikiin in flight—he had yet to find his land legs again, let alone take his first boat trip and find sea legs, and Ilisidi’s bodyguard was watching him closely everywhere he went. Cenedi got to his feet and quietly signaled one of his men to stay close to him.

Then Toby shut the engine down, walked over and began to hoist the sail. Bren twitched, almost moved to help his brother, old, old teamwork, that—he had taken a step in that direction, full of enthusiasm. But Barb turned up out of the dark, got in before him, working with Toby, all their moves coordinated—laughter passing between them, laughter which belonged to them, together.

A lot had happened. A great lot had happened, while he’d been gone.

The sail snapped taut—Cajeiri had run back to marvel at it, staggering hazardously against the rail in the process. The boat leaned, steadied to a different motion. The wind began to sing to them.

No right, he said to himself, no right to say a thing, or to insinuate himself into that partnership of Toby’s and Barb’s, not so early in his return, not while things were still fragile and both Toby and Barb were still defensive. He knew Barb, knew there was a streak of jealousy, sensed she’d moved particularly fast to get back and lend Toby a hand, nothing chance or unthought about it. He only sat and watched, letting Barb have her way, wishing his brother had twigged to that move, a little glad, on the other hand, if he hadn’t. He didn’t want to foul them up, didn’t want Barb’s worse qualities to get to the fore, things Toby might never yet have seen. Might never see. At the breakup, when it came, they’d both brought their worst attributes to the fray, he and Barb both. They’d seen behaviors in each other he hoped the world would never see again.

A feeling meanwhile crept up from the deck, that familiar thrumming sound of the wind in the rigging. The vibration carried into the bones, the gut, bringing him memories of past trips, past expeditions, fishing on the coast, a wealth of smells and sounds and sensations—it might have been a decade ago. The whole world might have been different, pristine, less complicated.

The wind moved, and the sea moved, and they moved over it, reestablishing a connection to the planet itself. Home, he told himself. Everything could be solved, in a breath of that cold air.

Had there been a voyage? Was there a space station and a ship swinging overhead? Was the whole world changed? He was back. He had never left. Nothing had changed.

Except him. Except what he knew, and what he had on his shoulders to do.

He drew a deep breath and hung isolated, between worlds, waiting for the sunrise to come over a planetary rim. Then his eyes shut, once, twice. He wrapped his arms about himself and slept his way to dawn.

Chapter 6

Sunrise still held a favorable breeze—indicative of weather moving toward the continent, in this season, and the Brighter Days ran before the wind with a continual hum of rigging and hull. It was a glorious motion, an enveloping rush of water.

And it was impossible to keep Cajeiri out of the works: Algini, taking his turn at Cajeiri-watch, took the young rascal in charge before breakfast, assuring he stayed aboard and uninjured, explaining the tackle and the working of the sail, explaining—Algini having once lived near the sea—how a wind not exactly aft drove the boat forward, and the mathematics of it all. Cajeiri sopped it up like a sponge—his other guards had not been so knowledgeable—and dogged Algini’s steps like a worshipful shadow.

Breakfast—chili hot from the galley—met universal approval, even from the dowager, who thought this strange spicy offering might go well on eggs, if they had had any.

Afterward Algini put out a line, baited it, set Cajeiri in charge of it, and the boy promised fish for lunch.

It was tight quarters, over all: everyone wanted to be on deck at all times, and atevi even trying to watch their elbows took up more room than the ten humans who might have been quite comfortable on the boat. Bren was constantly cold—Jago and Banichi found occasion to stand close to him, warming him and blocking the wind.

But the dowager, who had sailed often enough in her youth in Malguri, left her bench, and rose and walked about the tilting deck, to everyone’s acute concern, no one but Cenedi daring to keep close to her.

Within the hour, Cajeiri actually hooked a fair-sized fish, and all but fell in from excitement. It took Algini and one of Cenedi’s men to get it unhooked, not without getting a hand finned, but Cajeiri was triumphant, and admired his pretty fish, until it escaped across the deck to considerable excitement. Algini picked it up, and Cajeiri proclaimed it was a brave fish and ought to go free. So back to the sea it went, to universal relief. And the line went back in the water.

So they sat or stood and absorbed the sunlight, in a sea devoid of other ships, from horizon to hazy blue horizon. “Bren-ji,” Jago ventured, when Banichi had gone aft to talk with Tano, “this woman Barb. Is this a common name?”

The question. The very pointed question. Jago had once upon a time urged him to File Intent against Barb, back when Barb had been a trouble to his life. Jago had offered to take out Barb herself, except he had, in a little alarm, realized Jago was perfectly serious and told her that this was not the human custom.

Now he found no cover at all.

“It is a common name, Jago-ji, but this is indeed Barb.”

“And she has made a liaison with your brother?” Very little floored Jago, but this seemed to reach some limit of good taste… he parsed it in atevi terms, and it came out worse than with humans—man’chi might be involved. A family breach among atevi was beyond serious.

“It seems so,” he said, and on a quick breath, Jago giving a very dark look toward Barb, he touched Jago lightly on the arm and drew her over to the forward rail, in a small space of privacy. “I know this will be confusing, Jago-ji. You know that my mother has died.”

“One had feared so, Bren-ji. One offers whatever words are appropriate, with deep concern for your well-being.” But it did not relate to Barb: the silent objection was there, simmering under her patience.

“Thank you. Thank you, Jago-ji.” Touching her hand. “One appreciates the sentiment. It was no great shock, but a profound loss, all the same. And this is what I have to explain. It does connect. Barb, in her own way, Barb had become a close associate of my mother during her illness, since I was absent. And that was a good thing. Toby, meanwhile, Toby had attempted to assist our mother, and was absent from his household. His wife took offense and left him, taking the children with her.”

“They were hers?” Under atevi law, children were arranged for, and contracted for, and went with the contracting parent under the marriage agreement. Nor was marriage always permanent. Nor was there love, that troublesome human word. There was that other thing, man’chi, which followed kinship lines more than it followed sexual attraction and finance.

He let go a deep, despairing sigh. “Humans make no such contracts. They assume husband and wife share man’chi. And no, she had no particular right to take the children, but their man’chi seemed to be to their mother, so they went, and left Toby at a time of crisis.”

“One recalls the facts of the case.” Jago had been privy to the details of a great deal of it, once upon a time, and seen him frown and worry over it, though, he recalled, he had not troubled her with overmuch explanation. The only thing she had known for certain, he put it together, was that Barb, a problem to him, had been taking care of his mother for reasons unfathomable to the atevi mind.

“Toby’s wife, Jago-ji, did not sympathize with our mother in her wish to have her household about her. She insisted Toby move to the north coast. This was about the time I took up the paidhi’s office, which upset my mother greatly. Toby had moved away. I moved away. She had no servants, nor anyone close to her. She wanted us back. I could by no means cross the strait at will; for Toby, it was a shorter flight. And our mother found a way to have emergencies. This became a serious matter between Toby and his wife. Our mother abused Toby’s devotion, I cannot pretend otherwise; and when she became old and sick, Toby’s wife was not willing to view the situation as anything but the old quarrel. Her man’chi to Toby fractured. In such cases, one splits the property—and the children. Toby gave the wife the house, which she sold, and kept the boat into which he put all his fortune. And I suppose—I suppose when our mother died, Barb had no man’chi but to him, and he had no one but her.”

“This is difficult, Bren-ji,” Jago said, whether that she meant it was a difficult situation, or difficult for her to comprehend.

“I have a deep man’chi to my brother. He risks his boat, and his life, in offering to assist us. And Barb—Barb has come with him to work the boat as she has evidently been doing—it is, apparently, their household, and it may be—it may be that she wishes to be sure the man’chi between Toby and me does not supercede that between her and Toby. So she came. So she wishes to maintain her influence. I trust this is her motive. She will not let me touch the boat.”

That apparently made sense. But it brought a frown.

“If she brings him happiness, Jago-ji, and settles herself with him longterm—” Talking it out, having to translate it into terms Jago could comprehend, somehow took the sting out of his heart. “If she treats him well, Jago-ji, I shall never remember any quarrel with her. I would honor her as my brother’s wife, and be respectful of her and him.”

“Then you believe, nandi, that she has come on this voyage to support him as well as to maintain her hold.”

“She would. She has courage, Jago-ji. She always had. She wanted the glamorous life, when I was coming and going often from the mainland, with a great deal of my resources to spend. Then when I grew more involved with the aiji’s affairs and my coming and going grew more irregular, and sometimes fraught with public controversy, even assassination attempts—she wanted quiet and safety. You know she married once, a man who could provide that comfort. That contract was brief. Now, it seems she has chosen Toby, and the boat. I think it the best choice she ever made. Toby is an excellent man.”

“We all think extremely well of nand’ Toby,” she said, undoubtedly speaking for the staff, and added with a slight lift of the brow: “I shall accept her presence if she behaves well.”

“Do,” he said, laying his hand on hers, and then, thinking that, above all else, Jago had some reason to wonder what she would never ask: “But, Jago-ji, my regard is entirely for you. You need never wonder. You have no equal, in that regard.”

She cleared her throat quietly, both hands on the rail. Dared one believe she had wondered where Barb stood with him? Dared one think, dared one believe—possibly—Jago might be just a little jealous?

“Shall I protect this person?” Jago asked, out of her generous heart.

“As you would Toby, Jago-ji. But only as you would Toby.”

“Yes,” she said, that absolute agreement, and seemed peculiarly satisfied with that equation he established, Barb with Toby, a set, an established set she could indeed figure. He looked at her—the wind fluttering the ends of her braid, her dark face now completely calm and satisfied as she gazed out at the onrushing sea, and his heart warmed. Jago could by no means imagine what he felt; no more than he could quite grasp what she felt, that attachment that settled her whole universe into order around him and her duty more surely than love had a right to order his. He wished he could feel what she felt, for just ten minutes. His universe was so often chaotic, his certainties far fewer, his loyalties pulled in so many conflicting directions, always had been, until he felt habitually stretched to the breaking point.

But he’d known, when he became—romantically, on his side, at least—involved with Jago, whose sole statement, relayed through Banichi, was that she was attracted to his hair—he’d known that he’d gotten into territory with her he never would entirely understand. It involved a constant element of experimentation on her side, along with a kind of commitment fiercer and more lasting, he suspected, than a human could find outside parental love… sex having apparently nothing to do with it. He brought his badly-battered sense of human romantic involvement; she brought her own healthy and solid atevi attachment to her appointed leader; and they patched together an arrangement that he at least hoped satisfied both of them in all the healthy ways. He had never wanted to hold her to him if their arrangement ever became a burden to her, emotionally or otherwise… including if she wanted children, an impossibility between them—though one supposed two years with Cajeiri might have altered that, if the notion had ever taken root. He never wanted to hold her longer than entertained them both, but he knew, looking at her now, that she’d made herself ever so comfortable a spot in his heart—a comfort he never wanted to give up, not for any human connection that might explode into his chemical awareness.

He thought her notion toward him might be the same, that atevi fondness for well-worn places, comfortable associations, ancestral items, everything forever in place, hers, with every sense of permanency.

So now she had met her rival, and had heard the hierarchy of man’chi laid out in his own words.

So in her atevi universe, maybe—maybe it had reassured her and made her content. She looked to be. But what could he know? He was the translator, but certain things forever baffled him.

They talked about inconsequential things as the water rushed past the bow. They constantly meant something else. He wanted her, now that they had talked about their relationship—it had put him in mind of certain things and there was absolutely no place of privacy to be had, unless one counted the cabins below, which were exceedingly small for an ateva’s comfort, and everybody would know why they went below. He didn’t want to see his brother’s amused look. Or the dowager’s.

Or worst of all, Barb’s. And that realization almost made him inclined to do it anyway, but he would not embarrass Jago, not run the risk, however remote.

He contented himself with being next to her, with feeling her warmth in the chill wind.

In that state of affairs, Toby came up to them.

“I figure to put us into Naigi Shoals,” Toby said, “if that suits. The wind will hold fair long enough. It’s likely to come up a real blow by tomorrow, and I’d rather be away from the shore. That area is pretty deserted, except for fishermen. And I’d rather run by sail, conserving fuel.”

“He proposes a landing in the Naigi shallows,” Bren translated. “Near Cobo. And says the wind alone will carry us there.”

“One will propose it to the others,” Jago said.

“She says they’ll discuss it,” Bren said, and was not surprised when Jago left to do just that, Banichi and Cenedi alike being very familiar with all that coast, and Tano even more so.

“Damn, it’s good to see your face,” Toby said, for no reason, except they’d had only yesterday evening to talk, and so much to say, and no time, and topics—

God, so many topics they’d skirted round, that had to be said sometime.

“Good to see yours.—I wrote you a letter. It’s—it’s way too long to print out, unless you just happen to have a couple of reams of paper aboard. I’m not kidding. It’s about a thousand pages. But I have the file. I wrote you every day I was gone. You and Tabini, each a letter, just my thoughts, day to day, what I was doing, where I was, as much as I knew at the time… ”

“I’d like to have it.”

“I’ll give it to you before I leave. I imagine parts of it might better be classified. And I’ll leave it to you whether you want to take on that burden. If you want me to edit it and give it to you later, I will. But I’d like you to have the whole copy. So you understand.”

“I’d like the whole copy, too,” Toby said. “If there’s stuff to know—I want to know, if you can trust me with it. I’d rather know, and then maybe I can be some help.”

“I trust you. I just know what it can mean to your life to carry that kind of information. It could mean watching over your shoulder until everything in that letter ceases to be secret, and maybe after that, if you’ve gotten involved in my business. I’m not sure it’s worth it. I’m not sure it’s worth it for Barb, and don’t just drop it on her. She knows how to keep a secret.” The sinking thought came to him that he might, in giving Toby that letter, be driving an unintended wedge between them. “Use your own discretion, but if you tell her it exists, she’ll want to see it.”

“Do I want her to see it?”

“There’s nothing in there about her, nothing bad, nothing good, either. It’s about us. Where we were. And that’s plenty dangerous. When I wrote it, I didn’t know what they’d classify and what not, and now that this has blown up on the mainland—I don’t know. I think I’m going to blow it wide and see where the pieces fall. But I have to think about that. And if you don’t want it, if you don’t want the whole question, in consideration of Barb—I’ll understand. I should have given a copy to Shawn, for the information in it. I’d intended to clean the private stuff out and do that, and now there’s not going to be time.”

“I know what to edit.”

“And that means getting into it. And getting Barb into it. The more I think about it—hell, Toby, I’m risking your boat, I’m risking your neck and hers—I never meant to risk your peace of mind and your private life.”

Toby’s hand landed on his shoulder, squeezed hard. “You worry too much.”

“I worry for a living. I have to think of these things. And they’re real considerations.”

“I know they are. So what’s the classified part?”

“Aliens.”

“That they’re a threat?”

“The ones we met, nothing imminent. Not to be trifled with, but probably manageable. But there’s more than the kyo out there. A much wider universe than we ever imagined existed. A new referent. A new way of thinking. Hazards we may already be involved in.”

“So what’s a letter between brothers more or less? Is the news out there that bad?”

“It may be good, or bad, or the usual scary mix of things. It’ll still touch off the crazies.”

“Oh, God, everything touches off the crazies. That’s why they’re crazy. Give me your letter, silly brother. I don’t have that much paper, but I’ve got a computer aboard, for my charts.”

He opened his coat and took out a disc from an inner pocket of his coat, where he carried that, and Tabini’s letter. He gave the right one to Toby. He was extremely careful about that transaction.

“This little thing,” Toby said. “Doesn’t look dangerous to me.”

“Don’t let anybody see it until you’ve read it end to end. That’s all I ask. You’ve had a rough enough time being related to me, brother. I really, really don’t want to make it worse.”

Toby pocketed the disk and patted the pocket. “I secretly enjoy it.”

“God, I don’t know how you could.”

“Oh, look at us, now. Good excuse for a fishing trip, good view of a forbidden coast, breaking the law with a naval escort off beyond that horizon… and knowing there’s something useful I can do about the current messed-up state of the world. What more could I ask?”

“A brother who shows up when it’s really important.”

Toby grabbed his arm, hauled him around, never mind the boatful of atevi that went from relaxed to high alert. “Don’t you ever say that, Bren.”

“A discussion of brothers, nadiin-ji,” Bren said over the rush of the water, and more quietly, to Toby, who had let him go. “I won’t say it, but I still think it. Don’t meddle with my load of guilt, Toby. It looks like hell, but I’ve got it pretty well balanced by now.”

“Don’t joke.”

“I’m not joking.”

“The hell. What happened with mum was what had to happen, sooner or later, the course of nature, happens to us all, and no, as happened, you couldn’t possibly have been there, or you couldn’t have gone and done whatever you’ve done out there. What happened between me and Jill was my doing, my business, our business—Jill undertook a warfare the same as mum, to have me disavow everybody but her own circle. I must have picked her out of my subconscious, a familiar style of dealing with people, something I understood by upbringing. God only knows. But she and mum were a real bad match.”

“I won’t argue with you.”

“And Barb’s not like that. She’s not Jill.”

Oh, God, he most of all didn’t want to tread that territory. He didn’t want to claim to know her the way he did. But he did know her. “The reason we didn’t get along was the job, brother, just the job.”

“She’s not possessive.”

Not possessive yet, he thought, Toby was wrong about that: Barb was exactly like Jill, exactly like their mother. At least—he said to himself—she had been of that stamp. She’d gotten along perfectly with their mother, understood exactly what grief their mother had, at war with Jill.

But he carefully, determinedly, gave Barb credit for improvement over the years, most of it a matter of growing up, dealing with the consequences of her choices, after he’d gotten as far from Barb as he could get. She was entirely agreeable, if she was getting what she wanted, exactly like their mother. She was adept at making the environment constantly tense if she wasn’t getting what she wanted, exactly like Jill, and on one level his conscience told him he was a coward not to say exactly that to Toby, right now, while he had the chance and before Toby got himself into another bad relationship. But half of all that had been wrong in his relationship with Barb… was him, and his being constantly on the mainland; and constantly resenting the demands their mother put on him, and recognizing that game all too well—he knew that, too. If Toby and Barb shared a boat and were never apart—they might be happy. They could be happy. Could he help, by breaking that up with what he thought he knew?

“Is there a problem?” Toby asked, going defensive, and worried.

“She’s Barb, that’s all you can say. The fire’s completely cold between us, not even an ember left alight. That’s no problem of that sort; but we never got a chance to make a decent friendship after we broke up. I’ll do my level best to do that now. For your sake. You can tell her that, if you like.”

Toby let go a breath, so wonderfully open, so transparent and honest, all the way to the depths, his brother, two things which he wasn’t, and couldn’t be for two minutes running.

“I’ll do better than my level best,” he said. “We’ll work it out. Don’t worry about it.”

But he worried about it. There was one more thing Barb liked, different than their mother, and Jill. She liked the spice of drama in her life. She couldn’t pass up the opportunity for a little excitement. And if Barb pulled one of her shifts of attraction from Toby to him, just to see the sparks fly, he didn’t know what he’d do. The stability Barb demanded in her partners had never had to apply to Barb.

A thought which he shut down, except the determination to have a talk with Barb and lay down the rules of engagement—or non-engagement, as the case might be.

“Tell you what,” he said to Toby, “if you have any lingering doubt, believe this: Jago will keep us honest. I have an attachment. You know that.” Half humorously: “And believe me, Jago’s not to cross.”

Toby shifted a glance aft. Jago was not in view. But his shoulders relaxed as he leaned against the rail. “I hope you’re happy, Bren. And I’m not criticizing. Jago is special. She’s very special. And I really hope you’re happy. Contented, in the human sense.”

“Mutual,” he said, glad to escape the topic, and leaned there beside his brother, while Barb steered the boat and Jago—did whatever Jago did. Rested, perhaps. Perhaps just watched Barb like a predator watching prey. One never forgot, either, that Jago’s hearing was far more acute than humans were used to reckoning, and she understood Mosphei’ much better than humans were used to being understood.

Had she overheard? The rush of the water was very loud. Probably she hadn’t. He let it go. There was honesty between him and Jago, such that he could outright ask her, and they could discuss what Toby had said—remarkable, wonderful in relationships he’d had. He let go the tension.

Peace, for about half a minute.

A commotion, Cajeiri’s exclamation, and a sharp word from Ilisidi, involving venom, and cutting a line.

“Stingfish,” Bren cried, without even seeing the situation, and shoved away from the rail to get back past the deck house, which blocked their view. Toby was right behind him.

Cenedi had snagged the fishing line, it seemed, and with a flash of a knife sent Cajeiri’s orange-spotted, finny prize back into the sea, hook and all, to the relief of all aboard.

“But I had no chance to see it!” Cajeiri protested.

“Fortunate,” Ilisidi said dryly, from her seat against the cabin wall. “Foolish boy.”

“But, mani-ma, Cenedi cut my line!”

“Nand’ Toby can show you how to rig another hook to the line, young sir,” Bren said, “a valuable skill for a fisherman.” Water was scattered over the white deck, right across Ilisidi’s sitting-area, from what must have been a considerable inboard wing of the snaky animal in question, with lethal side spines and an equally lethal bite of needlelike teeth, had the boy attempted to disengage the hook. “And when we have an opportunity, I shall show you a detailed picture of the creature—which, if it had bitten your great-grandmother, would have grieved us all.”

A stamp of the formidable cane on the deck. “We would not be so foolish as to be bitten. One does not say the same for a willful boy.”

“Mani-ma.” A bow. A very measured bow. Oh, we are not behaving well today, Bren thought. The boy was as tired as the rest of them, and desperately trying, after the frantic habit of youth, to be entertained, but patience and good humor was in very short supply.

Ilisidi had noticed this sluggishness of respect, too, and arched a brow, and stared at the young rebel, her lips a thin line.

“Where are you, boy?”

The jutting lip faltered. Tucked in.

“Answer.”

“On a boat, mani-ma.”

“As if to say, a ship. And that is the ship-aiji, more, the owner of this boat, which we are not. We are guests of a person placing himself at great risk in transporting us. Does this fact suggest anything?”

A moment of silence, in which Cajeiri shrank half a handspan and drew a deep breath.

“Need we suggest it?” Ilisidi said sharply.

“One apologizes, nandiin.” Delivered very quietly, with a bow of the head, from a boy who looked, now the energy had gone out of him, frayed, running on nervous energy, and, yes, terribly scared, when the whole ship had reacted to a creature he had flailing on the end of a line he had had no particular skill to manage. “I did not intend disrespect.”

“Bow,” Bren said, nudging Toby, who managed it, and Cajeiri bowed to Toby, and the dowager nodded, and matters were patched.

“This boy is tired,” Ilisidi said. “Nawari-ji. See him to a bed and tuck him in.”

Indignation. “I do not need to be tucked in, mani-ma!”

“He does not need to be tucked in,” Ilisidi said serenely, “but will benefit from a little rest.”

“Nandiin.” With a bow and a great deal of dignity the young rebel laid aside his pole and departed to the companionway, one of Ilisidi’s young men at his heels.

The deck was silent meanwhile. Barb, at the wheel, kept clear of the business, watching with apprehension, decidedly.

And then things went back to ordinary, the staff relaxing, Ilisidi enjoying the sunlight, hands on her cane, eyes shut.

Toby cast Bren a worried look.

“There are rules,” Bren said carefully, since Ilisidi herself understood more Mosphei’ than was at the present comfortable. “He’s doing very well. But he’s only eight.”

Toby gave a deep breath, on edge, clearly, and perhaps recalling his time about the mainland shore, where people had been on holiday and relaxed, as relaxed as atevi staff could be. The whole picture of atevi manners had never been available to him, and was not, now. It might not seem Ilisidi had been understanding, even kindly, in her handling of a boy whose temper and self-command had just snapped, and snapped because he was a child who’d been snatched from a world of routine and order into a world that had grown very remote from him. But Ilisidi was not cruel. Two years ago, at six, Cajeiri had had no independence. Now he had begun to run certain things—being tall as a human adult and strong and dexterous enough to do things for himself. But on the earth—and under present circumstances—he was obliged to take fast, concentrated advice from his great-grandmother, and become very much more adult, for his own safety’s sake, overnight… not mentioning the fact his physical strength was enough to do serious damage.

“This boy,” Bren said in a low voice, as they turned and leaned on the rail, “may be aiji within the week. He will have life and death in his hands. Indulgence is nowhere on his horizon.”

“You think Tabini is really gone?”

“I don’t know,” Bren said. “No one knows.” He moved the conversation back to the side of the boat and forward, under the white noise of the water, recalling atevi hearing. “She learned a great deal of our language on the voyage.”

Understanding dawned. Toby nodded, gave him a look, then leaned beside him on the bow rail, the white froth rushing along below them.

Long silence, then. Conversation on old memories, winter on the mountain, school days. Their mother’s cooking. The whereabouts of their father, who never ventured back into their lives, not even lately. That was a lost cause. They both knew that.

The wind shifted, and Toby looked up at the sail, and quickly left to see to the trim. Bren thought of going with him, handling the boat just for a moment, but, again, Barb was back there, and they’d clearly worked out that smooth teamwork, Barb and Toby had. He chose not to interpose his own skills.

A full day of such running, and half the night, and they’d work into the shoreline isles under cover of darkness. He might, extraneous thought, get off the boat without dealing with Barb, postponing all such dealings until he got back from the mainland—granting he would ever get back. He could duck below for an hour, get some sleep, and let his staff relax, more to the point, which they would not be able to do with emotional tension on the deck: they weren’t wired to ignore a situation that their nervous systems told them was unresolved between him and Barb. God knew there would be no violence, but their nerves, already taut, would resonate to every twitch and gesture and look, especially since he was sure by now Banichi also knew that was the Barb.

And the last thing he wanted between him and Toby at this imminent parting was Barb. He didn’t want to go below, into the close dark. He thought he just ought to bed down as Ilisidi had done, on deck, wrap up in a blanket somewhere where no one would step on him. He could lie near the bow, and just listen to the water. That would be good. There was a decided nip in the air. But only enough to remind him the planet wasn’t temperature-regulated, not on a local scale.

“Bren.”

Barb. Barb had slipped up on him, masked by the rush of water, the very person he hadn’t wanted to deal with. He stared at her, frozen for the instant, caught between a desire not to deal with her civilly and the fact that he’d promised Toby peace.

“Barb?”

“I’m sorry about your mother. It was two years ago for me. I know it was only yesterday you heard. So I’m sorry.”

“Accepted.”

“You’re upset that you weren’t there. She accepted that.”

“The hell she did. She never forgave me. She blamed me to her last breath because I wasn’t there. Let’s have the truth.”

“She did that,” Barb conceded. “But it doesn’t mean she didn’t love you.”

That hit to the quick, that love word, that sentiment humans needed, and atevi didn’t understand. He felt an angry sting in his eyes and turned his face to the wind, his eyes to the horizon, unwilling to have Barb come at him on that topic.

“You know there were things she wanted in her life,” Barb said, unstoppable, “and that didn’t happen, and she’d have been disloyal to her hopes to ever give in. One of them was your father. She never would deal with him again. But she never stopped loving him.”

“Not that I ever heard.” And didn’t want to hear. Barb had no business in their family business. But she’d been there, at a time when their mother might have confided things. He hadn’t.

“She was stubborn,” Barb said, “just like you. She held on to her hopes and wouldn’t admit any other situation. Like you. Yes, of course she wanted you there. If she hadn’t, if she’d ever let you go, she’d have been letting you go in the emotional sense, and she wouldn’t ever do that. It was her kind of loyalty. Is that what you want to hear from me?”

“It’s no good to tell you that I did what I could. You know me. I’m very limited in that regard.”

“I accept it,” she said. “I’ve learned to accept it.”

“Doesn’t matter.” He didn’t like the direction this was going, and wasn’t going to talk about love and devotion with Barb.

“Maybe it doesn’t, to you,” she said. “But I think it does.”

“Doesn’t, Barb. Leave it. Leave it alone.”

“I couldn’t be her. I couldn’t live with you. That’s the truth.”

That was the truth he wanted. He looked at her this time. The years and the sun had put little fine lines beside her eyes. She wasn’t a vapor-brained kid any more. “You learned the hard way.”

“Did that.”

“So let’s all try to get it right this time,” he said, while the wind blew at both of them, whipping hair and clothing. “For Toby’s sake. You and I used to be friends. It was better while we were friends, before we began talking about love and the future and the rest of it. Before we ever slept together, we had fun. We liked life. Anything in the middle is a long voyage ago for me. Let’s have it that way again. Can we do that? Because I’m telling you, I can’t accept anything else.”

“Because you’re her son, and you don’t accept anything but what you choose to accept. I know that.”

That was a hit below the belt.

“I’m grateful you were there to help her. If you want thanks for that—thank you.”

“It wasn’t hard.”

“I’ve never understood why you did it. You had nothing in common that I could figure.”

“She needed someone. So did I. She helped me see things. She helped me understand you.”

That was worth a laugh. “She didn’t understand me. She never figured me out.”

“She understood you much better than you think.”

“Well, good. I’m glad. But take your sights off me, Barb. I swear to you, if you ever hurt Toby, I’ll be your enemy.”

“I know that, too.”

“Do you, now?” He discovered he didn’t trust her, hadn’t trusted her all these years, and might have been right after all. “Don’t mistake me, Barb. Don’t play games with this situation. You like stirring the pot, right. That’s fine. Don’t stir this one.”

“I’ll tell you something. What I was looking for in you—I’ve found, in him.”

Maybe she meant that to sting. Maybe he was supposed to be jealous of Toby. It badly missed its target, if that was the case. He was only disgusted with her.

“No games, Barb.”

“None of yours, either, Bren. No more promises to me or him for what you can’t do.”

“That—that, I’ve gotten wiser about.” She’d set him suddenly on the wrong foot, taken away the impetus.

“I love him, Bren.”

“You’d better.”

“It’s not the glitter and champagne it was with you, showing up now and again for a fantasy night at a hotel. Toby’s a mug of hot tea in a cold morning, that’s what I think of when I think of him. He’s a week on the water, fishing. Just us. He’s happy. So am I.”

Curious, that what she saw of Toby was the life he wanted at his own core, or thought he did, and the life he had, by scattered days that he treasured through the days of office and court. What she said she loved about Toby was his own daydream reality.

But what she’d gotten from one Bren Cameron had been the hard security, the rush from this meeting to that, the contests of power, the secrecy, then a few stolen moments of the sequin-spangled glamor he’d thought she thrived on.

And here she was, older, wearing denims, with her hair in windblown curls, her immaculate complexion getting little frown-lines from the sun.

A mug of tea and a boat, was it? That was Toby, for sure. Ambitions had certainly changed.

But so had his.

“I wish you both three thousand years.” It was what atevi said. “I hope it’s all smooth sailing.”

“Oh, not smooth sailing.” For a second he saw Barb laugh, honestly laugh, and those sun-lines were in evidence at the edges of her eyes. “We have our storms. But we sail through them. Always. We like the lightning.”

“Then you take care of him,” he said, disarmed. “Enjoy things with him. Laugh like that.”

“You mean that?”

“Damned right I mean it.”

She stood on her toes, suddenly kissed him on the cheek. He didn’t flinch, but he wondered whether Toby was, in fact, out of viewing perspective, back at the wheel. He didn’t kiss her back, just patted her arm.

It was a decent test. Attraction toward Barb wasn’t anywhere in his reaction. Just worry for Toby.

Jago had seen it, however, Jago not letting him out of her sight for a moment. Barb passed by her on her way aft, but Jago looked straight at him the while, then walked up and leaned on the rail beside him.

“She was confirming a truce,” he said.

“Indeed,” Jago said blandly.

Damn Barb, he thought.

“This is the channel,” Toby said, drawing a black line along a treacherous series of shoals. It was Naigi district. “Get in, get out. You can reach Cobo village from this beach, which is mostly sea-grass. The little bay is particularly nice for redfish.”

Bren translated. Except about the redfish. They all—all but Cajeiri, who was fast asleep—huddled on deck in the dark, the chart secured behind a plastic cover with a faint glow underneath, and marked over with erasable pen.

That Toby owned such a precise chart, lettered over in Mosphei’, had passed without comment from Ilisidi, but being related to the possessor of said contraband, Bren suffered a twinge of minor guilt under Ilisidi’s sideward glance.

“My brother has fished illicitly, aiji-ma,” he admitted, while security looked over the situation and discussed the area.

“He has not,” Ilisidi said with a wave of her hand. “He has our permission.”

“One is grateful,” he said, bowing his head, and by then security had reached a favorable conclusion.

“We can manage, nandiin,” Cenedi said. “We have a name, one Lord Geigi personally recommends.”

“Then let us do it,” Ilisidi said sharply, slightly underlit by the table as she leaned close for a look. “Toby-nandi handles this boat very well. We have every confidence. Douse this light.”

It went out.

“They agree,” Bren said to Toby. “And you have the grant of a fishing license, and the right to this chart.”

Toby cast him a second, questioning look, with a little quirk of impish humor. Toby knew… damn him, he’d known what he was challenging, bringing that chart out into plain view, and had known, too, that he’d get away with it.

“Light off the starboard quarter,” Tano said.

Bren looked. He couldn’t see it. Out in the open sea, there was every chance that light was some fishing boat, like themselves, only more honest. Or their naval escort, which had never come into view. But they could afford no chances.

“If they’re atevi, they may well have seen us,” he said. “Toby, Barb, Tano’s seen a light out there, starboard quarter.”

“Wind’s fair,” Toby said, and fair it was, bearing on the Brighter Days‘ best sailing point. They could go in, or shy off.

Shying off would only make it likelier they’d be spotted.

“I still don’t see it,” Barb said, looking out into the dark.

“Trust Tano’s eyes,” Bren said. “We have this chance to get ashore. Any dithering around about it only gives the opposition time and warning. We’d better use it. But, God, Toby, be careful getting out.”

“I’m the model of caution,” Toby said. Damn him, he was enjoying this. It was like their days on the mountain. Beat you to the bottom, brother. Downhill on skis.

No Jill, now. With the boat’s wheel in his hands and the west wind blowing, Toby was free, these days, freer than in years. And it showed. It youthened him by the hour.

“Scoundrel,” Bren said under his breath, sure that Toby heard him, since Toby gave him a grin.

He found a grin of his own in reply, thinking, damn, if we die, we die moving, don’t we, not sitting still and letting our lives fade out?

Deep breath, as Toby steered them for the unseen coast, and the wind sang in the rigging.

That boat out there, if it had seen them, might be radioing someone in a better position to cut them off. They could only hope it was one of Shawn’s, though Shawn’s people were supposed to be doing something slightly noisy to the south, running a navy vessel into forbidden waters near Geigi’s estate, and running out again as if they’d dropped someone off.

It wasn’t a very sophisticated ruse, that feint by sea. But the other side would have to spend energy reacting to it. The opposition had to expect something, with the starship in dock and the shuttle down. He only hoped nobody got killed making it look real.

The coast was a dim line on the horizon by sundown, a sunset that reflected off a layer of cloud at their backs. That cloud went iron gray as the sun slipped away, and left them running an iron-gray sea on sail alone, that rocky coast bisected by their bow.

“Piece of cake,” Toby called it. Bren eyed the rollers that came in there and broke on rocks and wished they could have done this by daylight.

They had their runabout, a light shell of a thing with, Toby swore, enough motor to handle the surf inbound, if not out. But a buoyancy rating for humans was not the same as a rating for that number of atevi. The boat could handle at most three of them at a time, and that meant getting a number of them ashore first, with weapons, to be sure they could land the rest, and one person continually fighting that surf back and forth with the boat.

“I can get it in and out,” Barb said, “and I’m light.”

It was the best, the logical choice, granted she could handle the boat, and Toby didn’t object. Bren just bit his lip and waited, watching, as the rocks and the surf became quite distinct in what was now a panoramic view of the coast.

There were no lights ashore. They showed none. They brought the sails down, fired up the engine, brought the boat up close to the stern ladder, and Barb went down to take the tiller, taking a heavy extra fuel can Toby let down to her.

Banichi and Jago opted to be first in, first to take up position on that shore, to guard the rest of them coming in. And they had life-jackets that they’d have to hold to: they were far too small for atevi. “Take care,” Bren wished them, “take great care, nadiin-ji.”

Baggage and armament filled up whatever room they had left. The little boat motor purred quietly into action and Bren went to the side rail and watched, lip caught in his teeth the entire time the little boat washed in with the surf and let out two people he desperately cared about.

Toby worked the engine to keep them in position—they didn’t drop anchor, just kept a visual fix.

The little boat came back through the surf, rode through light as a shell, with fair expertise. Bren heaved a sigh of relief. Cenedi committed his two juniormost, Toby had another tank filled, traded the empty, and off they went, another lengthy passage. A light crossed the sky, in the distance, a plane, but far from them.

Barb came back, and another exchange of fuel tanks. Then Tano and Algini went with her.

Bren gripped the rail and watched until they were safely ashore, paced, and realized he was pacing. The next load was more supply.

Bren went to stand by Toby. Just to stand there for a while. “Goes without saying,” he said. “But shouldn’t go unsaid, how much I owe you.”

“Wouldn’t have missed this for the world,” Toby said, and they stood there a while more, spending the agonizing wait content in each other’s company, in idiot remarks about the weather.

“Where are you going next?” Toby asked him.

“Don’t know,” he said. “Depends on what we find. We have names, people we may be able to rely on.”

“You be damned careful about it,” Toby said.

“Oh, yes,” he said, and heaved a pent breath.

Two more of Cenedi’s men went the long, slow trip.

“Wish I could go in with you,” Toby said out of a long silence.

“I’m glad you’re going back,” he said, “and, brother?”

“Yes?”

“Go home. I’ll phone when I can. Don’t hang around this coast to watch. When they know where we got in, they’ll be over this place like gnats on jam.”

“And where I am, they’ll think that’s where you got in.”

“Don’t even say it, don’t think about running a diversion, Toby. Leave that to the military. Don’t give me one more thing to worry about. Promise me.”

“I promise,” Toby said, but Toby would lie, in extremity. So would he. It was, he thought, a damned nasty habit in their family.

“Wouldn’t help us anyway,” he said to Toby. “We’ll be away from this coast fast as we can find transport, that’s the one thing I can say.”

“Just don’t take chances, Bren.”

“Mutual.”

This trip it was Cenedi and the dowager. “You will go with Lord Bren,” Ilisidi said to Cajeiri, buckling on a life preserver. “And you will do exactly what he says.”

“Yes, mani-ma,” Cajeiri said.

After the dowager left there was no restraining the boy. It was a thousand questions, most of them, in some form, Where are we, and Where are we going, nandi? It seemed forever while the boat clawed its way back through the surf. Forever, and far too short a time to talk to Toby, once Cajeiri was in his care. He had things he wanted to say, none of them quite finding words, none of them that he managed to say, except, when Barb came back and took on her last spare fuel can, “I want to see you on the holidays.”

“Think you can settle things by then?”

“I’ve got, what, four months? Sure. Time enough.” It was a jibe in the face of fate. He resisted superstition. “Just when you get out of here, go.”

“I’m going to marry her, Bren.”

He swallowed every objection. Every thought of objection. “Good,” he said. “Good. If you’re happy—that’s what I care about. Go home and do that.”

The little boat bumped the hull. He had to take Cajeiri down the ladder. He stopped to hug his brother long and hard, and to try to fill up all the missed chances in one long breath. “Luck,” Toby said.

Then it was down the ladder, Cajeiri last, and unsteady when he hit the cockleshell of a boat, rocking as it was in the chop. Bren yanked Cajeiri down onto a seat and sat down, himself.

“Can you swim, young sir?” Bren asked him, checking the fastening of the life preserver, that at least fit Cajeiri’s young body.

“A little,” Cajeiri said.

Which meant not at all in this rough sea. “Then stay still in center of the boat. Precisely in the center. Neither of us wants to fall in.”

“We’re off,” Barb said cheerfully. “They’re kind of disappearing into the rocks, out there, but they’re waiting for you.”

“Good,” he said. He didn’t know how to make conversation with Barb, let alone now, when everything in the world was riding on their getting inshore and Toby getting out again. He did as he’d told Cajeiri to do, centered himself in the boat and held on for the ride. Barb had her hands full, and the bow smacked down with fierce jolts as they went, white water boiling past the sides. Spray drenched them.

“May one turn around?” Cajeiri asked, wanting a better view.

“Keep your weight centered, young gentleman, and you may turn.”

Cajeiri did, quickly, as they rode the waves in, with ominous dark rocks on one hand and the other.

The engine throttled back, then Barb shoved the throttle hard, and they knifed through the boiling white.

A single dark figure waited for them as their keel hissed up onto the shingle—Cenedi, by the silver in his hair. Cenedi gave his hand to Cajeiri and pulled him out. Tossed the life preserver back aboard.

“Bren?” Barb said. “Be careful.”

He shed his own life preserver, Toby’s gear. “Make him happy,” he said to her while she was switching fuel tanks, last thing before he cleared the boat and ran up the shingle to the rocks.

He didn’t look back until he was in shadow, with Cenedi and Cajeiri and the rest of them, with all their gear. Then he looked over the top of a rounded boulder and saw the runabout fighting the surf. He watched, wet and freezing in the wind, until he saw the boat meet up with the Brighter Days—he couldn’t see Barb get out or Toby help her, but that was what he figured was happening.

He watched, chilled through, aware Jago had thrown a thermal sheet around him, watched as they began to move. Watched as she turned for the open sea.

“Good luck,” he mouthed, and, feeling a hand on his shoulder and a presence behind him, looked back at Banichi, who was urging him to get up and move.

He did that—looked back again, but now the boat was only a wedge of white behind the surf, headed home.

Chapter 7

They gathered in a small rocky slot well up on the headland, the dowager struggling considerably at the last of the climb up a rugged slope. She sat down on a rock under the overhang of a branch, and leaned both hands against her cane. One was not supposed to notice this fact, but Cenedi quietly proffered a small cup of water from his flask, and she took it gladly enough.

It was the darkest part of the night. The cloud that had filmed the west at sunset swept on across the sky and blotted out the stars above them. That made it more difficult to see, but it also made it harder for them to be seen, and that gave them a little time to catch their breath and to reconnoiter.

“We must get transport to come to us,” Cenedi said to them. “We are moving too slowly. If we can find a place for a few of us to wait—” Cenedi would never say that the dowager and the boy and likely the paidhi-aiji were the few of us in question, but Bren had no difficulty understanding there might be theft, mayhem, even casualties in the process of acquiring that transport, actions in which the few might be an inconvenience. They were at a crossroads of their plans, either to find a secure place where they might leave their weaker members in fortified safety, with allies, while the rest of them attempted to raise support—or go all together. Bren was not unhappy when Banichi supported the principle of stealth and rapid movement, which was their Guild’s general preference, and all of them going together into the interior.

“We have several names,” Cenedi said, “for this area. Dur remains one possibility, nadiin, but our adversaries will watch that.”

There were staunch allies in that particular district, for certain, somewhat to the north of them, and they might have gone there if they had run into opposition. Dur was an isolated place, the sort of place in which one could hide, but from which they could not maneuver with any aggressive rapidity at all—not unless they wanted to try an escape by air, in a small plane, and Bren sincerely hoped not to have to do that.

“Desari is our choice, then,” Banichi said, and others seemed to agree this name represented a good idea. “Two of us will go. We should.” That was in the dual, as Banichi put it, meaning himself and Jago.

Bren was less happy with that, but to this council—all of them were out of the Assassins’ Guild—he was necessarily a spectator, not a useful contributor of suggestions. They had spent their voyage down memorizing and arguing resources, and likewise used their voyage across the straits, laying these plans. When Toby had suggested this coast, and Cobo village, they had immediately known where he was proposing to land them and what resources they might have here, before they had approved the idea.

Now they were the ones with the information and the plan, which turned out not to be Cobo, evidently, but another village in the area and the paidhi could only wait, wait sometimes sitting on an uncompromising and chilly rock, sometimes sitting against it, resolved not to move about or stand up, for fear of attracting attention. Silence was all he could contribute to the situation. Ilisidi had lain down to nap on the lumpy, but less chill, bulk of their personal baggage. Cajeiri had completely flagged and gone to sleep on the icy damp ground, buffered by baggage. Cenedi and his men rested, catnapping by turns, cleaning weapons, speaking only in necessity.

But, damn it, he never could nap under such situations, even if he knew it was the sane thing to do. He sat there in one position or the other and fretted, and had a candy bar he’d stowed in his pocket, and listened to the sea, that vast, powerful sound that in principle seemed so quiet, and wasn’t. It could mask their small sounds. It could mask ambush. He felt deaf.

Tano and Algini came and sat by him, his protection, still. They went to sleep for maybe half an hour, taking turns with Cenedi’s men.

Bren just stared at the horizon, as a faint, faint glow began in the east, and grew, and grew, casting the lumpy horizon into relief, and slowly bringing reality to the landscape around them, rounded rocks and clumps of sea grass, small shrubs and a fairly precipitate slope behind their little camp.

Daylight. And the mainland. It seemed surreal.

Light grew. And with it, all at once, every ateva but Ilisidi and the boy suddenly stirred, opened eyes, looked in the same direction, an eerie simultaneity, a warning. They sat up, reached for weapons. Bren reconsidered his position, whether he had enough cover. He didn’t ask what was happening, or what their senses had perceived. He didn’t make a sound. Didn’t twitch a muscle, not risking even a scuff of dead grass.

Came a distant thrum, then a motor, some sort of vehicle, something of size, by the pitch of it. And he stayed quite, quite still, knowing that whatever he heard, the atevi around him heard more than he did. It could be a chance traveler. It could be trouble.

Cajeiri sat up suddenly, blinking and confused. Cenedi immediately signaled silence. Weapons were in evidence all around, and Cajeiri quietly touched his great-grandmother’s foot.

She woke, and Cenedi assisted her to sit up, as he moved Ilisidi and Cajeiri ever so quietly to a sheltered place behind the rocks. The paidhi was supposed to see to his own welfare, and the paidhi had no idea except to keep low and not move.

The noise kept on, a low gear, straining, and it was coming toward them.

Are we that close to a road? Bren wondered, as the racket grew and grew. Is it coming overland? He dared not put his head up to see what was going on, but Algini edged up among the rocks and got a look.

And stood up, as the racket and clatter crescendoed to a ridiculous level.

If Algini stood up, everybody could have a look. It was a battered old market truck, and Banichi was driving, Jago occupying the other seat. The side of the truck said, in weathered blue and red paint, Desigien Association, and it had made a fairly long, laborious track across the grassy headland, leaving tracks in the grass.

It came to a stop, and Banichi set the brake, and the two of them got out, beckoning them to come, hurry it up. Banichi and Jago were not in uniform—were in bulky country jackets and loose trousers, even their pigtails tied up with leather cord.

Bren gathered up his computer, his personal baggage, and Tano and Algini gathered up their own gear and Banichi’s and Jago’s, while Cajeiri and Cenedi assisted the dowager to rise and negotiate the rocky path toward the truck.

Baggage went unceremoniously into the truck bed ahead of them, except the computer, which Bren kept close, except the guns and ammunition, which various other people kept close. And the truck was atevi-scale. Cenedi got up onto the bed and bent over to assist the dowager up, and Nawari made a step of his joined hands, so that she could manage it, Cajeiri hovering behind, in case he needed to administer an indelicate push.

There was no need. The dowager, once aboard, went to the heap of baggage near the cab and sat down quite nicely. Cajeiri got up and wandered noisily around the truck bed, looking for a permissible spot, and Ilisidi beckoned sharply for him to join her sitting on the baggage.

Bren hitched his computer higher onto his shoulder and tried to climb up the metal rungs. Algini extended a hand from above and Jago, appearing below him, shoved from behind.

He turned and looked down over the tail of the bed. “Did we steal it?” he asked Jago.

“Borrowed, nandi,” she said. “We shall leave it at the railhead for its owners.” She clambered up. “There is a tarp, nadiin-ji. Regretfully, we must use it. Heads down.”

She hauled the oily, dirty thing from its position bunched against the rear of the cab, and and began spreading it out of its stiff folds, back along the slatted side-rails. Tano, from the other side, moved to help, and it spread like a tent over them. Bren sat down, as they all must, below the level of the side panels, their daylight cut out again in favor of oil-smelling dark and the vibration of the still-running truck engine.

“Are you well, nandi?” Cenedi asked Ilisidi, off toward the cab end, and Ilisidi answered, practically: “It will be warmer under the tarp, at least, Nadi-ji.”

There was some to-do, Cenedi and others evidently rearranging baggage to make Ilisidi a more comfortable place—she was not so tall that she had to bend her head, at least—and meanwhile the tarp was being tied down from above, lashed across with ropes, made into a snug container.

The truck smelled unpleasantly like fish.

Springs gave. Doors banged, forward. A moment later the truck lurched into gear and growled and lumbered into a turn.

They were leaving tracks that would persist in the tall grass, evident from the air. But trucks such as this one came and went without benefit of roads all the time in the country, heavy-tired, following tracks to fishing traps and boats. They had no choice but some such transport, given that the dowager was not up to the kind of brisk hike Banichi and Jago had taken last night, at what toll on unaccustomed muscles Bren could only imagine, and at what risk to the village in question, which one assumed had lent the truck knowingly to help them.

One assumed so, at least.

They jounced and bounced downhill for a long, winding trek, before they came to more level ground, and gravel under the tires. Likely they had come down to a common market route. The mainland had far fewer roads than Mospheira. By the name on the door, this one truck likely belonged to the whole village of Desigien, which meant any one in the village might use it to haul net, wood, supplies, or, daily, fish, or ice—Bren dimly recalled that an ice plant existed, central between Desigien and several other coastal villages, an essential item for fishermen who hoped to get their catch to market. They would truck it daily to the railhead at—where was it?

Adaran, Adaran was the name, whence it went to larger markets, even to Shejidan itself. If people in the district went visiting, they would walk generally, or take the local bus, which provided social connection for the little association, and that bus might run only twice a day, life proceeding at a slower pace out in the villages. And outside of such buses and one or two trucks such as this one for the whole village, that was the whole need for roads. Such interdistrict roads as existed would parallel the railroad right-of-way, village-to-market roads that were, generally, informally maintained, and persisting so far along the rail as frequent need kept wearing down the weeds.

He knew. He’d once had the job of surveying the rail systems, advising the aiji where expansion would or would not better serve the area… in those ages-ago and innocent days, so it seemed, when rail and a nascent air service was the whole story of atevi and Mospheiran transport. The office of the paidhi had read the histories of waste and pollution, and wanted to avoid the excesses of old Earth, wisely so, considering how passionately atevi felt about spoiling the landscape. The paidhiin of a prior day had advised the aijiin in Shejidan to go on as they had been going before the Landing, to link their provinces by rail, not road, to make orderly, minimal corridors for village-to-town transport that very little disturbed the environment, that kept the little associations as inward-focused as they had begun, above all not sprawling along transportation lines in ways that would absolutely destroy the atevi pattern of life, and with it, atevi social structure. Wise, wise decisions that gave them this little truck, this little-used road.

Circles. Interlocking circles. And no one went far by truck or bus. If they took their little truck out of district, it would look increasingly out of place, the farther it went from its origin. It could by no means serve them all the way to Shejidan. The train was where they were going. And how they were going to get aboard that without a fuss…

“Will we ride the train?” Cajeiri asked, as they bounced painfully about in potholes and what might be ruts, or simply an abundance of rocks amid the gravel. “Are we going to drive all the way to Shejidan?”

“We will take the train, young sir,” Cenedi’s voice said in the darkness. And because there was an obvious next question, for which Cajeiri could be heard drawing breath: “As far as Taiben.”

Taiben, it was. The aiji’s estate. If there was one place they might find trouble, nearly as efficiently as at Shejidan, Taiben was a likely place.

But it was a sprawling estate, almost a province unto itself, a maze of hunting paths and woods in which they might even lose this truck—if they could get fuel enough to get them there. He wished they could do without the train.

“Listen to me,” Ilisidi said, sternly, “listen, great-grandson, and remember a name. Desari. Remember this name, and be in debt to this village. Lord Geigi once rescued this man Desari and his daughter at sea when their boat engine failed, and when they had drifted for days, likely to die. Geigi recommended Desari of Desigien as a name to rely on, since every year that he could, on the anniversary of the rescue, this Desari has sent Lord Geigi a gift, so I have it from Geigi. So the debt remains, until Geigi might call on him. This will discharge the debt to Geigi, and place it on us in his place.”

“On the Ragi.”

“On all the Ragi,” Ilisidi said. “And you must remember it, boy, for another generation, a debt to him, and his whole association. The risk we have asked of them is considerable.”

“Our enemies could see the name on the truck.”

“Exactly so, if we make a mistake, and they will be in grave danger. What is the name, boy?”

“Desari,” Cajeiri said. “Desari. From this coast. From Desigien. But, mani-ma, will this Desari come with us on the train?”

“No,” Cenedi said. “He would be little help.”

“But,” said Cajeiri.

“Give us rest, great-grandson. An honest truck does not jabber as it proceeds along the road. We should be an ordinary truck, full of fish. Who knows who might hear, along the road?”

“Who would be listening, mani-ma?”

“Hush, I say!”

There was silence, then, none of them brooking the dowager’s exhausted annoyance for a very long, bumpy ride. Bren felt himself bruised, his own baggage having gone to cushion Ilisidi, and protected his computer in his arms, which somewhat kept him stable.

There was a whole world of things which, he thought suddenly, no, the boy didn’t automatically know, simply by being born atevi. He’d been very young when he’d been shunted off to Taiben, and then again sent off to his great-great-uncle Tatiseigi’s estate at age five, scarcely informed about the world at large, scarcely philosophical when, scarcely six, he’d gotten a little freedom of the grounds and learned to ride.

That had been a disaster, involving wet concrete and a very large patio, and uncle Tatiseigi’s great indignation.

Then the lad had been whisked off to space to get an education. To get an education, his father had said.

In what? Hacking the ship’s computer? Talking to hostile foreigners? Cajeiri was quite precocious in those regards… but what had they taught him? A fondness for dinosaurs?

They might, if they had been wiser, spent a little more time on the ordinary arts of going unseen, on natural history and most of all on atevi classics, which might have taught him that badgering his great-grandmother was not productive of harmony.

Not to mention the boy’s lack of knowledge about the world itself. How could he know how this truck fit into a village on the coast? How could he know how the roads lay, or how they all went to rail lines?

The boy had, literally, dropped in out of space onto his own planet, naïve regarding the weather, regarding the geography, naïve in many ways regarding Ragi rural society, and, the paidhi supposed, ignorant of the fabric of traditional atevi life which ought to trigger appropriate atevi twitches in young atevi nerves—if those nerves hadn’t been jangled by too much sugar and too many humans and no contact at all with the planet. He’d done his most critical growing in a linear human corridor only partially jury-rigged into a dwelling of atevi pattern. He’d entertained himself with movies and cultivated human children. The atevi world—it had its rhythms, its seasonally proper foods, its rules of etiquette and ethics, all the social graces that appeased volatile tempers and stiff regional pride. The boy had had the dowager to hammer the traditional courtesies and social conventions into his head, but had the nerves ever gotten triggered in the right ways, at the right times, in the very basic sense?

One could have a very deep unease, given what Cajeiri didn’t know, what they’d robbed him of, in taking him to space. The boy had no ingrained concept of how profound the bond had been between Geigi and that fisherman, the situation that allowed this debt to be passed up the lines of man’chi, from Lord Geigi to Geigi’s lords. Up, in the direction of wealth and ability—but never down, onto the shoulders of a poor man, who could discharge his debt by convincing his village to lend a truck.

But obligating the lord forever. And thence never to be discharged. That had been what Ilisidi had been trying to be sure of—that the young lord would know that name, remember the debt in his own generation, if hers failed that man. That was what the paidhi dimly grasped.

But had the boy? Cajeiri had sunk into quiet, and probably, in such silent times—Bren feared—was remembering the ship, not his uncle Tatiseigi’s estate, not the Bu-javid, or Taiben. He was, one very much suspected, thinking about the human company he’d left behind, since he had few enough memories of any other associations.

Can Gene and Artur go with me? Not just a boyish question. Desperation. Attachment, in a bond even the human paidhi had to think was unhealthy. The right social nerves just hadn’t gotten the right trigger at the right times, and the boy was more than a little lost, getting instruction, but missing any emotional connection. He knew all the right social moves the way he memorized the provincial capitals and their lords, but not why those moves had to be made.

Dared one think… a sociopath, if one let one’s thoughts wander far, far down an unpleasant track?

Impossible. A good and willing kid. Angry. Hurt. Exhausted. The dowager shoved lectures at him, and he argued, he defended his ground, he increasingly annoyed his grandmother, who probably had a better sense of what was going on with the child than he possibly could. His own advice certainly couldn’t help the boy.

The fish—God, the fish had been a moment. He afforded himself a wan laugh, in silence. But having to fish, having to have an activity, that was the frenetic energy the boy had, that explored things and then sent him dashing back to great-grandmama when the world threatened him…

That flocking instinct? Man’chi in its early expression? Maybe dashing back to adults was the normal part and the brash, aggressive exploration was what he’d picked up from his human associates.

Maybe a human just didn’t know how to judge the boy, and ought not to say a thing.

While Jago, who knew less about children than she knew about field-stripping her guns, had expressed concern during their voyage, but seemed to indicate there was not much to do about Cajeiri’s isolation, except to keep him happy and to discourage him from the human Archive. Banichi had said, what was it? That the boy was going to have to stand still long enough to be aiji in Shejidan, and that was by no means a given.

The brakes began a prolonged squeal.

“Keep utterly still,” he heard Cenedi say, doubtless aiming that at the boy, and the truck bumped and heaved to a stop.

Conversation reached them from outside the tarp, questions about their use of the truck, from someone who definitely didn’t recognize their right to have it, or to be here. Bren held his breath, held utterly still.

“Picking up driftwood, nadi,” he heard Jago said, in a country accent he’d never heard her use, “to make lamps.”

“Lamps, is it?” he heard from that strange voice.

“Driftwood lamps, nadi,” she said, “which sell quite well in Shejidan.”

“Who authorized you to have this truck?”

The wrong answer could damn the man and the whole village who’d helped them. Could cost lives.

“The council, nadi,” Jago said, “for a consideration. A fee for the wood and for the hire of the truck.”

“Papers,” the man said.

“Here,” Banichi said, and got out, a creaking of springs and the opening of the door.

Thump. That was the truck door on Jago’s side, and a second thump, as something hit the ground.

“Good move,” Banichi said, and one formed a picture of that truck door opening and bashing right into a man, perhaps a local security patrol, who’d gotten too inquisitive.

There was some to-do outside, a series of small movements.

“Best take him along,” Banichi said. “He may be local.”

The logic in that was clear, that they wanted no blood on their ally’s hands, and the man who’d come afoul of two Assassins was still, courteously enough, alive.

Banichi came around to lower the tailgate, letting in daylight and a welcome waft of cool air.

“One regrets to report an inquisitive nuisance,” Banichi said, “and a problem. We propose, nand’ dowager, to put the local constable aboard, and leave him where we leave the truck, for our ally’s sake, for peace in the district. We believe he is not Desigien village, but perhaps a neighbor from Cobo.”

“Do so,” Ilisidi said. “How far are we from the rail?”

“Not far, nand’ dowager. The train comes into the station just after dark, and will pick up the local railcar, which is our best hope. We are to leave the truck in its ordinary spot, which is by the depot north wall, where we can move safely after dark. After that the ride may be much cooler, nandiin, one regrets to say.”

One formed a picture. The local car would carry fish. And ice.

Their unwanted passenger came to in the dark, blindfolded and gagged, and thumped around, kicking and protesting, until Cenedi’s men got hold of him.

“You will live, nadi,” Nawari’s voice said pleasantly in the dark. “Be patient. We mean no particular harm to you and we shall return the truck, the use of which we took.”

A deal of muffled outcry, then. And a quick subsidence after.