Once a Hero

Chapter Five

After dinner, Esmay went to the private apartment where her great-grandmother waited. Ten years ago, the old lady had still lived apart, refusing to inhabit the main house because of some quarrel that no one would explain. Esmay had tried to wheedle it out of her, unsuccessfully. She had not been the kind of great-grandmother who encouraged the sharing of secrets; Esmay had been scared of her, of the sharp glance that could silence even Papa Stefan. Ten years had thinned the silver hair, and dimmed the once-bright eyes.

“Welcome, Esmaya.” The voice was unchanged, the voice of a matriarch who expected reverence from all her kin. “Are you well?”

“Yes, of course.”

“And they feed you decently?”

“Yes . . . but I was glad to taste our food again.”

“Of course. The stomach cannot be easy when the heart is uncertain.” Great-grandmother belonged to the last generation which adhered almost universally to the old prohibitions and requirements. Immigrants and trade, the usual means of fraying the edges of cultures, had brought changes that seemed great to her, though to Esmay hardly significant compared to Altiplano’s difference from the cosmopolitan casualness of Fleet. “I do not approve of your gallivanting around the galaxy, but you have brought us honor, and for that I am pleased.”

“Thank you,” Esmay said.

“Considering your disadvantages, you have done very well.”

Disadvantages? What disadvantages? Esmay wondered if the old woman’s mind was slipping a bit after all.

“I suppose it means your father was right, though I am loathe to agree, even now.”

Esmay had no idea what Great-grandmother was talking about. The old lady changed topics abruptly, as she always had. “I hope you will choose to remain, Esmay. Your father has chosen for you the reward of bloodstock and land; you would not be as a beggar among us—” That was a dig; she had complained, just before she left, that she had nothing of her own, that she might as well be a poor beggar living here on sufferance. Great-grandmother’s memory had not slipped at all.

“I had hoped you might forget those rash words,” she said. “I was very young.”

“But not untruthful, Esmaya; the young speak the truth they see, however limited it is, and you were always a truthful child.” That had some emphasis she could not interpret. “You saw no future here; you saw it among the stars. Now that you have seen them, I hope you can find one here.”

“I . . . have been happy there,” Esmay said.

“You could be happy here,” the old lady said, shifting in her robe. “It is not the same; you are an adult, and a hero.”

Esmay did not want to distress her, but across the impulse to comfort came the same impulse to honesty which had led to that earlier confrontation. “This is my home,” she said, “but I don’t think I can stay here. Not always . . . not for ever.”

“Your father was an idiot,” her great-grandmother said, on the trail of some other thought. “Now go away and let me rest. No, I’m not angry. I love you dearly, as I always did, and when you go I will miss you extremely. Come back tomorrow.”

“Yes, Great-grandmother,” said Esmay meekly.

Later that evening, in the great library, she found herself comfortably ensconced in a vast leather chair, with her father, Berthol, and Papa Stefan. They started with the questions she’d expected, about her experiences in Fleet. To her surprise, she found herself enjoying it . . . they asked intelligent questions, applied their own military experience to the answer. She found herself relaxing, talking about things she had never expected to discuss with her male relatives.

“That reminds me,” she said finally, after explaining how Fleet handled the investigation of the mutiny. “Someone told me that Altiplano has a reputation for being Ageist—opposed to rejuvenation. That’s not so, is it?”

Her father and uncle looked at each other, then her father spoke. “Not exactly against rejuvenation, Esmaya. But . . . many people here see it as bringing more problems to us than it could solve.”

“I suppose you mean population growth . . .”

“Partly. Altiplano’s primarily an agricultural economy, as you know. Not only is this world suited to it, but we have all those Lifehearts and Old Believers. We attract immigrants who want to live on the land. Rapid population growth—or slow growth long continued—would start encroaching on the land. But—consider what it means to a military organization, for a start.”

“Your most experienced personnel wouldn’t get too old for service,” Esmay said. “You . . . Uncle Berthol . . .”

“Generals are two a credit . . . but of course, the most experienced you have—the fellow who can always cobble up a repair for your landcruiser or your artillery—will stay useful and perhaps even pick up more expertise. Experience counts, and with rejuvenation you can accumulate more experience to learn from. That’s the positive. The negative?”

Esmay felt that she was back in school, being forced to perform in front of the class. “Longer lives for the seniors mean fewer slots for juniors to be promoted into,” she said. “It would slow down career advancement.”

“It would stop it in its tracks,” her father said soberly.

“I don’t see why.”

“Because it’s repeatable now. The rejuvenated general—to start at the top—will be there forever. Oh, there’ll still be some slots for promotion—someone will die of an accident, or in a war. But that’s not many. Your Fleet will become the weapon of an expansionist Familias Regnant empire—”

“No!”

“It has to, Esmay. If rejuvenation gets going—”

“It’s already widespread; we know that,” Papa Stefan said. “They’ve had the new procedure forty years or more now, and they’ve tried it on a lot of people. Remember your biology classes, girl: if the population expands, it must find new resources or die. Changes in population are governed by birth rate and death rate: lower the death rate, as rejuvenation does, and you’ve got an increase in population.

“But the Familias isn’t expansionist.”

“Huh.” Berthol snorted and hitched himself sideways in his chair. “The Familias didn’t announce a grand campaign, no, but if you look at the borders, these last thirty years . . . a nibble here, a nibble there. The terraforming and colonization of planets which had been written off as unsuitable. Peaceful, cooperative annexation of half a dozen little systems.”

“They asked for Fleet protection,” Esmay said.

“So they did.” Her father gave Berthol a glance that said Be quiet as clearly as words. “But our point is, that if the population of Familias worlds continues to increase, because the old are being rejuvenated—and if the population of Fleet continues to increase for the same reason—then this pressure can move them toward expanding.”

“I don’t think they will,” Esmay said.

“Why do you think your captain went over to the Black Scratch?”

Esmay squirmed. “I don’t know. Money? Power?”

“Rejuvenation?” her father asked. “A long life and prosperity? Because, you know, a long life is prosperity.”

“I don’t see that,” Esmay said, thinking of her great-grandmother, whose long life was now coming to an end.

“A long young life. You see, that’s the other thing that bothers me about rejuvenation. Longevity rewards prudence above all . . . if you live long enough, and are prudent, you will prosper. All you have to do is avoid risk.”

Esmay thought she saw where he was going, but preferred not to risk charging ahead. Not with this canny old soldier. “So?” she asked.

“So . . . prudence is not high on the list of military virtues. It is one, sure enough, but . . . where are you going to get soldiers who will risk their lives, if avoidance of risk can confer immortality? Not the immortality of the Believers, who expect to get it after they die, but immortality in this life.”

“Rejuvenation may work in a civilian society,” Berthol said. “But we think it can cause nothing but trouble in the military. Even if you could retain all your best experienced men, you would soon be out of the routine of training recruits—and the population you served would be out of the routine of providing them.

“Which means,” he went on, “that a military organization with anything but mud between the ears is going to see that it must limit the use of rejuvenation . . . or plan on a constant expansion. And at some point it’s going to run into a culture of younglings, a culture which doesn’t use rejuvenation, and is bolder, more aggressive.” He had never been able to resist belaboring a point.

“It sounds like the old argument between the religious and the nonreligious,” Esmay said. “If immortality of the soul is real, then what matters most is the prudent life, to make sure the soul qualifies for immortality . . .”

“Yes, but all the religions we know of which offer that prize also define such prudence in more stringent terms. They require active virtues which discipline the believer and curtail his or her selfishness. Some even demand the opposite of prudence—recklessness of life in the service of their deity. This makes good soldiers; it’s why religious wars are so much harder to end than others.”

“And here,” Esmay said, to preempt Berthol, “you see rejuvenation rewarding—encouraging—merely practical prudence, pure selfishness?”

“Yes.” Her father frowned. “There will no doubt be good people rejuvenated . . .” Esmay noted the assumption that good people would not be selfish. It was a curious assumption for a man who was himself rich and powerful . . . but of course he didn’t define himself as selfish. He had never had to be selfish, in his own terms, to have his least wish satisfied. “But even they will, over several rejuvenations, realize how much more good they can do alive, in control of their assets, than dead. It’s easy to lie to yourself, to convince yourself that you can do more good with more power.” He was staring blankly at the books; was this self-assessment?

“And that’s not even considering the dependency created by reliance on rejuvenation,” Berthol said. “Unless you have control of the process, adulteration—”

“As happened recently—” her father said.

“I can see that,” Esmay said, cutting off the obvious; she was not in the mood for a longer lecture from Berthol.

“Good,” said her father. “So when they offer you rejuvenation, Esmaya, what will you do?”

For that she had no answer; she had never even considered the question before. Her father shifted the topic to a reprise of the ceremony, and soon she excused herself and went to bed.

The next morning, waking in her own bed in her own room, with sunlight bright on the walls, she was surprised by a sense of peace. She had suffered enough bad dreams in this bed; she had been half-afraid the nightmares would recur. Perhaps coming home had completed some sort of necessary ritual, and they were forever banished.

With that thought, she hurried down to breakfast, where her stepmother offered the morning grace, and then out into the cool gold of a spring morning. Past the kitchen gardens, the chicken runs where every hen seemed to be clucking her readiness to lay eggs, and every rooster crowed defiance at the others. She had heard them faintly through her window on the front side of the house; here they were deafening, so that she was not tempted to slow and look at them.

The great stables smelled as always of horses and oats and hay, pungencies that Esmay found comforting after all these years. There had been a time when she resented them, back when she, like all the children, had been expected to muck out her own pony’s stall. Unlike some of the others, she had never enjoyed riding enough to make the work worthwhile. Later, when a horse became her escape route into the mountains, she was old enough that she no longer had the daily chores to do anyway.

Now she walked down the stone-flagged aisle, the great arches opening to her left into one of the exercise yards. On her right, rows of stalls with the dark narrow heads of horses peering out. A groom came out of a tackroom at the sound of her steps.

“Yes, dama?” He looked confused; Esmay identified herself and his face relaxed.

“I was wondering—my cousin Luci mentioned a mare she’d looked at—that Olin showed her—?”

“Ah—the Vasecsi daughter. Down here, dama, if you’ll follow me. Excellent bloodlines, that one, and has done very well in training so far. That is why the General chose her for your foundation herd.”

Outside the mare’s stall, a twist of blue and silver; Esmay looked down the row and saw more such twists. This was her herd, picked by her father, and although she could exchange them, it would shame him. But to make a gift of one mare, to Luci—that would be acceptable. She hoped.

“Here, dama.” The mare had her rump to the door, but when the groom clucked she swung round. Esmay recognized the qualities for which her father had chosen the horse: the good legs and feet, the depth of heart-girth, the strong back and hindquarters, the long limber neck and well-bred head. Solid dark brown, just lighter than black—“You would like to see her move?” the groom said, reaching for the halter that hung beside the stall.

“Yes, thank you,” Esmay said. She might as well. The groom led the mare out of the stall, across the aisle, and out into the courtyard. There, in the open ring, the groom put the mare through her paces, which accorded with her conformation. A long, low walk, a sweeping trot and long level canter. This was a horse to cover the ground, mile after mile, and yet she would be handy as well. A good mare. If only Esmay cared particularly—

“I’m sorry I was rude,” Luci said, from the arches. Her face was in shadow; her voice sounded as if she’d been crying. “She’s a lovely mare, and you deserve her.”

Esmay walked nearer; Luci had been crying. “Not really,” she said quietly. “I’m sure you heard all about my regrettable attitude towards horses back when I left.”

“I inherited your trail horse,” Luci said without answering the comment. She said it as if Esmay might be angry about it. Esmay had not thought about old—Red, had that been his name?—in years.

“Good,” Esmay said.

“You don’t mind?” Luci sounded surprised.

“Why should I mind? I left home; I couldn’t expect the horse to go unused.”

“They didn’t let anyone ride him for a year,” Luci said.

“So they thought I might flunk out and come back?” Esmay said. It didn’t surprise her, but she was glad she hadn’t known that.

“Of course not,” Luci said, too quickly. “It’s just—”

“Of course they did,” Esmay said. “But I didn’t fail, and I didn’t come back. I’m glad you got that horse . . . you seem to have inherited the family gift.”

“I can’t believe you really haven’t—”

“I can’t believe anyone really wants to stay on one planet,” Esmay said. “Even when it feels right.”

“But it’s not crowded,” Luci said, flinging out one arm. “There’s so much space . . . you can ride for hours . . .”

Esmay felt the familiar tension in her shoulders. Yes, she could ride for hours and never come to a border she need worry about . . . but she could not eat a meal without wondering if some old family grievance were about to explode. She turned to Luci, whose eyes kept following the mare.

“Luci, would you do me a favor?”

“I suppose.” No eagerness, but why would there be?

“Take the mare.” Esmay almost laughed at the shock on Luci’s face. She repeated it. “Take the mare. You want her. I don’t. I’ll square it with Papa Stefan, and with Father.”

“I—I can’t.” But naked desire glowed from her face, a wild happiness afraid to admit itself.

“You can. If that’s my mare, I can do what I want with her, and what I want to do is give her away, because I’m going back to Fleet . . . and that mare deserves an owner who will train her, ride her, breed her.” An owner who cared about her; every living thing deserved to be cared about.

“But your herd—”

Esmay shook her head. “I don’t need a herd. It’s enough to know I have my little valley to come home to . . . what would I do with a herd?”

“You’re serious.” Luci was sober again, beginning to believe it would happen, that Esmay was serious, and that different.

“I’m serious. She’s yours. Play polo on her, race her, breed her, whatever . . . she’s yours. Not mine.”

“I don’t understand you . . . but . . . I do want her.” Shy, sounding younger than she was.

“Of course you do,” Esmay said, and felt a century older, at least. Embarrassment hit then—had she seemed this young to Commander Serrano, to everyone who had a decade or more on her? Probably. “Listen—let’s go for a ride. I’ll need to get back in shape if I’m going to visit the valley.” She couldn’t yet say “my valley” even to Luci.

“You could ride her—if you wanted,” Luci said. Esmay could hear the struggle in her voice; she was trying hard to be fair, to return generosity for generosity.

“Heavens, no. I need one of the school horses, something solid and dependable . . . I don’t get any riding in Fleet.”

Grooms tacked up the horses, and they rode out toward the front fields, between the rows of fruit trees. Esmay watched Luci on the mare . . . Luci rode as if her spine were rooted into the horse’s spine, as if they were one being. Esmay, on a stolid gelding with gray around its eyes and muzzle, felt her hip joints creaking as she trotted. But what was her father going to say? Surely he had not expected her to manage a herd from light years away? Had he expected to manage them for her? As Luci cantered the mare in circles around Esmay, she decided to go the whole way.

“Luci—what are you planning to do?”

“Win a championship,” said Luci, grinning. “With this mare—”

“In the long run,” Esmay said. “Strategy, cousin.”

“Oh.” Luci halted the mare, and sat silently a moment, obviously wondering how much to tell her older cousin. Is she safe was written on her face as if with a marker.

“I have a reason for asking,” Esmay said.

“Well . . . I was going to try for the vet course at the Poly, though Mother wants me to study ‘something more appropriate’ at the University. I know there’s no chance of getting on the estate staff here, but if I qualified, I might somewhere else.”

“I suspected as much.” Esmay meant it benignly, but Luci flared up.

“I’m not just dreaming—”

“I know that. Get the hump out of your back. You’re serious, just as I was serious . . . and nobody believed me, either. That’s why I had the idea—”

“What idea?”

Esmay nudged her horse, and it ambled over to Luci’s mare. The mare twitched her ears but otherwise stood still. Esmay lowered her voice. “As you know, my father gave me a herd. The last thing I need is a herd, but if I try to give it back, he’ll be hurt and I’ll hear about it forever.”

Luci’s face relaxed; she almost grinned. “So?”

“So I need someone to manage my herd. Someone who will make sure that the mares go to the right stallions . . . that the foals get the right training, and are actually put on the market—” Family horses almost never went to market. “—And so forth,” Esmay said. “I would expect to compensate the manager, of course. The eye of the master fattens the herd . . . and I will be far away, for a very long time.”

“You’re thinking of me?” Luci breathed. “It’s too much—the mare, and—”

“I like the way you handle her,” Esmay said. “It’s how I’d want my horses handled, if I wanted horses at all . . . and since I have them, that’s what I’d like. You could save up the money for school—I know from experience that it impresses them if you fund your own escape. And you’d get the experience.”

“I’ll do it,” Luci said, grinning. Despite herself, Esmay thought back to the previous night’s conversation. Here was someone for whom prudence could never swamp enthusiasm.

“You didn’t ask what I’m paying,” Esmay said. “You should always find that out first . . . what it’s going to cost, and what you’re going to get.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Luci said. “It’s the chance—”

“It matters,” Esmay said, and surprised herself with the harshness of her voice; the horse under her shifted uneasily. “Chances aren’t what they seem.” Then, at the look on Luci’s face, she stopped herself. Why was she being negative, when she had just been admiring Luci’s impetuosity? “Sorry. Here’s what I want from you—a fair accounting of costs and income. Midsummer—that should give you time to write it up after the foal crop arrives.”

“But how much—” Now Luci looked worried.

“You didn’t ask before. I’ll decide later. Maybe tomorrow.” Esmay nudged her mount, and started off toward the distant line of trees beyond the canter track; her cousin followed.

She had forgotten about the old man at the reception until a servant announced him after lunch, when she had lingered in the kitchen over a second piece of rednut pie smothered in real cream.

“Retired soldier Sebastian Coron, dama, requests a few moments of your time.”

Seb Coron . . . of course she would see him. She wiped the last of the pie from her mouth, and went out to the hall, where he stood at ease, watching one of the younger cousins practice the piano with Sanni standing by, counting the time.

“Reminds me of you, Esmay,” he said when she came forward to shake his hand.

“It reminds me of hours of misery,” Esmay said, smiling. “The untalented and unrhythmic should never be forced to go beyond learning a few scales . . . once we’ve admitted how hard it is, we should be let off.”

“Well, you know, it’s in the old law.” It was, though Esmay had never understood why every child, with or without ability or interest, should be forced through ten years of musical training on a minimum of four instruments. They didn’t make all children learn soldiering.

“Come on in the sitting room,” Esmay said, leading him to the front room where women of the family usually received guests. Her stepmother had redone it again, but the bright floral-patterned covers on the chairs and long padded benches were in a traditional print. This one had more orange and yellow, and less red and pink, than Esmay remembered. “Would you like tea? Or something to drink?” Without waiting for an answer, she rang; she knew that with his arrival the kitchen staff would have started preparing the tray with his favorites, whatever they were.

She settled him in one of the wide low chairs, with the tray at his side, and herself chose a seat to his left, the heart-side, to show her awareness of the family bond.

Old Sebastian twinkled at her. “You have done us proud,” he said. “And it’s all over for you, the bad times, eh?”

Esmay blinked. How could he think that, when she was still in Fleet? She had to expect other combat in the future; surely he realized that. Perhaps he meant the recent trouble.

“I certainly hope I never have to go through a court-martial again,” she said. “Or the mutiny that led to it.”

“You did well, though. That’s not exactly what I meant, though I’m sure it was unpleasant enough. But no more old nightmares?”

Esmay stiffened. How did he know about her nightmares? Had her father confided to this man? She certainly wasn’t about to tell him about them. “I’m doing all right,” she said.

“Good,” he said. He picked up his glass, and sipped. “Ah, this is good. You know, even when I was still active, your father never stinted the good stuff when I came here. Of course, we both understood it was special, not something to be talked about.”

“What?” Esmay said, without much curiosity.

“Your father, he didn’t want me to talk about it, and I could see his point. You’d had that fever, and nearly died. He wasn’t sure what you remembered, and what was the fever dreams.”

Esmay fought her body to stillness. She wanted to shiver; she wanted to gag; she wanted to run away. She had done all those, in past times, without success. “It was the dreams,” she said. “Just the fever, they said, something I’d caught when I ran away.” She managed a dry laugh. “I can’t even remember where I thought I was going, let alone where I got to.” She did remember a nightmare train ride, fragments of something else she tried not to think about.

She did not know what tiny movement—a flicker of eyelid, a tension in the muscles along his jaw—but she knew at once that he knew something. Knew something that she did not, which he longed to convey and felt he must conceal. Her scalp prickled. Did she want to know, and if she did, could she get him to tell her?

“Well, you went to find your father . . . that was simple. Your mother had died, and you wanted him, and he was right there in the midst of a nasty little territorial dispute. That was when the Borlist branch of the Old Believers had decided to pull out of the regional planning web, and take over the upper rift valley.”

Esmay knew about that miscalled dispute: the Califer Uprising had been a civil war, small but intense.

“No one realized you could read that well, let alone that you could read a map . . . you hopped on your pony, with a week’s food, and set off—”

“On a pony?” She could hardly imagine that; she had never liked riding that much. She’d have expected her young self to sneak a ride on a truck bound for town.

Seb looked embarrassed—she couldn’t imagine why—and scratched at his neck. “Back then you rode like a tick on a cowdog, and just as happy. You were hardly ever off your pony, until your mother died, and they were happy enough to see you back on it. Until you disappeared.”

She couldn’t remember that—couldn’t remember a time when she would have chosen to spend all those hours on a horse. What she remembered was how much she hated it, the lessons and the sore muscles and all the work of picking out hoofs and grooming and mucking out a stall. Could this be true, that an illness had wiped out not only her pleasure in horses, but all memory of a time when she had enjoyed them?

“I guess you’d planned pretty well,” he went on, “because they couldn’t pick up your traces anywhere. No one thought of what you’d really done; they thought you’d gotten lost, or gone up in the mountains and had an accident. And no one ever knew the whole story, because you didn’t make a lot of sense when we found you.”

“The fever,” said Esmay. She was sweating now; she could feel it, like a sick slime all over.

“That’s what your father said.” Sebastian had said it before; now his voice echoed with her memory, and her new adult ability to interpret nuances of expression compared the two versions and found hidden disbelief.

“My father said . . . ?” Esmay said, carefully neutral, not looking at his face. Not directly, anyway; she could see the pulse in his throat.

“You’d forgotten it all, with the fever, and all for the better, he said. Don’t bring it up, he said. Well, I guess you know by now it wasn’t all a dream . . . I suppose those Fleet psychnannies dug it out and helped you deal with it, eh?”

She was frozen; she was simmering in her own terror. Cold and hot at once, closer than she wanted to some terrible truth, and yet not able to move away. She could feel his gaze on her head, and knew if she looked up she would not be able to hide her terror and confusion. Instead, she busied her hands among the little dishes of breads and condiments, pouring the tea, handing over a delicate cup and saucer with the spray-pattern touched with silver . . . she could hardly believe her hands were so steady.

“Not that I could have argued with your father, of course. Under the circumstances.”

Under the circumstances Esmay could cheerfully have wrung his neck, but she knew that wouldn’t work.

“It was not only my duty to him as my commander, but . . . he was your father. He knew best. Only I did wonder sometimes if you remembered something from before the fever. If perhaps that was what changed you . . . .”

“Well, my mother had died.” Esmay got that out past her tight throat. Her voice, too, was steady as her hands. How could that be, with terror shaking the roots of her mind? “And I was sick so long—”

“If you’d been my daughter, I think I’d have told you. It helps the trainees to talk things through after a bad engagement.”

“My father thought differently,” Esmay said. Dust was no dryer than her mouth; she felt drought-cracks opening in her mind, bottomless mouths to trap her . . .

“Yes. Well, anyway, I’m glad you had the chance to deal with it in the end. But it must’ve been hard when you had that traitor captain to deal with, that second betrayal—” The almost musing tone of his voice sharpened. “Esmaya! Is something wrong? I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

“It would be most helpful if you could simply tell me the story from your point of view,” Esmay managed to say; her voice was thickening now, the dust compressing into angular blocks of rock-hard clay. “Remember, I had only my own somewhat fragmentary memories to go on, and the psychnannies found them somewhat inadequate.” The psychnannies would have found them inadequate, if they’d found them at all, but they hadn’t. They had assumed that anyone with her background would have had any such problems dealt with earlier. And she, convinced by her family’s insistence that everything in the nightmares was just fever dreams, had been afraid to let them know she had problems. She’d been afraid of being labeled crazy or unstable, unfit for duty . . . rejected, to come home a failure. Was this why her family had assumed she’d fail, even to the point of keeping her trail horse unassigned?

“Perhaps you should ask your father,” Coron said doubtfully.

“I suspect he would be displeased at having his judgment questioned,” Esmay said with all sincerity. “Even by the Fleet’s psychiatric specialists.” Coron nodded. “It would be a help, if you wouldn’t mind.”

“If you’re sure,” Coron said. She had to meet his eyes a moment; she had to endure the worry in them, the tightness of the lines around his eyes, the furrowed brow. “It’s not a pleasant matter—but of course you know that already.”

Nausea bucked in her gut, sending sour signals to her mouth. Not yet, she begged it. Not until I know. “I’m sure,” she said.

It had been a time of riot and civil disorder, when a single small child, if determined and sure of herself, could travel by pony and then by rail some thousand kilometers. “You’d always been good at explaining yourself,” Coron said. “You could come up with a story the moment you were caught out. I suppose that’s why no one really noticed you—you spun some yarn about being sent to an auntie or grandmother, and since you didn’t act scared or confused, and you had enough money, they let you on the trains.”

All this was supposition; they had not been able to trace her path between the time she left the pony—they never found it, but in those days it might well have ended up in someone’s stew pot—and the last part of her journey, the train she’d taken right into disaster.

“The last despatches home had given your father’s station as Buhollow Barracks, and that’s where the train would have gone. But in the meantime the rebels had overrun the eastern end of the county, putting everything they had into an assault aimed at the big arms depot at Bute Bagin. The force at Buhollow Barracks was too small to hold them, so your father had rolled aside to hook around and cut them off from the rear, while the Tenth Cav moved up from Cavender to hit them in the flank.”

“I remember that,” Esmay said. She remembered it from the records, not from real memory. The rebels had counted on her father’s reputation which had never included leaving a plum like Buhollow unprotected . . . they had planned to immobilize his forces there with part of their army, while the rest went on to Bute Bagin and the supplies there. Later, his decision to abandon Buhollow and trap the rebel army would be taught as an example of tactical brilliance. He had done what he could for the town. The civilian population of Buhollow fled ahead of the rebels; they had been told which way to go. Most of them survived.

But Esmay, crammed in amongst refugees from earlier fighting, had ridden the train two stops too far. Both sides had mined the railroad; although the official reports said a rebel mine had blown the low bridge over the Sinets Canal just as the locomotive passed, Esmay had never been sure. Would any government admit its own mines had blown up its own train?

She did remember the enormous jolt that slammed the carriage crooked. They had been going slowly; she had been stuffed between a fat woman with a crying baby and a skinny older boy who kept poking her ribs. The jolt rocked the carriage, but didn’t knock it over. Others weren’t so lucky. She could just recall jumping down from the step—a big jump for her at that age—and following the woman and her baby for no reason than that the woman was a mother. The skinny boy had poked her once more then turned away to follow someone else. Streams of frightened people scurried away from the train, away from the blowing smoke and screams at the front end of the train.

She had lost track of direction; she had forgotten, for the moment, which way she was supposed to go. She had followed the woman and baby . . . and they had been following others . . . and then her legs were too tired, and she stopped.

“There was a little village the locals called Greer’s Crossing,” Coron went on. “Not even one klick from the train track, where the shipping canal turned. You must’ve gone there with others from the train wreck.”

“And that’s when the rebels came through,” Esmay said.

“That’s when the war came through.” Coron paused; she heard the faint slurp as he sipped his tea. She glanced up to meet a gaze that no longer twinkled. “It wasn’t just the rebels, as you know only too well.”

I do? she thought.

“It was right about there the rebels realized that they were being herded into a trap. Say what you like about Chia Valantos, he had a tactical brain between his ears.”

Esmay made a noise intended to indicate agreement.

“And maybe he had good scouts—I don’t know. Anyway, the rebels had been on the old road, because they had some heavy vehicles, and so they had to go through the village, to get across on the bridge. They were making a mess of the village, because the people around there had never been supporters. I suppose they thought the people from the train had something to do with the loyalists . . .”

The old memories forced themselves up, lumping under her calm surface; she could feel her face changing and struggled to keep the muscles still. Her legs had begun to hurt, after the hours on the train, the crash, the fall . . . the woman, even with a baby, had longer legs and took longer steps. She had fallen behind, and by the time she got to the village it was gone. Already the roofs had collapsed; what walls remained were broken and cantways. Smoke blew across streets littered with stones and trash and tree limbs and piles of old clothes. It was noisy; she could not classify the noises except that they scared her. They were too loud; they sounded angry, and tangled in her mind with her father’s voice scolding her. She wasn’t supposed to be so close to whatever made those noises.

Blinded by stinging smoke, she had stumbled over one of the heaps of old clothes, and only then recognized it as a person. A corpse, her adult mind corrected. The child she had been had thought it a silly place for someone to go to sleep, a grown woman, and she had shaken the slack heavy arm, trying to wake an adult to help her find her way. She had not seen death before, not human death—she had not been allowed to see her mother, because of the fever—and it took her a long time to realize that the woman with no face would never pick her up and soothe her and promise that everything would be all right soon.

She had looked around, blinking against the stinging in her eyes that was not all smoke, and saw the other piles of clothes, the other people, the dead . . . and the dying, whose cries she could now recognize. Even across the years, she remembered that the first thought she could recognize was an apology: I’m sorry—I didn’t mean to . . . Even now, she knew this was both necessary and futile. It had not been her fault—she had not caused the war—but she was there, and so far untouched, and for that, if nothing else, she must apologize.

That day, she had stumbled along the broken lane, falling again and again, crying without realizing it, until her legs gave out and she huddled into the corner of a wall, where someone’s garden had once held bright flowers. The noise rose and fell, shadowy figures moving through the smoke, some wearing one color and some another. Most, she knew later, must have been the terrified passengers on the train; some were rebels. Later—later they all wore the same uniform, the uniform she knew, the one her father and uncles wore.

But she didn’t remember. She couldn’t remember, not all of it. She had remembered, and they’d said it was dreams.

“It’d have been better, I always thought, if they’d told you,” Sebastian said. “At least when you got old enough. Bein’ as the man was dead, and couldn’t hurt anyone again, least of all you.”

She did not want to hear this. She did not want to remember this . . . no, she could not. Fever dreams, she thought. Only fever dreams.

“Bad enough for it to happen at all, no matter who did it. The rape of a child—sickening. But to have it one of ours—”

She fixed on the one thing she could stand to know. “I . . . didn’t know he was dead.”

“Well, your father couldn’t tell you that without bringing up the rest of it, could he? He hoped you’d forget the whole thing . . . or think it was just a fever dream.”

He’d said it was a fever dream; he’d said it was over now, that she’d always be safe . . . he’d said he wasn’t angry at her. Yet his anger had hovered around her, a vast cloud, dangerous, blinding her mind as the smoke had blinded her eyes.

“You’re . . . sure?”

“That the bastard died? Oh yes . . . I have no doubt at all.”

The invisible mechanisms whirled, paused, slid into place with a final inaudible crunch. “You killed him?”

“It was that or your father’s career. Officers can’t just kill their men, even animals who rape children. And to wait, to charge him—that’d have brought you into it, and none of us wanted that. Better for me to do it, and take my lumps . . . not that there was anything worse than a stiff chewing out, at the end of it. Mitigating circumstances.”

Or extenuating . . . her mind dove eagerly into that momentary tangle, reminding her that extenuation and mitigation were, although similar, applied to different ends of the judicial process, as it were.

“I’m glad to know that,” Esmay said, for something to say.

“I always said you should be told,” he said. Then he looked embarrassed. “Not that I talked about it, you understand. I said it to myself, I mean. It was no use arguing with your father. And after all, you were his daughter.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Esmay said. She was finding it hard to pay attention; she felt the room drifting slowly away, on a slow spiral to the left.

“And you’re sure you got it all sorted out, all but him being dead, I mean? They helped you in the R.S.S.?”

Esmay tried to drag her mind back to the topic, from which it wanted to shy away. “I’m fine,” she said. “Don’t worry about it.”

“No . . . I was real surprised, you know, when you wanted to go off-planet and join them. Figured you’d had enough combat for any one life . . . but I guess it’s your blood coming out, eh?”

How was she going to get rid of him, politely and discreetly? She could hardly tell him to go away, she had a headache. Suizas did not treat guests that way. But she needed—how she needed—some hours alone.

“Esmaya?” Esmay looked up. Her half-brother Germond grinned shyly at her. “Father said would you come to the conservatory, please?” He turned to Coron. “If you can excuse her, sir?”

“Of course. It’s your family’s turn now—Esmaya, thank you for your time.” He bowed, very formal again at the end, and withdrew.