Once a Hero

Chapter Six

Esmay turned to Germond, now fifteen, all ears and nose and big feet. “What—did Father want?”

“He’s in the conservatory with Uncle Berthol . . . he said you’d be getting tired of listening to old soldiers’ tales, for one thing, and for another he wanted to ask you more about Fleet.”

Her mouth was dry; she could not think. “Tell him . . . tell him Seb’s gone, and I’ll be out in a few minutes. I’ve gone upstairs to . . . to freshen up.” For once, the impenetrable assumptions of Altiplano society worked in her favor. No male would question her need to be alone for a few minutes with an array of plumbing fixtures. Nor would they rush her.

She went up the stairs by instinct; she was not seeing the brass rails holding the carpet snug to the risers, the scuffs on the steps themselves. Her body knew how to get up the stairs, around the corners, where to find the switches that gave her absolute privacy.

She leaned against the wall, turned on the cold-water tap, and put her hands into it. She wasn’t sure why. She wasn’t sure of anything, including the passage of time. The water cut off automatically, just as it would aboard ship, and she nudged the controls again. Abruptly she threw up; the curdled remains of lunch slopped into the clean swirl of water and disappeared down the drain with it. Her stomach heaved again, then settled uneasily. She cupped her hand under the faucet, and drank a handful of the cold, sweet water. Her stomach lurched, but steadied. She had never been prone to nausea. Not even then, not even when the pain was so bad she’d been sure she was being torn apart. The real pain, not the imagined pain induced by fever dreams.

In the mirror, she looked like a stranger—a gaunt old woman with flyaway dark hair, face streaked with tears and vomit. This would never do. Methodically, Esmay took a towel from the rack, wet it, and cleaned her face and hands. She rubbed her face hard with the dry end of the towel, until the blood returned and the greenish tinge of nausea disappeared under a healthy pink. She attacked her hair with damp hands, flattening the loose strands, then dried her hands. The water stopped again, and this time she didn’t turn it back on. She folded the damp towel, and hung it on the used rack.

The woman in the mirror now looked more familiar. Esmay forced a smile, and it looked more natural on that face than it felt on her own. She should put on something, she thought, looking to see if she’d spotted her shirt. A few drops showed, dark against the pale fawn. She would change. She would change into someone else . . . her mind stumbled over something in the smoke that was all she could see.

Still navigating by habit, she unlocked the door, and returned to her own room. By the time she’d taken off the shirt, she knew she’d have to change from the skin out. She did that as quickly as she could, taking what lay on top in her drawers, and glancing at herself only long enough to be sure the wide collar lay flat and untwisted around her neck. The pallor had gone; she looked like Esmay Suiza again.

But was she? Was Esmay Suiza a real person? Could you build a real person on a foundation of lies? She fought her way through the choking dark clouds in her mind, trying to cling to what she remembered, what Seb Coron had told her, to any logic that could connect them.

When the smoke-cloud in her mind cleared, the first thing she recognized was smug relief: she had been right. She had known the truth; she had made no mistakes. Her adult mind intruded: except for the stupidity of leaving home in the first place, the idiocy of a child trying to travel cross-country in the midst of a civil war. She batted that critical voice down. She had been a child; children were, by definition, ignorant of some things. In the essentials—in recognizing what she had seen, in telling the truth about what happened—she had been right.

Rage followed that moment of delight. She had been right, and they had lied to her. They had told her she was mistaken—that she was confused by the fever . . . or was there even a fever? She had started to call up the household medical records before her critical voice pointed out that of course the records would show such an illness, such a hospitalization. It could have been fabricated, all of it—how would she know? And to whom did she want to prove it?

To everyone, at that moment. She wanted to drag the truth before her father, her uncle, even Papa Stefan. She wanted to grab them by the neck, force them to see what she had seen, feel what she had felt, admit that she had in fact endured what she had endured.

But they already knew. Exhaustion followed exhilaration just as it followed fever; she could feel the familiar languor in her veins, dragging her down to immobility, to acquiescence. They knew, and yet they had lied to her.

She could keep her own secret, and let them think theirs safe, run away again as she had run before. They would be comfortable still, indulged by her complicity.

Or she could confront them.

She looked again in the mirror. That was the person she would become, if she became an admiral like Heris Serrano’s aunt. The diffidence, the uncertainty, that had mocked her so often had burned away in the last hour. She did not yet feel what she saw in that face, but she trusted the eyes that blazed out at her.

Would he still be in the conservatory? How long had this taken? The clock surprised her; she had been upstairs only half a local hour. She headed for the conservatory, this time with all senses fully awake. It might have been the first time she came down the stairs . . . she felt the slight give in the sixth from the bottom, noticed a loose tack on the railing side of the carpet, spotted a nick in the railing itself. Every sight, every smell, every sound.

Her father and Berthol were stooped over a tray of bedding plants with one of the gardeners. Her new clarity of vision noticed every detail of the plants, the notched petals of fire-orange and sun-yellow, the lace-cut leaves. The gardener’s dirt-blackened fingernails where his hands were splayed out on the potting table. The red flush along the sides of her uncle’s neck. White lines in the skin of her father’s face, where he had squinted against the sun so long that the creases had not tanned. A loose thread on the button of Berthol’s sleeve button.

Her foot scraped on the tile floor because she let it; her father looked up.

“Esmaya . . . come see the new hybrids. I think they’ll do very well in the front urns . . . I hope old Sebastian didn’t wear you out.”

“He didn’t,” Esmay said. “In fact, I found him quite interesting.” Her voice sounded perfectly calm, perfectly reasonable, to her, but her father started.

“Is something wrong, Esmay?”

“I need to talk to you, Father,” she said, still calm. “Perhaps in your study?”

“Something serious?” he asked, not moving. Rage surged through her.

“Only if you consider a matter of family honor serious,” she said. The gardener’s hands jerked; the plants shivered. The gardener reached for the box of planters, and he murmured something. Her father lifted his chin, and the man grabbed the box and scuttled away, out the back door of the conservatory.

“Do you want me to leave?” her uncle asked, as if he were sure she would say no.

“Please,” she said, this time testing her own power to put a sting in it. He flinched, his eyes shifting to her father, then back to her.

“Esmay, what . . . ?”

“You will know soon enough,” Esmay said. “But I would prefer to speak to Father alone, just now.”

Berthol flushed, but turned away; he did not quite slam the door going out.

“Well, Esmaya? There was no need to be rude.” But her father’s voice had no power in it, and she heard an undertone of fear. The little muscles around his eyes and nose were tense; the contrast between his tanned skin and the untanned creases had almost disappeared. If he’d been a horse, his ears would have been flat and his tail switching nervously. He should be able to put the sum together: she wondered if he would.

She came toward him, running her hand through the fronds of one of the sweetheart palms; it still tickled. “I talked to Seb Coron—or rather, he talked . . . and I found it most interesting.”

“Oh?” He was going to brazen it out.

“You lied to me . . . you said it was all a dream, that it didn’t happen . . .”

For a moment, she thought he would try to pretend he didn’t understand, but then a quick wash of color rose to his cheeks and drained again.

“We did it for you, Esmaya.” That was what she’d expected to hear.

“No. Not for me. For the family, maybe, but not for me.” Her voice did not waver, which surprised her a little. She had decided to keep going even if her voice broke, even if she cried in front of him, which she had not done in years. Why should he be protected from her tears?

“For more than you, I admit.” He looked at her from under those bushy brows, gray now. “For the others—it was better that one child suffer that confusion—”

“Confusion? You call that confusion?” Her body ached with remembered pain, the specific pains that had specific causes. She had tried to scream; she had tried to fight him off; she had even tried to bite. The strong adult hands, hardened by war, had held her down easily; bruising her.

“No, not the injuries, but not being sure what had happened—you couldn’t tell us who, Esmaya; you didn’t really see him. And they said you would forget . . .”

She felt her lips pulling back from her teeth; she saw in her father’s expression what hers had become. “I saw him,” she said. “I don’t know his name, but I saw him.”

He shook his head. “You couldn’t give us any details at the time,” he said. “You were exhausted, terrified—you probably didn’t even see his face. You’ve been in combat now as an adult; you know how confusing it is—”

He doubted. He dared to doubt, even now, her knowledge. A bright ribbon of images from Despite rippled through her mind. Confusing? Perhaps, in terms of organizing information to relate in court, but she could see the faces of those she had killed, and those who had tried to kill her. She always would.

“Show me the regimental roster,” she said, her voice choked with rage. “Show me, and I’ll point him out.”

“You can’t possibly—after all these years—”

“Sebastian says he killed him—that means you know who it is. If I can point him out, that should prove to you that I do remember.” That you were wrong, and I was right. Why it mattered so much to prove this was not a question Esmay wanted to examine. Proving a general wrong was professional suicide and military stupidity. But . . .

“You can’t possibly,” her father said again, but this time with no strength. He led the way to his study without another word; Esmay followed, forcing herself not to strike him down from behind. He moved to the console, and stabbed at the controls. Esmay noticed that his fingers were shaking; she felt a calm satisfaction. Then he stepped back, and she came forward to look.

The faces came up, six to a screen. She stared at them, one part of her mind sure that she would know, and another sure that she wouldn’t. Had her father even called up the right year? He wanted her to fail, that was clear enough. He might have cheated—but she could not believe that of him, even now.

Suizas did not lie . . . and he was her father.

He had lied before, because he was her father. She tore her mind away from that dilemma and stared at the screen.

She did not recognize most of the faces at all. She had no reason to; she had not been to Buhollow Barracks after her father was posted there. She found a few faces vaguely familiar, but unthreatening. They would have been men who had served with her father before, even among the household guard at the estancia. Among them, a much younger Sebastian Coron, whom she recognized instantly . . . so her memory was clear in some details that far back.

She could hear her father’s breathing, as she scrolled through the list. She did not look at him. It was hard enough to focus on the screen, to breathe through the tightness in her throat. Screen after screen . . . she heard her father shift in his chair, but he did not interrupt. Someone came to the door; she heard the rustle of clothing, but did not look up. Her father must have gestured, for without a word she heard the rustle of clothing retreat, and the gentle thud of the door as it shut.

Through the entire enlisted ranks, and she had not found that face her mind refused to show her. Doubts chilled her. The face she remembered had been contorted with whatever emotion makes men rape children . . . she might never find it among these solemn, almost expressionless faces in the catalog. It must be here . . . surely Coron would have told her if it had been someone in another unit, or an officer.

Or would he? She made herself keep going, to the officer ranks. There at the head was her father, no gray in his hair, his mouth one long firm line. Beneath, in descending order, the . . . her breath caught. Yes. Her heart fluttered then raced thunderously in her chest, spurred by the old fear. He stared out of the page, sleek and handsome, the honey-colored hair swept back . . . she remembered it darker, matted with sweat and dirt. But no doubt at all, not one.

She searched his face for clues to his choices . . . for some mark of depravity. Nothing. Regular features, clear gray eyes—coloring not that common on Altiplano, but much prized. The little button of an honor graduate, the braid on his epaulet that declared him an eldest son, of whom more was expected. His mouth was set in a straight line, a conscious copy of her father’s . . . it looked no crueler. His name . . . she knew his name. She knew his family. She had danced with his younger brothers, at the Harvest Games, the year before she left Altiplano for the stars.

Her mouth was too dry to speak. She struggled to swallow, to clear her tongue. She had struggled then, too. Finally she got out a word: “This.” She laid her finger on the image, surprised at the steadiness of her hand; her finger didn’t tremble at all.

Her father got up; she could hear him coming up behind her and fought not to flinch away. He grunted first, as if someone had slugged him in the belly. “Gods! You did—how did you—?”

Anger released her tongue. “I told you. I remember.”

“Esmaya . . .” It was a groan, a plea, and his hand on her hair was another. She slid aside from it, pushing herself away from the console, scrambling out of the chair.

“I didn’t know his name,” she said. Amazingly, it was easy to keep her tone even, her words crisp. “I was too young to have been introduced, even if he’d been at our house before. I couldn’t tell you his name, or give the kind of description that an adult might have been able to give. But I knew. You did not show me the rolls then, did you?”

Her father’s face, when she looked, might have been carven in bleached wood; it looked dry and stiff, unnatural. Was that her vision, or his reality? Her gaze wandered away, around the room, just noticing the familiar things before moving on to something else. In her mind, more and more of the certainties shifted, as if stone walls had been only scenery painted on movable screens. What did she really know about herself, about her past? What could she rely on?

Against this chaos the past years in Fleet stood firm: she knew what had happened there. From her first day in the prep school to the last day of the court-martial, she knew exactly what she had done, and who had done what to her. She had created that world for herself; she could trust it. Admiral Vida Serrano, an easy match for her father, had never lied to her . . . had never screened anyone else, at her expense.

Whatever she had had to suppress, to limit, in herself in order to make this haven was expendable. She didn’t need to find the part of herself that had loved to ride, or paint, or play antique instruments . . . she needed to keep herself safe, and she had managed that quite well. She could give up Altiplano; she had already done it.

“Esmaya . . . I’m sorry.” He probably was, she let herself think, but it didn’t matter. He was sorry too late and too little. “If—since you remember, you probably need therapy.”

“Therapy here?” That got out before she could control the emotion in it, the scorn and anger. “Here, where the therapists told me it was all my imagination, all fever dreams?”

“I’m sorry,” he said, but this time with an edge of irritation. She knew that tone; he could apologize, but that was supposed to be the end of it. She was supposed to accept that apology and let it go. Not this time. Not again. “I—we—made a mistake, Esmaya. We can’t change that now; it’s past. I can’t possibly convince you how badly I feel about it—that it was a mistake—but there were reasons. I asked advice . . .”

“Don’t,” she said harshly. “Don’t make excuses. I’m not stupid; I can see what you would like to call the realities. He—” she could not bring herself to dirty her mouth with the name. “He was an officer, the son of a friend; there was a civil war in progress; you could not risk a feud—” Memory reminded her that the young man’s father had commanded a sizable force himself. Not merely a feud, but potentially a lost war. Her military training argued that a child’s pain—even her pain—weighed less than an entire campaign. But the child she had been, the child whose pain still shaped her reactions, the child whose witness had been denied, refused that easy answer. She had not been the only victim—and for the victims, no victories sufficed . . . the victories were not for them, did not help them. Yet defeat promised only more of the same. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to force back all the feelings that wanted to escape, shut them back into the darkness. “It did not take rejuvenation to make you prudent,” she said, throwing at him the only new weapon she had.

A short silence, during which her father’s breathing was almost as harsh as hers had been that bitter day.

“You need help, Esmaya,” her father said, finally. His voice was almost back to normal, warm and steady; the general in command of himself, a lifetime’s habit. She wanted to relax into the promise of fatherly love and protection.

She dared not. “Probably I do,” she said. “But not here. Not now.” Not with the father who had betrayed her.

“You won’t come back,” he said. He had never been stupid, only selfish. That wasn’t entirely fair, but neither was he. Now he looked at her, as straight a look as he might have given a commander he respected. “You won’t come back again, will you?”

She couldn’t imagine coming back, but she wasn’t quite ready for that negative commitment. “I don’t know. Probably not, but—you might as well know . . . I’ve worked out a deal with Luci for the herd.”

He nodded. “Good. I shouldn’t have done that, but . . . I suppose I was still hoping you’d come home for good, especially when they treated you like that.”

And you treated me better? hovered on her lips but did not quite emerge. Her father seemed to hear it anyway.

“I understand,” he said. He didn’t, but she wasn’t going to argue, not now. Now she wanted to get away, far away, and have some time alone. She suspected she would have to spend some time with Fleet psychnannies in the end, but for now . . . “Please, Esmaya,” he said. “Get help in your Fleet, if you won’t accept it here.”

“I’m going to ride out to the valley,” she said, ignoring that. He had no right to tell her what to do about the wound he’d inflicted. “Just for a day. Tomorrow. I don’t want company.”

“I understand,” he said again.

“No surveillance,” she said, meeting his gaze squarely. He blinked first.

“No surveillance,” he agreed. “But if you stay overnight, please let us know.”

“Of course,” she said, her voice relaxing even as his had. They were alike in ways she had never noticed; even in her anger she suddenly felt the urge to tell him about the mutiny, knowing that he would not find her actions surprising, inexplicable, as the Familias officers had.

She walked out into the afternoon, feeling nothing but a great light emptiness, as if she were a seed pod at summer’s end, ready to blow away on the first autumn stormwind. Across the gravel drive, crunching under her feet. Between the beds of flowers whose color hurt her eyes. Across the sunlit fields beyond, where shadows shifted and moved and called her name, but she did not answer.

She came back when the sun fell behind the distant mountains, tired in ways that had nothing to do with walking however far she’d walked, and went into the dim entrance hall, where the smell of food and clatter of dishes stopped her short.

“Dama?” Esmay whirled, but it was one of the servants, offering a tray with a cup and a folded note. She shook her head to the cup of tea, took the note, and went upstairs. No one followed, no one intruded. She lay the note on her bed, and went down the hall to the bathroom.

The note, as she’d half expected, was from her great-grandmother. Your father told me I am now free to talk to you. Come see me. She put it on the shelf above the clothes pole and thought about it. She had always assumed that her father obeyed his grandmother, as she obeyed her grandfather; though men and women had different roles, elders always ruled. She had thought so, anyway, imagining the chain of authority coming down, link by link, from eldest to youngest through all the generations.

Had her great-grandmother really known the truth and not told her? How had her father gained so much power?

She lay back on the bed, and as the hours passed she could not find the strength to move, to get up and bathe or change her clothes or even turn away from the square of sky she could see darkening from blue to gray to the star-spangled midnight. It was all she could do to blink her eyes when they burned from staring at the window; it was all she could do to breathe.

In the first light of dawn, she struggled up, stiff and miserable. How many mornings she had wakened stiff and miserable, hoping to see no one on the way to the baths, on the way out . . . and here she was again, supposedly a hero—she would have laughed at the thought if she could—once more alone at the top of her father’s house, once more awake and miserable after a sleepless night.

She told herself, firmly, in the tone she thought Admiral Serrano would use, to get a grip on herself. A deep breath of the morning air, sweet-scented with the nightblooming flowers on the house wall. She made it to the bathroom, showered, brushed her teeth. In her room she dressed in riding clothes; when she came down the stairs she heard the familiar clatter in the kitchen where the cooks were already at work. If she put her head in, hoping for a taste of the first baking, they’d want to talk to her. She went on, past the kitchen, to the storeroom. Inside on the right, if the custom hadn’t changed, was a stone jar of trail bread. Anyone could grab a handful, if headed out to do early chores.

The stable, busy as always by daylight . . . the grooms and their helpers scurrying from stall to stall, buckets clattering. She went to the stable office, where she found her name at the top of the list of the day’s riders. Her father had done that, probably the night before, and she felt no gratitude. In another hand, someone had written in a horse’s name, Sam.

“Dama?” One of the grooms. “When you’re ready, dama.”

“I’m ready,” Esmay said through a dry throat. She ought to have taken a water bottle too, but she didn’t want to go back for it. The groom went ahead of her, down the aisle of that barn and into another and out again into the small training ring, where a bored brown horse leaned its chin on the rail where it was tied. A trail saddle, slicker tied neatly behind the cantle, saddlebags, water bottle . . . her father must have specified that, too. She hadn’t needed to take the trail bread. A trail bridle, easy to unclip the bit so the horse could graze, a long lead-line now clipped into the hitching rail’s permanent loops.

The groom offered his linked hands, and she mounted; he unclipped the lead and handed her the end to tuck into the saddle ring. “He is good, but not too fast,” the groom said, and opened the gate into the upper pastures.

She turned the horse’s head onto the trail that would, hours later, lead to her valley. Eventually her stiff body relaxed into the rhythm of its walk, and she made herself look around. Morning light lit the recesses of the mountains on her right, and the vast rolling pastures that spread from their foot as far east as she could see.

She could remember riding out here from childhood. She had always taken a deep breath, going out the gate, because it meant freedom. Thousands of hectares, dozens of trails, hidden wooded hollows even in this open grazing land, and all the intricate topography of the mountains . . . no one could find her, once she was out of sight of the house. Or so she’d thought.

She took the deep breath, and it caught in her throat. Anger sat on one shoulder, and grief on the other; the stink of old lies filled her nose and she could not think of anything else. She had lived through the assault itself—she had, thanks to Seb Coron, outlived the assailant. But she had not outlived the effects . . . worst of all effects, the lies.

The horse ambled on, carrying her along as time did, mere passage without change . . . without the right change . . . without healing. She could ride forever—the horse slowed, and she looked up to find they’d come to a fork in the trail; she legged it to the right—and it would not help. Nothing would help. Nothing could help. Nothing on Altiplano, at least.

At the second fork, she turned right again. It was stupid, going to the valley when she felt like this, and yet it had helped before. At other bad times in her life, she had gone there and found peace, at least for awhile. She rode on, seeing little, hearing little. It hurt so much. It hurt beyond hurting, to the point where pain became a white fog, as the physical pain had been then.

She argued with herself, part of her defending her family even now. It wasn’t true they had done nothing: the man was dead. But that was Seb Coron, doing it for her father, not her father doing it for her. And what if Coron had lied about that? It wasn’t true that her father hadn’t cared: he’d done what he thought would help. But it hadn’t helped, and he hadn’t changed his mind. He, whose rule had been “If one thing doesn’t work, try another.”

She rode beside the creek now, but its spring-full rushing made only a white noise she found annoying. It was too loud. In the shade of the trees, she felt cold; in the sun she felt scorched. The horse sighed, and pulled a little toward the water. She halted it, clambered off feeling every stiff muscle, and led it down to drink. It laid its lips on the water and sucked; she could see the gulps rising up its gullet. She waited until it was finished, until it lifted its head and gave her a look and then tried to stray off toward some buttonweed twigs. She didn’t want to climb back on, but she had to.

She walked instead, leading the horse, until her legs felt better. By the sun, it was late morning. She didn’t really want to go on to the valley but where else could she go? Someone would ask, knowing where she always went . . . she pulled herself back into the saddle, and rode on.

The valley was smaller than she remembered, and she could feel nothing for it. The pines, the poplars, the creek, the meadow. She looked around it, trying to feel something . . . it was hers, it would always be hers . . . but all she felt was pain and emptiness. She slid off the horse and took the bit out of its mouth. She could walk around and let it graze for an hour before heading back. She remembered to loosen the girth, then took down a water bottle and drank. Her body wanted food, but her mind did not; she made it halfway through the lunch the cooks had packed for her before her mind won the battle, and she threw up what she’d eaten.

She felt faint, then, and sat on the cold ground with her head down on her knees; the horse snatched at the grass nearby, the ripping and chewing of grass punctuating her thoughts. What could she do? Emptiness behind her, emptiness before her.

In the middle of that emptiness, those few vivid moments when she had done something right, and saved someone else. Heris Serrano. Vida Serrano. What would they say now, if they knew all this? Would it explain what the admiral had wanted explained? Would it change anything? Or would it be worse, far worse, to let them know what had happened to her? She already had black marks against her; she had known from childhood that nothing in a military career is ever completely forgotten or forgiven. If she became not only the colorless, ordinary young officer from a backwoods planet, who just happened to do the right thing once and save a Serrano neck . . . if she admitted that she was damaged, fractured, prone to nightmares . . . that had to put her in more jeopardy. That had to risk being thrown out, sent home . . . except she had no home. Not this valley, not anywhere.

When her head cleared a little, she made herself drink again, and eat the other half of lunch. This time it stayed down. It tasted like dust and wood, but it stayed down.

She was home well before dark, handing over the dry, cool horse to the groom with thanks. Her stepmother hovered in the hall; Esmay nodded politely.

“I rode too far,” she said. “I need a long bath, and bed.”

“Could I send up a tray?” her stepmother asked. It was not her stepmother’s fault. It had never been her stepmother’s fault; she wasn’t sure her stepmother even knew. If her father had kept it such a secret, perhaps she didn’t know even now.

“Thank you,” Esmay said. “Soup and bread would be fine—I’m just too tired.”

She was able to get herself in and out of the bath, and she ate the food on the tray when it came. She put the tray back out in the hall, and lay on the bed. She could just see the corner of her great-grandmother’s note on its shelf. She didn’t want to see it; she didn’t want to see anything.

The next morning was marginally better. Luci, who clearly knew nothing, wanted her to come watch a schooling session with the brown mare. Esmay could think of no polite way out of it, and partway through the session came out of herself far enough to notice that the problem with the canter depart was Luci’s failure to keep her outside hip in place. Luci accepted this with good grace, and offered a tube of liniment for Esmay’s obvious stiffness. They went in to lunch together.

In the afternoon, her conscience would not let her avoid her great-grandmother any longer.

“You are very angry with me,” her great-grandmother said, not looking up from her embroidery. She had to use a thick lens and a special light, but she worked on it every day, Luci had said.

“I am angry,” Esmay said. “Mostly with him, I think.” Meaning her father, which surely her great-grandmother knew.

“I am still angry with him,” her great-grandmother said. “But I’m too old to put much energy into the anger. It’s very tiring, anger, so I ration it. A sharp word a day, perhaps.”

Esmay suspected humor at her expense, but the old woman’s face had a soft vulnerability that she’d never noticed before.

“I will say I was wrong, Esmaya. It was how I was brought up, but it was still wrong of me. Wrong not to tell you, and wrong to leave you as I did.”

“I forgive you,” Esmay said quickly. The old woman looked at her.

“Don’t do that. Don’t lie to me, of all people. Lies added to lies never make truth. You don’t forgive me—you can’t forgive me that fast.”

“I don’t . . . hate you.”

“Don’t hate your father, either. Be angry with him, yes: he has hurt you and lied to you, and anger is appropriate. You need not forgive him too soon, any more than you forgive me. But don’t hate, because it is not natural to you, and it will destroy you.”

“I’m going away, as soon as I can,” Esmay said. “And I’m not coming back.”

“I know.” Again, a sense of vulnerability, but not intended to sway her decision. Her chin firmed. “Luci told me about the herd. You are right, and I will argue for Luci when the time comes.”

“Thank you,” Esmay said. It was all she could say; she kissed the old woman and went away.

The days crept by, then the weeks. She counted them off; she would not cause a scandal by moving to the city for the rest of her leave, but she could not help watching the calendar. Her resolve had hardened: she would go, and never return. She would find someone—not Luci, who had no feel for it, but someone else—to become the valley’s guardian. Nothing here meant anything to her now but pain and sorrow; the very food tasted bad in her mouth. She and her father had spoken each day of other things; she had been amazed at both of them, the way they could evade any mention of or reference to that disastrous afternoon. Her stepmother took her shopping in the city; she allowed herself to be draped in suitable clothes; she packed them into her duffel to take along.

Then it was the last week . . . the last five days . . . the last four. She woke one morning stabbed by the sorrow that she had been in her valley, but she had not seen it. She had to go one more time; she had to try to salvage something, some real memory that was also a good memory, from her childhood. She had been riding almost every day, just to keep Luci company, so if there was a horse free, she could go now, today.

For the dama, there was always a horse free. A trail horse? Of course, dama, and the saddle, and the bridle. And might the groom suggest that this horse accepted hobbles well? Very good. She went back into the kitchen, and collected a lunch. She felt, if not happy, at least positive . . . the pull of Fleet, she thought, the knowledge that in just a few days she would be back in her new home, forever.

The valley opened before her, magical again, as it had been in her childhood . . . as she would remember it in the moment of her death. It hardly deserved the name of “valley,” although when Esmay had first seen it, she’d been so young it seemed large. Now she could see that what she remembered was merely a saucer in the side of the mountain, a grassy glade in which a small pool trickled away in a murmuring stream that would become a rushing noisy stream only further down. On one side were the dark pines, secretive, rising from rocky ledges, and facing them were the white-boled poplars with their dancing leaves. In this brief mountain spring, the new grass was spangled with pink and yellow and white, the windflowers and snowflowers . . . a few weeks later, the tall scarlet and blue lupines would bloom, but now all the flowers lay close to the ground.

Esmay leaned back in the saddle and took in a deep breath. She wanted to breathe in and in, filling herself with the resinous scent of pine, the crisp scent of mint and grass, the sweetness of the flowers, the tang of poplar and even the sour rank smell of the lush weeds near the water. She could feel tears rising, and she clamped down on her emotions. Instead of crying, she dismounted, and led her horse forward to drink from the pool. Then she removed the saddlebags, and slung them over her shoulder. She led the horse to the fallen pine—still there after all these years—and unsaddled it; she put the saddle over the leaning trunk, then hobbled the horse before removing the bridle.

The horse worked its way back out into the sunshine, in the meadow grass, where it set to grazing. Esmay settled herself on the convenient rock she had placed years before, and leaned back against the saddle. She unbuckled the left saddlebag and took out the meat-filled pastries Veronica had packed. She would have five hours of peace here, before she had to start back.

She could hardly believe it was hers now. She belonged to it, to this chill rock with its multicolored lichens, to the trees and the grass, to the mountain itself . . . but by law and custom, as their saying went, it was now hers. By custom and law she could bar anyone from trespassing here . . . she could fence it, shield it, build a house here that no one ever entered but herself.

It had been her dearest dream, once. A little cabin, one or two rooms, all to herself, with no memories in it, here in this golden place. She had been a child then; in her daydream, food had appeared on the table without any effort of hers. Breakfast had been . . . had been cereal with cream and honey. Someone else, some invisible magical person, had washed the sticky bowl. She had always been out for lunch, usually perched on a rock high above, watching the sky. Dinner, in those dreams, had been fish from the stream, sweet-fleshed mountain trout, lightly fried.

Not this stream; it was too small, but downstream a few kilometers. She had fished there, the time she camped here for a week: reality, not dreams, by then, the summer she was eleven. The fish were as tasty as she’d imagined, but the hike back and forth had convinced her that she would have to find another food source.

Papa Stefan had been furious; so had her father, when he came back from the situation in Kharfra (there was always a Situation in Kharfra). Her stepmother had panicked, convinced that Esmay had killed herself . . . remembering that unsavory row, Esmay felt herself knotting up, the cold of the stone striking deep. She pushed herself off the rock and walked out into the sun, stretching out her arms to it.

Even at eleven she had known she would never kill herself, no matter what. Had Arris ever told her father? Probably not. She would have been afraid to introduce any more tension, any more difficulty, between father and daughter. Poor Arris, Esmay thought, closing her eyes against the sun as she lifted her face to it. She had been six years too late with her sympathy, six years too late with her shock and horror. Now she could understand how futile Arris must have felt, with a stepdaughter so awkward, so independent.

Esmay walked down the slope to the open grass. She crouched, putting a hand to the ground. It was cool—only on the hottest midsummer day would the ground feel warm up here—but not as cold as the rock. She let herself down onto the grass, and leaned back with her hands clasped behind her head. Above, the morning sky burned blue, the exact blue that felt right, that made her happiest. She had never found that blue on another planet. Under her shoulders and back, the land upheld her with just enough pressure.

“You’re not making it easy,” she said to the glade. Here and now, she could not imagine leaving Altiplano forever, giving this up forever. The horse, a few rods away, waggled an ear at her but went on munching.

She stretched out on her side, and looked at the flowers, reminding herself of their names. Some were original terraforming rootstock, and others had been developed here, for this particular world, from Terran gene lines. Pink, yellow, white, a few of the tiny blue-violet starry ones she had privately named wish-stars. She had had private names for all of them really, taken from the plant names in the old stories, whether or not they were really related. Campion and rosemary and primrose sounded pretty, so she used them; harebell sounded silly to her, so she didn’t. She touched them now with a fingertip, renaming them: pink rosemary, yellow campion, crisp white primroses. It was her valley, these were her flowers, and she could give them her names. Forever.

She looked over at the horse. It was grazing steadily, not so much as an earflick to indicate any danger. She leaned her head back on her arm again. She could feel the warmth of the sun where it touched her, and the coolness of the shadows. She felt herself relaxing, as she had not relaxed since she arrived—or for how long before?—and let her eyelids sag shut. She rolled her face into the fragrant grass to get the annoying sun off her eyelids . . .

And woke with a jerk and a cry as a shadow stooped over her. Even as she lunged up, she recognized the horse. It snorted and plunged away, fighting the hobbles, frightened because she was.

It had only wanted a treat, she told herself. Her heart was racing; she felt sick to her stomach. The horse had settled uneasily a short distance away, watching her with pricked ears.

“You scared me,” Esmay said to the horse. It blew a long rattling sigh at her, meaning Me, too. “It was your shadow,” Esmay said. “Sorry.” She looked around. She had slept at least an hour, more likely two, and she could feel the heat of sunburn on her ear. She had worn a hat . . . but not when she lay down. Idiot.

When her heart slowed, she felt better, rested. Lunch, her stomach reminded her. She walked back to the rock, shaking the kinks out of legs and arms, and then took her hat and the lunch sack back into the sun. Now she was ready for that meat pasty, and the horse would enjoy the apple.

After lunch, she walked down by the stream, and let her mind loose again. She had come home, and found the truth, and it had not killed her. She didn’t like it—it hurt, and she knew it would continue to hurt—but she had survived the first terrifying hours as she had survived the initial assault in childhood. She felt shaky, but not in danger of dissolution.

Was she ready to give this up, this lovely valley that had helped her cling to sanity so often? The stream chuckled and splashed at her feet; she knelt and put her hand into its icy flow. She loved this sound, the smell of the pungent herbs on its bank, the feel of icy water on her hands and face when she knelt to drink. She loved the heavy tonk of stone on stone when she stood on the uneven one that rocked back and forth.

She did not have to decide now. She had years . . . if she stayed in Fleet, if she qualified for rejuvenation, she had many, many years. Long after her father died, long after everyone who had betrayed her died, she could come home to this valley, still young enough to enjoy it. She could build her cabin and live here in peace. It would not have to hurt to return; she could avoid that pain just by persisting.

Against this vision rose the vivid, eager face of her cousin Luci, Luci willing to risk struggle, conflict, pain . . . the opposite of prudence. But Luci had not suffered what she had suffered. Tears burned in her eyes again. If she gained her peaceful valley at the end by simply outlasting those who had betrayed her . . . Luci would be old, perhaps dead . . . because how many normal lifetimes would she live, before she had earned retirement and the peace of her valley?

She would like to have Luci for a friend as well as a business partner, Luci who now looked up to her, as she could not recall anyone in the family looking up to her before.

“It’s not fair,” she said to the trees and the slopes and the gurgling water. An icy breeze slid down the creek bed and chilled her. Stupid complaint; life was not about fairness. “He lied to me!” she screamed suddenly. The horse threw up its head, ears pointed at her; somewhere upstream jays squalled and battered their way through thickset twigs.

Then it was quiet again. The horse still watched her with the suspicion of the edible for the eater, but the jays had flown away, their scolding voices diminishing. The water gurgled as before; the breeze failed and came again like the breath of some vast being larger than mountains. Esmay felt her rage draining away with it, not really gone but its immediate pressure eased.

She spent another hour wandering around the glade, drifting in and out of moods like the clouds drifting in and out of sight above the slopes. Sweet memories of her childhood trips—of learning to climb on the boulders at the foot of the cliff, of the time she found a rare fire-tailed salamander under the ledge of the creek’s largest pool—swept over and under the other memories, the bad ones. She thought about climbing the cliff again, but she had not brought any climbing gear, and her legs were already stiff and sore from riding.

Finally, as the afternoon shadows began to climb the boulders, she caught and saddled the horse again. She found herself wondering if her father had told Papa Stefan . . . or only Great-grandmother. She wanted to be furious with Great-grandmother for not overruling her father, but she had used up her store of anger on her father. And besides—when she’d come back from the hospital, her great-grandmother had not been in the house at all. Was that why she had moved away—or been sent away?

“I am still an idiot child,” she said to the horse, as she unlooped the hobbles and prepared to mount. The horse eyed her and flicked an ear. “Yes, and I scared you out of your wits, didn’t I? You’re not used to that kind of behavior from Suizas.”

She rode down the shadowy trail beside the stream deep in thought. How many of the family knew the truth, or had known it? Whom, besides Luci, could she trust?

The upper pastures, when she came to them, were still in sunlight, out of the shadow of the mountains. Far away to the south, she saw a drift of cattle moving slowly. In the distance, the buildings of the estancia were nested in green trees like little toys, bright-painted. For some reason she felt a rush of joy; it passed through her to the horse, which broke into a trot. She didn’t feel her stiffness; without realizing she was going to, she legged the horse into a canter, and then let it extend into a gallop. Wind burned in her face; her hair streamed back; she could feel each separate tug on her scalp and the power of the galloping animal beneath her lifted her beyond fear or anger.

She walked the last mile in, as she had been trained to do, and grinned at Luci who was just coming in from polo practice when they met in the lane.

“A good ride?” asked Luci. “Was that you we saw galloping in the upper fields?”

“Yes,” Esmay said. “I think I’ve remembered how to ride.”

Luci looked worried, and Esmay laughed.

“The deal is good, Luci—I’m going back to Fleet. But I’d forgotten how much fun it can be.”

“You . . . haven’t seemed very happy.”

“No. I haven’t been, but I will be. My place is out there, as yours is here.”

They rode in together; Esmay did not have to say more, because Luci was ready to talk for hours about the brown mare’s talents and her own ambitions.