by Jaleta Clegg
"Have you ever heard of Rowan?" I asked.
His eyes went wide before crumpling in frustration. "I know I know it."
"Like you know my face," I said.
"Different," he said, shaking his head. "I can't explain how. It's like telling someone who's blind the difference between two shades of green."
"Rowan. How does it connect to Jericho? Or the silver lady?"
"I don't know," he said, defeated by the blocks in his mind.
"Don't worry about it," I said, tucking the paper into a pocket. "We'll figure it out." Before it got us killed, I thought but didn't say.
I found one other item in the box that wasn't a necklace. One of the pouches, a deep blue one, contained a ring instead of a necklace. The ring was heavy, an ornately carved wreath of leaves and berries cast in antique gold with three letters inscribed on the inner band. They weren't letters from Standard, the language everyone spoke if they wanted to participate in anything within the Empire. They definitely weren't characters from the Sessimoniss language, which didn't surprise me. I was the only non-Sessimoniss in the Empire who could read their language. They were strange, all sharp angles and straight lines.
Mart took the ring from me, turning it slowly between his fingers. He saw the letters and frowned. "They should be familiar, but they aren't. I'm sorry." He handed the ring back to me.
"Maybe Larella can help you get your memories back," I suggested.
"They're blocked for a very good reason," Mart said. "It would help if I could tell you what the reason is, but if I knew then they wouldn't be blocked."
I slid the ring on the middle finger of my right hand, the only one it even came close to fitting. It was big, solid and heavy on my finger. "I'll show it to the others. Maybe one of them will recognize it." It was a long shot, but who knew what odd bits of information the others had in their heads.
We finished sorting and counting the necklaces. I entered the information in the handcomp, filing it away with all the other information on our cargo. Mart excused himself, claiming he was tired. He still looked haunted, worn through, although not as badly as when I'd first run into him. He scooped up Ghost on his way out of the cargo bay.
I poked through the other bins, looking for a way to kill time. It was still several hours until dinner. I knew what was in each bin. I'd sorted and catalogued and filed and bought most of it. I finally settled on doing my exercises. The cargo bay was narrow, but the exercises were designed with small spaces in mind. I'd neglected them too often in the past. I knew trouble was coming this time. I wanted to be ready for it, physically at least. I pushed my way through the stretches and limbered up.
It took an hour to really work my way through all of the exercises. I was hot and sweaty but I felt good when I finished.
Larella had cleaned all of her things up. The bathroom wasn't as empty as I normally kept it, but I could live with her presence there. I showered and dressed in clean clothes. And puttered away another hour doing my laundry and cleaning my cabin.
We played cards after dinner.
Clark took one look at the three of us and claimed he really needed to help Beryn in the engine room. Mart retreated to his cabin with the cat.
"Why do I suddenly feel very nervous?" Jerimon asked. But he agreed to play cards. We even let him use his marked deck. He thought I didn't know they were marked.
He still lost, miserably. Larella had been well coached. She passed all the right signals. And kept Jerimon distracted. I had a hard time keeping a straight face.
"This isn't fair," Jerimon finally complained. He was in the hole over a thousand points and was doing dishes for a week straight.
"Perfectly fair, Jerimon," I said. "You marked the cards and we're not complaining."
"That's because you aren't losing," he said.
"You aren't very good at cards, are you?" Larella asked, her voice dripping with sympathy. She patted his hand.
"I'm very good at cards," he corrected. "I'm not in the same class as you cheaters, though. Let's play without cheating and see how you do."
I got out my deck, the one that wasn't marked, and shuffled. Jerimon insisted on examining them. I made sure he didn't mark them as he handled them.
"Satisfied?" I asked him.
"No signals, no messages, no whatever," he warned.
We didn't cheat, not much, and he still lost. Larella was a lot better than she let on. She had Jerimon completely fooled.
"We could start running a card scam and get rich," I said as I gathered up the cards to deal again.
"Too dangerous," Jerimon said.
"Less dangerous than most of the things I do," I said.
We played until Jerimon finally gave up in complete disgust. He had dishes for the next month and cleaning all the bathrooms on the ship at least twice.
"Take pity on him," Clark said, watching Jerimon retreat. He and Beryn had shown up to raid the galley.
"Why?" Jasyn asked in mock innocence. "Try the cookies in the tin. Larella gave me the recipe."
"Do you play Crystals?" Clark asked Larella as he dipped into the tin. The cookies were tiny, crunchy things. He took out a handful.
"Never heard of them," she said. "I'm not much good at games."
"I play a bit," Beryn said. It was a surprise to me. That was the first indication he'd given that he did anything other than tinker with engines.
"You want to play tomorrow?" Jasyn asked.
"Which rules?" Beryn asked.
Larella and I left them deep in a discussion about neutral zones and redshift.
"You don't play Crystals?" Larella asked me when we were in the cabin.
"I'm lousy at it. Even when they try to let me win I lose. They'll be playing it all day. A four person game takes hours if they're any good at it. And they are."
"Good," she said, surprising me. "I want to spend some time tomorrow with you and Mart. We can try crystal readings. I brought my cards with me, too." She wasn't referring to playing cards. "I want to try reading Mart. I'm not nearly as good at it as Lady Rina, but maybe it will tell us something."
"Explain to me what you did at lunch." I sat on my bunk and pulled my boots off.
Her answer was muffled in her dress as she pulled it off. She shook it out and pulled on a pair of silky gray pajamas.
"Do you usually sleep in your clothes?" she asked me, head cocked to the side. "It isn't good for your energies. You should wear something red, not pajamas. More like a nightgown."
"What does this have to do with anything? I prefer to be in my clothes when emergencies happen." They happened all too frequently in my life. I'd been accused of being obsessed with wearing my boots and keeping my pockets full of useful items. It made me feel more secure.
"The way you dress at night has an effect on your sleep," Larella said patiently. "It influences your dreams."
"So, if I wear a red nightie, I won't have nightmares?"
"It wouldn't hurt to try," Larella suggested. She used my bunk to step on as she got into her own. "Do you have many nightmares?"
"Not anymore," I said. I only had a bad one every couple of weeks now instead of several times a night.
She hung her head over the bunk to look at me. Her curls tumbled around her round face. "You should try it. You have the perfect nightgown. I saw it when I was putting my clothes away." Her head popped back into her own bunk. "You should try a different scent of shampoo. Something with lavender."
I stood up and studied her. My eyes were on a level with hers as she lay in her bunk.
"So, the colors I wear and the soaps I use affect my aura?"
"Everything you do affects it." She rolled onto her side and propped her head on one hand. "You should take better care of yourself. It will improve your aura. Then maybe you won't be so grouchy." She frowned and brushed her hand over my hair. "Why is your hair purple? I thought it was just the light earlier."
"Bad dye job," I said.
"Tomorrow," she said and yawned daintily.
"I'll help you sort your things."
"Are you going to tell me to wear dresses and go barefoot?" I asked suspiciously.
"Only if you want to," she said, lying back down. "Your shipsuits are actually perfect for you."
"It's just everything else that puts my aura out of balance?"
"Now you're understanding," she said with a smile. She closed her eyes.
It sounded like a pile of unrecycled waste to me. I was skeptical, but I also thought it wouldn't hurt. I got out the nightgown. Red and soft and silky, it was quite pretty. Jasyn had bought it for me. She'd bought most of the clothes I owned. What harm could it do? I changed, enjoying the feel of the skirt swirling around my legs.
I didn't have nightmares. I had some very private dreams involving Tayvis that I wasn't about to share with anyone.
Chapter 12
I showed them the ring the next day. None of them recognized the letters or the leaves. Larella shuddered when she picked it up, although she wouldn't admit to it or why. It made me wonder.
The numbers on the scrap of paper were just as baffling. Jasyn said they didn't match any coordinates she knew. She tried running them through the computer. It gave her an unknown sector message. She promised to try them through a more comprehensive database later. The word rowan meant nothing to anyone. Larella thought it was a kind of bush mentioned in ancient Family lore. It had gone extinct centuries ago, unable to thrive outside of its native planet.
I tucked the paper away and put the ring back on my finger. It was one of the safer places to store it.
Jasyn, Clark, Jerimon and Beryn set up the Crystals board. Larella declared she wanted to learn to play by watching. Mart found a string and played with Ghost. I went to sit in the cockpit.
I had pieces of a puzzle that didn't fit with each other. Mart. The butterfly necklaces. Jericho. The retreat of the silver lady. A heavy ring with unknown symbols carved inside it. A scrap of paper with numbers that made no sense. Rowan. Someone shooting at us on Verrus. The name Jericho raising questions on Landruss. Mart at the middle of all of it. The answers were in his mind, behind walls so hard even he didn't know if they could be removed or broken. If he even wanted them removed.
No matter how I twisted the information, I couldn't get any of the pieces to fit with any of the others.
And how did Larella and Beryn and Lady Rina's cards fit in? If they were part of the same puzzle and not pieces of different ones.
The Crystals game was a close one. They dragged it out all day. Jerimon was finally eliminated about dinner time. Clark went out soon after that. Jasyn and Beryn agreed to call it a draw at that point. They could have kept going for another full day.
After dinner, Larella announced she was going to read her cards. She insisted we dim the lights. She dressed up in a garish robe and a jeweled cap. A large red crystal hung between her eyes. She looked ridiculous, but I had enough self control not to say it. She brought out a deck of cards, not as old or as ornate as Lady Rina's but the pictures and the creepy feeling were the same. She shuffled them carefully, once, then placed them on the table, squaring the edges.
"Mart," she pointed an imperious finger at the seat across from her, "sit there. Divide the deck."
Mart sat then lifted half of the cards. Larella moved the other half out of the way and took the pile he held. She laid out the top card, face down. The others went in loops around the central card. Three circles, interlocking around the central card. Larella set aside the extra cards.
She took a deep breath and closed her eyes for a long moment. I wondered how much of it was dramatics and how much was really necessary. She tapped the central card three times.
"Turn it over," she said to Mart.
He turned it face up. It was a card I'd never seen before. Three rings of gold circled an animal that looked vaguely like a horse. Larella sucked in a breath.
"Now these, clockwise," she said indicating one of the rings.
Mart turned over a series of pictures. A hooded figure, a night sky with two moons, an ornate metal key, a starship, the tower, more I had never seen before. Larella said nothing, but she went pale with each card. She indicated the second circle. Mart repeated the performance. The cards were all those of danger, darkness, or journeying. At least that's what I guessed. He turned up the horseman and the sword more than once. The third circle had even more unsettling cards. The last two he turned over were the Jester and the Eye. Larella sat back, her fingers twitching as if she were afraid of touching the cards.
"What does it mean?" Mart studied the cards as if his past and his name were there to read.
Larella shook her head. Her jewels winked in the dim light. We waited. A shiver ran up my spine as I looked at the cards spread on the table.
"Great danger," Larella finally managed. "Death, betrayal, a long journey, secrets, and answers." Her fingers traced the first circle of cards. "The present. The past," she said as she moved to the second circle. "A great evil. Death. And betrayal by those closest to you." She moved to the last circle. "The future," she whispered. I found myself leaning closer over the table. I wasn't the only one. "Knowledge and resolution. But at a great cost. Are you willing to pay the price asked of you? Sacrifice," she added, tapping three of the cards. "A great sacrifice."
Mart stared at the cards, his face pale and set. The room was taut with tension that grew with each second of silence. The hairs on my neck rose. Mart finally shoved the cards into a pile. The mood broke, the magic faded. Larella was just a young woman in a silly outfit.
"This does no good," Mart said. "Where are the answers?" The look he gave Larella was hard, demanding. She looked down at the table.
"The cards aren't exact," she said defensively as she gathered them back up. "I'm not very good at reading them yet. I was hoping they might give you a clue about your past."
"Maybe I should leave it past." Mart dropped his head into his hands. "Maybe I should forget it, find somewhere to become just an ordinary person."
"What of the men shooting at you?" I asked. "They won't stop looking for you."
"Maybe if I went far enough away."
I wanted to tell him it wouldn't work. It hadn't for me. I'd had to shoot the men chasing me.
He shoved away from the table and locked himself into the end cabin. We sat in silence after he was gone.
"I hoped it would help," Larella said again.
"Thank you anyway," Jasyn said, placing her hand over Larella's.
We didn't stay up. I went to bed, wearing my nightgown and hoping it would bring pleasant dreams again. It didn't. I had dreams of mysterious men in dark hoods riding black horses circling me and chanting in a language I should know but couldn't remember. It was almost a relief when the reentry alarm sounded and dragged me away from them.
I went to the cockpit, barefoot and wearing my swirling nightgown. I should have taken the time to dress. Jerimon was in the cockpit before me. He looked like he hadn't gone to bed at all. He glanced at me and grinned, but his heart wasn't in it.
"It's a definite improvement," he said as I sat in my seat.
I didn't bother to answer.
Beryn showed up to take the navigator's chair. "I'm not certified, but I know enough to get us insystem."
I nodded. The trickiest part of navigating was setting the course in the first place. I could have handled downshifting by myself if I had to. Jasyn did more with scanning and the com than she did navigating after a jump.
We slid through transition. The Phoenix handled roughly. We kept spinning to the side.
"We just lost two of the stabilizers," Jerimon announced as the ship shuddered and rolled over and over.
Beryn hit the intercom button. "Hang on," he said. "Rough travel ahead."
I fought the controls, trying to get us straightened out. Jerimon's hands flew over his own controls. Between the two of us, we finally got the ship flying mostly straight.
Beryn called up Jewel's traffic control. "We've got some engine troub
le," he said to whoever answered. "We need a straight vector in." There was a pause. "No, we don't need the full rescue unit activated. Just a little trouble with our stabilizers. We'll land safe enough, we just aren't very maneuverable."
I was impressed. Either he was the greatest liar I'd ever met, or he had a lot of faith in our piloting skills.
"Vector heading six nine two," he told us. "Straight course in and free of other traffic."
Jewel wasn't a major destination, traffic was mercifully light. We fought the ship the whole way in. The fuel gauge slid into the red zone because we were flying with mostly thrusters. The planet came up in the viewscreen, a swirling ball that looked like a million others.
"Beacon heading coming through now," Beryn said as he fed the coordinates to the bottom of the display. He switched back to ground control, explaining to them who we were and why we were landing at Jewel.
The atmosphere of Jewel was wild with wind. The ship bucked and veered, shaking so badly my teeth rattled. Jerimon and I shifted control back and forth.
We finally hit the ground, a lot harder than I'd intended. We lost a third stabilizer just as I switched over to the maglev drive. The only one still working was the one we'd just replaced.
"We really should have balanced them better," Beryn said over the squealing of alarms.
I slammed the cutoff button. The ship went quiet.
"If we'd had time, I would have," I said. "I just hope we've got the cash to replace all three."
"We can't stay here long," Jerimon said. "Jasyn was only planning on a few hours."
"She'll have to plan on longer, then. We aren't going anywhere until we get those replaced."
"There are only three shipyards here," Beryn said, tapping into the local datanet. "Jewel caters mostly to rich people on vacation. Most of the restaurants and stores are owned by Family, though. We should be able to get parts."
