Shadow of the Swan (Book Two of the Phoenix Legacy)

by Wren, M. K.

  Then she stiffened, eyes wide, staring like the blind into the dark.

  A sound. But it was gone. Or perhaps she couldn’t hear it for the generators, or for the pounding of her pulse in her ears.

  There. Again. A stirring, and—someone breathing. She wasn’t alone in the darkness.

  The terror was paralyzing; she ached with it. It took an effort of will to move her hand slowly along the wall to the light control, and the light was as blinding as the dark.

  On the floor. A strange, dark shape, like a shadow, no face; that was a shadow, too, behind a face-screen. He lay on his side, right hand curled limply near his head. The hand was ungloved; flesh and blood.

  Call Lectris, you fool.

  But she only stared at this apparition, and perhaps she didn’t call for help because she was wondering again about her sanity.

  No. This apparition, however irrational in itself, might explain Samsen’s and Jamison’s strange reactions. What had Hamit said? An escapee from the Cliff; a Phoenix agent. Conditioning. That’s what they called it; a kind of hypnotic control over the mind, over perception and memory.

  Lectris—for the God’s sake, call Lectris.

  Still she ignored the dictates of cautious reason and approached the sprawled shadow-form slowly. She couldn’t hear his breathing now. Was he dead? She wondered at the pang of regret she felt at that, then the relief when she knelt beside him and he stirred, pulling in a shuddering breath. The man was ill; dreadfully ill. Her mouth tightened. She knew something of the treatment given prisoners in the Cliff.

  Then again she froze, staring fixedly at his hand. A fine, gold chain was entwined in the long-boned fingers. And a disk of gold. Her hand moved to the medallion, no conscious mental impetus guiding it.

  A baying wolf. On the other side would be a lamb.

  She turned it over.

  “Holy God . . .”

  She spoke the words aloud, but she didn’t hear them. He moved, the chain slipped from his fingers, leaving the medallion in her hand. He turned onto his back with a long, rasping sigh, the pace of his breathing quickening. Her hand went to his throat, searching out the ’screen ring. She drew back when she touched his skin. It was hot; his pulse was pounding. Then she fumbled at his collar, driven to find the ring, to turn it off, to see his face—

  The shadowy haze vanished.

  I’m going mad; it was conviction now.

  She was laughing. It was odd, though, with the tears blurring her vision. She shook with laughter, and at first didn’t realize the choking sound wasn’t in her own throat.

  The sound chilled her to silence. He was fighting for breath, fighting for life, his body racked with spasms of coughing. He couldn’t breath—

  “Lectris! Mariet! Come here!”

  She heard the door open, Lectris tumbling in, Mariet’s chirping cries, but she didn’t look up. She was trying to lift his shoulders, to get his head up so he could breathe.

  “Lectris, help me!”

  Without a word, with only a faint, bewildered frown, Lectris knelt and lifted the man’s shoulders, propping his body against his own, something gentle and solicitous in his attitude. Adrien was loosening his collar, her movements deliberate, her mind clear; there was no time for shock.

  “Mariet, stop screeching. The oxymask in the emergency kit by the condeck door—bring it to me.”

  “B-but, my lady—”

  “Don’t argue with me. And hurry!”

  The coughing had stopped, but not the desperate straining for breath. Yet he was conscious. At least his eyes were open, turned on her. Dark eyes that should be blue. That were blue. She couldn’t speak; she could only smooth the black hair back from his burning forehead and watch his eyes close again.

  “Here it is, my lady—the oxymask.”

  She took the mask from Mariet without seeing her, connected the tubes and set the pressure, then strapped it in place and switched on the pump. Her hands were steady, her concentration intense, but when she pushed his sleeve back to take his pulse, she began trembling again. Bandages. Shock cuffs.

  The Cliff. It was called “interrogation.”

  Mariet’s voice seemed to come from a great distance.

  “My lady, who—who is this man? Do you know him?”

  Had he changed so much? Did the dark lenses, the unnatural gauntness of his face, confuse her to that degree? Or was it simply that Mariet’s mind balked at recognizing this sick, desperate fugitive—this living ghost—as the Lord Alexand?

  Adrien held his nerveless hand in hers, every contour, every bone and muscle, achingly familiar.

  “Yes,” she said softly. “Yes, Mariet. I know him.”

  2.

  Castor’s days weren’t so short at this latitude in the summer, but they still ended abruptly. The ochre hills on the horizon held a frosting of light, but the starry sky was black.

  Dr. Lile Perralt had been a guest in Adrien’s icecap retreat on many occasions; he was one of the few people she allowed here. Sometimes, he knew, she invited him because she thought he needed the rest and solitude it afforded, although she always had a plausible excuse that had nothing to do with his needs. And sometimes her needs were the reason offered, with total honesty.

  Loren Eliseer had commissioned the building of the retreat as a solace for his daughter’s grief nearly five years ago and let her oversee its design and construction, and Perralt had always particularly admired him for that. She needed it then, both the place of retreat and the distraction provided by the planning and building. It became a very personal expression ultimately, and she was fortunate in having a sympathetic architech. Now it was a shining islet on the edge of the northern icecap, 2,500 kilometers north of Leda, well beyond the encroachment of any human habitation, approached through the rugged gap between the Troyan and New Andean Mountains. A two-leveled structure of white marlite, an airy circle enclosing a courtyard graced by arched arcades, every room looking inward into the court on one side, and on the other, outward to the icecap or the Barrens, with the atmobubbles enclosing a landing area on the south, and a pool and garden area on the north.

  Lile Perralt sat in a chair by the windowall in his bedroom staring out at the ghostly white patterns marking the edge of the icecap. A long-range transceiver rested in one hand, but he wasn’t ready to use it yet. He sat motionless, breathing slowly, waiting for the pain in his chest to abate. He’d found it necessary to triple his usual daily dosage of medication, but that wasn’t surprising. He was only glad it was still effective. The time would come when it wouldn’t be. He was a physician and recognized that, and he knew he should talk to Ben Venturi about his heart.

  Not yet. After the wedding, perhaps. He couldn’t leave Adrien before that, especially not after today.

  He took a long breath and let it out slowly. A tragedy, the Selasid marriage, but it was too late to stop it now. Both he and Kahn Telman had tried to make Loren Eliseer realize what an error it would be, Kahn on an economic and political plane, himself on a personal one. But Eliseer believed he had his back to the wall, and perhaps he did.

  Perralt had his own reasons to regard it as a tragedy. He opposed the marriage because he loved Adrien like the daughter he never had. He had attended her birth and come to love her wholeheartedly before she was a year old. He watched her grow from a gamin of a child to an exquisitely lovely young woman, saw her quick mind flower, watched her fall in love with the promise of a happy marriage before her, only to have the promise crushed a few months short of realization. And it was “Dr. Lile” who was at her side through the long nights after that, not Lady Galia, or Lord Loren, although her father offered what comfort he could. But Adrien never wept in her parents’ presence.

  And now this extraordinary young woman was about to be chained for the rest of her life to a man known for his insensitivit
y, even cruelty. The prospect of the Selasid marriage was enough of a burden for her, but now this—a tantalizing hope.

  Perralt had assumed until today that the Society’s opposition to the marriage stemmed from the fact that it would align Eliseer with Selasis and weaken Eliseer. But now he realized there was more to it.

  He pressed his fingers to his throat, counting the pulse beats. Still erratic, but the pain was almost gone.

  How could she be so calm? It still seemed incomprehensible.

  When his aircar had arrived, she was waiting for him. She led him through the portico into the central courtyard and told him calmly, with almost no hint of emotion, that the Lord Alexand wasn’t dead, that he was alive and lying in one of the bedrooms here in the retreat, desperately ill. She wouldn’t have told Perralt anything if it weren’t for that, nor asked him to come here, and she wouldn’t tell him how this ghost came to her. She only told him that Alexand was a fugitive from the SSB, an escapee from the Cliff.

  That should have alerted him; escapes from the Cliff were rare, and Ben had called only hours ago. But Perralt had been too overwhelmed by this resurrection, and the questions and implications in it. And too preoccupied with the constricting pain in his chest. He had to take one of his pills, telling Adrien it was for his nerves. She didn’t believe that, but she didn’t challenge it; she never did.

  She led him to the nulgrav lift, then along the balcony, coolly explaining that she’d used the Bel’s emergency oxymask, that she’d kept Alexand hidden in the bedroom compartment, and that when Bel landed at the retreat, Lectris had carried him inside before Jamison realized he’d had an extra passenger, then she’d sent the pilot on to Leda.

  In the bedroom, he found his patient covered with a therm-blanket, his face obscured by the oxymask. Perralt approached the bed prepared for one kind of shock, but not for a double shock, and for a time he thought it might be too much for his aging heart.

  His first thought when he removed the oxymask was so naïvely, irrationally logical: Adrien’s wrong. This isn’t the Lord Alexand. This is First Commander Alex Ransom.

  Only later did he wonder why he had never made the connection between Alexand and Alex Ransom. Of course, he’d only seen Ransom’s face in a few vidicom transmissions from Fina, and that had been at least two years after Alexand’s “death.”

  Certain responses become reflexive for a doctor, and Perralt was grateful for them. The labored breathing, rapid pulse, and high fever triggered automatic responses in the physician that gave the man—and the spy—time to get his balance. He sent Adrien away on the pretext that he needed to attend his patient alone and, to his relief, she didn’t question that or object.

  His patient turned to him, half conscious, fumbling for words. “Doctor, I . . . couldn’t warn you . . .”

  It had seemed ironic even then. A warning equal to the full scope of this shock was impossible.

  His patient slept now under Adrien’s watchful eye. He would recover quickly enough. He had exacerbated the viral infection acquired at the Cliff with an overdose of drenaline, and fortunately he’d stayed coherent long enough to explain that. In the two-hour delay at the Leda IP port, the injection Dr. Radek gave him had worn off. He had taken a drenaline tablet out of desperation and in defiance of Radek’s warning, hoping it would keep him on his feet a while longer. He was unconscious within a minute of taking it.

  Perralt sighed with the resigned forbearance of physicians for the willfulness of their patients, then looked at his watch, and picked up the transceiver. Ben would be frantic. It was four hours past Ransom’s scheduled arrival time in Helen.

  Alex Ransom would be safe here for three days. He’d be safe with Adrien under any circumstances, and Perralt had taken the precaution of conditioning Lectris and Mariet, checking the building, and particularly the bedroom, for monitors, and installing jamblers. But what would happen after those three days? It was Adrien’s future that concerned him; Adrien who would soon be Karlis Selasis’s Promised.

  It seemed unfair. She didn’t deserve any more anxiety or grief, and if Lord Alexand still loved her, why would he inflict it on her? He’d given her grief enough.

  Perralt switched on the transceiver. It wasn’t for him to pass judgment; there was too much he didn’t know. Only Adrien could judge this.

  A blur of static, then a voice emerged from the speaker. “Venturi on line.”

  “This is Lile Perralt. Are you clear, Ben?”

  3.

  The worst was over. Alexand awoke knowing he was on his way to recovery and there was no danger now of relapse. The illness seemed of endless duration in his mind; time at the Cliff was an equivocal thing.

  He knew he wasn’t alone, but for some time he lay still, eyes closed, feeling the enveloping warmth of the thermblanket and the soft texture of the sheets, smelling the subtle scents of fine cloth and rich woods. He’d never realized they had unique odors before these years in the plasex, plasment environment of Fina.

  And another fragrance, light and sweet, that called up Terran springs. He remembered that perfume. Its name was Primaraude. Adrien was his visitor.

  He opened his eyes, searching for her in the dim light. Castor was in its night, and a glance at the clock on the bedside table told him he’d been asleep at least eight hours.

  He looked to his right across the shadowed room. The wall was broken by two glassed bays rising from the floor and curving to meet the chambered ceiling. The bay on the left showed tongues of the icecap, pale streaks against the darkness; the black sky was spangled with stars that didn’t waver. The white ice streaks, the glitter of stars, served to delineate a dark silhouette. He made no sound, no movement that might distract her from the bleak white-on-black landscape.

  Through the long hours while he waited for her in the Bel, he had tried to put words together in his mind, words to explain himself and why he came to her now. A futile endeavor. First, because he hadn’t had a chance to voice those words. Second, because words weren’t enough.

  He gazed at the shadow against the stars, his mind straining at adjusting to a kind of temporal displacement. It was as if he’d fallen into a chasm opening into the past and wakened to find himself mentally exactly where he’d been nearly five years ago.

  No. He hadn’t slipped backward. The truth was in a different kind of temporal shift. The unfathomable time-link binding him and Adrien had survived the interweavings of events and years and surfaced in the future, the now that was the future for Adrien and Alexand.

  A marriage of destiny.

  He closed his eyes, hearing the ominous rattle of locks and thinking of another marriage that could be destined only by the hellish spirts of Nether Dark.

  This marriage must be stopped. The words echoed in his mind with the brazen clangor of futility, an ultimatum made impotent by hopelessness.

  A soft rustling sound, leaves in a wind; Adrien moving toward him. He listened, savoring that scent of some remembered spring, the fear dissolving like shadows in sunlight. Hope still lived as long as Adrien lived.

  He opened his eyes. Adrien sat down beside him, a faint smile modeling the fine contours of her mouth, her eyes shadowed ellipses in the soft light.

  He had dreamed of that face. It had never been part of the nightmares; it was relegated to a subtler form of mental agony, one he had never consciously recognized. Images that were only ineffably beautiful, the pain coming upon wakening to realize they were lost. Terran things, all but one: the whisper of eucalpyt leaves, the cool earth scent of spring rain, the dapple cloud shadowed contours of green hills, the clean silence of windless snows. And Adrien Eliseer.

  Neither of them spoke. There were implications in this encounter, decisions only sensed, not yet comprehended, that must be understood.

  But not now.

  It was enough to understand that dusky-eyed, lumine
scent face, to realize there was no recrimination, no bitterness in those somber eyes. To realize that in some sense she hadn’t relinquished hope, either, in spite of his death. She still wore the symbol of that life vow on her hand.

  He took her hand in his, remembering all the subtle, delicate nuances of it: ivory and velvet. And remembering the night he’d put this ring on her other hand. Then he pushed her silk black hair away from her face, watching her eyes close, the dark lashes drawing shadows across her cheeks. There would be no secrets between them. Her faith deserved enlightenment.

  The second parting would come soon enough.

  He saw the silver glint of tears on her cheeks and heard the soft intake of breath as their lips touched, and he wondered how he could forget the fragile texture of her mouth, why it came as a surprise that so much could be said without words.

  4.

  Alexand moved with even strokes through the water, pausing to catch his breath when he reached the rim of the circular pool, looking up through the sheen of the atmobubble to the blue-black sky. The air was tropically warm; this ’bubble let more ultraviolet through than the one over the main part of the retreat. Even the plants here were tropical; Terran, most of them, but a few were Polluxian.

  He took a deep breath; there was only a hint of an ache. Then he pushed away from the side of the pool, keeping the rhythm of his strokes slow, enjoying the physical freedom as he never had before the Cliff, luxuriating in the flow of warm currents against his skin. When he reached the other side, he turned and crossed back to his starting point.

  Adrien was waiting for him there.

  He didn’t see her until he started to launch himself across the pool again. He came to an abrupt halt and reached for the rim, hearing her laughter as the splashing died. She knelt by the pool, smiling down at him, her hair caught in a narrow chaplet, falling free over her shoulders. The rose hue of her gown cast warm lights on her face.