by Sharon Lee
“Gently,” Ren Zel murmured, bending down to offer a forefinger in greeting. “That leg has already been broken once—and very thoroughly, too.”
The cat blinked up at him and touched its nose, dainty, and slightly damp, to the offered finger. The demands of courtesy having thus been satisfied, it pushed its head hard against Ren Zel’s hand, startling the man into a soft laugh, as he obligingly rubbed the sturdy gray ears.
A small wind moved among the leafy things, bearing sweet, unaccustomed scents. Ren Zel drew another deep breath, and straightened with a final chuck of the cat’s chin.
“Come now, let me walk through this garden. I have been—long away—from gardens.”
He strolled forward, boots whispering across the grass, smiling as his sleeve brushed the leaf of a misty night bloomer and released a scent as sharp and as satisfying as cinnamon. Precisely such a small treasure might have been found in the garden maintained by the House into which he had been born, years and worlds away.
Directly ahead, the grassy route he followed dead ended in an opulent sweep of greenery, but before one reached that, one came across the roots, and then the trunk, of a monumental tree.
Ren Zel picked his way across the surface roots. Glancing down to be certain of his footing, he saw that the cat companioned him still, gliding silently over the irregular ground.
Arriving at the tree itself, Ren Zel steadied himself with one hand flat against remarkably warm wood, and craned upward.
Above him, he saw shadow, sketching, perhaps, the shapes of leaf and branch. The stars were quite obscured, and the brilliant, silvery sky. He squinted into the vastness of the shadow in vain; details eluded him, though he gained a vivid impression of strength, of . . . age . . . and . . . warm regard.
From the high branches came a sound, as of something come loose and falling swiftly groundward. Pilot reactions flung Ren Zel back half a dozen paces, which was well, else the small plummeting object would have struck him squarely on the head.
Instead, it smacked in to the dark grass and was immediately leapt upon by the cat, who planted both white front feet firmly on its prize and looked up at Ren Zel with unmistakable challenge, as if to say, Well? I’ve caught it for you, Master Timid. Are you too fainthearted even to look at what it is?
Ren Zel stepped forward and bent down, not without a certain amount of wariness, recalling the antics of tree-toads in the garden of his youth. The cat stepped back, tail high, and flicked out a negligent paw, moving the object sufficiently for his eye to find it.
No tree-toad here. Frowning slightly, Ren Zel bent and picked up what proved to be a seedpod—two seedpods, connected by a thin branchlet. He looked at the cat, sitting primly, tail around toes, its gaze very much on Ren Zel’s face.
“Your tree is throwing things at me, eh? Am I to infer that I am unwelcome?”
One quicksilver paw came out, passing lightly over the whiskers, then the cat was walking away, tail high. Ren Zel moved his shoulders, thought to drop the seedpods, and then did not: they felt warm and comfortable in his hand and it came to him that he would have need of them, later.
Halfway across the glade, the cat paused in its purposeful perambulation and looked over its shoulder. Again, Ren Zel had the distinct impression that, if the animal could speak, it would this moment be saying something rather sharp to one Master Timid Sandfeet and urging him to come along quickly, now.
Thus gently persuaded, Ren Zel stepped forward. The cat watched him for a moment, then, apparently satisfied that he would do as he was bid, took up the lead.
***
PIECES OF WHAT had once been a ship fell, tumbling, out of the sky.
Miri, stirring beneath the shelter she did not remember taking, watched them fall, and gingerly, ready to snatch back at the first cold shock of emptiness, extended her thought to the place where his pattern should have been.
It was—there. Pre-occupied right this second, but displaying no signs of attenuation like she’d seen when he’d been dying on the Yxtrang fighter. In fact, he seemed quite amazingly busy for a man who ought to have been vaporized when the beam pierced his ship.
Carefully, not wanting to disturb his concentration, she pushed her thought a little deeper into his pattern. Her vision side-slipped crazily, and she was seeing the ground from high above, turning gently and rising slowly beneath her as—as?
Escape kite, Val Con murmured in her ear. The manual key opened the emergency drawer, and triggered the escape hatch.
She closed her eyes, which didn’t quite get rid of the disorienting far-view of the ground. Even more carefully, she withdrew her thought from his pattern, and opened her eyes to the sky.
High up against the clouds, she saw a long, black wing, spiraling lazily downward.
THE PATH culminated in a door. The cat stopped and looked at him over its shoulder.
Ren Zel surveyed the situation. The door was set into a section of wall. The section of wall was part of a greater wall, which formed, so he was persuaded, part of the first story of a clanhouse. He glanced down at the cat.
“I am afraid I’m no use to you. My print will not open this.”
The cat yawned, sauntered over to the door, stood on its back feet, braced itself with one paw against the lower door and stretched toward the latch with the other. Ren Zel sighed sharply.
“Understand me, it’s useless! This is a clanhouse—I am clanless. There is no door on all the worlds of Liad which will open to my hand.”
The cat stretched higher, its paw questing well below the latch.
“Merely disobliging, am I? Well, the proof is easy enough.” He went forward two steps and snatched at the knob, already hearing in his mind’s ear the blare of bells as the house took alarm from the touch of an intruder.
The knob turned easily in his hand. The door swung wide, silent on well-oiled hinges. The cat strolled inside, then stopped and looked over its shoulder in a way grown far too familiar.
“No.” Ren Zel stared down into glowing eyes. “I cannot.”
The cat came back, stropped itself one way and the other, soft and caressing, against his legs, then moved on again, down the dim hallway.
It was risky—even given the malfunction which had allowed him to open a coded door. He did know the risk. Yet the house lured him, with its promised glimpses of the life he had been denied. Surely, he thought, just a short stroll down the hall, a glance into a room or two—surely there was no harm in that?
Knowing his peril, Ren Zel stepped inside, closing the door carefully behind him, and being quite certain that the lock had caught before he followed the cat into the deeps of the house.
Time and route blurred. He thought they might have crossed a dark, deserted kitchen, he and the cat, and gone up a thin flight of stairs insufficiently illuminated by night-dims, and down another hall, or possibly two . . .
Time righted itself. They stood before another door. The cat stroked, long and sensuous, across Ren Zel’s legs, then stretched high on back feet, reaching for the palmplate set far above its head.
“This is the private apartment of someone who belongs to this house,” Ren Zel said, his voice barely a whisper. “Surely, my hands are useless to you here.”
The cat did not even deign to turn its head. Ren Zel sighed, stepped forward and put his hand with absolute certainty against the coded plate. His palm tingled as the house scanned him. His shoulders stiffened beneath his many-times mended jacket, as if tensed against the grip of a hostile hand.
Silent and stately, the door slid back on its groove. The cat made a pleased burble and all but leapt within, tail held tall, fairly quivering with joy.
Ren Zel took a step back. That is, he meant to take a step back, to retrace the half-remembered path through private, richly carpeted corridors, to descend the back stairway, cross the kitchen, and gain, first, the starlit garden, and shortly thereafter the familiar, beloved halls of Dutiful Passage.
He went forward another step, clearing the
beam, and heard the door slide shut behind him.
It occurred to him, somewhat belatedly, that he had lost his mind.
Mad or sane, his traitor feet kept on, walking him softly and without haste through a pleasantly cluttered parlor, ’til he crossed yet another forbidden threshold, into the very sleeping room of one who was clanheld, alive, and joyous.
The inner room was spacious, the center held by a bed of noble proportion, set directly beneath a skylight, from which silver beams illuminated the rumpled coverlet, and wove stars into the long, dark hair of the woman asleep against the pillows, one rounded arm flung high over her head, a frown disturbing the smooth expanse of her brow.
Sanity returned, quick and cold, freezing his feet to the carpet. They would kill him, the people who belonged to this house. Truly, they would kill him—and justly so—a stranger who had forced himself, alone and uninvited, into the very sleeping room of one of the clan’s precious children.
Biting his lip, he half turned to go—which was the moment the cat chose to leap upward from the floor, landing solidly on the stomach of the sleeping woman.
“Ooof!” The lady jack-knifed into a sitting position, snatching the cat into her arms. “Horrid creature! First, you refuse to share my sleep and now you refuse me solitary slumber! Unhandsome, Lord Merlin! I had thought you for the garden all the night—”She stopped, hearing her own words, so Ren Zel thought, and put the cat gently to one side, staring across the rumpled blankets to—himself.
“Oh,” she said, and tipped her head to a side, as one puzzled, but in no wise terrified to find a stranger standing at the very foot of her bed. “Good evening, Pilot.” Her voice was slow, the tone oddly reverberant. She spoke in the mode between equals.
By the Code, he should throw himself on his face and despoil her no further while she got on with the business of screaming for her agemates, or her elders, or her delm to come quickly and dispose of him.
Ren Zel inclined his head, matching her grave, unfluttered attitude. “Good evening, Lady.”
In the starlight, she smiled, and tossed the coverlet aside, sliding out of bed and coming toward him on silent, naked feet, her bed shirt floating ’round her knees.
“Now, you,” she said. “I confess I had not expected you. May I know your name?”
He did bow then, very gently, in the mode of introduction. “Ren Zel.”
She smiled again, and shook her hair back. He thought it threw off sparks in the starlight.
“A brief name, but well enough.” She paused, standing so close that he could see the color of her eyes beneath the winsome dark brows—silver, like the starlight.
“My name,” she said, “is Anthora.” She held out a hand, the lace of her sleeve falling gracefully back along her arm. “May I hang your jacket away? We are all pilots here.”
“I—” His throat closed. He took a breath. “I should not stay.”
“What—when you have come so far? At least take your ease for an hour before the exertions of the journey back.”
She swayed forward another half-step, the silver eyes wide in a face not precisely beautiful, with its sharp cheekbones and pointed chin. It came to him, as if from a distance, that he had seen a like face—then lost the thought in horror as he found his hand rising, drawn as if by a magnet toward her silken cheek.
Her eyes flickered, following the motion, and he used the moment to go back a step and to lift his hand higher, displaying the twin seedpods, still attached by their branchlet.
“A gift,” he managed, his voice sounding unsteady in his own ears. “If the lady pleases.”
“A gift?” For an instant she merely stared, then threw back her head and laughed, fully and without artifice. Ren Zel felt his mouth curving into a smile, his eyes following the perfect curve of her throat down to the rounded thrust of her breasts against the thin stuff of her shirt—his breath caught, blood heating; and in that moment she met his eye, still grinning, and reached out to pluck up the pods.
“A handsome gift, I own, and perfectly suited to the occasion! Come, let us share.”
He blinked at her, tongue-tangled with mingled desire and dismay. “Lady, I do not—”
“No, have a care!” She raised an admonishing finger. “You have brought the gift; our duty is plain. So!” She broke one of the pods from the branchlet. It lay for a moment on her open palm, then neatly halved itself, showing a plump, sweet-smelling kernel.
“Thus, for the guest.” She extended her palm, and perforce he took up the offered nut. “And now for me.” Again, the pod lay quiet for an instant before falling apart in perfect halves. Daintily, she plucked the kernel from its nest, raised it to her lips, and paused. Silver eyes slanted up at him, mischievous and gentle, as if she perfectly comprehended his dismay—and his desire. “Eat, denubia. I swear that you will find it good.”
Denubia. She should not call him so, he thought, plucking the kernel free of its nut-half. He was no proper recipient of a Liaden lady’s endearments. Carefully, he slipped the kernel into his mouth—and gasped as a riot of taste exploded along his tongue, and exploded a second time—and yet again, so that his eyes perceived strange patterns in the aether and his ears heard music behind the silence, and his treacherous, traitor body cried out against its incompleteness.
He gasped again as the sensations faded, though they did not dissipate entirely. It seemed to him that he could still see lines of power and probability intersecting in the air all about; and that the low hum of music trembled just inside his ears.
“Gently . . .” Her voice was—and her hand was on his arm, which should not be.
“Lady, cry you mercy . . .” He could not allow this, whatever this was, to go on. If he was a-dreaming, he would wake. Now. Closing his eyes, he drew on—why, in someway on the lines he perceived about him, pulling this one thus, and this other one so . . .
“Sit the board serene, Pilot. Sometimes, it is wisdom to do nothing.” She stroked his arm, tracing lines of fire on his skin through the much-mended leather. He made the error of opening his eyes and beheld her face before him, silver eyes worried and teasing at once. The threads he had gathered slipped from his grasp; the building surge of music settled back to a sweet hum. Anthora smiled.
“It is well,” she said and stepped back, holding out both hands. “Your jacket, Pilot. You do not need it here.”
True enough, he thought, and had it off, placing it in her hands with a lingering touch.
She held it for a moment, as if considering the weight of the leather, then looked back to him, her brow knit in puzzlement.
“This jacket carries many wounds.”
“Healed,” he told her, striving for some measure of lightness. “Both of us healed, well enough. That jacket saved my life, Lady.”
“All honor to it,” she said, silver eyes solemn, and shook it sharply, as if she snapped a rug free of dust, and moved away to drape it over the edge of a chair.
She was back in the next instant, and it came to him that the room was growing lighter, for he could see the full curves of her body plainly through the pale shirt.
“Time grows short,” she said, moving close and smiling into his eyes. “May I have your kiss, Ren Zel?”
He had been born for no other purpose than to give her his kiss. And he came to her too late: dead and beyond them both to heal it. He shook his head, realized that she might not understand the Terran gesture, and murmured.
“No. Lady—I am clanless. You are—I should not be here . . .” he finished, helplessly.
“Poppycock,” she said in plain Terran and grinned, lopsided and adorable. “Well. Let us try another face of the fortress. You will see that I am quite without shame—so: Since I am a lady and may mind my own melant’i—Would you spurn my kiss?”
He looked into silver eyes and knew that he should lie.
“Never.”
Her grin softened as she closed the final distance between them, setting her naked feet carefully beside his boot
s. They were much of a height, and she easily lay her arms about his shoulders. Her breath was warm against his cheek and he held her waist between his two hands, cradling her closer still as their lips touched—
And the universe took fire.
DAY 349
Standard Year 1392
Hamilton Street
Surebleak
HE WOKE with the echo of gunfire in his ears, and a searing sense of loss.
“Natesa!”
Someone nearby whispered her name, the voice unfamiliar—thin and ragged—and yet if there were a friend of hers nearby . . .
“Dammit, don’t you start that again!” That voice was immediately identifiable: Cheever McFarland, and in something of a pet, to judge by the volume.
Pat Rin opened his eyes, gaining an immediate view up into the big Terran’s face, which showed more worry than temper, despite the volume—and, just now, a profound and dawning relief.
“Now, why didn’t I think of doin’ that before?”
“Doing what?” Pat Rin asked, and heard the unfamiliar ragged whisper emerge from his own mouth. Other details of his condition were beginning to emerge: He hurt, comprehensively; and his left arm was immobilized.
“Never occurred to me to just tell you to shut up,” Cheever was continuing. “Well, o’course, it wouldn’t—when in your life have you ever done what you were told?” He frowned, trying for ferocious.
“You been layin’ here for the better part of two days, out cold, and feverish—which would’ve been worrisome enough—and you been talkin’ Liaden non-stop, except for the occasional hour when you’d yell for Natesa. Which is what happened to your voice. What happened to the rest of you is you took a pellet in the arm and another one in the thigh, and you’re in Penn Kalhoonpersonal house, being taken care of by his personal staff, none of who speak Liaden, by the way, which is probably a good thing, considering the little bit of it I could scan.”
