Malia smiled. “I’ll be fine...it’s not like there’s not company in-system if I get lonely. To be honest, it’ll be nice to be by myself for a while. And I like the view. It never gets old.”
Reese drew in a deep breath. The prospect of leaving the ship with a stranger made her anxious, but the Queen of the Eldritch had sent Malia as her representative, and the foxine had guided them here as promised; no one on her crew could have set that course, or rescued the ship had Malia failed them. For better or worse, Reese had committed to this network of contacts and trust. And besides—she was about to see the Eldritch homeworld with her own eyes! How many people could say that? How could she miss it!
“All right,” she said. “Let’s do this thing.”
“You first, Boss,” Sascha said. “And remember to move out of the way or it won’t let us pass.”
“Right,” Reese said. She resettled her bag’s strap and hugged Allacazam against her midriff. “Here we go,” she murmured, and stepped over the Pad into a dim space that seemed to go on forever into shadows and the suggestion of ornate railings and furniture. She stumbled a little further to give the Pad room to emit its next passenger and found herself staring at an Eldritch, and he was not Hirianthial.
“Oh, no,” she blurted. “I don’t speak the language!”
“Never fear, madam,” the man said. “I speak yours.” He touched a palm to his breast and bowed. “I am Neren Fasith, castellan of the Jisiensire estate, in service to the Sarel family. My lord asked me to make you welcome.”
It was such a smooth delivery that she almost didn’t notice the shiver of his wrist... but his skin—gloves? Were white and his livery was wine-red, and that made the tremor visible. “Ah... thank you. I’m Reese—Theresa Eddings, captain of the TMS Earthrise...”
Sascha appeared with the silhouette-limning flash of a Pad transfer, and behind him almost on his tail, Irine. Kis’eh’t and Bryer followed in short order. “And... ah, these are my crew. Irine and Sascha, those are the cats. Kis’eh’t is over there and the tall one is Bryer.”
The man’s pause was brief but Reese saw it anyway; she’d gotten too used to scrutinizing Hirianthial for similar minimalist cues. “Welcome to the Jisiensire townhouse. I have rooms prepared for you all, and there are refreshments upstairs in the solar. If you will follow me?”
Her people didn’t say anything, but the look Sascha flashed her was just visible in the low light, and she could tell his brows were lifted. She shrugged and shifted Allacazam to the other arm before starting after the man. The dark was strange: she’d never been in a place where nightfall meant the insides of buildings were dark too. Was there some custom against using artificial lights? Or... did they not have any? Crazy idea. Who didn’t have artificial lights? And the smell... the smell was overwhelming and alien. Not bad, but she was accustomed to the odorlessness of enclosed environments. When the Earthrise’s air started to smell, good or bad, it was because some filter somewhere needed changing.
The man leading them picked up a lamp at the top of the stairs. It had glass panes set in some sort of metal, and there was a candle in it. A candle. Reese had only enough time to give it a look of utter incredulity before their guide brought them to a tall and ornately painted door, which he pushed open for them onto a parlor lit by several more candles, and a fire in a fireplace. The furniture looked like museum pieces, with carved wooden finials and upholstery with embroidered scenes of people riding on horses or sitting on picnic blankets in the countryside. There were tapestries and paintings on the wall, rugs on the wooden floors, and in the corner, an honest-to-bleeding-soil harp as tall as Reese, its strings glittering in the flickering light: firelight really did flicker. Who knew? She hadn’t.
As they stared into the room, the man said, “The lord should return within an hour. If you will permit me to have your bags taken to your rooms? You need only set them here against the outside wall. Just so, thank you. If you need anything, use the bell-pull.”
And with that, he was gone, leaving them in the chamber with each other. For a long moment, no one said anything. Then Sascha said, “Uh, Boss... I’m afraid to sit.”
“I bet they don’t like animals on their furniture,” Irine muttered, which made them all glance at her. “What? Don’t you get a feel about this?”
“From that man?” Kis’eh’t said, surprised. “Absolutely nothing. Did you?”
“Not from him,” Irine said. She waved a hand at the room. “From this. I mean, it’s beautiful and I really want to enjoy it but we know they’re xenophobes. We know Hirianthial never talks about his past. What more do we need to get the picture? We’re not wanted here.”
“I was maybe less worried about them hating us and more worried about putting my posterior down on a chair we could sell for a year’s worth of fuel,” Sascha admitted.
“That’s the other thing,” Irine muttered. “He didn’t tell us he was rich!”
“We could have guessed that part, though.” Kis’eh’t padded toward the fireplace and stopped short of the raised flagstones of the hearth. “That feels really nice to be so dangerous and inconvenient.”
“Don’t set yourself on fire, please,” Reese said, nervous.
“I won’t. It smells good though, doesn’t it?”
“Is that what that is?” Reese asked, and stepped a little closer herself. She hugged Allacazam tighter as sadly inadequate protection against his neural fur catching on fire, a possibility he found unworthy of worry from the soothing green colors he kept painting in the back of her mind. With him working on her she allowed herself to inhale the rich scent of hot sap and burning wood. And it was warm, which made her notice that it had been cold in the hall, very cold. “It is nice, isn’t it.”
“You’re ignoring me!” Irine said, exasperated.
“I think maybe you’re reading too much into one room,” Reese replied, but she felt a hint of unease herself. She had assumed Hirianthial had good reasons not to discuss his home. She’d also assumed he hadn’t wanted for money either, but the size of this place, even disguised by the dark, implied a level of wealth she wasn’t prepared to accept. She glanced up at the ceiling and found instead a peaked roof formed of glass panels, and beyond their silhouetted panes, the high vault of a night sky with alien constellations. What would this place look like during the day? And would she be ready for it?
“I guess these are our refreshments,” Sascha said from the side of the room. He gingerly took the pitcher from the candle-warmed cradle and sniffed the inside. “Wine, maybe? With cinnamon?”
“Food,” Bryer observed, and took one of the fruit slices, popping it in his mouth. “Apples.”
“Apples?” Kis’eh’t looked up sharply, then went to the sideboard to investigate. She frowned at the tray, then tried one. “Aksivaht’h. Apples!”
“They’re particularly good?” Reese asked, puzzled at the Glaseah’s fixation.
“They have apples,” Kis’eh’t said to her. “Why? Do they grow them here?”
“Maybe they’re imports,” Sascha said.
“On a xenophobic world?” Kis’eh’t shook her head. “So they don’t talk to outworlders, they only trade with them? That doesn’t make sense.”
Reese sat on the edge of the hearth, holding Allacazam against her stomach. “Why are we so upset about this? We should be happy, right? Someone we like has invited us home with him, offered to let us stay at his place, and we see that it’s a nice place and it’s very comfortable. Why are we picking at it?”
“First of all, he didn’t invite us,” Sascha said, ears flipping back. “We pushed him into letting us do this.”
“And he ran away from this place. If it’s so nice, why?” Irine asked. “I mean, really. He’s got a nice house, it’s gorgeous and he’s even got servants. So what made him leave it behind?”
“And why do they have Terran apples when they hate outworlders?” Kis’eh’t said.
Reese stared at them, wide-eyed, then looked up a
t Bryer. “What about you?”
The Phoenix swept the room with his strange whiteless eyes, then shrugged, a motion that rippled through his metallic wings. “Here now. Deal with what is, when it becomes necessary.”
“Of course,” Reese said and sighed. She petted Allacazam, who sent a query through her mind, like the rising flight of a bird. “I don’t know,” she said to him. “But I guess for now... we wait.”
Sascha poured a glass of the wine and brought it to her. “You don’t have any questions of your own?”
Reese took the glass, fingers stinging from the unexpected heat. Who warmed wine? She glanced at it, then up again at the ceiling. Finally she said, “All I want to know is... why are there no lights?”
Painfully inbred and weak in both constitution and temperament, Eldritch horses were already prone to skittishness, and Hirianthial’s unease made his mount painfully fractious. By the time he was waved through Ontine’s gates he was ready to be quit of both the ride and his own thoughts, tense and cruel with the fear of what might have been, and what might yet be if he did not learn to control a talent for which there was no curriculum. A groom took his mount and left him to mount the palace’s stone steps to the entrance, a cold wind off the nearby ocean stinging his cheeks and working on his joints. His court coat and cloak were little protection, and his gloves even less so; the stiffness of his fingers was new, though. When he’d been younger, the season hadn’t seemed so cruel.
Entering the front hall cut off the wind, but Ontine was cold in winter, something no number of tapestries or rugs could mitigate. He straightened his clothes and allowed the inevitable guards to examine his bona fides, and then he was striding behind one down the halls to his cousin’s quarters. He surrendered his sword to a man in the white uniform he’d once worn and was escorted into Liolesa’s office, and there he was left, in the quiet. The suite was exactly as he recalled it—he could have been gone only a few days, rather than over fifty years—with the chairs and coffee table arranged on the rug before the hearth, and her desk and cabinet of books on the raised and carpeted dais, in the corner between two windows. Her office faced the city; her bedroom, the sea. That was Liolesa: pragmatic and visionary by turns.
She was also habitually overextended, and it didn’t surprise him that she wasn’t awaiting him. He sat on one of the chairs by the fire, grateful for the warmth, and composed himself to wait. He was in fact drowsing when the door whispered on its hinges, but the sound brought him to his feet, and he would have bowed save that her expression quelled him. She was standing by the door, arrayed in taupe and cream and citrines braided in hair coiled to hold her abbreviated crown in place, and she was glad to see him for no reason he could fathom but exhausted in every other way.
“Hirianthial,” she said at last. Her heels clicked on the stone floor and then the rug muffled them as she joined him. “It is good to see you, cousin. Welcome home.”
So simple. So easy. He had not expected it, and that was why he said, “I did not think you would be so forgiving.”
“Because you fled without so much as saying goodbye?” She rested her eyes on his, and it was rest; they had known each other that long. “Did you suppose I would hate you for it?”
“I abandoned my duty,” he said. “My House. My Queen.” He paused, finished. “My cousin.”
“I would hardly be worthy of your regard, did I blame you for leaving in the face of all your losses,” she said, and her sincerity glowed in her aura, warm as hearth-fire. “Hirianthial... it is in the past. You are here now, and I am glad of it.”
“My lady,” he said, and put all his gratitude in it, for he had not realized until now how painful he’d found the possibility of losing their long friendship.
She offered him her turned cheek as she used to, and because they were both people who permitted very few intimacies, even with those they trusted, he kissed it as he used to. Her tension was almost imperceptible, would have been had he not been able to sense her sudden concern; he withdrew just enough to see her face and her gaze, always too insightful, was studying him now. He could see the green flecks in their tawny irises, and on them, his own reflection, too grave.
“Something has happened,” she said. “Tell me.”
“Corel was no story,” he said. “You so intimated once.”
“I did,” she agreed. “And it was true. He was no story.”
“I have his worst power.”
She was silent for several heartbeats, her aura tight, too close for him to read. Then she said, “Sit.”
He obeyed and allowed himself the luxury of putting his head in his hands. Liolesa’s gown rustled as she strode from him, and he heard her pouring something. When she brought it back, he could smell the sweet almond of the cordial they’d shared when they were younger. “Drink,” she said more gently, and again he obeyed. Once he’d had a long sip, she said, “Now, tell me.”
Where to begin when he wanted to talk about it not at all? “I had been kidnapped on a colony world and was under duress in my captor’s keeping when... I could no longer bear his company. In a spasm of negation, I killed him and some six other people, and struck several more unconscious outside that radius.” He looked at the liqueur. “Having discovered this ability, I immediately applied to return home. If Corel was real, there must have been... training for such talents, real training. Protocols. Something I might learn to prevent myself from accidentally hurting anyone.”
“Was it so easy to do that you fear such accidents?” Liolesa asked, in a voice thankfully devoid of horror. It was always thus with her: practical matters first. Emotional reactions, if any, later.
“No,” he answered. “At least... I don’t think so. But I have had it demonstrated to me that I can be triggered unexpectedly.” He thought of Neren and flinched. “No, I need help. Tell me there is help here to be found, cousin.”
When she didn’t answer, he looked up at her sharply. “Liolesa. Tell me there is help to be found for my condition.”
She said, “I don’t know.” She lifted her fingers at his expression. “Soft, cousin. I don’t say this to fret you, but because the history of it is tangled and you know none of it; I knew none of it myself until Maraesa passed me the crown. Indeed, if I tell you any of it, technically I am committing treason—”
“Treason!” he exclaimed.
She laughed, rueful and low. “But I think I will write myself a pardon if I am ever discovered.” Rising, she went to the sideboard and poured her own glass. “I shall put it curtly for you. The Church was founded to seek and cull talents as powerful as Corel’s, not to foster brotherly love, no matter that they developed that mission later. So while it’s true that they probably have some understanding of how to train your abilities, we would have to ensure they didn’t kill you first.”
Hirianthial stared at her, stunned.
“And for the choicest of ironies,” she concluded, “I am the titular head of the arm of the Church devoted to slaying these rogue talents—as one might expect, given the permissions they would need to stage rampant executions—but both Jerisa and Maraesa gave them their heads for so long they no longer report their activities to the crown.” She sipped from her glass. “I have been putting pressure on them, but I suspect they lie to me. Cleaning house would require a near-dismantling of the entire priesthood of the God and I don’t need them throwing in their lot against me when the rest of the court is about to explode... a court, I add, that you have timed yourself perfectly to disrupt with your presence, given that we are convening in two days.”
His cousin had never been prone to hyperbole. Hirianthial set the cordial down with fingers grown suddenly numb and said, “What’s happened?”
“Decades I’ve spent slowly moving us toward the point where our enemies can no longer fight the inevitability of my plans,” Liolesa said. “More than that. Centuries. You know, cousin.” She sighed. “And it has come all undone. I no longer have an heir, Hirianthial.”
“
That rumor’s truth?” Hirianthial said, startled. “But what has happened to Bethsaida?”
She set her glass down and rested her hands on the sideboard, her shoulders hard. Then she drew in a deep breath and returned to the chair opposite his. As she sat, she said, “Bethsaida had been making noises about proving herself to me, and it appears she decided to go off-world to demonstrate that she was capable of the same exceptionally stupid acts as I was when I was her age. While she was gone, the Chatcaava took her.”
“No,” Hirianthial whispered.
“She was rescued from their throneworld by the last scion of Imthereli at great cost to himself,” Liolesa continued. “But she has returned completely unsuitable for anything but religious orders, preferably someplace far from people, particularly men. Aliens too she will no longer countenance without terror. I have sent her to the Abbey of Saint Avilana, which is as remote a location as I could manage while still placing her on allied lands, and I have done my best since to make people think she is on retreat there. But that story hasn’t held. Few people who knew Bethsaida would have imagined her on retreat.”
“My God, cousin,” Hirianthial said. “What will you do?”
“That is exactly what I have been trying to decide,” Liolesa said. “But I am without issue and consort. So are you, and your brother, of course, is no longer an option—more on that matter later. I could go outside the royal bloodline and choose someone from a minor family within Galare, but such a move will incite people to demand I consider their children since I am already looking outside Jerisa’s line. But most importantly, my enemies see that I have no one to carry on the work, and they no longer wish to stand for my policies. They think it might be easier to find some way to pressure me into accepting their choice of successor... or worse, take the throne themselves.”
“No doubt because you have made their lives more difficult for them,” Hirianthial murmured.
She snorted. “They make their lives difficult for themselves, cousin. Most of them have been incapable of fulfilling a responsibility as basic as feeding their tenants. So I have fined them for it. Every time I have to pay for food, shelter, clothing, any of the necessities they are duty-bound to provide, I charge them for it.” At his expression, she said, “It is my right. They fail in their vows to me as vassals.”
her instruments 02 - rose point Page 13
