Love and Intrigue Under the Seven Moons of Kordea

by Helena Puumala

  “This place is so beautiful, and mysterious,” said Sarah. “I would love to explore it, and get to know it better. But my subliminal self—or whatever—was reminding me that there are still unfinished tasks left behind in my reality. Though, she did agree that other people could finish doing them; it’s not absolutely necessary that I go back.”

  “There is something else, however, that you need to know before you decide whether to stay or go,” Aris said. “Something that you’ve refused to look at, refused to allow yourself to become aware of.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Sarah countered.

  Now the golden-haired guide turned to her.

  “You need to look into someone’s heart,” she said. “We will show you.”

  A window of sorts opened up in front of her. It was a window into her own reality, to Ferhil Stones, in fact. Not the tower work room of the Circle Witches, but a room in the Infirmary. It was a pleasant room, like all the patient rooms in the Ferhil Stones Infirmary were: wood floor, plaid covers on the bed, light-coloured walls, and a window shaded by a growth of thick-leaved trees on the outside. Under the bed covers lay a body which Sarah immediately recognized as her own. It lay motionless, eyes closed. Black hair framed the face, in which not a muscle moved, save for those that kept it breathing, barely. Sarah, in a trance.

  Beside the bed, in a comfortable chair sat a familiar figure. She knew him well. The fair hair with its slightly violet highlights, the finely-wrought features, the well-formed physique which an Agent kept toned in anticipation of having to use it; she recognized it all. The expression on the face, however, shocked her; it was one of utter dejection, of loss almost beyond bearing. The blue eyes with their slightly violet cast were staring at the empty face on the pillow.

  As Sarah watched, one of his hands reached for the patient’s hair, running gentle fingers through a tress. He spoke:

  “I’ve known so many women. And you are the only one who truly mattered, Sarah. And I never got to kiss you, or to hug you.” The voice trembled. “Never mind anything more than that.”

  “What?”

  Sarah, in the tower room of the Castle Fortune turned to stare at the golden-haired guide.

  “Why didn’t I know this?” she cried. “Why didn’t somebody tell me?”

  But even as she spoke she knew that she had been told. Jillian had practically shoved the facts in her face, not so long ago! She had refused to believe Jill! And then when the golden-haired guide had come to her in the dream, she had assumed that “the person who was very important to Coryn” would have been some stranger, some woman the Liaison Officer had met in Trahea! She had not dared to believe that the handsome ex-alyen could possibly have fallen in love with her, Sarah, skinny black-haired Sarah, a ship mechanic from the Port of Laurentia, on Earth!

  “Let’s not forget a very talented amarto-sensitive,” Aris interjected with a smile.

  “Okay,” Sarah said shakily, “but a skinny, little chit, nevertheless; Dian is the much more attractive Witch of the two of us.”

  “And has the good sense to know when a man is not interested in her, because he has given his heart away to someone else,” Aris added. “I do believe that Dian has turned her attention to the brilliant Scientific Advisor.”

  “To Jaime?” Sarah nodded. “But of course. They’ll make a great couple.”

  “As will you and Coryn Leigh. If you’ll just get busy building the bridge.” This was the guide. “Aris and I will help you, but you better let your man know that you’re coming, so he’ll know to wait. He’s about to give up and go back, broken-hearted, to finish what needs to be done.”

  *****

  He had run his fingers through her hair, planted a gentle kiss on the cool forehead, and was just straightening up in preparation of exiting the Infirmary room, all his hopes dashed, when he thought that he heard his name called.

  He looked around him, and then at the face on the pillow. It had sounded like Sarah’s voice, but the body in the bed had certainly not spoken.

  And then he heard it again, although he could not have said where it was coming from:

  “Wait for me a little longer, Coryn. An hour or two. Stay at Ferhil Stones a couple of hours more, and I’ll be there.”

  Was that a ray of hope springing alive inside his heart? Dare he hope? If he did hope, would the hope just get dashed against rocks all over again?

  He stood by the bed, undecided, when the room door opened. Marlyss came in, accompanied by the Greencat.

  “You may as well come and join the delighted crowd celebrating in the dining room,” Marlyss said with a broad smile. “She’s building a bridge, but it’ll take a bit of time, even with all of Sarah’s talent. You’ve eaten nothing for hours. It’s morning; sun’s coming up, so you may as well spend the sleep cycle here, with Sarah, once she’s back. Other things can wait until tonight. If you want, we can call for a flyer to come and fetch you both, once the sun has gone down again.”

  “So the voice I heard was really her?” he asked tentatively, hardly daring to let the joy and the relief that were pouring through him to exist.

  “It was Sarah, all right.” Marlyss really was all smiles. “The voice may not have been actual sound waves, but it was real enough for you to hear it, I gather.”

  He reached down to caress the Greencat’s neck. The animal turned to nuzzle the hand, and he understood that it, too, was very happy that Sarah was coming back.

  *****

  He was back in the room when Sarah opened her eyes.

  He perched on the bed, to sit next to her. She pushed aside the covers, looked into his eyes, and, now, at last, believed what she saw there. With a little, contented sigh, she reached her arms to him, and he wrapped her into his, marvelling at the delicacy of her body. Such a strong spirit to live in the slight physique!

  “Sarah, my beloved, my beautiful Sarah,” he murmured, and she giggled, making a girlish sound which filled his heart with joy.

  “When I was shown what was in your heart, I heard you say that you had never even kissed me, or hugged me, never mind anything else,” she whispered, her mouth searching for his.

  “That was true,” he answered, when he came up for air. “You’re willing to fix that today?”

  “Oh, yes. Only—“ she giggled again, but this time the giggle sounded tentative, and her body tensed a little under the arms that were holding her, the Kordean sleep shirt, and all.

  “I guess you need to know beforehand,” she added a little lamely. “I’ve never been with a man, that way.”

  “What?”

  She grimaced at his surprise.

  He tugged at her nightshirt, and slid a gentle hand under it, between her legs, registering the trembling of her body, apparently conflicted as to how it should respond.

  After a quick exploration he kissed her forehead, and laughed, a touch ruefully.

  “You’re not joking,” he murmured into her hair. “How’d you manage that?”

  “There never was anyone I felt strongly enough about....”

  She sounded bereft, and he pulled her closer, held her against his heart, breathing in her scent.

  “It’s a good thing you ran away from that drug-addled, Malloran rapist, that time on the Planet of the Amartos,” he said. “That would have been a hell of an introduction to what should be one of the best things in life.”

  She shuddered. Then:

  “Do you mind very much?”

  “Mind what?”

  He was peeling off the night shirt that lay between them.

  “That I’m, you know, a silly virgin.”

  He stopped what he was doing, and lifted her face so that they were looking into each other’s eyes. He grinned at her, almost ferally.

  “I’ll mind five or ten years from now, when we’ve been married a while, and you, for some reason, are seriously pissed off at me. It’ll happen; my mother tells me that it happens in the best of relationships, and she’ll tell yo
u that, too, probably on our wedding day. While annoyed at me, maybe you’ll run into some dark, brooding, brainy man who wants to bed you. And you’ll be thinking to yourself that, hell, what would it be like to lie with him? After all you’ve only ever slept with the fair-haired fool, and have no idea what another bed-partner might amount to! That’s when I’ll mind: I’ll go totally jealous on you, do not doubt it for a moment, Sarah, beloved!”

  “Oh.”

  She brought a hand up to caress his cheek.

  “But I don’t have to worry about you running off with another woman because you’ve slept with lots of them, and know what that amounts to,” she said. “Is that what you’re saying, too?”

  “Yes. You, dear Sarah, are my chosen one. But,” and he resumed the task of undressing her. “We’ll put all my experience to use, making your introduction to physical love as pleasant as is possible.

  “Help me with this chaste garment that seems to have decided to settle between us.”

  She reached for the lacings and started to undo them.

  “I want to help you get out of your clothes, too,” she said, a girlish grin lighting up her face.

  *****

  “My goodness,” said Jillian, when Coryn and Sarah showed up at the Liaison Office that evening. “She’s absolutely glowing. Hm. I suspect that you have forgotten your fiduciary duties, Coryn, and have bedded your protégé.”

  “Fiduciary duties can go hang,” Coryn responded, wrapping an arm around Sarah. “This is a grown woman I’m holding, and an absolutely remarkable Witch. As you should know, Jill, having been transported by her efforts from that absurd Organization Facility, on a back-of-beyond world, to Kordea. Besides, there’s no time to accuse, try, and jail me for taking advantage of my position of power over this fragile flower! Your spouse is among the people who need rescuing!”

  Jillian’s little grin, which she had been trying to bite back, abruptly widened into a broad one.

  “Ha! I’m ahead of you on that, Coryn Leigh!” she cried. “Have you talked to Marcues, yet?”

  “No, I have not,” Coryn replied. “I didn’t want to use the Ferhil Stones communicator for that, so I was waiting until I got back to this Office.”

  He let go of Sarah, after planting a quick kiss on her head, and added:

  “I don’t want to leave you, of course, but I suspect that it would be bad form for me to be fondling your behind while I talk to Marcues. So if you don’t mind....”

  She shooed him away, blushing furiously, while the workers in the room burst out laughing. Jillian came over, and hugged her.

  “I’m so happy for you both,” she said. “May you have as much fun together as Joe and I have.”

  “Is that good-looking man your boyfriend?” piped up one of the two skinny girls sitting at a table, reading tablets, apparently under Nance’s watchful eye. “Excuse me, but I think he’s kind of out of your class, looks-wise.”

  Nance looked up, and burst out laughing.

  “Like Coryn would care!” she said. “Suse, Coryn’s managed to scoop for himself the most talented woman in this room, and, quite possibly on this whole world! Asking her to be a perfect beauty, too, is just a little much, and he’s smart enough to understand that!”

  “Besides, he’s a man to appreciate a lovely ass, and Sarah has that,” Jillian added between guffaws. “By the way, Sarah, meet Suse and Mimi. I don’t think that you’ve had the pleasure, yet. Apparently you pulled them from The Organization Facility at the same time as you transported the rest of us.”

  “We were having sex with Rolf and Sevi at the time,” Suse explained.

  “You were, with Rolf,” Mimi protested, right away. “Sevi and I were sleeping.”

  Jillian rolled her eyes.

  “Nance is trying to clue them in a little bit about male-female relationships,” she muttered to Sarah. “Poor Nance—though she’s doing an admirable job, considering what she’s got to work with. Dr. Jonas has agreed to see to it that they’ll get at least a few hours of sex-ed in, before we send them back home. Those Settlement idiots have left them totally ignorant.”

  Just then Coryn’s inner office door opened up again.

  “Jillian Ashton!” he shouted. “Get in here, and explain to me what you cooked up while I was at Ferhil Stones! If I’m hearing Marcues right there are phony battleship specs involved, plus the whole goddamned Confederation Armed Forces!”

  “Another nasty word,” muttered Suse, while Nance and Karan shared looks, and burst out laughing.

  Jillian was laughing, too, while she sprinted to the open door of Coryn’s office.

  “I thought that it seemed like a waste not to make further use of Jaime’s specs,” Sarah heard her say, before the door shut again.

  “Jaime’s specs! What specs?”

  The communicator was on the setting which allowed Marcues to follow the conversation in the room from his own vantage point, and to participate in it at will.

  “Oh, yeah, I guess nobody’s had the chance to brief you on how we managed to get ourselves into that Organization Facility, Coryn. That can happen when you spend a lot of time at the Circle of the Twelve Stronghold, consorting with the wise women.”

  Jillian allowed herself to direct a quick, teasing grin at Coryn, since she knew that her back was to the communicator’s camera. He raised a brow, but ignored the jibe otherwise.

  “Anyway, the story we cooked up—a portion of it was factual—was that we’d trade these Confederation battleship specs that someone had stolen from the Experimental Craft Division of the Armed Forces, and which had somehow fallen into our hands, for vehicle parts that our machines desperately needed. You see, Joe, Texi, and Sarah had used our spares to fix the Settlement’s vehicles. When it turned out that we had nothing to trade for the replacement parts, Jaime came up with the stolen ship specs idea and created some on Hera’s Hope’s computer, which he said looked plausible, but would never actually work if those doofuses tried to use them.”

  “Coryn, I don’t get it,” came Marcues’ voice, sounding petulant. “Where do you dig up these inventive people? I can’t imagine anyone in my office coming up with a crazy but workable scheme like that one, never mind put it into operation!”

  Jillian rolled her eyes. Marcues could be such an unimaginative, bureaucratic, and envious dork, at times. The real work of the Agency was done by the people on the ground.

  “Jaime’s a genius-level physicist who, fortunately for us, was looking for a challenge when I decided that the Kordean-Terran Liaison Office needed a Scientific Advisor,” Coryn explained to his Agency boss, mildly enough.

  He was thoroughly on the job, again, and the first order of business, like so often, was to keep the interpersonal waters from getting roiled. It was hard to get work done when people were snarling at each others’ throats, and the Agency could be as big a hot-bed of battling egos as any other portion of Confederation Bureaucracy.

  Jillian then launched into the portion of her story where she, through Fiana Marsh, Steph Clennan, and their boss, Carovan, had sounded out the possibility of getting the Armed Forces involved, in order to, possibly, get back their supposed battleship specs, and, certainly, to bring back to face justice the people involved in the thievery.

  “I’m thinking, maybe a small contingent of Military Police, or their look-alikes,” Jillian had explained to Carovan, once she had had a secure line with him at the other end of it. “The Military does cooperate with the Agency every now and then, when that seems like a good idea. But to tell the truth, I’d like to hand Marcues something that’s pretty much all figured out, ready for him to add the final polish to, as well as his approval.”

  Carovan had chuckled.

  “I hear you Ms Ashton,” he had said. “Marcues is known to be a pretty pedestrian thinker, one who has, on occasion, thrown out a whole row of ducks, just because one of them was slightly askew. And, yes, I think that I can get you people who will find this caper interesting. The Military has not
had all that much to do, other than to drill, for quite some time. And though their top brass might want to get some fireworks going with The Organization, the rest of us would just as soon nothing of the sort ever happened.

  “Maybe your little stage show would serve to keep a few eager fellows occupied for a bit, letting them go into the border area between us and the Organization, to haul home some presumably loony civilians.”

  “Though, just between you and me, The Mission fellows and Elli are pretty far from loony,” Jillian had laughed.

  “I hear you. And having made the acquaintance of Jaime during his pilot training days—sounds like, if the rest of The Mission members were even near the same page with him, you people had quite the crew out there.”

  “We did,” Jillian had agreed. “And we really want to get all of them back safely. Partly, of course, since some of the guys are our spouses and other relatives.”

  *****

  “Did you get the message from one of the Mission members which was sent directly to you, Coryn?” Marcues asked. “I couldn’t access it, since it was directed to you alone.”

  “Yeah,” Coryn replied, evenly enough, ignoring, Jillian could tell, the implication in Marcues’ voice that he ought to have been able to intercept the message. “It was Jaime letting me know that the y-chromosome contingent at the Facility made it out safely, and giving me the co-ordinates of the location where they’re hoping to hole up. I gather that Roland and Elli ended up with Hera’s Hope, and probably need rescue more urgently than the others do.”

  “So I should okay this cooperation with the Military?” Marcues continued. “Do I send them straight to this target world, or do you want to add personnel to their roster?”

  “Tell them to go after The Organization contingent holding Roland and Elli directly,” Coryn instructed, using the tactful tone of voice which he had found in the past to work the best with his unimaginative boss. “And ask them to kindly send a ship here to pick up some of us for the sortie to rescue the rest of the Mission.”