A Few Good Men

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  One of them, almost my height, and probably close to Sam’s age, spoke, looking embarrassed, “Sir, Mr. Remy said you were not to go out.”

  “What?” Was I under house arrest?

  “Sir . . . there have been incidents. We cannot allow you to go out.”

  Abigail stopped short too, and suddenly looked like she would like to kick herself. “There have been battles,” she said. “Around the house. Mostly broomer battles, but I suppose, if they see you . . . I mean, surely they have some way of seeing around the house, and if they see you . . . well . . .”

  Well, it was different. I was a prisoner in my own house, for my own good. Not that it felt any better. I felt helpless, which was the last thing I wanted to feel. I had just started to feel that I had some control over my destiny and that my life was mine to spend or waste and now . . . And there was Nat. What had the idiot been doing, running alone with Goldie, if there had been incidents around the house? “What was he thinking?”

  “He never thought he’d be a target. He’s been doing this since he was twelve. You see, he was first turned down for the . . . for our . . . for training.” She gave a dubious look at one of the guards, as though not sure he was one of the Usa—one of us. She walked away a bit, her hand on my upper arm, pulling me along. It was like a row boat pulling a cargo ship, but I let her, and I bent down so she could whisper to me without anyone overhearing, and she did whisper, urgently, “Because he was the . . . you know one of a pair of twins is always weaker? That was him, and he was seriously underweight and spent most of his childhood being ill. So they turned him down, and he started training up by himself till they took him. It’s second nature to him, I think. I’ve never known him not to run on the beach every morning. And what would he think? Who would care about him and what he was doing?” Abigail said, understanding what I meant. “I mean, they’re not going to arrest every person in the house, right? They’d have to bring a really big force to bear to do that, and then it would be really obvious and not something they could sweep under the rug with Scrubbers. I think they’re still trying to keep any dissension secret, and they don’t want a major battle. So they’re sending small detachments, but we figured they would be intent on capturing or killing you. Oh, maybe Father if they suspected he had any say in your behavior. But . . . Nat? Who would care about Nat?”

  I pulled her away from the door and down the hallway, to the door at the other end, next to my room, where the only rooms nearby were mine and those were empty now I was here. Better to be able to speak without constriction. I needed to know.

  I had to force the words past my throat, which was trying to constrict. “What if he got in battle with them, and they killed him?”

  “No. We’d have found his body. Why would they take the body? That makes no sense.”

  “The Scrubbers specialize in making bodies disappear,” I said. The idea of Nat cut up into small, unidentifiable pieces and burned or dissolved made me ill. He’d been alive yesterday—a tight ball of enthusiasm and energy.

  She shook her head. “Only in circumstances where it makes sense. This doesn’t. They don’t occupy the island, and arguably leaving Nat’s corpse behind would scare us more than his disappearing.”

  “Perhaps they hope we’ll go in search of him.” I was thinking that they would undoubtedly know of my proclivities, and they would, undoubtedly, know of Nat’s. Maybe they hadn’t known Nat’s before Max died, but surely they’d suspect, or know afterwards. And it was entirely possible they thought they knew more about the two of us than they could possibly know. Maybe they thought it was inevitable. And I’d spent a lot of time locked with Nat in my room, and he slept there. Surely the Good Men had spies in my house. I’d have them if it were reversed. And surely they knew Nat and I had spent a lot of time together. A lot of time together alone. Perhaps they thought I wouldn’t stand to have him taken away from me. Perhaps this was a trap for me.

  The problem was that though they were all wrong, I couldn’t stand to have him taken away from me. I wasn’t even sure that I considered him a friend. If I did, we had an odd sort of friendship that consisted of annoying each other into some sort of consensus. But he was Ben’s nephew, and the more I thought of it, the more I realized he was not only an honorable man, but a loyal one. And I needed all the loyalty I could get.

  She looked doubtfully at me. “I don’t think they think the Sons of Liberty will go in search of him,” she said. “I mean, we look after our own, but it takes a while to organize, and we’d never let someone who is a high-profile target go.”

  It hit me, perhaps belatedly, that I’d sacrificed some of my freedom in order to join the fight for freedom. Policy and organization. Not just Lucius striking out on his own. And part of me wanted to do just that. To take the secret tunnel to the beach and go in search of Nat. “I didn’t mean the Sons of Liberty,” I said, my voice catching. “And speaking of that, shouldn’t you be in the Daughters of Liberty?”

  She looked up at me. “Why? You mean you don’t think I should be active?”

  I blinked at her.

  “The Daughters of Liberty,” she said, “are support and propaganda. I’m not suited to that.” She paused a moment. “You know Martha and Nat taught me broom riding and broom fighting, right?”

  “You mean . . . but . . . you’re a woman.”

  “What does that have to do with anything? The groups have that name because of their work in the Revolution in the USA. It has nothing to do with gender. And do you really want to argue this now? I thought we were going to find Nat.”

  I blinked again. “Find Nat? But you just said the Sons of Liberty don’t do that.”

  “Did I say anything about the Sons of Liberty?” she said, and her eyes flashed up at me, just like Ben’s did, when he thought I was being particularly dim.

  “Us?” I said. “You and me?”

  She nodded, intently, desperately, then hissed in annoyance, and made a head gesture that indicated that someone had approached. I looked in the direction her chin had tilted. That too was a Ben-gesture and I read it instinctively and without thinking. Steps from me stood one of my valets, seemingly dancing foot to foot, in the pose of someone who hopes to be noticed without actually interrupting anything. I wondered what in hell he thought he was interrupting. “Yes?” I said, turning to him.

  “Patrician, if you would, that, is . . . Mr. Remy asks if you’d see him . . .”

  I felt relief flood me for just a second, and was about to ask where Nat had been and where he was now, when I remembered. Mr. Remy was always, unless in very specialized circumstances, Sam. So, I straightened and said, “Where is Mr. Remy?”

  “His office, sir.”

  “Father!” Abigail said, as though this comprised a comprehensive indictment of his manners, morals and possibly the fact he dared to be alive at all. And before I could ask what in heaven and hell she meant by that, she added in a rush. “It’s just like him.” She grabbed my upper arm again, and squeezed hard. “I’ll see you af— I’ll find you. Be ready.”

  And like that, she turned around and ran down the hallway, her childlike movements reminding me that she was indeed still a child in some ways. I had no idea what she meant by my being ready. I had no idea what she meant by finding me. For that matter, I had no idea what she meant by saying that she and I should go and find Nat. But the one thing I would need to make sure—very sure—I remembered was that she was the child, and I was the adult. No matter how capable, how daring, how brave she was, she was seventeen and I was almost twenty years older. Which meant it was part of my duty not to let her run her head into a noose or worse.

  Which is exactly what I was thinking, as I walked back into the main offices, and by guess more than memory, identified the door to Sam’s office right next to mine.

  I don’t know what I expected. But I didn’t expect to slam the door open and find Sam sitting behind the desk, looking like this was a perfectly normal day.

  My Son

/>   And then he looked up, and he didn’t look anything at all like normal. He looked like a man who had lost his son.

  There is no other way to say it, no other way to explain it. It sounds odd, but I didn’t know there was a particular look that translated as that before, and if anyone had told me such a thing existed, I would not have believed it. And yet, that was the only thing that applied, when Sam looked up at me.

  His features looked much the same as always; his expression was composed; his eyes looked perfectly normal. I don’t mean to say that he looked like he’d been crying. He didn’t even look as though he’d been worrying. But something—something behind his eyes, something behind the perfectly composed facade of his features—had collapsed. It was like a building that is wholly burned on the inside without the walls showing any damage from the outside.

  In that look I realized two things: He was sure Nat was dead. And he would not let it stand in the way of the great cause that had already cost the Remy family two of their young men.

  I wasn’t so sure in either case. Oh, Nat might very well be dead. Who was I to say otherwise? I had no proof, nothing concrete I could oppose to the idea. On the other hand, I didn’t think I could allow Nat to be dead. I didn’t think I could take it. Not now, not yet, not like this.

  “Sam,” I said, my voice curter than I meant it to sound. “You wished to speak to me?”

  His answer came quickly and in perfectly urbane tones. “Yes. You see, we’re supposed to meet with Simon St. Cyr and Jan Rainer today, and before we do, we need to get some paperwork in order. I’m sorry to call you so early, but I haven’t been to bed yet. I stayed up all night discussing things with the council of twelve, on how to steer this. It is obvious that they’re going to launch a frontal assault as soon as they’re sure that there is no way to get rid of you by stealth. Right now, the only reason they haven’t attacked the island openly is that they have hopes the Scrubbers can do their job and take you out, and then they can deal with us as they would deal with any house that has lost its Good Man. Jan is going through the same. Believe it or not, this is both the best and the worst right now. Strategically, we shouldn’t want the whole might of the Good Men to come to bear on two—or even three seacities—but on the other hand, this also doesn’t allow us to defend ourselves, to get our own military force in place, or to request supplies and volunteers from the various secret organizations that have been fighting—” He stopped and stared at me, in shock.

  Until he did so, I didn’t realize I’d sworn, loud and profanely. Yeah, the sound of it still hung in midair. Yes, my mouth felt like it had just pronounced the words, the hard dental consonant pronounced hard enough to bruise my tongue against my lips. But I had no intention of doing it, and didn’t realize I’d done it till Sam stared up at me.

  “I beg your pardon?” he said, not so much in censure, but in total confusion, like a man who takes a step in the dark and finds nothing under his foot.

  I took a deep breath, found my mind—or at least that part of it that had sworn loudly, rather than, say, punching a hole in the nearest wall at listening to strategy of revolution while Nat Remy was missing—while Nat Remy might, even now, be fighting for his life or worse. And I repeated the swearing, with careful and exact instructions of what we should do to the revolution, the Council, the Good Men, the army and the broom they rode in on.

  For a moment Sam stared at me, speechless. I heard Ben, as clear as day, in his best, sarcastic tone say, mildly, What? All of them, Luce? Even you don’t have that much stamina. And it occurred to me I’d never used that word in front of Sam, much less in that loud, decided and vulgar a manner. “I’m sorry, Sam, but—”

  “Son,” he said. His voice was at once commanding and hollow. The house might be burned to a husk, but its walls were stone, two foot thick and twice as hard to dismantle. “Son, do you think I don’t know how you feel? Do you think I don’t feel it too? Nathaniel was my son.” He looked, of a sudden very tired. “My firstborn. Beyond that, he’s been my closest helper. He’s been my right hand for years. Do you think I’m not grieving?” He looked suddenly stern and angry, Zeus pater, or another of the old, unabashedly male divinities, in a raging fury. “Do you think I don’t care? I will remind you that in many ways it is the second time I’ve lost my oldest son. I raised Benjamin from the time he was two. What do you want me to do? Scream and howl? Do you think I wouldn’t do it if I thought it would bring them back? Or even bring one of them back? But that’s not how life works. That’s not how grown-ups act. We know that screaming and howling has no effect on the material world, and that dead is dead and nothing is bringing it back.”

  And now I was angry. In my mind, clear as day, was the certainty that this was how he’d taken Ben’s arrest too—with grief, sure, with crushing grief, likely, but also with quiet and sure resignation, the kind that absorbed the body blow and lived to fight another day. If the Sons of Liberty, the organization he was working for, the organization he served to his last breath, had done anything, anything at all, there was a chance Ben would be alive today. That Ben would be alive right now.

  I put my hand in my pocket, to take out the flag, to put it on the desk, to say that I didn’t want any part of this organization that took its own members being destroyed and did nothing. But, though it sounds crazy, I felt a hand close around my wrist, and I heard Ben’s voice, Steady, Luce. You don’t want to do that. And you know you don’t. What else do you expect of them? They’ve been clandestine for two hundred years. Proscribed on penalty of death. What do you expect? Fighting spirit? They wouldn’t have survived this long. They’re the mouse that nibbles in the dark, not the cat who hunts in daylight.

  I took a deep breath. “I want you to not give up,” I said. “I want the twelve to not give up. I want you to think where Nat can be. I want us to find him. He told me that the Sons of Liberty take care of their own. He wanted me to join so I’d be protected. And now we’re going to leave him alone to die? We’re going to leave him for dead, when he might still be alive? You and the twelve can go to hell. I’m going to find him.”

  He looked up at me, startled, then asked a personal question.

  “Not that I see where that’s any of your business,” I said harshly, and saw him flinch, which was good because if anyone else had asked that question in those circumstances, I’d have punched his lights out. To think that the only reason one could have for wanting to fight for Nat’s life was physical intimacy was insulting and demeaning to both him and myself, and possibly to the whole human race. I expected better of Sam, and the only reasons I didn’t get truly angry was that I knew the shock he’d just suffered, and that he had to be half out of his mind. I was half out of mine, too. But at least mine wanted to fight for what was worth it. “But no. I’m not even sure we’re friends. But I’m sure he’s a loyal and honorable man, and I’m sure he’d fight for me or for you. He doesn’t deserve to be left alone to die in some ignominious way.”

  “Lucius, son,” Sam said, very softly. “If I weren’t sure he was dead—”

  “How can you be sure? What sense does it make? Why would they kill him when they know how useful he is as bait?”

  Sam stood up. His office had no windows, unlike mine. It was hardly larger than a quarter of my bathroom, about the same size as the cell in which I’d spent fourteen years. The desk was set halfway through it, halfway between the back wall and the door, facing the door. Now he started pacing between the wall and the door. “Why would they leave him alive, Lucius? Ask yourself that.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “They left me alive, and more, they left Ben alive. I fully understand that I had to be kept alive, a way of storing the body in more or less working condition, but why keep Ben alive? Why not cut him down that first day? Was it just so they could force me to kill him, and have an excuse to put me away?”

  “You don’t know what strings I pulled, and how fast, to keep Ben alive,” he said, looking up at me. He looked suddenly very t
ired. “You have no idea. They wanted to do just that. They wanted to kill him. Your . . . your father did. I convinced him that if he left Ben with you, you . . . your tendencies wouldn’t be so obvious. No, I didn’t know why at the time, but he clearly didn’t want it to be known what . . . how you were. Now I understand, of course. He didn’t want rumors of it to attach to him, if he ever had to ascend to power under your name. Not that it should matter to an absolute ruler, but clearly it mattered to him. And I convinced him there would be less scandal, and less trouble if he left Ben alive and with you, in jail. Only there wasn’t less trouble.”

  “You have no idea what it was like,” I said. “Or what would have happened to him, if I hadn’t fought.”

  “Did I blame you? Did I ever say you were guilty in any way? I figured it out. And now that I know what your father really was, and what he wanted with you, I can see that his plan simply changed. It was still obvious, to everyone who knew you in jail, I’m sure, and to everyone who supervised it that you and Ben were involved. And it was obvious that there was talk and it would be remembered, so he thought the best thing was to get you put in solitary and give people time to forget. Plus, I suspect, Ben was caught passing out information. I know they tried to get information out of him before . . . I know part of the torture was for real information. I saw the files, though your father was cunning enough not to run those by me. But we didn’t abandon him. We didn’t abandon you.” He sagged, suddenly, as though a weight had dropped on his shoulders. “You know we didn’t. Even if all my cunning planning, my desperate pleading and maneuvering served was to make Ben’s life last through one more hellish year, and to keep you distressingly aware and sane through your captivity.”

  Tell him it was all right, Ben said. Tell him, damn you. Don’t you dare pile guilt on him, on top of everything else.