Heart of Gold

by Sharon Shinn

  “No, I am not going to inform the gulden of Ariana Bayless’s treachery. If I could, I would tell the indigo, for I think they would rise up in fury and oust her from power. But they would not believe me, guldman that I am.”

  “Then I’ll tell them,” she said swiftly.

  “They would not believe you, either. Your very name makes you suspect. Possibly there is no one they would believe. I must find some other way to punish her—perhaps by managing to live. After that, I will see.”

  This meek retreat ran counter to everything she knew of Chay, everything she knew of the gulden, so fierce and quick to defend their honor. Yet she was wise enough to see that it took more strength to resist the reprisal, more courage to stay silent and endure. He was even stronger than she had always believed—and he might be dying.

  “You are a great man, Chay Zanlan,” she said in a low voice. “The world was enriched the day you were born, and it will be a much poorer place the day you die.”

  “That is good to know,” he said. “But do not eulogize me yet. I have a great deal of energy in me still, and a great deal left to do.”

  He rose to his feet, and she followed suit. “When will they know if the drugs will help you?” she asked.

  “In three days, I believe they said.”

  “Will I be allowed to see you again?”

  “If my schedule permits. It is a rare pleasure for me to talk with you, daughter of my dearest friend.”

  “And yet, yesterday you consigned me to my own race,” she said, somewhat daring.

  He smiled briefly. “And there I will return you. What I said then is still true. You can flirt with another culture, but you will always return to your own.”

  “It has been more than flirting,” she said with some indignation.

  He took her hand in his huge one; it was like being enveloped in friendly flame. “It has been true love,” he said. “But that changes nothing. You belong with your own.”

  “That is not the way to change the world,” she whispered.

  “You’re right,” he said, and kissed her fingertips, then released her. “But this is not the day the world will be changed.”

  * * *

  * * *

  When the guard showed her back inside her quarters, Nolan looked up quickly. He was seated on the sofa facing the door, poring over notebooks which appeared to be filled with mathematical equations.

  “Well?” he asked hopefully. “What did he say?”

  But she could not speak. There was too much to say. She headed straight for her room, closed the door, and sobbed away the rest of the afternoon. And then, because she could think of no other escape, she closed her eyes and slept.

  It was dark outside when she woke, feeling sodden and generally achy. What had shaken her from sleep was a knock on her door, and a minute later it was repeated.

  “Kit? Kitrini? Are you awake? Kit?”

  She sat up in bed and reached for the light. “What is it?”

  “Can I come in?”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I just want to see if you’re all right. Can I come in?”

  She must look frightful. Her cheeks were tight with dried tears, and her hair fell in knots around her face. “I’ll be out in a minute.”

  But he opened the door and peered in anyway. “Are you all right? You’ve been quiet for so long. And you missed dinner.”

  “I’ll be fine.” She sat up straighter in bed, smoothing her hair down with her fingers.

  He came all the way in, carrying a tray of food. “I saved you the best pieces,” he said in an encouraging voice. “Some fruit, and some dried fish, and some really wonderful bread. You must be hungry.”

  “I ate with Chay,” she said.

  “That was hours ago,” he said firmly, and set the tray on a nightstand beside her bed. Then he pulled up a chair and sat beside her. “You’ll feel better if you eat. I promise you.”

  “Oh, all right,” she said ungraciously, and picked up a fork. The food was all cold, of course, but it had come from Chay’s kitchens, and so it was marvelous. She did actually feel a little more cheerful as she ate the last bite. Impossible that mere food could make any difference against such a sea of troubles.

  “And your vitamins,” he said, handing her one of the pills he had been dosing her with for the past three days. She didn’t even bother to argue this time, just swallowed it with a sip of tea.

  “And your foot?” he asked. “Does it hurt? Do you want a pain pill?”

  “Actually, it feels pretty good today. I think I’m fine.”

  “Good. Now tell me what Chay Zanlan said.”

  “All bad news,” she said quietly. “He is in fact infected. He’s taking the antidote you brought, but his doctors aren’t sure they’ve caught the disease in time. And they’ve already found it in many people that he’s dealt with in the past few weeks. It’s as contagious as you said.”

  Nolan nodded gravely. “But they can spread the word about it, can’t they? Convince the whole race to get inoculated? He found the papers I gave him, didn’t he, with the formulas for the vaccine?”

  “Yes. And the gulden have a marvelous information network—and a fanatic loyalty to their leader. If Chay says everyone should take the vaccine, everyone will take it. They should be able to contain the virus.”

  Nolan sat back in his chair, smiling and pleased. “That’s it, then. That’s success. That’s the best news you could hope for.”

  “No,” she said. “The best news would be that there was no fear of Chay dying. The best news would be that such a virus did not exist.”

  “I meant the best news in the real world,” he said.

  She shook her head because she had nothing to say to that. “So, how did you entertain yourself all day while I was gone—or sleeping?” she asked.

  “I watched the monitor a little. I picked up a word here and there, but I couldn’t really tell what they were saying. And I worked on a project of my own. Something I should be doing at the lab, but I thought I could get a start on it here.”

  He fell silent a moment, thinking about something, and then he looked over at her with a smile. “Though it’s hard for me to imagine going back to a job at the lab,” he said. “Working with Cerisa as if nothing had happened. Living an ordinary life. It’s as if the door has closed on the past and there’s no way back to it.”

  “You might feel differently once you’re in the city.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Or maybe not,” she said, with assumed energy. “Maybe now’s the time to marry your fiancée—what’s her name?”

  “Leesa.”

  “And move back in-country. Forget the city. Forget Cerisa. Forget that you were ever in Geldricht.”

  He gave her a small smile that seemed full of pain. “That seems even harder to imagine,” he said.

  “Forgetting Geldricht?”

  “Marrying Leesa.”

  She was silent because her heart ballooned up, squeezed aside her lungs, choked off the passages to her throat. She merely looked at him, arching her brows as if to ask the casual question.

  Nolan shrugged, smiled, glanced away, glanced back. “For so long,” he said, “she was the epitome of everything I wanted. We were betrothed when I was fourteen. I had known her my whole life. She is exactly what any high-caste boy would dream of. She’s beautiful. She’s charming. She’s sweet-tempered—which is a rare thing among indigo women, as you may have noticed. And she loves me. She’s the only woman I’ve ever been with. She’s the only woman I wanted to be with. Until—”

  “Until?” Kit managed to ask.

  “Until recently. The past few months. She wants to be married later this year and go live on her grandmother’s estate. That means I would leave the city forever. Be just like any other blueskin man, happy and anonym
ous. Raise our children, scheme to see our daughters marry well. Once that was the only life I could dream of. Now it frightens me.”

  “So what life would you prefer,” she asked, “in a perfect world?”

  He shrugged. “I haven’t thought about it. I didn’t realize there were other options. I guess I’d want to do something worthwhile with my life. Continue my work at the lab. Study to become a doctor. Do something that mattered.”

  “Marrying and having children matters,” she said.

  “Having children matters, if you do it right,” he agreed. “If you raise them to be honest citizens with kind hearts and uncompromising ethics. Otherwise, you’ve made the world a worse place, not a better one. But marrying? I don’t know that in and of itself it’s something that improves the world.”

  “But love always improves the world,” Kit said. “It—it loads the scale on the side of good. It’s a counterweight to all the sadness and deceit and just plain evil that make the world so wretched.”

  “If you marry for love,” Nolan said quietly.

  She had no easy reply to that. “So what will you tell Leesa,” she asked at last, “about your adventures in Geldricht? What will she think?”

  “I don’t know that I’ll tell her any of it,” he said. “I don’t think—I really don’t think—she would condone the genocide of the entire gulden race. But I don’t think she would seriously consider it a bad thing if the whole nation died out through some mysterious, innocent infection. And she wouldn’t understand why I found it important to save Chay if I could. She would not have harmed him herself, you understand, but she would not have considered it her responsibility to warn him, either. It would not seem important enough to her.”

  “That will be a very big secret to keep from her the rest of your life,” Kit said gravely.

  He shrugged and smiled. “From everyone, I imagine. At least if I want to attempt to try to live any kind of normal life.”

  Kit shook her head. “How strange. Here I am, wanting to shout of Ariana Bayless’s treachery to the whole city, and you and Chay are thinking of how to conceal it. Is she to be allowed to get away with this, then? Perhaps to try something worse another time? Is no one going to bring her to justice?”

  “I thought Chay would do all that.”

  “He says not. He wants to avoid civil war.”

  Nolan closed his eyes and passed a hand over his eyes. Kit took the opportunity to study the lines of his jaw and cheekbone. He was such a common-looking man, attractive enough but undistinguished. How had his features come to seem so extraordinary to her? How was it she could close her own eyes and call up the exact shade of his skin, delineate the double scallop of his brows? When had he become so familiar, when had he become so exceptional?

  “Well, I’ll have to think about that some more,” he said, and he sounded tired. He dropped his hands to his knees.

  She wanted to reach over and comfort him. She wanted to say, You have done enough. Let someone else take up the banner. But she sat where she was, clasping her hands in her lap, and said nothing.

  He seemed to brood a moment, studying his own curled fists, then looked up at her with a smile. “So, are you bored?” he asked hopefully. “Would you be willing to play a round or two of choisin? Or teach me some more vocabulary words?”

  She smiled and rose from the bed. “I’d be glad to,” she said. “Take your choice.”

  * * *

  * * *

  The next two days were essentially a repeat of the first, except that Chay did not again call for Kit. She tried to persuade herself it only meant that he was busy, not that he had grown suspicious of her again, not that he was feeling too ill to see her. He had not forgotten them, that was certain. Delicious food was delivered to their door on a regular basis, as well as fresh clothing and, occasionally, flowers and other gifts. She had neglected to ask Chay about reading material for Nolan, so the next morning she asked a guard, and that night, a stack of novels arrived with the evening meal.

  “I’m astonished,” Nolan said, browsing through the choices. “I really wasn’t expecting him to have anything, but these are classics.”

  “Gifts from my father, I would guess,” Kit said, for she recognized titles that she had been encouraged to read. “My father always said cultural literacy is essential if you want to interact with another nation, and he would spend hours—days—telling Chay some arcane point of indigo history. But Chay may have read these on his own without my father’s encouragement. Chay knows five or six languages besides goldtongue, and he probably has sampled major literature in all of those languages. He is nothing if not informed.”

  “Any of these you particularly like?” Nolan asked. “I haven’t read these since—since my schooldays back in-country.”

  “A Wanderer’s Tale, by Lorella Tibet,” Kit said, smiling. “That was one of my favorites when I was growing up.”

  “I don’t think I’ve read it. Heard of it, of course. Leesa and my sister each read it about a dozen times.”

  “Well, it is sort of a young girl’s adventure book,” Kit conceded. “You might not like it.”

  “But I might,” Nolan said. He settled onto the couch and gestured for Kit to sit across from him. She did, wondering what he planned now. He opened A Wanderer’s Tale, glanced down at the first page, and began reading aloud.

  “Prologue. ‘Hetta stood at the garden gate, one hand on the latch, and wondered if this was the day she would finally slip through the ornamental fence, leave behind the manicured lawn, and escape into the rough country just visible beyond the borders of her mother’s house. Behind her, she could hear her sister calling her name, but though her sister came nearer with every step, somehow her voice seemed to grow fainter and farther away. The trees on the other side of the fence, however, appeared to move closer the longer Hetta watched. They squirmed and wriggled where they stood, shaking their long trailing branches at the young girl watching, inviting her over to partake of whatever mystery and excitement they had discovered on the other side of the gate. “Hetta!” her sister called again, but Hetta almost could not hear the voice, so faraway had it become. She lifted the latch and stepped outside the fence, and into another world …’ ”

  He read for about an hour. When he stopped to fetch himself a glass of water, Kit took the book and read the next few chapters. Hetta had been her idol, back when she had first encountered this book. That had been during one dreary, interminable summer she had spent with Granmama, when her father had not come to visit her once for six endless weeks. Like Hetta, Kit had longed to escape the neat lawns, the formal houses, the regimented days. Of course, she had known that a completely different world existed, and she was determined to make her way back to Geldricht, not the mythical kingdom that Hetta eventually stumbled upon. And she would not make Hetta’s mistake, oh no. She would not, at the end of her own tale, forsake the bright kingdom in favor of the familiar green lawns of Inrhio.

  Or would she? Chay had made it clear that her position here was precarious, certainly not permanent. She did not know how long she would be permitted to wander within the brilliant, dangerous boundaries of the alien kingdom. That was a bitter lesson Hetta had not been forced to learn, that sometimes you are not welcome where you most desire to be.

  “I like this,” Nolan said, when Kit laid the book aside once she got tired of speaking. “But if all the girls of Inrhio read this when they’re children, why are they all so conservative and traditional once they grow up?”

  Kit laughed. “And I suppose, after you read Corbin Heather, Trewillin Soldier, you joined the crew of a merchant ship and sailed off to fight in foreign wars? Because I read all the boys’ adventure books, too, and they’re just as full of intrigue and daring as the girls’ books. And yet I never did meet an indigo man who confessed to having been a pirate.”

  “No, I suppose I should have been reading Co
rbin Heather, Lab Scientist, but I never came across any book like that,” Nolan said with a smile. “Maybe that’s why children are always so disappointed with real life when they grow up, because all the adventures only exist in fiction.”

  “Were you disappointed?” Kit asked curiously.

  “A little. When I began to realize how my options were narrowing down. Or worse—how I didn’t really have any at all. The course of my life was set when I was fourteen, and at that time it all sounded pretty exciting. At twenty, it seemed a little dull. But then I got accepted into the state university and invited to work at the Biolab, and some of the excitement returned. A different kind of excitement, though. Tempered. That’s when I realized that this was as good as it was ever going to get. No piracy on the high seas. No sword fights with evil barbarians. No adventures.”

  “This is an adventure, in its way.”

  He nodded, serious again. “But this one I would have forfeited,” he said.

  The third day, Chay sent for Kit again. She was elated as she hurried down the hall after the guard—but as soon as she saw Chay, she was alarmed. Three days ago, he had looked as healthy and energetic as ever. This day, he looked weary and pale, and he coughed incessantly. He had again invited her in for an afternoon snack, but this time they were not left alone. One of his personal assistants stayed in the room the whole time, coming forward every time Chay’s cough grew more insistent to offer a soothing drink or a cloth to spit in.

  She tried to hide her concern, for it was not acceptable for a woman to show that she thought a man was weak, but she was so worried that it was impossible to conceal that completely. “How long have you been this ill?” she asked him, when he had recovered from a particularly severe fit.

  “Yesterday and today,” he said, breathing heavily. “I had been better this afternoon, or I would not have sent for you.”