Heart of Gold

by Sharon Shinn

  “What can I do? How can I help you?”

  He shook his head. “I just wanted to have the pleasure of your company another hour. To assure myself that you are well and being treated with courtesy.”

  “Yes, every courtesy,” she said impatiently. “What have the doctors said? Your cough is so wretched—surely this is not a good sign. Have the drugs helped you at all? What do they know?”

  “They know very little,” he said, then paused to cough again. “Time is the only physician who can give us the answer.”

  “I thought you said you would know something in a few days.”

  “Now it appears to be a few days more.”

  “And the others? Who have caught your infection?”

  “All of them seem to be responding well to the treatments.”

  “Then it is only you,” she said slowly.

  “Then it is only me. Which is good news indeed.”

  She gave him a look of silent protest, but he only smiled. “Do not despair yet,” he said. “I am a strong man, and a determined one. I will live if I possibly can.”

  “I’ll ask Nolan,” she said suddenly. “He may have a new formula. He may realize he left something out of his old drugs. He’ll come up with a fresh cure for you.”

  “You have great faith in this unconventional blueskin.”

  “I think he is the most amazing man I have ever met,” she said honestly. “I think he is—so pure of heart that he makes other, ordinary men seem wicked by comparison. I think he is so generous that my own thoughts shame me by their selfishness. He is so kind that he makes me search my soul to find new ways to be compassionate to others. And brave. Not one man in ten thousand would do what he has done.”

  “You must wish your father could have met him,” Chay said.

  “You have met him,” she said. “That is almost as good.”

  * * *

  * * *

  The guard practically had to drag her from Chay’s presence. The guldman had broken down several times into an uncontrollable asthmatic wheeze, and the last time, Kit had flung herself across the room to kneel at his feet, begging him to stop coughing. He had waved to the attendant, who pulled her none too gently to her feet, but she couldn’t stop pleading with Chay to take a drink, breathe deeply, feel better, be all right. When the bout had passed, he lay back weakly in his chair for a moment. His face was so pale that the gold sheen of his skin seemed to lay across his features in a layer so distinct that she could peel it back to reveal the blood and muscle underneath. His hair was dark with sweat, and the breath shuddered into his lungs. He did not look strong enough to stand.

  “Chay—” she said desperately.

  He opened his eyes, looked at her, and summoned a smile. “If this should be the last time you see me,” he said, “remember me any way but this.”

  “Chay, don’t say such things!” she cried.

  He heaved himself to his feet, wavered, but seemed to gather strength. “But I do not think it will be the last time,” he said more cheerfully. “If I allow you to hug me, will you promise to release me?”

  “I promise,” she whispered, and he signalled to the guard to free her. But it was a lie, because she couldn’t let go, and Chay had to detach himself with some force.

  “Now go,” he told her, putting her into the hands of the guard, who held her with a grip there was no gainsaying. “I will see you again in a few days if I am able. Study patience. For there is nothing worthwhile bought with any other coin.”

  “Chay—” she begged, but he turned for the private door, taking his assistant’s arm. “Chay!” she called, but she was being pulled out the other exit, guided down the hall, and there was nothing she could say, nothing she could do, nothing that would change anything.

  But when she was deposited inside her own quarters, she turned on Nolan in a frenzy. To his casual query of “How’s Chay?” she responded with a frantic, “He’s dying! You must do something.”

  “Dying! But two days ago—”

  “He’s so sick—he can’t stop coughing—and he looks so exhausted. Nolan, you have to fix him. You have to come up with some better drugs. Something more concentrated, maybe. You know, Chay is very strong. He can withstand dosages that might kill other men. You can mix up a medicine just for him.”

  “Kit, I can’t. I only know one formula, and it—”

  “But you have to!” she exclaimed. “There must be something else you could try, something you left out because it was too dangerous. Talk to Chay’s doctors! They’ll tell you what he can endure. They’ll help you come up with a new prescription.”

  He put his hands on her shoulders and tried to calm her with the persuasion of his touch. “Kit. I have done what I can. There is no magic in me to fix Chay. I have no other cures.”

  She wrenched away from him and began pacing the room. “If it was an indigo lying in there dying, you’d be working at your lab books hard enough, trying to come up with answers … If it was Ariana Bayless, you’d try new formulas.”

  “I doubt it,” he said dryly.

  “If it was your Leesa—oh, the sun wouldn’t set on any day that you hadn’t come up with at least three new drugs to try and save her—”

  “I would do for Leesa what I have done for Chay—try my best.”

  “It’s because he’s gulden!” she said furiously. “You won’t help him because of his gold skin—”

  He looked thunderstruck. “How can you possibly say that to me?”

  “You told me! On the train! You said how you despised the gulden, you thought of them as less than human—”

  “It is true that I have had to work to overcome my prejudices,” he said, seeming to fight for calm. “And I consider it a great personal flaw that I have at times looked on gulden as—as not quite equal to me. But that doesn’t mean—”

  “You can’t stand them,” she accused. “You don’t care if Chay dies. If any of them die.”

  “I have spent most of my time, these past few years, coming up with medicines to cure the gulden,” he said in a low, steady voice. “I personally—me, Nolan Adelpho—I found the drugs that stopped two epidemics before they had time to become disasters. I worked overnight at the lab more times than I can count, putting together those formulas. I didn’t rest until I found the cure, the combination. It is not because Chay is gulden that I cannot help him. It is because this is all I know. I have done my best. If it is not good enough, then I am not good enough. You cannot change that by cursing.”

  “You could try,” she whispered, suddenly turned supplicant, clasping her hands together to plead for the favor. “You could look at your old formulas and try to come up with something new—”

  He gestured at the notebook even now lying open on the sofa. “What do you think I’ve been doing the past three days? I’ve been going over my math. I’ve been reviewing my chemistry. Without a computer and a fully equipped lab, I can’t do any actual tests, but I haven’t been able to devise any new patterns that I’d like to try, anyway. Do you understand me, Kit? I have done what I can.”

  “But you’re killing him!” she wailed.

  “He may die, but I didn’t kill him,” Nolan said in a grim voice. “I have done everything I can to save him.”

  “I hate you,” she said.

  He said nothing for a moment, then nodded and shrugged his shoulders. His face had grown unbelievably tired. “Your privilege,” he said, and turned away.

  She crossed the room in four swift strides and caught his arm. “No—no, I didn’t mean that,” she said, turning him back to face her. She was swamped with a whole new set of unbearable emotions—remorse, fear, self-loathing. “You of all people I could never hate.”

  He stood passive in her grip but would not meet her eyes. “You have no reason not to,” he said bitterly. “After I threatened Jex’s life and p
ractically abducted you. Why wouldn’t you hate me? I expect nothing else.”

  She gave his arm a little shake. “Nolan, don’t say such things. You’re the kindest, the best man I know. I would trust you with my life—with Jex’s life—Chay’s. You are such a good man! It makes me ashamed of myself.”

  He looked at her now, sideways, tentative. “That day we first arrived,” he said shyly. “When Chay asked you your opinion of me. Did you mean it? All that about trust and your heart.”

  She nodded, her eyes fixed on him, willing him to believe her. “Don’t ask me when it happened,” she said. “Maybe when you fed the runaway wife at Krekt Station. Maybe when you said you had not taken a private car on the train because you didn’t want me to be afraid of you. Maybe before that—maybe in the city, when you made me take the pills. You seem so concerned about everyone. Willing to care for everyone. That’s a trait I haven’t seen in anyone before, man or woman, blueskin or gold. It’s not in me, certainly.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t. I don’t care for everyone. Sometimes I wonder if I love anyone as much as I should. I want to be a good son—a good husband—a good father, if the time ever comes. I try to be a good friend. But most of the time that just consists of being agreeable on the surface and keeping my thoughts to myself. That does not make me a kind man. It just means I manage to stay pleasant to most people most of the time.”

  “Oh, Nolan,” she said, and she could not stop herself. She lifted one hand to trace the wide curve of his cheekbone. The color of his skin was so intense that she could almost feel its sultry heat, distinct from the pulse and fever of his body. The nubbed texture of his whiskers felt like spiky linen under her fingertips; his lips were an inset panel of satin. “I hope Leesa deserves to marry a man as wonderful as you.”

  He had not moved since she touched him; he had transmogrified to granite. His eyelids had half-closed, as if the spell that had changed him to stone had caught him mid-blink, mid-swoon. When he spoke, his lips brushed against the palm of her hand, still laid across his mouth. Not another muscle in his body changed position. “I will not be marrying Leesa,” he said.

  She pressed her fingers harder against his mouth as if to push the words back in. “Don’t say such things,” she said. “Of course you will. She will never learn of your visit here—and if she did, she would love you anyway.”

  “No matter what happens here—no matter what she learns, or does not learn—I cannot marry her. This trip has changed me too much.”

  Kit dropped her hand. “If it has made you a better man, that is no reason not to marry.”

  “It has made me an inconstant man. And I cannot marry her if I do not love her.”

  He had not moved; but now Kit took a step backward. “What makes you think you have stopped loving her?”

  “Because I have started loving you.”

  It was as if buildings crashed, bells clamored, sirens rose like demonic voices, and yet the room was absolutely silent. Kit could hear water playing from the other chamber. She could hear Nolan breathing. She could hear her own heartbeat.

  “What?” she said faintly.

  His feet were still nailed to the floor but he made one cautious movement, spreading his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “You. How can you think I am so wonderful when you are—you are—this incredible, complex, passionate, loyal—ideal—woman? I can’t think when you’re in the room. When you’re not in the room, I can’t think of anything but you. I marvel that you could exist, that such a world as ours could produce you. You have changed me in ways I can’t even describe.”

  She backed away with every phrase he uttered, shaking her head, holding her hands before her in a protective, warning gesture. “Don’t say things like that,” she said. “You’ll regret them. You’ll be sorry.”

  “How could I be sorry? For you to know how I feel? Oh, I know you can’t love me back. I know your heart is given elsewhere. I’m not asking for anything from you. But I wanted you to know. I love you, and I can’t unlove you, and when the world ends, I will love you still.”

  Now she stood half a room away, still shaking her head, but she had folded her arms high across her chest so that her hands clung to their opposite shoulders. “You wouldn’t love me if you knew,” she whispered. “There are things about me that would turn you away—”

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “Everything!” she cried. “Do you forget? You hate the gulden so much, and yet half my life has been among them. They have been my lovers, they have been my closest friends—”

  “I don’t care,” he said. “Do you think I’m afraid that you have been tainted—corrupted? You? One look at your face and anyone could see how pure your heart is.”

  “One look at my face, and you would think I was a highcaste indigo heiress,” she said tensely. “But that is exactly what I am not.”

  “I have known my share of the Higher Hundred,” he said quietly. “And what I love about you is that you are nothing like them at all. You’re unique.”

  “I’m alien,” she said.

  “Exotic,” he amended.

  “But I’m not for the likes of you,” she said. She made her voice hard, though it took all her strength. Inside she was shaking like wine held in an unsteady hand. “You are on foreign soil and stirred by unfamiliar sensations. When you’re home again, this madness will pass—you’ll look back on this entire episode as some kind of crazy dream. You’ll want your usual friends and playthings around you then. You’ll be shocked to think you could ever say you loved me.”

  “If I thought that was true,” he said, “I would stay on Gold Mountain the rest of my life.”

  “You would not be welcome here. You are an outsider, you do not belong. You belong with your own people, your own family, and the girl you have loved your whole life. Go back to them and forget me.”

  “I may go back. I won’t forget you.”

  “Once we leave this place, you’ll have no reason to see me again.”

  “Every reason,” he said. “I love you.”

  “Not in Inrhio,” she whispered.

  Now he finally moved, three paces toward her, bending forward a little as if to peer at her face from a far height. “And if, once I return to the city, I find you are still in my blood like some kind of shadow heartbeat?” he demanded. “What then? Would you believe me if I came to you then and said I still loved you? Would you trust me, and be willing to try and love me in return?”

  “It will not happen,” she said.

  One step nearer. She was against the wall, she could retreat no farther, but the stern look in her eyes stopped him where he stood. “And if it does? Can I seek you out? Convince you?”

  She had once more folded her arms across her chest, this time to try to control her fevered shaking. “I don’t know—I don’t know—it would be wrong,” she stammered, losing the ability to put her argument in words without telling him everything, without saying the worst—what he would perceive as the worst, anyway. “You will not want to see me, let it go at that. When we’re in the city—”

  “When we’re in the city,” he said firmly, “everything will be different. But you’ll see how much things are the same. I have changed for the last time—this is the man I will be till I die. And that man loves you.”

  And because she still had no answer for that, she turned and ran from the room. One more time to fling herself on this bed and cry as if the world was ending. She used to think she was a woman who seldom cried. Strange how one trip had changed that, changed her perceptions of herself, of the people around her. Changed everything.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The next three days passed in fragile silence. Their quarters were too small to allow Nolan and Kit to avoid each other completely, and Nolan made no attempt to. He had no wish to stop seeing her; for him, nothing had changed. Speaking the words aloud had not
made him any more sensitive to her presence, or any less, or altered what he felt or what he wanted. His bones still crumbled the first time he saw her every day; his brain momentarily shut down with the shock. But that had been true for days now and was not actually unpleasant. The enforced intimacy was no hardship on him.

  Kit kept to her room as long as she could in the mornings, but hunger eventually drove her out. She managed to be civil to Nolan, though hardly warm, and he kept a respectful distance. He didn’t badger her with questions or repeated assurances of his love. He merely repeated to her whatever news he’d been able to guess at on the monitor, told her if the guards had left any message with the breakfast tray, and went back to work on his formulas.

  But he felt sorry for her. She clearly felt trapped, desperate, anxious for Chay and wary of her fellow prisoner, and there was nothing she could do about any part of her situation. Midway through the second day, just to offer her a distraction, Nolan suggested they continue reading A Wanderer’s Tale, and she gratefully acquiesced. She didn’t seem up to reciting the text herself, but she sat slumped in the chair, hand supporting her chin, and listened as Nolan read. It pleased him that he could do something for her, even something so small.

  When the book palled on both of them, they took up choisin again, Kit playing with far more concentration this time. Two hours passed without either of them saying a word except to request a card or a turn at the dice. Nolan tried to remember some of the strategies Pakt had used, just to make the game a little more exciting, but he still could not get his mind around the tactics, and so Kit won handily.

  “Another game?” he asked, but she had risen to her feet.

  “I don’t think I could bear it,” she said. “I’m going to bed.”

  It was barely past sunset; she couldn’t possibly be tired. But maybe she was one of those people who possessed the knack of retreating into sleep when the world became too much to cope with. He had never had that skill and, until now, had not envied it.

  “Tomorrow, then.”