her instruments 02 - rose point (29 page)

“What she said.” Irine looked hopeful.

“Fine, fine. Just don’t break any dishes,” Reese said.

“I think we should start with the heraldry,” Kis’eh’t said to Sascha. “Have you got your tablet with you? Let’s start associating them with names, if we can.”

Reese left them to it and went back to her bedroom to climb onto the monument and sit on its edge. As she contemplated the very distant floor, Allacazam rolled up to her side and bumped her. He formed a question in her mind, a sound like a very distant song she couldn’t make out.

“I’m okay,” Reese told him, petting him. “Confused, but when is that not normal?”

The swath of sudden black was disagreement.

“All right, maybe I’m not always confused,” Reese said. “But when I’m not, it’s because I’m in denial about all the things I don’t understand.”

A peep of light at the edge of the fading black, and the surprise of a sunrise in her mind.

She chuckled. “Well, I can learn.” She pulled him into her lap and hugged him. “Maybe it’s being around people who are even more into denial than I am. I can see how stupid it is. No, worse. How dangerous. And ridiculous, too.” She made a face into his fur. “I don’t want to be ridiculous.”

The strands tickled her nose until she wrinkled it. In her mind a picture formed of Hirianthial with a lute, serenading her on a grassy sward. She hid her grin, shook her head a little. “Don’t be silly.”

One of the lute strings broke with a twang. Tiny Hirianthial looked astonished.

Reese snickered, then quieted. “No, I mean it. It’s not like that.”

The scene was washed with twilight blue, faded into that mist. She sighed at the sense of reproach, even as gentle as it was. But she didn’t say anything. She didn’t feel ready to say anything... maybe she never would be. Clearing her throat, she called, “Hey, Irine! Wake me up when the dinner tray shows up!”

“Will do!”

Reese kicked off her boots and curled up on the mound of blankets. Two more days, and then... who knew.

The following morning Urise saw him and said, “You have had an unfortunate event.”

Hirianthial replied, “Would it be presumptuous for me to ask how you derived that knowledge?”

The priest huffed softly and sat across from him in the dull light seeping in through the library windows. “You think I took it from your aura?” He smiled, shook his head. “I am an old man, and have had many, many students. You have a look to your shoulders and face, my son. I could no more describe it than I could fly. So. What disordered you?”

“I still react to attack with too extreme a response,” Hirianthial said. “Even against people I know to be safe.”

“You are living in the past,” Urise said. “We shall have to remedy that.”

Hirianthial glanced at him. “Is that my problem?”

“It’s everyone’s problem,” the priest said with that blend of humor and resignation common to the elderly. “Why should it not be yours?” More gently, “You relive your experience on the colony world. You relive the cruel sorrows of your life before that. You live by those lessons. But you no longer have that luxury. Your power makes it too perilous for those around you. You must learn to live in the present, truly be here, now. So, let us go.”

“Go where?” Hirianthial asked.

“Out,” the priest said firmly, and rose.

Bemused, Hirianthial followed. They walked to the opposite end of the palace, where the priests quartered, and out the door beside the chapel to the lakeside. The weather was grim and the sky wan, and the chill in the air stiff enough to make his wrists hurt. The ever-present breeze off the sea only exacerbated the ache; he could only wonder how Urise bore it.

“And now?” he asked his teacher.

“Yonder woods,” Urise said. “Go there. Do not come back until you touch a deer.”

“Touch... a deer,” Hirianthial repeated.

“Go on,” the priest said, folding his arms into his sleeves. “I’ll wait for you here.”

Hirianthial started off, paused. He said over his shoulder, “Deer are shy of people.”

Urise’s brows lifted, but he answered not at all save to smile.

Resigned, Hirianthial headed for the woods on the opposite end of the lake. It was not a short walk, and while one dressed for the cold of the palace, he was still several layers short of what he would have preferred had he known he would be exposing himself to the wind. The trees, once he gained their shelter, protected him from that... but also cut him off from what little sun could be felt through the cloud cover. The gloom that enshrouded him was moist and cold, and his breath plumed white in it as he wandered, wondering how he would manage to find a deer much less touch one. He supposed he could compel them to come, but the idea was distasteful.

If the object of this lesson was to force him to leave his cares behind, he was failing already. He found a fallen tree grown over with a lace of frost-pale mold and sat. He didn’t remember the cold plaguing him this much, but he was no longer three hundred years old and immune to the consequences of physical punishment. There was a time he could have spent all day in these woods in a thin court coat and come back to stand a night shift at Liolesa’s door—

—but that was the past again. And yet the past had made him who he was. How could he let go of it? He reached back under his hair and drew the dangle over his shoulder. The memories associated with it now were unfortunate, and yet he would not hurt the
Earthrise
crew by cutting it off. To cauterize the traumas of his past seemed to require the sacrifice of the beauties and joys he’d also lived through. His grief over Laiselin—and the memories of their too-short life together. His pleasure at being a good steward for Jisiensire—and the pain of his brother’s betrayal. The relationship he’d relied on for so long in his cousin, the Queen—and the knowledge that to have it back, he would have to stay here.

The fist in his hair, living close by the touch of Irine’s fingers as she braided in the ornaments.

He didn’t think he could let it go. Any of it.

He didn’t know how long he spent there, bent over his knees, head down, breathing in the cold damp air and feeling the shadows of the trees on his back like a pressure that bore him into the earth. In his heart, the joy of living fought with the hurt of it until he could no longer separate them, and the effort made him understand that they were not him. That he was apart from them, evaluating them.

The sudden sense of choice was so dizzying he lost a breath to it, and the world seemed to also. The hush in the glade was so intense his ears rang and he shuddered.

He looked up and found a gray-coated doe studying him, her sides dappled in trails of icy moss. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to touch her nose as she extended it toward him, feel the heart’s-blood warmth of her. She was living now, and so was he.

He left the woods carrying that sense of timelessness with him, a trailing cloak of otherworldliness that made him feel the cold less. When he joined Urise, the priest nodded. “Very good. Now, the lesson.”

Surprise made the world move at a normal pace, and the change was jarring. “That was not the lesson?”

“No, no,” Urise said, shaking his head. “That, my son, was the lecture. The lesson is maintaining some of that epiphany this afternoon, when you go to court.” He grinned. “You will tell me tomorrow how it goes.”

Hirianthial considered the horizon, then said, “You are good at this, Elder.”

The priest snorted, aura shot through with sparkles of humor. “Flattery won’t improve your grade.”

“What do you think?” Felith asked.

Reese and Irine were bent over the offerings, their shadows falling on the fabric.

“They’re pretty?” Reese said, touching the sleeve. “I guess? What do I know about dresses?”

“You must try them,” Felith said, decisive. “For they will need to be adjusted. You first, my Lady, as your tigraine’s dress will not be needed for a few days.” As Sascha, Kis’eh’t and Bryer entered the greeting chamber, she added, “I have something for you, sir Sascha, but I fear nothing for you, miss Kis’eh’t. Nor you.” She looked up warily at Bryer, who said nothing.

“I didn’t expect you to,” Kis’eh’t said. She joined Reese and Irine.

“What do you think?” Irine asked, amused.

Kis’eh’t said, “Why is Reese getting the same sort of dress as Irine?”

“I beg your pardon?” Felith asked.

Kis’eh’t pointed. “There are only two female bipedals, and there are two dresses, so these should be for Irine and Reese. But Reese is our captain. She should be in something fancier.”

Taken aback, Reese said, “I’m sure this is fancy enough for me.”

Kis’eh’t shook her head. “Reese, this is a feudal culture, or something similar enough to look like it. That means that you having people under you makes you important. If you walk in there signaling that you’re our equal, then you’re losing out on the status you’d have by claiming us as your people, to be protected.”

Reese eyed Felith. “Is she right?”

The Eldritch wrung her hands. “It does grant you more prestige, to have vassals of your own.”

“I’m guessing that reflects well on the Queen too,” Reese said, fingering the sleeve of one of the gowns. “To be taking on a retainer with employees?”

“The Queen cannot take on a retainer with employees,” Felith said. “If you are a lady with your own people to caretake, you can only serve her as a vassal, a true vassal. It is the only way to preserve the lines of duty...” She trailed off. “That is one word for us, draevilth. I don’t know how to say it in Universal. From the Queen comes the authority that protects the lady, and that authority is passed through the lady to the people. Too from the Queen comes the power and gifts of that authority, which the lady is to pass down to her people. From the people come the gifts and duties that are due the lady, and those she passes up to the Queen. A retainer is always at the end point of that relationship. Not in the middle.” She made a face. “Does that make sense when I explain it thus?”

“Yes,” Reese said. “And it means I need a fancier dress.”

“Oh, but you must not!” Felith exclaims. “If the Queen wishes you for a retainer—”

“She knew I had crew,” Reese said. “And hell if I’m not going to protect them. I found out the hard way that they’re mine—” She eyed the twins, who grinned, and even Kis’eh’t smiled and gestured encouragement. “—so absolutely, I’m not going to pretend otherwise.”

“The Queen cannot take on a human vassal!” Felith exclaimed, aghast.

“She should have thought of that before she offered,” Reese said. “And she did offer. She gave me the jewelry and everything.”

Felith passed a hand over her eyes and sighed. “I am not certain where to find anything more ornate than this in less than a day.”

“The answer to that is obviously Araelis,” Kis’eh’t said.

“But the court convenes in four hours! She will be engaged!”

“That gives you plenty of time, then,” Sascha said.

Felith pressed her lips together. “Very well,” she said finally. “I will go and ask. But be aware, Captain... a lady being taken on as a vassal must bring some sort of gift, something that makes her worth to her liege-lady clear.”

Thinking of the horses—and even the
Earthrise
, which, while no prize in the Alliance, represented more carrying capacity than this world had—Reese said, “I think I can come up with something or other.”

Felith considered her warily, then sighed and said, “I will return.”

After the door closed, Reese said to Kis’eh’t, “That was a good catch.”

“Thanks. It makes sense in the context of the society,” Kis’eh’t said. She sat, folded her tail over her feet. “And the last thing we want is for you to be considered someone unimportant. If the Queen gets in trouble, her servants are fair game. But someone with enough power to be one of the Queen’s vassals might get wooed by the other side before they decide she’s more likely to be loyal than bought and kill her.”

“Just a little bit violent there, don’t you think?” Irine asked, ears flattening.

“Better to assume the worst,” Kis’eh’t said. “Violence figures largely into cultures that don’t have formally codified laws.”

“These aren’t feudal kings from Earth’s past, though,” Sascha said. “They’re aliens.”

“Are they?” Kis’eh’t said.

A very, very long pause.

“You’re suggesting they’re colonists?” Reese asked, when she could trust her voice.

“They look awfully human,” Kis’eh’t said.

“So do we!” Irine said.

“That’s exactly her point.” Sascha’s ears had flattened to his skull. “We were made by humans. That’s why we look human.”

“Isn’t there a theory that intelligent life will tend to evolve in similar ways?” Reese asked.

“Reese,” Kis’eh’t said. “You hug a Flitzbe every night.”

“They’re more like plants than animals....”

“I’d argue that,” Kis’eh’t said. “But fine. What about the Platies? They’re true-alien. And the Akubi? Not very humanoid, are they? Giant flying dinosaur bird things... they don’t even look like the Phoenix, who were designed.” She added to Bryer, “Pardon me for saying so.”

Bryer ruffled his wings. “Truth is not offensive.”

“I tend to agree, myself,” Kis’eh’t said. “And the Chatcaava? Really? Dragons that can fly and shift their shape?”

“That doesn’t mean that two sets of human-looking people can’t co-evolve,” Reese said.

“All right,” Kis’eh’t said. “I’d consider that myself since we have no direct evidence. Except for one thing.” She leaned forward. “They know about horses.”

“Oh, my,” Irine said, eyes wide.

“Maybe they traded Earth for some a few thousand years ago,” Reese said, frowning.

“A few thousand years ago, Earth hadn’t made alien contact with anyone,” Kis’eh’t said. “And not long after that, you were a little occupied with some wars, remember? So where did the horses come from? This place has horses. What’s more, they have bad horses. You all had to ride them, so you maybe didn’t have a chance to look at them the way I did, walking next to them. They’ve got signs of inbreeding.”

“Maybe it’s just that batch that’s bad,” Sascha said, thinking.