The Ships of Air (The Fall of Ile-Rein) (50 page)

“Ah. Everyone who matters.”

Ouch
. But it wasn’t quite true. Gerard mattered, Florian mattered, even Ander mattered. Princess Olympe, Niles, Colonel Averi, Lady Aviler. The missionary woman who had been brave enough to speak to them in the Isle of Storms base, then kissed her cheek later. The chief petty officer who had given her his pistol when Ixion had escaped, various other random people whose names she didn’t know or barely remembered, they all mattered. Arites, Basimi, Captain Feraim, Stanis and all the other dead mattered. “All right, so I didn’t get everyone into this,” she snapped. “But I made them put me in charge, then I couldn’t handle it. The idea to steal a boat was stupid.”

“Not stupid. Ill-informed. But it must have seemed the only option at the time.” He eyed her thoughtfully. “After you entered the city and saw the situation at the harbor, did you still intend to go through with it?”

She sensed this was a question he actually wanted the answer to. “I might have. We would have gotten killed.”

“The chances of dying were fairly high all along,” he admitted easily. “Why did you make them put you in charge?”

Tremaine gestured helplessly. “The Syprians don’t like to take orders from men who aren’t part of their family. Giliead was the only one who could hear the Gardier crystal, I didn’t think I could convince him to try to use it if he thought—He didn’t want to do it and he did it anyway and—I don’t know.” She found herself pausing for the moment when a normal person would have said something reassuring. She sighed to herself.
Do I do that? No wonder I keep Florian in a constant state of distracted annoyance
. “You know, some people have fathers who just say ‘there, there, it’ll be all right.’”

Nicholas snorted in pure contempt. “That would hardly help, since you know it isn’t true. It isn’t going to be all right. The chances are good that it will never be all right again.”

Well, yes
. Tremaine wearily leaned on the counter, eyeing him. She didn’t feel like crying anymore, at least. She felt like getting some answers. “You know Reynard Morane.”

“We’re acquaintances,” Nicholas agreed so casually it would have fooled her if she didn’t know better.

Tremaine rubbed the bridge of her nose, angry that he would still play these games with her. “He took time out during the evacuation to find me and ask me how I planned to get out of town.” She had always known she had had more than one guardian, that Gerard wasn’t the only one who was watching over her or the Valiarde estate, she just hadn’t known who the others were. She had had a telephone number to call in the Garbardin district of Vienne for help, and had used it occasionally at the times when Nicholas’s past had caught up with her. “The only way he could have done that was if the man at the Garbardin exchange reported directly to him.”

Nicholas lifted a brow. “If you think that’s the only way he could have done it, you badly underestimate the resources available to the Queen’s Guard, especially during wartime.”

Tremaine studied the ribbed metal ceiling, mentally begging for patience. “And he said he was my uncle.”

“Ah.” Nicholas folded his arms, conceding the point with a faintly disgruntled expression. “Yes, he was your other guardian. Years ago we made the decision to act as strangers, so association with me wouldn’t damage his political career. Reynard’s past was checkered enough, he didn’t need me hanging about as further ammunition against him.”

“I figured that part out,” Tremaine told him, mock-patiently.

“Now I have a question for you.” He watched her thoughtfully. “What on earth possessed you to marry that man?”

“What?” Tremaine glared at him, caught by surprise and suddenly on the defensive. “Did you pretend to be a Gardier so long that you picked up their prejudices? They don’t think the Syprians are people, by the way.”

As an attempt to throw him off the scent, it worked miserably. “Tremaine, don’t be conventional,” Nicholas said witheringly. “My objection is that by my calculations, you can’t have known him more than six days.”

“Oh.” Tremaine rubbed at a spot on the counter, trying to collect her thoughts. The truth might be an interesting option. “It was a dare. A Syprian political opponent dared me, in front of a lot of people, and it would have been an insult to Ilias if I’d refused. So I didn’t refuse. And I just wanted to.” She looked at Nicholas. His expression was mildly appalled. She gritted her teeth. “Gerard said it was all right.”

Nicholas regarded the ceiling, shaking his head. “Gerard was not chosen as your guardian for his status as a paragon of propriety.”

This distracted her. “Gerard’s proper,” she protested.

“He came to it late in life, believe me.”

Tremaine gestured in frustration. “Considering the decisions I was making back home before all this started, I don’t think you realize how close to normal marrying Ilias was. For me.” Maybe that was a sign. For someone who had wanted to kill herself not so long ago, she was doing an awful lot of things to try to tie herself to this life. Even before she had discovered it must have been partly due to Arisilde’s accidental influence on her.
Maybe part of you knew that it wasn’t as bad as it seemed and was trying to keep the other part from doing something stupid
. Nicholas was still looking at her. “And he’s nice. And his foster mother likes me.”

Nicholas let his breath out, his expression reluctantly resigned. “I suppose it’s legal.”

“Yes, as if that’s going to matter while the Gardier are taking over the world. Both of the worlds.” She knew he had no real objections, he was just trying to get a reaction out of her. Just to see how he would react, she said deliberately, “Syprian marriage is a little different. I had to buy him.” After a pause for effect, she added, “I used the gold coins from the safety-deposit box in the Bank of Vienne.”

Nicholas stared at her, his pose of detached comment forgotten for the moment. “All the coins?” he demanded.

“No, not all the coins.” Tremaine glared in irritation. Nicholas had had hundreds of thousands of reals’ worth of art at Coldcourt and yet had considered having electric wiring run on the second floor of the house an extravagance.

Nicholas shook his head, apparently willing to let the money issue drop. “At least he’s not Ander Destan. I couldn’t stand that little prick.”

E
ventually Giliead fell asleep on the floor, so Ilias found a blanket in one of the little rooms and covered him with it. Though his body ached and his eyes were gritty, his thoughts were going in circles and he still couldn’t lie down, let alone sleep. He decided to go find Tremaine and see if he was still married.

He went back down the ladder into the lower crew area, pausing at a doorway to a little room off the passage, where the ship’s talking curse box lived. Molin was seated inside, hunched over the box, twisting knobs and tapping on things. Ilias knew he was trying to make it hail the
Ravenna,
but from Molin’s expression it wasn’t going well.

He stepped away from the door without disturbing the man and turned to find himself face-to-face with his new father-in-law. They regarded each other warily. Nicholas said, distinctly and with a certain grim emphasis, “You mean to take care of my daughter.” It wasn’t a question.

“Yes,” Ilias said, realized he had spoken Syrnaic, and repeated the word in Rienish.

They eyed each other. Then Tremaine broke the tension by stepping out of the crew area at the end of the passage. “Ilias.”

Nicholas stepped out of the way, giving him a sardonic nod. Ilias moved past, not breaking eye contact until the last possible moment. When he reached Tremaine, she drew him aside into a little room off the larger common area, asking, “How is Giliead?” She kept her voice low, so Cimarus and Cletia wouldn’t hear.

“Just…worried about what’s going to happen when we go home,” Ilias admitted. He leaned gingerly against the metal cabinet, trying to ease the ache in his side.

“You mean, what Visolela and Nicanor might do?”

He shook his head slightly. “What the god might do.”

She frowned slowly. “Like what? It can’t…un-Choose him.” She read his expression worriedly. “Can it?”

“It doesn’t happen often. Maybe once in a generation.” He looked away, gesturing helplessly. Most people didn’t know it ever happened at all, but the poets who kept the Vessels’ Journals knew the stories. Gunias of the Barrens Pass, whose god had left him for a reason no one knew, and who had fallen on his sword. Eliade of Syrneth, who had killed her sister in a fight over a man, then walked into the sea when her god refused to see her. “I don’t know. It’s not like a person. Some things it cares about, some it doesn’t. It didn’t act any different to me after I got the curse mark—”

“But that wasn’t your fault.”

Ilias stopped, caught by that. He absently took her hand, noticing the nails were bitten to the quick. “This wasn’t his fault either. But it was something he did, not something that was done to him. If there’s a difference, that’s it.”

“But the god didn’t mind us,” she protested. “It didn’t do anything to Florian or Gerard or Arisilde in the sphere.”

“But it didn’t Choose you either.” Maybe she was right. He couldn’t think about it anymore or he was going to go crazy. He let out his breath in frustration, pushing the hair out of his eyes. “There’s no way to tell until we get there.” He looked at her for a long moment. Her eyes were hollow and her face drawn, and her skin felt chill though it wasn’t cold in here. Under those layers of sarcasm and anger she was all nerves and pain; she couldn’t keep that tamped down forever. He just wished he knew how to help her. “So, how are things going with…He jerked his chin toward the doorway.

“Oh, him?” Her smile was bitterly ironic. “He hasn’t killed anybody or overthrown any governments or brought down any captains of industry since we’ve been aboard so far, so I suppose he’s bored.”

Ilias’s mouth quirked; he hadn’t understood all of that, but he was fairly sure she wasn’t entirely joking. He asked carefully, “Is he angry that you got married?” He knew Rienish men had far more control over decisions made by their household. He had also known this might end with Tremaine leaving for her own land and him staying behind in Cineth, but he somehow hadn’t thought that it would be soon.

Tremaine shook her head, obviously irritated. “He thinks it’s impetuous of me to marry someone that I’ve only known for a few days from another world that I don’t know anything about.”

Ilias nodded. When she put it that way, it did sound a little…impetuous. “Karima probably already traded away the coins,” he found himself saying.

“He doesn’t really care, he’s just trying to make me react.” Tremaine gestured sharply. “It’s infuriating.”

He wasn’t sure she was right about that.

Then from the passage, Molin called jubilantly, “The
Ravenna
!” followed by a lot of very fast Rienish Ilias couldn’t catch. Cletia and Cimarus got to their feet, looking worried, and the boy Calit sat up, blinking sleepily.

“He’s raised her on the wireless,” Tremaine repeated for Ilias, stepping into the outer room, heartfelt relief in her voice. “God, that’s good news for once.”

S
omeone touched her shoulder, saying, “Florian.”

She started and sat up, her legs aching and one foot asleep, startled to see she was still in the darkened storeroom. “Ow,” she muttered, rubbing her eyes. There was no tall thin man with violet eyes and wispy white hair standing over her, that had been a dream. She shivered at the sudden chill in the air.

Then she saw something move across the threshold of the door. As she squinted at it, a breath of white mist crept in. Florian stared. “Oh. Oh, no,” she whispered grimly to herself.
You wanted something to happen, there it is
.

She pushed to her feet, stepping to the door, careful to avoid the questing wisp of mist.

Like the breath off a bog, a layer of the stuff floated above the passage leading to the main corridor.
Damn it
. She thought about calling out, but the knowledge that whatever was causing this had to be here somewhere nearby squelched that impulse. She closed her eyes for an instant, going over the words of the concealment charm again, then turned the other way, moving down the corridor toward Ixion’s prison. Reaching the corner, she darted a cautious look around it. Three of the guards lay sprawled in the passage, already unconscious, tendrils of mist wafting over their bodies.

The mist covered the floor on the far side of the door to the guardroom and pockets of it oozed into being everywhere there was clear floor space.
It’s surrounding us, cutting us off from—
“Shit!” Florian hopped away from the mist reaching for her ankles and darted into the guardroom. Four more men lay unconscious around the empty chamber, one stretched across the table in the corner, the receiver for the ship’s telephone in his hand. Florian scrambled onto the table, just avoiding a reaching wisp, and grabbed the receiver out of the man’s limp hand. She tapped frantically on the cradle, but the line was dead.

The door to the inner room flew open and Florian froze as for the first time she got a good look at Ixion. He looked like an ordinary man, handsome even, wearing a set of gray army fatigues. There was a sparse dark fuzz across his skull, as if he had shaved his head and the hair was just growing back. She had expected something a good deal more horrible after the body-growing process the others had talked about, but the past few days must have completed it. His eyes darted around the room but didn’t settle on her; she fervently hoped her charm was working on him and he wasn’t just toying with her.

He made a ritual gesture her eye couldn’t quite follow and the mist peeled back from the floor in a half circle around him. But as he stepped forward Florian caught movement out of the corner of her eye and jerked away in horror, nearly stumbling off the table. Something was standing in the doorway, almost within arm’s reach of her.