Price of Ransom (41 page)

There was another bit of a silence. Then Paisley squirmed, remembering that she was, after all, not yet seventeen. “But min, what
be
it?” she demanded.

Lily chuckled. “What was the
Forlorn Hope
originally meant for, Paisley?”

Paisley looked at her, mystified. “It be ya highroad ship, min. Ya exploratory—” She broke off.

“Ya exploratory ship,” Lily finished for her. “Exactly.”

Behind, the innkeeper emerged from the kitchen. “Ah, you’re up betimes, are you? Will you be having something hot to drink, café perhaps, or cocoa?” While he served them, he sang as well, a simple melody that Bach harmonized.

Later, the others came down, some separately, like Gregori, and some, Lily noted with interest, together.

“Good morning, Jenny. Yehoshua.” She regarded them speculatively. Yehoshua flushed and went to sit down with Deucalion at a different table. Jenny merely grinned and eased herself into the seat next to Lily. “You look pleased with yourself.”

“Quite pleased,” replied Jenny, and ordered her breakfast.

Kyosti emerged from the inn, cast about, and focused on Lily. Dr. Farhad came out directly behind him, but she let him sit down at the table with Lily and Paisley and Jenny and went herself to sit next to the others. Kyosti, sitting, looked a little puzzled, and the edge on him, the clean, alien presence he had possessed so strongly, seemed blurred, like a picture, smudging, that is seen to conceal something else underneath. He glanced at Jenny, and at Paisley, and narrowed his eyes, looking puzzled, as if he was trying to figure something out about them.

“Good morning, Hawk,” said Jenny, curious.

“Good morning,” he said without a trace of accent, and lapsed back into perplexed silence.

“Do you want us to come up with you today?” Jenny asked Lily, to cover the uneasy quiet that settled around the table.

“No. I think just Bach and I and Deucalion.” She hesitated. “And Hawk.”

“And Dr. Farhad?” Jenny asked, jesting slightly.

“No.” Lily examined Kyosti intently. His attention, surprisingly, had wandered from her, and he was looking around the courtyard as if he was trying to remember where he was. “I don’t think Dr. Farhad, this time.”

After their meal, and the innkeeper’s directions—he apologized that there were no vehicles heading up that road this day—Lily found herself walking along a wide dirt path with Deucalion beside her, Bach at her shoulder, and Kyosti trailing behind. The day was fair and fine, or so she deduced from the warmth of the air and the clear sky. Deucalion was too quiet—too tense—to notice. The aria Bach sang had a light, playful melody that made the long climb easy, if one walked in step. They passed no traffic, although once in the distance she heard the sounds of animals and saw white backs heading up another slope, a darker beast at their heels. A slight figure, a boy, perhaps, lagged behind, stick in one hand, a small brown carry slung over the opposite shoulder. He saw them and waved, and though she was too distant to make out his face, she waved back, and Deucalion, too polite to be entirely abstracted, waved as well.

This brief human contact cheered her. A few trees decorated the slopes, but mostly it was grass and the occasional crooked line of tumbled stone wall. The road narrowed and branched, and true to the innkeeper’s directions they headed right down a defile, and came around an outcropping of stone into a tiny nook of a valley at the base of which lay a cottage. Smoke rose from its chimney. The whole scene looked so utterly primitive to Lily that at first she did not realize that it was a dwelling. But as they neared, a small brown animal rushed out of the building, making the most horrendous noise, and a figure appeared in the doorway.

She would have recognized his posture anywhere, even at such a range.

“Gwennie. Gwennie,
fach
. Come, girl.” His voice, without precisely shouting, carried the distance easily.

The beating of her heart quickened, and she felt her breath grow shallow and fast, as if she were climbing to some great height far too swiftly. Deucalion became, if anything, more silent. Bach ceased singing.

The animal turned tail and trotted back to the cottage to stand beside the man in the doorway. He simply watched as they neared, not moving, and yet Lily knew that he would recognize her as easily as she recognized him. Soon she could see his face: he looked older, without looking aged, and there were a few streaks of silver in his brown hair. His face was composed—far more composed than hers, she imagined, because a grin kept trying to break out onto her lips, and she kept forcing it back, trying to keep with the dignity of the situation and the quiet serenity of the valley. Perhaps he had left such ties behind, preferring, after everything, to start his life utterly anew. She felt a sudden misgiving. She should not have come.

At two meters she halted, and he looked at each of them in turn, that steady, calm gaze that she knew and loved so well.

“Well, Lily,” he said, in exactly the same tone he had always used at the academy. Then he did smile, and she let out the breath she had forgotten she was holding. “It’s good to see you.” He came forward, and they embraced. After a moment, he stepped back and turned to regard his son. “Well, Deucalion,” he said in exactly the tone she recalled from the academy—the one he reserved for those students he thought ought to be doing better. “It’s been a long time.”

“Yes,” said Deucalion. Neither of them moved toward each other.

Heredes—Taliesin, she corrected herself—switched his gaze to Hawk, and for what was surely the only time since she had known him, she thought he looked uncomfortable. “But, Lilyaka, who is this? I didn’t know you were traveling with je’jiri—” He sounded almost disapproving, and then he faltered, and blinked. “Hawk?”

Kyosti was examining the covered pens behind the cottage, which were dank with the odor of some animal that had but recently left them. He did not respond to Heredes’s question, or even appear to have heard it, or realize that it was meant for him.

“He’s been—ill,” said Lily.

“So I see.” Heredes regarded him a moment longer, his expression unreadable, and then waved toward the door. “Will you come in?”

“I’ll wait outside,” said Deucalion quickly. A look passed between the two men that was to Lily unfathomable.

“As you wish,” replied Heredes, quite reserved. “What about Hawk?” he asked Lily.

“Who knows? We’ll just have to see.” Heredes turned, and she followed him inside, Bach trailing behind her. Despite her expectations, the interior was neat and clean and well lit by its four windows. It boasted only a bed, a table and chair, and a portable cookery. A white, flat, thin substance she did not recognize littered the table, and she went across and touched it. She stared at it a moment before she realized that the markings on it were writing—words. “What is this?”

He laughed. “That’s paper. I see you still have your composer.”

“Oh, yes.” She turned back to him and grinned. “I could scarcely do without him.”

Patroness,
Bach sang, in a sharp key,
I was not aware that the lack of my presence wast something thou considered.

“It isn’t, Bach. It is something I devoutly wish will never come to pass.”

His cadence, in reply, was brief, but ascending.

“Tea?” Heredes asked.

“Yes.” She paced the room, measuring it out as she had measured cells on that long journey to find him.

He chuckled finally, watching her from his station at the cookery. “You may sit down, if you wish.”

But she didn’t sit. She halted in the middle of the room and stared at him, shaking her head. “I thought you were dead.”

He blinked. “Didn’t I tell you once, that it’s terribly—”

“—boring being dead?” she finished for him, and they both laughed. She sat down. He put a kettle on the cookery burner. “What are you doing?”

“Ah, but here, Lily, one does not make tea in any fashion but the traditional way. It would be heresy. This will take a few minutes.” He crossed to sit on the bed. “Actually,” he said after a pause, “it
was
rather dull. Evidently I was in a coma. I had a bullet in my brain. It’s a very lowering thought, when one comes to know of it.”

“When did you find out?”

“Much later. I was on Bella’s ship by that time, under the very best medical care, but it was still a difficult recovery.”

“You ought to have been dead.”

“Yes, I suppose I ought to have been. But I’ve always hated doing what other people expect of me.”

“Is that why you came here?”

He considered the question gravely. “No. Perhaps, in the end, this was the likeliest place for me to have gone to ground.”

“Concord Intelligence is looking for you, you know.”

He smiled, wry. “They’re looking for all of us, all that are left. They don’t know to leave well enough alone. We won’t trouble them.”

“They think you will.
I’ve
had trouble enough.”

He shook his head. On the cookery, the kettle began to whistle, and Bach, not to be outdone, added a harmonic pitch. Heredes rose. “That’s a feint if I’ve ever seen one. I’ll take it. How
did
you come to be here, Lilyaka?”

So, while he poured the hot water into a pot and out again, and then filled it up over a scattering of dried leaves, and after a bit poured the contents of the pot into ceramic mugs, she told him.

“Well,” he said when she had finished. He took a sip of his tea, got up, and poured them both a second mugful. “Well, Lily.” Just that. Then he nodded, and Lily knew, at that moment, that she would never receive a greater compliment. They sat in mutual, easy silence while she savored it.

A dark form appeared in the open door, tall and slender, head tilting once from side to side. “Lily?” it said.

Heredes shifted on the bed.

“Come in, Kyosti,” Lily said. He entered, pausing to scent again, and then moved with a predator’s grace across to Lily and sank down to sit at her feet. He looked at Heredes, unblinking, and then up at Lily. Heredes gave a slight cough. For a fleeting instant, Lily had the insane thought that he was nervous, but she dismissed it. “What have you been doing here?” she asked him. “Are you going to stay? The innkeeper said you were waiting for a lease.”

“For the time, yes, I think I’ll stay. After I came out of the coma, I began hearing words, so like any good Welshman, I returned home to discover whether I was mad or a poet, since I wasn’t dead.”

The confession took her rather by surprise, and yet, she realized, he was really no different from the Heredes she had known before. “Which is it?” she asked.

The answer came from an unexpected source. “‘Never was there in Gwyddno’s weir, anything as good as tonight.’”

Heredes laughed. “Welcome back, Hawk. Although I will confess to you, Lily, that I’m still not sure. But I have a good deal of time to discover which it is. ‘There is a fine fortress on the shore of the sea. Graciously there his desire is granted to everyone.’” He paused. “As well, I’m still struggling to remember the language. It’s been a very long time since I spoke it last.”

“Which language?”

“The one spoken here. And the one spoken by poets. But you’ve told me what has happened to you. You haven’t yet told me what you intend. As much as I hesitate to give advice”—he hesitated—“I don’t recommend taking up their offer. It’s bad enough to have enemies, but to consciously choose a course of action that will create them for you is, to my mind, a little foolish.”

“No, I don’t intend to become a spy in The Pale. In fact, I just thought of something last night.” She glanced down at Kyosti, flushed a little, and looked up again. “I was out on the village green, looking up at the stars. They seem different, seeing them from the surface of a world, than being surrounded by them. Less accessible and more desirable. On the ship, they’re just part of you. I suppose you take them for granted, just like we took the high weather for granted on Unruli, or you take the hills and grass and clean air for granted here. But it made me think: the
Forlorn Hope
was built to be an exploratory vessel. Why not recommission it? With its current crew and whatever specialists and additional crew it needs. We’ve the experience of running the road from the Reft to League space—with a pilot and navigator, and Bach, able to calculate to the finest edge and run the way without beacons or stations to guide us. We’re all of us more used to space—or at least to enclosed spaces—than planets. And those that aren’t,” she spared a glance for Kyosti here, “have other compelling reasons to take such a course. The League must need to keep pushing outward, if not in the direction of The Pale, then toward the Reft, or in some other quadrant.”

“Well, it’s not me you have to convince. It’s this tribunal. And I doubt if they’ll take my testimony as a good recommendation.”

“No, I doubt if they would. Which reminds me, what do you know about Korey Windsor and his two Ardakians?”

“I’m glad to hear they’re still with him, if only because he needs the companionship. He was a hell-raiser, Korey, back when I knew him. He always drank too much and ran right on the edge in all his operations. He got shot up badly twice. Barely lived. But I would trust him at my back.” As he said this, he looked at Hawk, and looked, if anything, guilty.

“That’s high praise, from you.”

Heredes met her gaze. “Lily, for me, after what I’ve seen and what I’ve done, that is the single quality on which I judge a person. Trust them not to stab me, and trust them to hold their own in a fight. Anything else is inconsequential.”

His expression was serious in a way she had never seen it before, and she realized that he was speaking to her as to a peer, judging that she was fit to receive and understand such information. “I wonder if I really knew you, before,” she said softly.

“You knew me well enough. You learned enough from me, Lily, that I can safely say that you learned to find your own way. That is the greatest gift a student can give a teacher: to return at last to them as an equal.”

They talked on, into the afternoon, talked about his childhood and about his life as an actor, discussed strategies for recommissioning the
Forlorn Hope
, laughed at Lily’s description of the effect Pinto had on the female population of the ship. Heredes even spoke, briefly and with great reticence, of La Belle. Kyosti sat uncannily silent at Lily’s feet. He scarcely moved the entire time. The dog lay panting on the hearth, watching them with dark eyes and dozing off now and then.