The Law of Becoming: 4 (The Novels of the Jaran) (91 page)

“Shit,” said Rachelle. “The little bastard’s right. He can do whatever he damned well pleases.” But then, deliberately, she winked at him.

Anatoly grinned, knowing that he had one on his side. “Of course, by only accepting your freely given oaths, I accept also that you may freely leave, so long as you tell me openly and we fix between us any due compensation and an agreement about what you may and may not do afterward which might jeopardize the security of my position.”

“Hey, Florien, no selling tech secrets to the competition.”

Florien blinked in his absentminded way. “Rachelle, someday the evil spirits will get you.”

“I hope so.”

“We’ll have to discuss it,” said Branwen suddenly, cutting into this interchange. “We vote on things here.”

“I know that,” said Anatoly. “I’ll go back to my cabin and wait for your decision.”

In his cabin, he took off his boots, lay down on the narrow bunk, hooked his hands under his head, and stared at nothing. After a while, he rolled onto his right side and fished out the castle piece, setting it on the floor.

“Show me the board.” At once the flat black game board flowered into existence, contained in its grid of glowing white lines. The horseman had moved two intersections away from the emperor’s throne. The piece shaped like a teardrop had moved closer to him, and another piece, shaped like a blade, had moved farther away. The others had not changed their position from the last time he had looked.

All daiga holdings.
Should he simply go down to Rhui and report in to Bakhtiian, handing these lands over to him, as was his duty? Or should he claim them for the Sakhalin tribe, as was his right? Except without Bakhtiian and his vision, without Ilya’s marriage to Tess Soerensen and the intervention of Charles Soerensen, Anatoly would never have left Rhui at all, never left the jaran, never known that khaja lands flourished beyond the plains, that worlds and stars existed beyond Rhui and Mother Sun.

A bell rang at his door. He closed his hand over the castle piece, concealing it, and the game board vanished. Lifting his hand, rolling up to sit, he said, “Enter.” The door slid open and Branwen walked in. That was one of the many things he liked about her: She never hesitated. She knew this was her ship, and however powerful he might be now, prince of the Sakhalin, prince in the Chapalii Empire, it was still
her
ship. Like an etsana, she understood where her power lay, and that she alone could wield it.

She sat down on the end of his bunk. Like a woman, she did not ask for permission. His feet brushed her hips, but she did not move away from their touch. Her brown hair curled down over her shoulders. The soft white light emanating from the bunk’s ceiling washed the red highlights to silver.

“It was unanimous,” she said. “Rachelle tried to vote twice, to make sure she won.” She grinned.

Anatoly liked her grin. “You’re teasing me. You didn’t tell me which way they voted.”

“Someone has to make sure you don’t fuck up. We just appointed ourselves. Ten years, barring catastrophic changes, as long as you keep to your end of the bargain. To be reconsidered at the end of that time.”

She stretched her long, lean legs out in front of her and rested a hand just below his knee, as if balancing herself there.

“That is acceptable.” He was almost painfully aware of the warmth and pressure of her hand on his leg. It had been so long since a woman had shown him spontaneous physical affection.

“I don’t normally do this,” added Branwen, “and I know you’re married, but you’ve sustained a shock. And you look like hell.”

“I do?”

But those were the last words he said for a while, because she leaned forward and kissed him on the mouth.

Valentin died three hours after Diana and Portia left Naroshi’s palace. Both events came abruptly, as if an unseen communication had triggered them. Ilyana had not gone to see Diana off; she had been too busy consoling Evdokia for the loss of her best friend. And anyway, an undercurrent of hushed arguments and frowning looks had swirled through the company since planetrise. As usual, no one bothered to tell Ilyana what was going on, but she heard enough to guess, eavesdropping.

“She would cut out like that with only two performances left.”

“Give her a break, Annet. Gives you a chance to shine, don’t it?”

“That’s true. Though playing Zenocrate to Veselov’s Tamberlaine is more like punishment.”

“Yeah, he
is
flat. I don’t see why everyone says he used to be such a promising actor. He’s just a slut.”

“He’ll go back to the acties, I bet.”

“We can hope.”

And another pair, in another place.

“It’s about time she did something, instead of just sneaking around with Yassir. I feel sorry for that poor husband of hers.”

A snort. “Serves him right, the arrogant
tvut.
He’s so polite he’d freeze your blood to ice, and all like he’s doing you a favor. D’you think it’s true he saw the emperor? Nah. Why him, and not anyone else?”

“Cos’ he’s a—what—a prince?”

Gales of laughter, which annoyed Ilyana more than the comments about her father had. But they broke off soon enough. “They got a message in this morning something urgent. That’s why La Brooke left.”

Only two performances left. Sitting beside Valentin’s couch, she shut her eyes and tranced out on his breathing. Monitored by the bed, his exhalation and inhalation soothed her because of its regularity. His body had curled even farther into a fetal position, and his right hand had ceased twitching, as it had been all yesterday.

She didn’t want to leave. She didn’t want to go back to London, not really, except to see Kori and her other friends, but that’s where they would go, if he could get around M. Pandit. But wherever they ended up, she could not bear going on day after day like this with her parents, even with an advocate in tow, to monitor their psychological health.

Valentin let out a breath. There was silence. She thought at first that she had dozed off, but she hadn’t. He had stopped breathing.

She jumped to her feet and bolted for the curtained door. When her hand touched the cloth, she froze. They would come soon enough. An alarm must be going off on Yomi’s slate. But why hurry them? They would just force Valentin’s heart to start up again; they would plug his brain stem into an artificial stimulator, and he would live, mindless, against his will, through the machine. She turned and stared down at him.

His face was slack, empty. All the mobility of expression that made him Valentin, little pest, favorite brother, had vanished when their father had severed him from his soul. His lips still had the pale rose tint of a delicate shell, but even that seemed to drain out of him as she watched, as he cooled. His life slipped away, and she let it go. When they all came running, it was too late to try to bring him back.

“I fell asleep,” she lied, starting to cry. She did not have to lie about her grief. They left her alone to weep while they conferred over the body. She went out to sit in the courtyard. The sun warmed her, and she took off her boots and let its heat linger on her toes, on her ankles, on her knees.

“Yana!”

She flinched and tugged her trouser legs back down to her ankles.

“It is unbecoming to expose yourself so shamelessly,” snapped her mother. “But I suppose that now that you have gone to live in… a man’s tent, that you no longer feel constrained to behave like a good woman.”

“I’m not sleeping in a man’s tent! I’m just using David’s cot. He sleeps somewhere else.”

Karolla hefted Little Rose up onto her shoulder. The baby’s presence was itself an accusation. Unnamed still, because of her sister’s stubbornness. But Karolla said nothing more. She walked over to the group gathering outside the room where Valentin lay.

They were arguing over what to do with the body. Ilyana spotted David’s thick crown of braids in the throng and sidled over to his side, squeezing past some of the others to reach him. She used his body as a shield from her father, who stood next to his wife, confronting Yomi.

“He must be left on the plains,” Karolla was saying in her pedantic way, “so that he can be born again into the world.”

Into which world? Ilyana thought. This world? What would he become, born back onto an alien moon? An alien himself? A ghost crying for its true home?

“He must be taken back to the plains,” repeated Karolla stubbornly.

“To Rhui?” Yomi asked. “You know that is impossible.”

“Then at least back to Earth. Surely even you barbarians have places where you lay out your dead so that Father Wind may cleanse their souls and return them to living.”

Someone whispered: “What does she mean, cleanse them?”

“I don’t think he wants to go back to Earth,” said Ilyana suddenly, stepping out from behind David. Everyone else started, except David, who had known she was there. “He hated it there. I think you should burn him. He wants to be released.”

“That is not our way,” said Karolla. “He has not earned release.”

Vasil just looked at Ilyana, as if she was a stranger to him.

“I don’t care about
your
way. It’s what he wants.
Your
way is what killed him.”

“Who gave you the right to speak such accusations? His body must be given to the wind so that his soul may be returned to the earth.”

“Let him go! Why won’t you just let him go? You don’t care about him, only about yourself.”

David grabbed Ilyana and dragged her back before her mother could slap her.

Karolla whitened. In khush, she said: “I cast you out of my tent. You are no longer my daughter.”

Ilyana gasped. She looked toward her father, but Vasil’s face was cast of stone. He deliberately looked away from her.

Karolla went on, inexorably but with a weird dignity, her words spoken almost by rote, as if memorized from some similar ceremony she had witnessed, she had endured, many many years before. “I declare you tribeless, motherless, kinless. Wander where you will, you shall find no welcome by this fire.”

Stunned, Ilyana could not move. David led her away, and she simply walked with him, nerveless, numb. Like rock, she felt nothing, but a sharp blow would crack her.

David sat her down on a bench in the sun. “What did she say?” he asked.

She shook her head. She could still see the knot of people, shifting nervously now that an explosion had occurred that they could not interpret. She could still see her father’s golden head, turned away from her.

David pulled her to her feet and guided her out of the caravansary. “What was that all about?” he demanded when they came out onto the dusty road that led to only one destination—to the ruined caravansary. A road that led nowhere. The planet loomed in copper glory in the sky. The sun splintered its rays through one of the outer rings, scattering light in odd fragments over the flat landscape. Out in the grass, the horses grazed peacefully, calm in the golden haze of the sun.

Ilyana broke away from David and ran. At first, anywhere, away. He came after her, but she was younger, not as fast in a sprint, but she had more endurance and she had a head start.

“Genji!” she called into the drowsy air. “Help me.”

The barge came for her. She clambered in, slipping once on the stairs in her frantic haste, and the hatch closed behind her to the sound of David cursing her in at least three different languages. Then she left him far behind. The craft slipped through the rose wall and rain poured over it, coursing down its ribs, splattering the dense glass. Clouds obscured the sky, as they always did. Here, in Naroshi’s palace—in Genji’s palace—it was always raining.

The barge halted and she tumbled out. She had never seen this place before. Rain drenched her, but it was a relief because the air stifled her with its heat and humidity. She stood in front of a small tile-roofed cottage in the middle of a clearing surrounded by jungle. She was soaked to the skin before she finally worked up enough courage to go inside.

She had to push the door open. She stood dripping on a mosaic entry way. What had she expected? A magical hut that, tiny on the outside, opened up into vast ballrooms on the inside? It was just a single room, about fifteen meters square, with no furnishings except a single shell-like chair placed in the center of the mosaic floor. The tiles in the floor had an odd quality of shifting every time Ilyana blinked, like the pattern of stars as seen by a ship in transit.

Genji sat in the chair. Her eyes were open, but she didn’t seem to be inside them. Ilyana waited. Water puddled at her feet and, slowly, dried up, sucked away into the tile floor. Her clothes lightened as the moisture evaporated out of them. It was oppressively hot. Ilyana looked up to the high beams that straddled the open room, beams as dark as ebony wood. When she looked back, Genji was watching her.

Ilyana opened her mouth to speak, but no words came out.

“I have been traveling with your cousin,” said Genji. She did not rise from the chair. Ilyana realized abruptly that fine filaments bound her to the chair, wispy strands as delicate as a spider’s web.

“My cousin?”

“Prince Anatoly. Why have you come, my child?”

She had enough strength left to take three steps forward before she collapsed into a heap on the floor. The mosaic was cool against her skin, but as hard as her mother’s heart. Ilyana had no tears left.

“I have no mother,” she whispered, staring at her hands. She lifted her gaze to take in the smooth cascade of Genji’s night-blue robes, her pale shining alien hands curved lightly over the arms of her chair. “I have no tribe.”

“You will stay with me.”

Eyes wide, Ilyana stared up into her face. Not a human face, not even precisely a face by human standards, but no longer completely strange. A chill struck her, and she shivered, but it passed, soaked up by the heat. “Forever?” she asked, and her voice quavered, lost, and vanished. For an instant, she was terrified. She passed through to resignation and then at last, because she was young, threw away all her fears, consumed by an intense curiosity.

“ ‘Every change is merely part of a mystical pattern,’ ” said Genji. “You will stay for as long as need be.”