Chapter 8
CHAPTER EIGHT
She isn’t afraid of me.
Njkall turned the thought over in the grey pre-dawn while Polly slept nestled against his side, one small hand still fisted loosely in the fur over his heart.
I’m asking you not to be patient anymore. I’m asking you to come with me.
He’d waited a year to hear something like it. And now that she’d said it, now that she’d told him fiercely in the dark that she knew the difference between fear and new, now that she’d told him that she wanted him—he found the wanting had grown teeth he hadn’t known it had.
That was the cruelty of it. Her fear had made restraint easy. Her fear meant be still, be safe, take nothing, give everything, and wait. He was good at waiting. He’d built a whole life on the strength of it.
But she wasn’t afraid anymore. She’d taken away the one thing that had made his self-denial simple, and left him with a small warm female asleep against his ribs, her breath moving the fur at his throat, her hand over his heart, and permission.
And permission was so very much harder to survive than a locked door.
Because she’d also said slowly. And slowly was right. Slowly was the only honest pace for what she was and what she’d lived through and how far she still had to walk. He knew that. He believed it. He would hold to it if it took the rest of his years.
It was only that she’d shivered against his mouth last night and made that small helpless sound, and something in him had roared awake that he’d kept chained for so long he’d half convinced himself it had died in there.
It had not died.
He sighed quietly, then eased himself from beneath her hand, and got up before the wanting could make him stupid.
Clan business, thank the gods, did not care what a male wanted.
By the time he entered the council chamber, he had three separate messages waiting and two clan members standing at the entrance with the particular patient hunch of people who’d been told to wait but had things that could not keep.
“Two of the offworlders from the resort went up the north ridge,” the first said.
Sennt, young and earnest, still growing into his shoulders.
“In their soft little boots. They said they wanted to see the sarlag herd to take pictures. By the time the guide found them, one of them had frostbite in two toes. The medic at the resort is tending to him.”
“Only two toes?”
“The guide was fast.”
He rubbed his jaw. “Whose party?”
“The mining consortium’s. The ones who booked the whole east wing.”
Of course. The ones with the money, who therefore believed the planet would negotiate. It never did.
“Tell the resort no more ridge walks without two guides and proper gear checked at the door,” he said. “If the consortium doesn’t like it, they can freeze at their own expense somewhere else. But put it politely.”
The second one had a longer face and a longer list of problems from the port.
A trader had set up a stall selling what he swore were licensed weapons and were not.
Another trader was selling fake crystals and each time he was ordered to move on, he’d simply move forty paces and reopen.
The eldest son of one of the clan members had spent a month’s earnings on a gambling table that hadn’t existed the week before.
None of it was disastrous. That was rather the point, and the part that troubled him most. Each thing on its own was the ordinary friction of more people arriving somewhere that had been quiet.
But small things multiplied, and Port Eyeja had spent generations as a place where small things went unanswered until they grew into large ones.
He’d wanted the traffic. He’d argued for it against the elders who wanted the world to stay shut.
More contact, more trade, and more knowledge of the Empire that had ignored Hothrest for so long was both good and necessary, if his people were to have a hand in their own future instead of waiting for the future to arrive without them.
He had simply not wanted it to arrive quite so fast.
“I’ll go down myself,” he said. “Send word to Baralt I’m coming.”
“He’ll say he can handle it.”
“He can. Tell him anyway.”
Port Eyeja was even busier than on his last trip.
He noticed it in the first street—more bodies, more colors, more of the small nervous huddle of newcomers who didn’t yet know which lanes to avoid.
A group of them, resort visitors by their too-clean coats, stood clustered at a corner taking pictures of a sex-seller draped along a doorway, and the seller was letting them.
For a price, of course. One of the newcomers looked as though he might faint from the excitement of being somewhere dangerous while entirely safe.
Children, he thought, without much heat. Playing at the edge of the galaxy. Well. Better they play here, where Baralt’s people could watch over them, than out in the mountains where the mountains played back.
He found Baralt in the law enforcement building as usual. He looked up and sighed when Njkall entered.
“They warned me you were coming,” Baralt said. “I told them it wasn’t necessary.”
“As I assumed you would. You look untroubled.”
“I’m always untroubled. Ten years on the fight circuit teaches you not to worry about the small stuff.
I’ve already dealt with the weapons trader.
I confiscated his stock, walked him to the port, and watched his ship leave.
He’ll tell everyone I stole from him, which is true, and that I’m unreasonable, which is less true, but both are useful. ”
“The gambling table?”
“Newer problem. Fellow off one of the trade ships, sets up in a different back room every night, so my people can’t sit on it.
I’ll find the pattern, but there’s only so much you can do to protect people from their own stupidity.
” Baralt dropped into a chair that groaned under him and gestured Njkall to another.
“The fake crystal trader is easier to track, but just as persistent. I might have to confiscate his stock as well. The real trouble isn’t any one of these.
You know that. It’s the volume. Every ship that comes for the resort’s money brings ten passengers, and one of those ten is looking for exactly the kind of place this used to be.
They come sniffing whether we like it or not. ”
“Then we make sure they smell you instead. Or your males.”
“That’s the plan.” Baralt flashed his fangs again. “It’s mostly working. Isabel says I’ve become insufferably fond of the sound of my own authority. I told her that’s marriage, learning new things about yourself.”
He huffed something that was almost a laugh.
They went through it properly then, discussing the patrols, the pressure points, where the extra bodies needed to go and where the clans could spare them.
Baralt was, as ever, better at this than he pretended and worse at accepting help, and the negotiation took the shape it always took, which was two males who trusted each other arguing about resources until they landed exactly where they’d both known they’d land at the start.
“One more thing,” Njkall said, rising. “The male Athtar left you. Doren.”
“What about him?”
“Where is he?”
“Still at Rjmar’s. He’s made himself Rjmar’s problem, which suits me fine—one less body in my lockup.
” Baralt shook his head. “He’s got a mouth on him that’s going to get his throat opened one of these nights, and he seems to be in a hurry about it.
But he’s not stupid, and he’s not a slaver, and he hasn’t actually broken anything of mine yet. So he’s still Rjmar’s problem.”
“I’ll look in on him.”
“Why? He’s not clan.”
“No.” Njkall considered the question. “But Athtar took him on so he must have seen something in him. And he’s here now. That makes him mine to think about, whether he likes it or not.”
Baralt snorted. “You collect them. You know that? Broken things off ships. It’s a wonder your caves aren’t full to the roof.”
He thought of a small dark-haired woman with grey eyes, asleep with her hand fisted in his fur, and did not answer that at all.
Rjmar’s shop crouched at the end of one of the better side lanes, close enough to the braziers of the main street to stay bearable, far enough that the rent was survivable.
It was the kind of place that sold everything and specialized in nothing—salvage and oddments and offworld goods that had washed up on Hothrest by roads best not asked about, all of it stacked to the low ceiling in a chaos that Rjmar swore he understood.
The door-chime rattled as he entered, and warmth and the smell of dust and old metal closed over him as he ducked under the lintel.
“—not the point, old male, the point is you’re charging me for a bed I didn’t ask for in a town I didn’t ask to be in—”
The voice cut off as both of the males in the room looked up. Rjmar was behind his cluttered counter, calmly doing something to the innards of a small device with a thin tool. The male who had been speaking had the coiled readiness of someone who expected trouble through every entrance.
He had a build made for speed rather than strength, his Tajiri blood plain in every line of him, but tempered with some other race, and he was young—still young enough to think anger was armor.
He looked Njkall up and down and did not step back, which was either courage or foolishness and probably both.
“Let me guess,” Doren said. “Somebody sent for the clan leader to come frown at me. Do I curtsy, or is a nod enough for a clan leader? I forget my manners. Being abandoned on an ice ball does that to a man.”
“Njkall,” Rjmar said, not looking up from his work. “Ignore the noise. He’s louder when he thinks no one’s listening, so this is nearly polite.”
“You own nearly polite,” Doren shot back. “You bought it wholesale.”
Njkall let the room settle a moment before he spoke. The pause was a habit, and he watched the young male chafe against it before filling the silence with his own tapping foot because he couldn’t bear to leave it empty.
“I understand Athtar left you here,” he said calmly.
“Athtar abandoned me here, which is the difference between a favor and a knife.” Doren bared his teeth, which was less impressive than a Hothian doing it and he seemed to know it, which made him do it harder.
“I made one reasonable attempt to renegotiate the command structure of a ship I was doing all the work on, and for that I get marooned on a frozen rock at the ass-end of the Empire with no ship, no credits, and a shopkeeper who charges me for the privilege of freezing indoors. So. If you’re here to add a lecture, get in line behind the cold and the debt. ”
“You tried to take his ship.”
“I tried to improve it.”
“By taking it.”
“Semantics.” But something flickered under the bravado. Not shame exactly, but something older and rawer than shame. The particular fury of a male who had learned early that no one would ever give him anything, and had decided, therefore, to take it, and hated that the taking had left him here.
He knew that fury. It usually came from somewhere ugly.
“I’m not here to lecture you,” he said, his voice still calm. “You’re not clan. You’re not my responsibility. Rjmar’s given you a roof, which is more than the town owed you, so I’d suggest not spitting on it.”
“There it is—”
“But,” he went on, and he injected enough authority into his voice that even Doren shut his mouth, “you’re on my world now.
That means the same rules cover you as cover everyone here.
No slaving. No taking what isn’t yours, which also means no renegotiating what isn’t yours.
You keep your claws to yourself and your work honest, and no one here will trouble you.
You don’t, and you’ll answer to Baralt, and after Baralt to me.
Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
Doren held his eyes. Njkall could see the effort it took, the refusal to be the first to look away, but he did, his jaw tight, and for just a moment the anger cracked far enough that Njkall could see the exhausted male underneath, the one who hadn’t slept properly in a long time because sleeping meant trusting the place he slept.
“I understand,” Doren said, “that everyone on this rock loves to explain the rules to me.”
“Then we’re finished.” Njkall turned to Rjmar. “He giving you real trouble, or just the loud kind?”
“The loud kind.” Rjmar set down his tool at last and looked up, and there was something in the trader’s weathered face that surprised Njkall a little.
His expression was dry and amused and not at all unkind, watching the young male the way a male watches weather he’s decided to enjoy rather than curse.
“He’s got quick hands and a quicker mouth and he actually knows how a manifold comes apart, which is more than I can say for most of the strays this town produces.
He’s earning the bed. He simply prefers to shout about it. ”
“I do not—”
“He’s a great help,” Rjmar said over him, as serene as Baralt, “when he isn’t insulting me.”
“I insult you while helping. It’s called efficiency.”
Njkall looked from the trader with no clan and no ties, who’d chosen a life alone in a rough town, to the furious young stray he’d apparently decided to keep underfoot, and thought that the two of them deserved each other entirely.
Rjmar had spent thirty years perfecting the art of not caring about anything, and something about this loud angry male had clearly slipped under his guard, and Rjmar hadn’t even noticed it yet.
Doren, for his part, was too busy being furious to notice that the only person on the planet not trying to fix him or lock him up or ship him off was the very male he kept picking fights with.
They’ll drive each other mad, he thought. And it’ll be exactly what both of them need. He’d seen stranger family made from worse pieces.
“Keep him,” he said, and turned for the door. “He’s your problem.”
“I didn’t ask to be kept!”
The door shut behind him on Doren’s indignant voice, and he walked back out into the thin sunlight and the crowded streets and wished, not for the first time, that a clan leader could also be a ship’s captain. Captains had the freedom to make decisions and then leave them behind.
He began the long trek back towards the clan caves. Clan business had provided the distraction he’d wanted, but as soon as he thought of the small female waiting for him, and of grey eyes and a soft mouth and slowly, but with me, his steps quickened anyway.