Chapter 18
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Brannik had eaten in hundreds of ports across dozens of systems, and none of them had prepared him for what Amy did to the ship’s ration store.
She’d used the same meat protein packets he’d butchered the day before and the same dried grains, and she’d turned them into something that made his mouth water three compartments away.
He still didn’t know how, even though he’d watched her the whole time.
She’d toasted the grain first in the dry pan until it smelled nutty and tempting, then bullied it into softness with careful splashes of water, and added spices he hadn’t even noticed, and worked the protein into the mixture until it stopped being a punishment and became a meal.
And even after watching every step, he knew he couldn’t produce the same result.
He ate three bowls. She watched him do it with an expression he was learning to recognize—the small quiet pride of someone whose work was being appreciated.
“That’s the fourth time you’ve scraped the pot,” she said.
“It’s good.”
“‘It’s good.’” She shook her head, but the corner of her mouth curled. “I make you the best meal you’ve had in five years and I get ‘it’s good.’”
“Best meal I’ve had in longer than that.” He set the bowl down. “Not since my mother cooked. Not like this, but she cooked for me.”
He hadn’t meant to say it. The words came out before the guard he usually kept over them could prevent them, and once they were out he found he didn’t want to pull them back.
She went quiet across the small fold-down table, the way she did when she sensed something fragile and didn’t want to startle it into flight.
“You never talk about her,” she said.
“No.”
“You don’t have to now.”
That was the thing about her. She never reached for what he didn’t offer.
Everyone who’d ever wanted something from him had tried to grab it, whether it was information or obedience, his strength or his silence.
She simply placed her hands in her lap and waited.
She left the door open, and let him decide whether to walk through it.
He walked through it.
“You know she was Aurelian.” He turned the empty bowl in his hands, watching the low light slide across the metal.
“She was almost as small as you. She had my eyes, or I suppose I have hers. Everything about her was gentle, in a place with nothing gentle in it.” He was quiet for a moment.
“And she was sad. There was always a sadness beneath everything, even when she laughed. I was a child. I didn’t understand it.
I thought all mothers carried something heavy that they never set down. ”
“What was she sad about?”
“I never learned.” His jaw tightened. “Although now I think it was because she missed her people. She’d stand at the window some nights and look up, and I’d ask what she was looking for, and she’d say—” His throat worked.
He hadn’t said these words aloud to another living creature.
“She’d say, home. And then she’d smile and tell me I was her home.
I think both of them were true, but I only understood that much later. ”
She didn’t say anything, but she reached across the little table and laid her hand over his and left it there.
“She left one day when I was eleven.” The words were flatter now, worn smooth by the years he’d carried them.
“And she never came back. My father waited for her for six months.” He drew a slow breath.
“And then one day he sat me down and told me he had to go and find her, that he couldn’t live without her, and that he’d bring her home.
He left me with his brother’s family. He said he’d return.
” His mouth twisted. “He didn’t. He never returned.
Either he found her and there was some reason they couldn’t come back, or he found nothing and he’s dead in some system I’ve never heard of.
I’ve never learned which. Twenty-five years, and I’ve never learned which. ”
“Brannik.” Her fingers tightened on his. “He left an eleven-year-old.”
“He loved her.” He said it without heat, because it was simply true, and because he’d made his peace with the shape of it long ago even if not the fact. “That’s what the Tuori are. When a Tuori male chooses his mate, there’s nothing else. Not the world. Not his own life. Not—” He stopped.
Not his son. He didn’t say it out loud, but he knew she heard it anyway.
“So they raised you,” she said carefully. “His family.”
“They raised me as an obligation.” His voice went cold and even, telling her something that had stopped being able to wound him a long time ago—or so he told himself.
“They weren’t cruel, just—uncaring. I ate at the edge of their table.
I slept where there was room. I was the half-blood, the runt, the family shame.
I was small, because Aurelians are small, and I hadn’t yet come into my father’s size.
Tuori children are big. I was not. And a small Tuori is—” He searched for the word she’d understand. “—prey.”
“They hurt you.”
“They trained me.” The distinction, on Tuor, was academic.
“Every Tuori child undergoes the warrior regime. There’s no exception, not even for a half-blood they despise—especially not for a half-blood they despise.
It’s meant to break the weakness out of you and forge the rest into something that survives.
For a full Tuori child it’s brutal. For a small one—” He turned his hand over under hers, so their palms met, and looked at the size of it against her fingers.
“I broke bones I didn’t know a body had.
I learned to fight because I had to learn faster than the ones twice my size, and I had to be cleverer, because I could never be stronger.
Not then. I learned every technique they’d never bothered to learn because they’d never needed to.
I stopped speaking when I was eleven, the year she left, and I found that silence frightened them more than anything I could say. So I kept it.”
Her eyes were bright and hard, not with pity but with something closer to fury on his behalf.
“And then you grew,” she said.
“Then I grew.” A dark satisfaction filled him at the memory.
“All at once, the way Tuori do. Fifteen, sixteen, and suddenly the runt was taller than the males who’d spent years teaching me my place.
Suddenly all those techniques I’d learned because I was small, I could use with my father’s strength behind them.
” He met her eyes. “They stopped tormenting me. They started being careful around me instead. And they hated that even more.”
“What made you leave?”
He was quiet for a long moment. This part he’d told no one, ever.
“One of them—my cousin, the worst of them—said something about my mother.” His voice dropped, and even now, years removed from the incident, he felt the old rage stir.
“He said she’d run off. That she’d never been taken, never been lost. He said that she’d looked at what she’d whelped and been so ashamed she’d abandoned us both.
That my father had died chasing a female who never wanted to be found.
That I was the leavings of a coward who couldn’t stand the sight of her own son. ”
She didn’t speak, but her hand tightened around his.
“I nearly killed him,” he said honestly.
“I had him on the ground and my hand was around his throat and I felt it start to give under my fingers, and I understood, in that moment, exactly what I was. What I could do. What I’d become while they weren’t looking.
” He drew a breath. “I stopped. I don’t fully know why.
Perhaps because if I’d finished it, they’d have been right about me and right that my mother had bred a monster.
So I stopped. But they saw my face, and they knew.
They knew if I stayed, one day I wouldn’t stop. ”
“That’s why you left.”
“That’s part of why. But it was also because I was tired of wondering.
I wanted to know where she was and why she left.
That’s when I started searching for answers.
” He looked up. “So I took a working passage on the first ship that would have me, and I never went back, and I’ve been chasing that light down every rumor in the galaxy for twenty years. ”
The ship hummed around them, quiet and constant. She sat with his hand in both of hers now, her head bowed over it, and when she lifted her face there were tears standing in her eyes and she made no move to hide them.
“You were eleven when your mother left. Your father followed her six months later.” Her expression softened. “You were still eleven, Brannik. You were a child.”
“Yes.”
“Brannik.” She said his name the way she’d said it in the cell, the way that had broken something open in him the first time, just his name, spoken because she wanted to say it. “I’m so sorry. For all of it.”
“It’s old.” He turned his hand and threaded his fingers slowly through hers, careful of the claws, watching how small her hand looked compared to his. “I don’t tell it for pity.”
“I know. That’s not what this is.” She rose from her side of the little table, and she didn’t turn to the seat beside him.
She walked into the space between his knees, so their faces were on the same level for once.
Then she pushed the hair away from his face with both hands, and held it there, looking at him. “That’s not what this is at all.”
He went very still.
The night before, she’d frozen, and he’d let her go without a heartbeat’s hesitation, because her no mattered more than his own hunger and always would. He’d meant every word of it. He’d have waited months. Years. However long it took, even forever, if forever was what she needed.