Chapter 14
Chapter
Fourteen
Never underestimate the power of a nice view
Over the past three weeks, I had found reasons to go to the village.
Good reasons. Practical ones. I’d brought things from the deep water they couldn’t reach and traded for food that wasn’t fish.
I’d shared a meal there twice—once with Pasek and his family, once with a small group that included Braija and two of the village elders, at Maive’s invitation.
Both times had been easier than expected.
Each time I’d spoken with Maive briefly, and I wasn’t imagining the awareness between us.
It felt like we were…dancing, but not with our bodies.
This was difficult for me. I had never learned the art of subtext, until now as I found myself trying to court a woman.
Three weeks. I’d spent three weeks trying to decide what kind of outing I would ask Maive to join me on.
Ultimately, I settled on asking her to come up for a ride in the shuttle.
That was all. Ask. I had requested much more difficult and dangerous things from people over the course of my adult life.
This was a simple question. She’d probably say no. But she might say yes.
I stood outside the entrance to the large stone building in the dark, and did not knock.
She was home. The communal hall below was dark and locked, but above it, where the building narrowed into private quarters on the upper floors, the windows were lit warm.
I raised my fist. I had entered fortified compounds under hostile conditions.
I had approached armed targets who very much wanted me dead.
I had operated in circumstances where hesitation cost lives.
None of that had felt as harrowing as standing outside a woman’s door in the dark, in new clothes, trying to remember how to make a fist connect with wood.
I knocked.
A pause. Then footsteps from above.
She opened the door looking awake and unhurried, as though visitors after dark were unremarkable. She wore simple clothes—pale, loose—and her hair was down. I hadn’t seen it completely undone before. It was longer than I’d realized.
“Good evening, Gilrox,” she said, and waited.
“Clear night,” I said. “I thought…” My words choked off. Maybe I should have arrived earlier. Should have asked her more formally. Should have brought another gift.
She raised her brows. “You thought…what?”
“That you might want to come up in the shuttle. With me. See the planet from above.” I paused, wishing I had been able to string those words together with more elegance. I surely sounded like the brute I looked like. “If you have nothing else to do.”
She looked at me for a moment. Then, “Let me get my wrap.”
She went inside and came back with a soft gray cloak and a shy smile.
I’d prepared myself for a likely rejection and was a little thrown off in the absence of it.
I led her to the clearing where the shuttle sat and she walked up the ramp beside me.
Inside, she took the copilot seat the way Aila had—as though it had been waiting for her specifically.
I sat, ran through preflight, and lifted us off into the dark.
She said nothing as the ground fell away beneath us. I watched the altimeter and kept my eyes on the instruments for as long as I could manage. I didn’t manage long.
Maive gazed through the forward screen, hands resting in her lap.
The planet curved below us in a spectacular show of late evening colors and the bronze slice of one of the planet’s moons.
The ocean caught the light of both in long vivid sheets.
The narrow, habitable strip of land grew smaller between the water to the east and the mountains to the west. The flash crystal mines up in the cold zone caught nothing.
The stars above were winking on one by one.
Her breath caught and her lips parted on a small gasp as she took in the beauty around us. She recovered almost immediately, hands tightening once in her lap before releasing. But I’d witnessed it. Her face had opened briefly in a show of pure wonder, and then she was composed again.
“It’s extraordinary,” she said in a voice that was nearly steady.
“That’s why I thought I’d bring you now,” I said. “It’s unreasonably beautiful.”
She laughed at that and I held our altitude as we moved at a slow clip. She leaned forward slightly and tracked the coastline below. I could see Valrim Village from here, before it passed out of view. She’d found it without my pointing to it, and when she did, she was quiet for a while.
“I forget how far away everything else is,” she said finally. “It’s easy to forget there’s so much out there besides our little village.”
“Not everything out there is good,” I grunted. “Planets you feel far away from tend to have a reason for it.”
She made a soft sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “Is that experience talking?”
“Extensive experience,” I said with a nod.
She looked at the stars and sighed. “Ulrid would have loved this.”
I waited.
“My life partner.” She glanced at me briefly, maybe checking my expression for a reaction, then turned back to the view.
“He passed six winters ago. An illness. By the time we knew what it was, there was nothing to do.” She said it plainly, in the way of words said so many times they no longer cut.
“He was a scholar. He knew more about Runam history than anyone alive. He spent his life trying to preserve it, record it, keep it from being lost.” A pause.
“He would have wanted to see everything from up here. He would have asked you a thousand questions and remembered every answer.”
I tried to picture that. A quiet man with a scholar’s mind, reading and recording.
A man who sat with ideas rather than weapons, who measured his life in pages and knowledge.
He sounded nothing like me. “I’m sorry you lost him,” I got out.
And I meant it. The thought of Maive suffering made my chest hurt, even if it was for grieving another man.
“Thank you,” she said. “He was the one I leaned on when the weight of everyone else got heavy. I didn’t understand how much I relied on that until he wasn’t here anymore.”
The planet turned slowly below us.
“You’re carrying it yourself now,” I murmured. “That must be hard.”
“I’ve had six winters to learn how.” She sat back. “I’m better at it than I was.”
There was nothing useful I could say, so I didn’t try. We held the orbit for a while longer and the silence between us had no discomfort in it, which was its own thing to notice.
“You said you’d forgotten what it felt like to want to stay somewhere,” she said after a while. “That night at the festival.”
“I had.” I kept my eyes forward. “I’d been moving for long enough that staying anywhere stopped feeling like a possibility.
You go from one assignment to the next and you just hope you don’t leave each location completely destroyed.
” But often, we did. I adjusted our heading slightly.
“And then there was a day when I knew I was done.”
She was peering at me, not the sky. “How did you know?”
I shrugged. “It was a feeling. My old mentor told me that if I lived long enough, I’d know when it was time to quit. And I knew that if I kept going like I had, I wouldn’t walk away.” I shot her a quick grin. “The wisdom of age, I suppose.”
She laughed again. “And you chose this planet, of all the worlds you’ve visited. All the wonders you’ve seen.”
“My process was data-driven,” I explained, and ticked off my list of criteria. “When I found this planet, I knew it was right for me. I put the ship down.” I paused. “And then this woman showed up and told me to get lost.”
Her lips twitched. “You didn’t listen to her.”
“Nah. The fishing’s too good.” I glanced at her quickly. “And the woman grew on me.”
“The retired mercenary grew on her, too,” Maive murmured.
My hearts beat harder, but I kept my voice steady. “I’m trying to figure out who I am now,” I said. “I know who I was. But I’m not that anymore and I’m working out what comes next.” It was more than I’d meant to say. “It’s an uncomfortable place to be.”
“Yes,” she said, and I knew she wasn’t a stranger to uncomfortable places. “Transitions are rarely comfortable.”
“True,” I said.
We flew for a while longer, and I circled back around and brought us back to the village.
I set the shuttle down in the clearing and opened the hatch.
We walked down the ramp into the cool night.
The village was quiet. A few lit windows, the harbor lanterns, the ocean a soft sound in the dark behind the buildings. The walk to the path was short.
She turned to me before we entered the heart of the village.
I’d been assembling something reasonable to say. I wanted to thank her for coming, and say good night like a semi-normal person, when she kissed me. Quick. Her hand touched my jaw for a moment, warm and soft, and then it was gone before I’d fully understood what was happening.
She stepped back and looked up at me. There was something faintly startled in her expression. “I keep doing that.”
“I don’t mind it.”
Her eyes held mine. “You don’t?”
“No,” I said, trying to keep the hungry growl from my voice. “Don’t mistake my surprise for displeasure.”
“Good,” she said, then bit her lower lip. “I find I rather like doing it.”
I flexed my fingers to keep from reaching for her. “Then by all means, continue.”
“Maybe I will.” She patted the center of my chest, experimentally, and smiled. “I don’t need an escort back.”
“Okay.”
“Good night, Gilrox.”
“Good night.”
She walked back into the village with the dark and the harbor lights around her and didn’t look back.
I stood in the clearing after she’d gone and thought about a scholar named Ulrid who had been quiet and gentle and known everything about the history of his people, and who had been the thing she leaned on.
I tried to find the version of myself that resembled him, and came up empty.
But she had kissed me twice now. She had asked me, in a manner of speaking, whether I minded it, and I had told her I did not, and she had said good. We were edging past the ambiguity stage. Thank the flecking stars.
Whatever she saw when she looked at me, she seemed to like it, for reasons that defied comprehension. And I’d made it clear that I liked her, too.
I climbed back into the shuttle and went home, somewhat at a loss, which was becoming a familiar feeling. But also, with an unsteady but growing hope that my retirement may not be as lonely as I’d expected it to be.