Chapter 2
LORKIN
I went back to the Agency that afternoon to finish what I'd fled that morning, and Nezara still wouldn't strike my name.
"You presented yourself at the appointment," she said, not looking up from her crates. "That makes you a candidate in good standing. I cannot strike a compliant citizen from the rolls because he scowled at my clerk this morning and walked out without a word."
"I didn't ask to be on the rolls."
"And yet." She found the form she wanted and laid it flat.
"Take it up with whoever submitted you. I only process what I'm given.
" Her eyes flicked up, unbothered. "Though you might ask yourself why a man so set against being matched drove into town the instant the countdown hit zero, fled before he'd said one word to me, and then came back before dark to argue the point, instead of paying the fine and forgetting the whole thing. "
I didn't have an answer for that one that I was willing to say in a room. The honest answer was that I'd told myself, both times, that I was coming in to refuse, and I'd believed it right up until her scent reached me through the door that morning and took the legs out from under the lie.
I'd run like a green fighter who'd lost his nerve at the gate, and that was the first mistake. Coming back was the second, because the smell of her was still in that doorway hours later, and it came home with me and sat in the forge the rest of the day.
I worked through it. Work was the answer to most things.
I cleared a backlog of plow fittings, repointed a logger's sled-runner, and when my hands still wouldn't settle I pulled a bar and started a blade, because that always settled them, the old rhythm of it, heat and fold and draw.
By the time the light went gold, I'd hung the knife on the east wall, oiled and sleeved with the others.
Twelve blades nobody had ordered. I stood and looked at them a while, and told myself it was good to be ready. A man who'd watched as much bloodshed as I had kept blades within reach. That was all it was.
Prudence wore a lot of ugly faces, and this was only one of them.
Kazan showed up at dusk.
I heard the rig before I saw it, that big engine cough he'd never bothered to tune, and then he filled my doorway, horns nearly brushing the ceiling. The Bastion. Forty marines and a broken arm hadn't taken him down. Now he wore flannel and smelled faintly of goats.
"You're coming to supper," he said.
"No."
"Maisie's friend's in town. Maisie wants the whole crowd out tonight. We're feeding people. You're a person, allegedly." He looked past me at the wall, and his face went blank for a second. "Another knife?"
"It's good practice."
"Mm." He didn't call me a liar; he never did. He just stood there, being alive and content in a way that should have been impossible for a man who'd done what we'd done, and waited me out. "Maisie asked for you special. She thinks you're sad."
"I don't need to be fixed. And I'm not sad."
"Then come to eat and be rude. Nobody'll stop you." A pause. "Wear a shirt without burn holes."
"I'll wear what I want."
Only as I pulled it on did I realize he'd tricked me into agreeing.
The orchard glowed. It always did this time of year: the star-figs hanging gold-tipped and violet through the rows, the cottage windows warm, lanterns strung along the porch and out into the trees.
Half the unmated males in New Knossos had turned out to stand around being enormous and shy near a fire pit, clutching cups they were too nervous to drink from.
The mated ones had brought their wives, small bright shapes tucked under enormous arms, and the whole thing had the careful, hopeful feeling of men who'd been told this was how you built a future and were trying very hard to believe it.
I hated it the way you hate a thing you don't get to have.
Kazan's place had changed since I'd last let myself come out here.
There were human-sized touches everywhere now, low steps to the porch, a railing at the right height for a small hand, a whole second set of everything scaled down and built in, and Kazan moved through it all without thinking, ducking nothing, his tail sweeping slow and content.
Five years ago this man had helped bring an empire to its knees. Now he carried a tray of cups out to nervous bachelors and bent to let his wife steal one off it, and she laughed up at him. He looked at her like the rest of the galaxy didn't exist.
It looked like peace. From where I stood, in the dark past the lantern line where I could see the exits, it looked like a man who'd handed a small mortal creature the keys to everything that could ever hurt him, and called it a good trade.
This party was to find Chloe a husband, and I had no place here.
It didn't take long to spot her. I could have found her with my eyes shut. She was at the center of the loudest knot of people on the porch, a cup in one hand and the other going, and her voice carried out over the yard, pitched to make the crowd lean in.
She'd done something to her hair, curls and ringlets that a forbidden part of me wanted to touch. She had a scarf around her shoulders, one of Drevus's, human-sized and well made, which meant somebody had already been buying her soft things, and the thought made me want to huff.
Ridiculous. I had no claim on her, and she deserved good clothing.
She was telling a story. Something about Earth, a job she'd had, a man who'd done something stupid, and she made herself the fool in it, every time.
The joke always landed on her. The crowd roared, and she beamed like she'd won something, and underneath the beam, in the half second before the next line, her eyes did a fast, flat sweep of every face to count who was still laughing.
She was counting smiles the way I counted exits.
I knew that look. You wear it when you've learned that the room can turn, and you'd rather be the one to make it laugh before it makes you bleed.
Something in me that I'd been keeping cold went dangerously warm.
Maisie found me before I could leave. She came across the yard with two cups and handed me one without asking and stood beside me looking out at her own party like an overseer surveying a training camp.
"You came," she smiled. "Kazan owes me a barn."
"A barn?"
"He's going to build me a she-shack." I wasn't brave enough to ask what that was.
She barely came up to my elbow, and she'd lost every bit of the flinch she'd worn when she arrived here; she stood next to a former arena gladiator in the dark and felt no need to watch his hands.
"She's something, isn't she? Chloe. People look at her and see a party.
She's the most loyal person I've ever known and the worst at letting anyone be loyal back. "
"Why are you telling me this?"
"No reason." Maisie's hazel eyes were entirely too knowing. "Can't a girl gush about her bestie?"
I didn't dignify that. A minor commotion at the goat pen saved me. One of the glow-goats had got its head wedged in the fence rails, bleating murder, and a couple of the young males were standing around it, making it worse. I went over because it was something I could fix.
And it got me away from Maisie. Not that I would ever admit to the retreat.
The goat had panicked itself stupid. I got down on one knee in the mud, put one hand flat on its dumb, furious little skull to hold it still, and worked the rail wide enough with the other to slip its head free.
It immediately head-butted me in the chest, the ungrateful thing, and then leaned its whole glowing weight against my knee and demanded to be scratched, forgiving me entirely the instant I was useful.
"Okay," I muttered at it. "Okay. You're fine. You were always fine, you idiot."
I scratched it behind the horn buds. Its eyes went half shut. Stupid, breakable, alive.
When I looked up, Chloe was watching me.
Me, alone, from the edge of the porch light, and the performance had dropped clean off her face for once and left something open and startled underneath, like I'd done something she didn't have a joke ready for.
Something in my chest reached for her across the whole muddy yard and pulled so hard I had to put my free hand in the dirt to steady myself.
I stood up too fast and set the goat aside. Then I spotted Zarcal in the crowd.
Yes, that was it. Zarcal was the answer.
Zarcal had wanted a wife since the day we landed and would have climbed any mountain for the chance, and Zarcal was warm in a way I had never once managed to be.
I crossed the yard to him and didn't let myself look back at the porch.
"You should talk to her," I said. "Maisie's friend."
Zarcal followed my nod, and his whole face changed, went soft and hopeful in the firelight. He had a cup in each hand, but he barely noticed. "Chloe," he said, like he'd been building up courage to say her name. "She's something, isn't she? The shape of her."
"She's on her last placement," I said. "If no one takes her, she'll be sent home. She needs a male who actually wants this. Who'll be good to her."
"Since when do you care?" Zarcal asked.
"Can't I look out for a friend?"
He looked at me a moment longer than I liked, the way the men who'd survived with me sometimes did, like he could hear the parts I wasn't saying. Then he looked back at the porch, at her, and the hope won out over whatever he'd half-heard, the way hope does in men who've been starving for it.
"I've been on this rock five years watching," he said, quiet, not bitter, just true. "I'd be good to her, Lorkin. I'd be glad every day. You don't know what that's worth till you've gone without it."
"I know," I said, which was the truest thing I'd said all night and the one he was least equipped to hear.
"I'll talk to her," he said.
"Good," I said.