Chapter 10
LORKIN
The office was still shut.
I'd told myself on the walk into town that Nezara would have the door propped open and the kettle going, back to logging her matches and gentling whoever came through next.
I built the whole morning on it. Then I stood in front of the squat human-built box between the apothecary and the cider house and read the same paper I'd read a week back, the corners gone soft from the weather, the words underneath not changed at all.
Closed. Urgent matters at the courthouse.
I read it twice. It said the same thing both times.
A transport was already on its way. Ten days, near enough, before Chloe’s placement with Zarcal officially ended, and the ship came to take my mate back to Earth.
The only hands that could strike his name and write mine were still gone after a week, and the clock wasn't waiting for them to come back.
So I turned toward the courthouse, where the paper sent me, and went to find the man who'd put my name in this in the first place.
The town hall sat at the wide end of the main street, stone footings under a dark-timber frame, the gallery up on its two big posts and the broad doors thrown open so a bull could walk through without dropping his head.
It had been a charter house, a grazing court, the room where they'd run the tribunal that nearly took Maisie back to Earth.
Today it was quiet. A clerk's table sat near the dais.
Dust turned in the light from the high windows.
And Remmen was at the far end with a stack of folios, buttoned into the pressed coat he wore to remind the rest of us we were civilized now.
He looked up before I was halfway across the room. He always knew when a door opened behind him. None of us ever lost that.
"Lorkin." He set his pen down and folded his hands. The silver on his horns caught the window-light when he tipped his head. "Twice in one week. I'm starting to feel courted."
"Where's Nezara?"
"Not sure. Last I heard she said something about audits." He leaned back. "You came all the way to the hall to ask me that?"
"No." I'd come here because Nezara was gone, which made Remmen my only other option.
The Agency didn't run New Knossos; it was not the law here.
I needed another solution. "I want the rest of Zarcal's placement.
Strike his name off Chloe's match contract and write mine.
There's ten days left on it. When it closes, I'll marry her.
Properly. Whatever your paper needs me to sign. "
For a moment, Remmen didn't say anything. He had a politician's face, smooth and pleasant and built to give nothing back, and I watched him decide which of three or four answers to hand me.
"You?" he said. "The male who walked into Nezara's office a month ago to strike his own name off the rolls?"
"Things have changed."
"Have they?" He let that sit. "And now you'd take a bride. A human one." He didn't make it cruel. He made it gentle, which was worse. "Why?"
I'm her mate.
The words came up flat and certain, the way they had every hour since the first breath of her in that little box.
No question of it on my side, and never had been.
But it wasn't a thing I'd hand Remmen across a clerk's table, where he could hold onto it and use it later.
So I gave him the part that was true and kept the rest.
"She's on her last placement," I said. "It fails, she's on the next ship out. I can stop that. I'm willing to."
"Does she want it?" Remmen asked. "You, I mean. Not the staying. You."
And there it was, the question I hadn't let myself stand still long enough to ask.
I knew what I felt. But did she feel the same?
She slept against me now and didn't flinch. She'd taken the knife I forged for her and kept it close, careful with it, and it mattered to her that the hands that made it had been mine.
There was a feeling in her, and I'd have sworn to it in front of a tribunal.
But underneath it, low and shamed and mine to carry, the other thing.
That a woman as quick and warm as Chloe was clinging to the only roof in town that would have her, and only a fool takes a grip like that for love.
She liked the horns. She was cornered. Neither one was the same as choosing me, and I knew it.
I didn't believe it. Not really. But it lived in me, and it didn't quiet down just because I told it to.
"I think she'd do whatever it took to stay on Ceres-9," I said. "Even if what it took was me."
Remmen studied me. "That's not what I asked."
"It's the answer you're getting."
"Hm." He came around the table, unhurried. "So let me see if I have it. You'd take her off Zarcal's hooves, marry her, give her your name and a roof and everything else. You'd keep her." He stopped a stride off. "Even if she never loves you. You'd do that to her."
It went in clean, and I felt my hands close.
"Don't," I said. "Don't stand in this hall, and ask me what I'd do to her.
You found the Agency, and you signed us all up to it, my name in with the rest, your seal on the order.
You made this town a place where a human woman gets put in a house with a male who wakes up swinging, and now you want to know if I'm gentle enough for the job. "
"I want to know," Remmen said, even and quiet, "if you're about to do to her what was done to you. Keep someone who doesn't want to be kept."
"She stayed." My voice came out rough. "I dropped her packed bag on the floor and left her every chance to pick it up and walk. She stayed. You weren't there."
"Maybe," he said. His voice was infuriatingly calm, refusing to argue.
"You'll understand it one day." I didn't plan the words.
They came up out of the old anger, and the longer they hung in the air the truer they felt.
"You'll be standing in this hall in your nice coat, running everyone's lives, and the office will send you a human you never asked for.
Some small thing'll come off a transport, no taller than my chest, and knock you clean off your hooves, and we'll see how much you love doing things correctly then. "
Something moved behind Remmen's face; quick, there and gone. Then it smoothed right back down.
"Noted," he said dryly.
He went back around the table and pulled a fresh folio off the stack.
"I'll draw it up. Marriage contract, citizenship papers.
There's a way to get her bound and made a citizen of New Knossos before the Agency can send her back.
If it comes to it, I can put her past the Agency's reach with a stamp.
" He squared the pages and grimaced. "But I'd rather not. "
If the solution was in hand, what was the problem? "Why not?"
"Because the contract is the whole of it, Lorkin.
" He looked up, and the politician was gone for a breath, and what was under it was a male who'd built a town out of nothing and lay awake nights over it.
"The paper is the only reason a woman crosses the dark to a place like this and lives.
It's why Earth keeps sending them. A human bride signs, and the contract swears she'll be housed, kept, never coerced, and shipped home whole if it goes wrong.
That promise is what keeps her safe in a house with the likes of us.
And we are not the only stop on that line.
The Agency runs matches on a dozen worlds.
The first time New Knossos ducks a contract, slips a bride out the back to keep her, every one of those worlds learns the promise is worth nothing.
Every match after hers pays for it." He set the pen down again.
"Chloe wants to stay. I believe you. It still has to be done right, or it isn't worth doing, and it won't hold. "
I'd come in ready for him to refuse me. I hadn't been ready for him to be right.
"So what do you want?" I said. I could feel my future slipping away, and I needed to fix it. Somehow.
"Get it right with the Agency. Properly, on the record.
When Nezara's back, we go to her together and we make the case for the transfer before the placement ends.
" He slid a folio toward the edge of the table, toward me.
"But none of it moves while Chloe's still matched to another male.
Before I write a word, before Nezara hears any of it, you get Zarcal to release her.
In his hand, on paper, freely given. He took the placement. He's the one who has to let it go."
I'd handed her to him in the first place, too much a coward to take what was mine and too sure I'd break her. Then he'd lost himself in his own kitchen and come for her. He was back in that house now, healing or not, and I'd have to walk in and ask him to sign his wife over to me.
"He'll do it," I said, and didn't know if it was true.
"Then go ask him." Remmen had already picked his pen back up. "And Lorkin. When you stand in front of him." He didn't look at me. "Ask him like a male asking a favor of his brother. Not like a male collecting a debt."
I nodded. It was the only thing I could do.
The street had dried out under the noon sun; the ruts gone hard, the cider house already loud at one end of town. Zarcal's place sat east and a little south, the wall still unfixed, the conversation I owed him waiting behind his door.
I didn't go. Not yet, and not alone. I'd spent all of this deciding for her. Handing her off, taking her back, walking into rooms to fix her life while she slept. I was done doing it in the dark.
Whatever I had to say to Zarcal, Chloe would be beside me when I said it. I turned back to go and find her.