Lost Sheep

 

"It will be good for you," Gram said. "Your father and mother loved it there."

 

Dorian sat very still and kept his breathing even. It was just a car. Cars were just cars. He wasn't afraid of staircases, was he, or bathtubs, or electrical sockets, because that would be stupid. They were just things.

 

His stomach hurt.

 

"He always talked about the library," Gram said. "As much as you like books, I'm sure you'll enjoy the library." 

 

It was the same stuff she'd been saying about Youngblood Academy for days now, since the evening she mentioned casually at dinner that she was sending him away to boarding school, like a dog being sent off to a kennel when his existence was inconvenient. I guess I'm lucky she can't just drop me off at the pound. Except she is, basically, isn't she? Only I'll never be adopted. Just kept in my little cage forever.

 

The Rolls Royce hit a bump, and Dorian gasped before he could stop himself, digging his nails into the seat. Gram hadn't noticed; she was looking out the window. Dorian's gaze followed hers for a moment, accidentally, and he caught a glimpse of trees blurring by, so fast, so fast. He looked away immediately, swallowing hard.

 

"Look at you," Gram sighed, "still wearing your lunch. Are we twelve or two, hmm?" A handkerchief was poking a neatly pointed head out of the breast pocket of her perfect charcoal-grey suit; she pulled it free and wiped the corner of his mouth, where Dorian could only assume some trace had remained of the pea soup he'd choked down for lunch. He was surprised when, after cleaning his face, Gram lingered a moment, brushing her thumb back and forth on his cheek. "Your mother's eyes," she murmured. "She was beautiful. Your daddy would have followed her to the ends of the earth."

 

He didn't get the chance, Dorian thought. It was she who did the following.

 

Gram sat back with a brisk sort of sigh. "This will be better for you, Dorian. You'll see." She turned back to the window, but kept the handkerchief in her hands, twisting it and twisting it.

 

Dorian tried not to flinch when the car hit another bump.

 

 

 

The headmaster's office was very neat, and not nearly as large as Dorian would have expected. A potted plant crowded into a corner threatened to engulf one side of Dorian's chair. Most of its leaves were yellow and brittle; the whole thing seemed covered with a grey haze. Dorian almost thought he could see it withering, like a sped-up film, racing to its doom before his eyes.

 

The office wasn't big, but the headmaster was – a big burly black man with a voice so deep it was hard to hear. He looked more like a wrestler than a teacher. Actually he looked more like a refrigerator than a teacher.

 

"It's a pleasure to meet you, Dorian," the headmaster rumbled, holding out his hand.

 

For a second Dorian stared at the enormous hand, wondering if it would crush him. Gram bumped him delicately with her elbow, managing to make it hurt despite the grace of the movement.

 

"Dorian, sweetheart, say hello to Mr. Crosby."

 

Dorian was tempted to just stare blankly, as he'd done for those first few days in the hospital, when nothing seemed worth the effort of talking or moving and he hurt too much to move, anyway. But if he did that now, he'd just end up at a looney bin instead of a school. He doubted they had summer breaks at looney bins. So he said, "Pleasure to meet you, Mr. Crosby," and shook the giant dark-brown hand with his tiny pale one.

 

Dorian was used to being tiny and pale – last year he'd been the second-smallest in his class – but next to Mr. Crosby he looked like spun sugar. Spun sugar, his mum had told him, was what they made windows out of in action movies, so that the actors could crash through them and not get hurt.

 

When real glass shattered, it hurt people. Very, very badly.

 

Mr. Crosby's eyebrows had risen at the sound of his accent, which he was used to. Here in America he sounded British. In Britain, he sounded American.

 

Would he ever see London again?

 

When you grow up, he told himself while Mr. Crosby and Gram talked over his head. As soon as you're eighteen, you can do whatever you want, whether Gram likes it or not. A little less than six years. It seemed like a very long time to be stuck with Gram.

 

"—should be him now," Mr. Crosby said as a knock sounded at the door. "Come in, Mr. Pierce."

 

The man who entered the room was Mr. Crosby's physical opposite, short and slight and fair. His suit was light gray, his glasses didn't have frames around the lenses, and his hair was solid white, though his face didn't look that old. It was like he was trying to be as colorless as possible.

 

"This is Mr. Pierce, Dorian, the guidance counselor here at Youngblood," Mr. Crosby said.

 

"So this is young Mr. Rivers," Mr. Pierce said, with exactly the sort of overly sad-and-gentle smile and hushed voice Dorian had gotten so sick of at the hospital. He was spun sugar, and everyone was afraid of breaking him. He forced himself to shake Mr. Pierce's hand, which was startlingly cold. "Perhaps it's been explained to you," Mr. Pierce said, "that we'll be having sessions together twice a week? Your grandmother thought it might be helpful."

 

Great. So this was a school and a looney bin.

 

"If you'd like, Mr. Rivers, we can step outside and I can give you a bit of a tour while your grandmother and the headmaster get the boring grown-up stuff settled."

 

Oh, please no. Dorian glanced at Gram, hoping for one of her stay-right-where-you-are glares, but instead she nodded her head toward Mr. Pierce and said, "Go on, Dorian."

 

Dorian sighed heavily and followed Mr. Pierce out of the office.

 

He hadn't taken off his coat in the car or in Mr. Crosby's office, even though he was uncomfortably warm, because if he did that Gram would see that he was wearing Dad's old black jacket underneath. Gram wanted him to wear the fancy coat she bought him and throw away "that ratty thing, it's much too big for you" but it was Dad's and it smelled a little like his pine-and-ginseng cologne. He was glad of the double layer of jacket when Mr. Pierce led him outside, where dead grass crunched under a veil-thin layer of snow.

 

"This is what we call the quad," Mr. Pierce said, gesturing around at the wide expanse of snow-dusted grass. There were benches and trashcans and dirt paths, and a few thick-bellied trees rattling with dead leaves. "The boys' dorm is there, the girls' over there, and there are classrooms in the other two. The cafeteria is on the back side of that building opposite."

 

Cafeteria food three times a day. One more thing to look forward to about boarding school.

 

While Mr. Pierce droned on about the beautiful grounds and something about sports teams, shivering in his light-grey suit coat, Dorian watched his own breath crystallize in the air. It's there all the time, that's the weird thing, he thought. You only see it when it's cold out, but it's always there. This is what it would always look like, this drifting fluttering thing, if only we could see it.

 

Mr. Pierce stopped talking after a minute, looked at Dorian and sighed. "Sit down, Dorian." He took a seat on the nearest bench.

 

Dorian hesitated, but it wasn't like he had anything better to do. He sat on the other end of the bench, as far from Mr. Pierce as possible. The thick plastic mesh of the bench was ice-cold under his thighs.

 

"Dorian, I know this is a difficult time for you. I want you to know I'm here to help."

 

Words boiled in Dorian's throat. A difficult time? Like other times are going to be better? Like if I stick it out and stay strong, my parents will come back to life, and the 'difficult time' will be over? You don't know anything about anything and you think you're going to help me? Are you going to use your Guidance Counselor magic to bring back the dead? To make my grandmother love me or fix my eyes or let me leave this stupid kennel for unwanted children?

 

None of the words made it out of his mouth. That happened a lot lately.

 

"I'm sure you'll have no trouble settling in and making friends," Mr. Pierce was saying. "But I'll be here for you to talk to, about whatever you want, whenever you want to. Okay?"

 

Friends. Dorian hadn't even thought about making friends, really. He had friends at home – or he did have, before the accident. Before he spent over a month in the hospital, alternately drugged to the gills or in too much pain to think, with nobody left alive who even knew who his friends were, much less thought to tell them what had happened. No one had told the school, or the post office, or the neighbors. And then he'd gone to live with Gram, and now he was here, and Dorian's old friends seemed like ghosts.

 

"Your parents were both students here, I'm told," Mr. Pierce said, expectantly, as if Dorian should be excited about that. Why would he be? They weren't here. And it wasn't exactly shocking that Gram had chosen to store her inconvenient grandson in the same warehouse where she'd stored his inconvenient father.

 

I bet he hated it here. I bet they both did. I bet me being here is the last thing either of them would have wanted.

 

"What's that?" Mr. Pierce asked, and Dorian realized he was fiddling with Mum's necklace again. Quickly he dropped it back inside his shirt.

 

It wasn't a girly necklace. Gram acted like it was weird for him to wear something of Mum's, but it wasn't a girly necklace and Mum had let him wear it lots of times when he was little. She would want him to have it.

 

"We have a dress code here," Mr. Pierce said. "Boys aren't supposed to wear jewelry. Just keep it inside your shirt, I won't tell." He winked, and Dorian hated it, hated for the man to have any excuse to feel like they were friends. But he could have taken away Mum's necklace and he didn't, so Dorian forced himself to say, "Thank you, sir."

 

"You're welcome," Mr. Pierce said, and yes, he was smiling now like they were friends. Ugh.

 

"Here come the headmaster and your grandmother," Mr. Pierce said at last, after an awkward silence. "It's probably time to meet your roommate."

 

 

 

The boys' dorm was an ugly two-story stone building with drafty hallways and hardwood floors that magnified every footstep. Dorian figured those floors were going to be cold as any London sidewalk, all winter long. At the moment, with many classes still in session (grades six through eight let out at 3:20, Mr. Crosby said; the high school grades had another hour), there wasn't much activity in the building—a few boys lugging schoolbooks, a few muffled voices from behind doors. Dorian's door was at the very end of its hallway, on the right-hand wing of the first floor. Room number 25, according to the metal numbers on the door.

 

Mr. Crosby knocked and, at the sound of a faint "Come in," opened the door to give Dorian his first look at the kennel he'd be living in for the next five months.

  

The dorm room, already half the size of Dorian's real bedroom at home, (the one he would never seen again), was divided in half again with a strip of masking tape. On one side of the tape was a bed, wardrobe, and desk. Dorian's handful of boxes and suitcases were already piled against the foot of the bed; Gram's driver had been busy. On the other side was the same furniture plus a bookshelf, dresser, and television, crammed along the walls and surrounded by mountains of overflowing stuff – books, movies, clothes, model ships, video game equipment, and all manner of odder things, piled in unstable, haphazard heaps that crept right up to the edge of the masking tape. On the bed – also piled with stuff – like a cherry on top of a sundae, perched a stocky brown-haired boy with a striped sweater and a sullen expression. A handheld video game (or was it an iPad?) beeped and whistled in his hands.

 

"Good afternoon, Drew," the headmaster rumbled. "This is your new roommate, Dorian Rivers. Dorian, this is Drew Mabry. He's going to show you around Youngblood and help you get settled in."

 

Yes, Dorian thought, I can tell he's eager for the job. "Hullo," he said. Drew glanced up from his video game, smiled tightly, and looked down again. Something on his screen exploded.

 

Mr. Crosby didn't look pleased at Drew's lack of enthusiasm, but, to Dorian's relief, didn't try to force him to sit up and be friendly. "Well, I'm sure you want a moment with your grandmother before she leaves. I'll have someone bring over your class schedule and schoolbooks very shortly. Welcome to Youngblood, Dorian." He shook Dorian's hand and walked out.

 

Mr. Pierce put a hand on his shoulder. "Just remember, Dorian, you can come talk to me anytime."

 

Behind him, Dorian heard Drew snort. He tried not to cringe away from Mr. Pierce's hand, managing a locked-teeth smile and nod. Finally Mr. Pierce left as well.

 

Gram looked over at Dorian's roommate, sighed, and put a hand very briefly to Dorian's cheek. "They don't let you call home for the first two weeks, but as we discussed, you'll be coming home for a visit that second weekend. Mr. Crosby knows what bus to put you on, and Bradley will pick you up from the bus station."

 

Dorian said nothing. Right now he was pretty sure he hated Gram and never wanted to see her again, yet all he wanted to do was grab her around the waist and beg her not to leave him.

 

"By then I hope you'll be able to tell me how much you love your new school." Gram stroked his hair, just once, watching his dark curls flow through her fingers with a peculiar wistful expression, then said, "Goodbye, Dorian," and walked out the door.

 

She was walking away. Back to the car. He might never see her again. He hadn't said goodbye. He tried to shout it, to tell her goodbye, but nothing came out of his throat.

 

For a long minute he stared silently at the door. Then, abruptly exhausted, he crossed over to the bed and lay down, staring up at the ceiling. On his roommate's game screen, something made a weird, wriggly noise like a dying bagpipe, and exploded.

 

***

 

At 5 o'clock, Drew put down his iPad and heaved a heavy sigh. "You're a brilliant conversationalist, you know that?"

 

Dorian said nothing.

 

"Well, they start serving dinner about now." He started putting on his shoes and coat.

 

Dorian debated just staying where he was. He didn't really want to go anywhere with Drew, and he wasn't very hungry. But he wasn't stupid enough to think he would never be hungry; he needed to know where the cafeteria was and how it worked. Of course he did have a map – Mr. Crosby's assistant had brought the class schedule and books, as promised, along with some other informational stuff about the school – but whatever. He might as well go now. All he had to do was stand up and walk after Drew; he'd never taken his shoes or coat off to begin with.

 

Outside, darkness was falling fast, and it was so cold that the inside of Dorian's nose seemed to go crisp. He'd gotten sweaty inside his double-layer of coat, and every drop of it suddenly felt like ice. A fresh layer of gathering frost crunched underfoot as he followed Drew across the quad toward the building Mr. Pierce had said contained the cafeteria. Good to know the man's information was sound. They seemed to be part of a pilgrimage; kids of all ages, alone or in groups, were drifting toward the cafeteria like ants following a trail.

 

"Prince! Yo!" Drew shouted, and a blond boy ahead of them, probably their own age but tall for it, turned around.

 

"Mayberry! What up?" The blond boy high-fived Drew and play-punched his shoulder. "How'd the math test go?"

 

"Don't ask. Least I don't have to study for it anymore."

 

"This the newb? Shrimpy thing, ain't he? Least he won't take up much space."

 

Drew rolled his eyes. "They measured the room exactly in half."

 

"For real? Bummer."

 

"Get this. He had servants to bring in his boxes." Drew's sneer was a work of art, simultaneously communicating contempt, amusement, and sarcastic awe.

 

Dorian snapped, "Well, it's not like my grandmother could help me, she's a bit frail if you didn't notice, and as you've so astutely observed, I'm something of a shrimp."

 

They both stared at him.

 

"Dude," Prince said. "You from England or something?"

 

Dorian blinked. "Sort of."

 

"The girls will be all over that, huh? Rich baby with cool accent." Prince laughed and threw his arm around Drew's shoulder, visibly dropping Dorian from his attention. "Speaking of which, Mayberry, we gotta talk about this thing with the boots, 'cause that ain't gonna fly and I think you know what I'm talking about..."

 

Dorian slowed his steps and let Prince and Drew pull ahead. It wasn't like he couldn't find the way to the cafeteria now. Just follow the other ants.

 

 

 

The cafeteria was a sea of round tables surrounded by chairs, with one wall taken up by a food counter and another by a salad bar, everything done in the school colors of blue and yellow. It was loud and getting louder, and suffocatingly warm after the chill of the outdoors. Dorian took off his outer coat as soon as he stepped inside, but left Dad's jacket on.

 

He tried to get a glimpse of the food counter as he got in the rapidly-growing line to approach it, but couldn't see what was on offer. It took him several minutes to notice a large sign near the entrance.

 

DINNER SCHEDULE

MONDAY - PIZZA

TUESDAY - CHINESE

~~"WILD WEDNESDAY!!!"~~

THURSDAY - PASTA

FRIDAY - VEGETARIAN

 

Vegetarian. 'Wild Wednesday.' This all sounded very ominous. But today was Monday, and the steaming golden pizzas he could now see as he inched through the line looked great and smelled better. 

 

He got his tray, and his drink, and two pieces of pepperoni pizza. Ahead of him a bunch of older boys exchanged dirty jokes and punched each other. Behind him a tiny black girl sniffled while her friend whispered, "He was a crappy boyfriend, you're better off without him. And anyway he'll probably come crawling back in a week." Dorian tried not to make eye contact with anybody.

 

Inevitably, though, the moment of truth arrived; he turned away from the food counter, tray in his hands, and was confronted with the fact that he had no one to sit with. Nor was there any chance of getting a table to himself, the place was way too crazy for that. He could either invade the table of a perfect stranger, or... well, it wasn't like there were guards on the doors.

 

He pushed a door open with his back and found himself in a short hallway containing a bench, a water fountain, and a ficus tree. A door at the end sported a dark window and a sign reading ADMINISTRATION OFFICE. The cafeteria's chaos was muffled here, and it wasn't so chokingly warm. Perfect. He sat on the bench and started eating his pizza.

 

It was probably always going to be this way. He should get used to the idea. He told himself it was better than being at Gram's, where he either ate dinner in the hard chairs of the dining room, sitting through awkward, stilted conversation with Gram, or more often, in the kitchen with whichever servant felt sorry enough for him to sit with him through a plate of leftovers. Alone was better; he didn't have to pretend to be happy.

 

For just a second, he pretended he was back at home – eating pizza in the living room while Dad tried to get the electric fireplace working, Mum laughing and tired from a double shift at the hospital, the tick tock tick tock of Mum's crazy-eyed cat clock with the moving tail...

 

It would never happen again. He would never see any of them again, not even the clock. He hadn't thought to ask Gram to get it from the house. What had happened to it? Did the new owners keep it? Did they keep Dad's lava lamp? Had they found the hidden drawer in the desk?

 

He had been staring at the opposite wall without seeing it for a while now, until it blurred and he scrubbed his napkin furiously across his face. Nothing could be more lame than the shrimpy new kid crying in a corner. He wasn't gonna be that kid.

 

He felt a shock clear down to his toes when his eyes cleared and he realized what he'd been staring at all this time – realized that it wasn't exactly true that he'd never see his parents again.

 

Framed photographs marched down the wall of the corridor, each the same size and shape, each containing a group of students in caps and gowns. He had been staring at the Class of 1994, six years before he was born.

 

Gram's voice in his head – "Both your parents graduated from Youngblood Academy. Class of '94. I probably have your father's diploma somewhere."

 

Dorian set his tray aside and stepped closer to the photograph. There was a plaque underneath, engraved with the name of the school, the year, and the names of the students. There! Right there – Scott Rivers. And next to him, Isobel Corbitt.

 

They looked... they looked like kids. Of course he knew, intellectually, that his parents had once been kids. But to actually see it... They had been, what, seventeen, maybe eighteen, in this picture? Still a lot older than Dorian could imagine being. But kids. They were smiling for the camera, and Dad's arm was around Mum's shoulder, his dark curly hair was all smushed under his graduation cap and the sun glinted off his glasses. Mum's cheeks were all red like they got when she was excited and happy. Her ash-blonde hair was a lot longer than it ever had been in Dorian's memory, flying everywhere in the wind.

 

Dad had started finding gray hairs the year before last, and worried and worried about them 'cause he was only thirty-four for crying out loud, and Mum had laughed and kissed him and called him silverfox.

 

"I hope you're still laughing when I'm solid white by age forty," Dad had grumbled.

 

But he would never be solid white, and he would never be forty.

 

***

 

Long after Dorian finished his pizza, found his way (with some difficulty) back to his dorm room, and took advantage of Drew's absence to unpack some of his things, he found himself thinking about the photograph. How Mum and Dad were gone but their picture was still there. He'd never given a whole lot of thought to photography before, but it was almost like magic, wasn't it? It was just light and chemicals and paper, but it was also a tiny blink of time caught and frozen in place. What else but magic could make a person outlive himself, exist without existing?

 

Gram hadn't packed him any photographs. Well, Gram hadn't really packed, she'd told Bradley and Laura to do it, when Dorian refused to do it himself. He'd hidden in the attic, listening to his iPod and playing both sides of a chess game that was missing two pawns and a bishop, while Bradley and Laura put his clothes and his books, his desk lamp and some of his DVDs, his Rubix cube, his X-Men and Avengers action figures, and ugh yes they had actually packed his teddy bear. Dorian hid it quickly under his bed, stuffed inside one of his uglier sweaters because yes okay he didn't want it to get dirty.

 

It was after eight o'clock before Drew came back to the room; by then Dorian had his clothes in the wardrobe, most everything else stuffed into the desk drawers, the boxes folded down and stacked under the bed. His Beast, Colossus and Iron Man figurines were arranged carefully on top of the desk; Dorian didn't figure Drew could give him much grief over that when he had Star Wars video games strewn across his bed. Sure enough, his roommate's gaze almost bordered on approving as he glanced over the desk on his way in. For a moment Dorian hoped he would say something, but he didn't, which was fine, because what did Dorian care what Drew thought?

 

They sat on their respective beds in silence, Drew playing on his iPad again and Dorian looking over his class schedule. He would be doing "placement evaluation" tomorrow morning, but then he had classes in the afternoon. Had Gram told them he'd been out of school for three months? And didn't remember any of the school stuff from the months before that? Well, maybe it would turn out that he remembered more than he thought. He'd been getting good grades. Maybe once he started actually trying again, it would come back to him.

 

Dorian buried his face in his pillow. He was going to get put in the stupid-kid classes, he'd never catch up and for the whole rest of school he would be in the stupid-kid classes, and no college would ever let him in, and he'd never be a doctor because he was too stupid. And he hated it here and he wanted to go home, go home, go home but other people were living there now and using Mum's clock and Dad's desk and sleeping in his room, his room that he and Dad had painted, with stars on the ceiling and trees on the wall. What if they had painted over his room?

 

Drew was sitting just a few feet away, so Dorian forced his breathing to be slow, forced his eyes to be dry. He was twelve years old, he wasn't some baby to wail and cry when he didn't get what he wanted. He was twelve. After a minute he sat back up, hoping his face wasn't puffy. His pajamas were on the foot of the bed; was it late enough to put them on and go to sleep? He was so tired.

 

"Is there a curfew here or what?" he said, without looking at Drew, his voice startling loud after the long silence.

 

"Lights-out is at ten," Drew said. "Not supposed to leave the building after nine."

 

Dorian pulled out his pocket-watch. It was 9:20 now. Maybe he could stretch out getting-ready-for-bed for forty minutes. Mr. Crosby had pointed out the bathroom on their way in; this side of the bottom floor had four toilets and three shower stalls to share. Dorian picked up his pajamas, toothbrush, towel and soap gel, and set off down the hall.

 

As soon as he stepped inside the bathroom, he decided it belonged at the very top of his Things To Hate About Youngblood Academy list. It was a horror-house of ice-cold tile, creeping grunge, and stinky, sweaty boys. There were three of them in there, shouting and laughing and throwing their socks at each other. They had to be Dorian's own age, this bathroom was only for sixth-graders, but that didn't keep them from being considerably bigger than him. He nearly slipped on wet tile dodging a careless elbow, and ducked into the one empty shower stall to find the drain coated with hair and a bad word scratched across the entire left-hand wall.

 

I want to go home, I want to go home, I want to go home.

 

 

 

Ten o'clock, and lights-out. Dorian, already curled in a tight ball under his covers, gave no sign of noticing when Drew finally put away his iPad and turned off the lights. He desperately wanted to sleep, but it was shaping up to be another of those nights, with his body too exhausted to move but his brain whizzing around like a hamster in a wheel.

 

To top it off, his stomach was hurting. Not, like, stomachache-hurting. It was hurting like it had hurt in the hospital, weeks and weeks in the hospital, with blood leaking around the stitches when he coughed. It hurt like it had hurt in the car.

 

Jagged edges of wood, dark wet red and moving every time he breathed

Mummy, Mummy

"Don't touch it, baby, just stay still. The firemen are coming to help us. We need to stay still."

Mummy it hurts

"I know, baby, I know. Be still. It'll be all right."

 

He threw the covers off, so suddenly he startled himself, but there was no sound or movement from Drew's bed. Already asleep. Good. 'Cause Dorian needed to see his Mum and Dad and the only way that was going to happen was for him to go see their picture outside the cafeteria.

 

He put on his shoes without socks, then Dad's jacket, then his heavy coat, and tiptoed out the door, down the dark hallway, and out of the dorm building.

 

It was freezing. His legs in their single layer of flannel pajama felt like they might crack, like little trees when the sap inside froze. The breath condensing in front of his face was no feathery stream but a white storm that he could barely navigate through. He held his breath, cheeks and nose stinging, and looked around the quad.

 

Everything was black with white edges of frost, barely recognizable as the Youngblood Academy of daytime. Only a very few windows still glowed, muted behind curtains. The buildings all seemed taller and closer and... and somehow, where they had just been buildings in the sunlight, objects, they now seemed to have personalities. Unhappy ones.

 

Almost, Dorian turned around and went back inside. But back to what? Room 25, Drew Mabry and no sleep. He wanted to see Dad grinning in his goofy hat, and Mum with her hair flying in the wind.

 

He set off across the quad, footsteps crunching in the frost – but wait, no, that was the girls' dorm building. He was looking for the cafeteria. It was... it was that one over there, right? Right.

 

Crunch. Crunch. Crunch. Well, at least no one could sneak up on him, right? Maybe it was creepy out here alone in the dark, but as long as he knew he actually was alone, he was perfectly safe, right? If he was alone, then there was nobody there to hurt him.

 

He didn't feel alone. He kept feeling like he'd seen something, a flicker of movement in the corner of his eye. Something wispy-grey.

 

No. No no no not real not real. Not real last time not real now.

 

He could barely feel his legs. Maybe he should go back. But what if he turned around and saw – no, no, the cafeteria building was closer than the dorm now. He was almost there.

 

He reached the building, and tugged on the door, but it only clanked, barely moving. Locked. Of course it was locked, it was the middle of the night, and anyway the cafeteria was around the back – if he went around the back would the door be open?

 

"I wonder what you're up to?"

 

Dorian spun around with a gasp. There was no one there. He knew he'd heard someone but there was no one there.

 

He stood with his back pressed to the door, the handle digging into his ribs, and couldn't move. Cold burned in his lungs, his legs had gone numb and he couldn't move. Before him, the dark stretch of the quad remained completely empty of life.

 

Go home go home I want to go home.

 

Finally, his muscles creaking with tension and cold, he began moving back across the quad toward the dorm building. His breath seemed loud as an engine's roar, and there was so much empty space all around him, anything could be there, anything could attack him out of the dark. He wanted to run but he forced himself not to run, Mum had taught him years ago that running when you were scared only made you more scared, something about adrenaline and heartrates, fight or flight. Mum knew everything about the human body because she was a doctor.

 

Don't move baby, be still, the firemen are coming to help us

It's bleeding it hurts

You're going to be okay honey

(lying, lying, I should have died)

 

Once, on the way back to the dorm, he thought he saw it again – wispy grey in the corner of his eye. He froze, held his breath, looked straight ahead but focused all his attention on the thing to the side that he could barely see.

 

It was... person-like. A person-like size and shape. Taller than him. Parts of it seemed to be... drapey, fluttery, like skirts or hair.

 

Grey Lady Grey Lady no no not real

 

"Can you see me?"

 

Dorian ran, ran, ran, back to the dorm, footsteps thundering down the dark hallway. He slammed the door, threw himself into bed and pulled the covers over his head, coats and shoes and all, and stayed there, not even trying not to cry, ignoring Drew's groggy irritated questions until the other boy finally shut up and went back to sleep.

 

It took him over an hour to stop shaking. He didn't go to sleep until the window began to brighten with dawn.

 

 

CHAPTER ONE

 

 

"Come down from there, my lord Prince." The bodyguard's voice drifted up the considerable distance from the ground to the top of the supply wagon, almost lost in the sound of Alti's own breath and drumming heart. "Please, my lord Prince."

Alti executed one last turn-and-flip so as to land at the very edge of the wagon, and grinned down at his guard. "Shield, I am in no more danger here than on stage."

"It's a moving wagon. Indulge me, my lord Prince."

Alti wiped sweat from his forehead and began drawing one foot up as far behind him as it would reach. "You know I would, old friend, but it's far too warm a day to practice inside a wagon, and if I do it on the ground, the wagons will leave me behind!"

"Perhaps practice can wait, then." Shield's stout figure jostled inside its armor as he trotted alongside the wagon, sweat giving an extra sheen to his silvery skin.

"I suppose I could practice this part of the act instead," Alti said, pulling three throwing knives free of his waistband and doing a butterfly kick as he juggled them.

Shield made a choked noise. "Lad, do you know what your parents would do to me if any harm came to you on this foolhardy jaunt—"

"My parents have plenty more sons where I came from." Still, Alti sighed and flipped the knives back into their sheaths. It was unfair to tease Shield too much; as a magically-created vassal, his core purpose of guarding Alti's safety could never be relaxed or ignored. All the same, Alti did need to practice—they'd be arriving at the front in a day or two, and he wasn't quite happy with his performance at the last camp, for all that it seemed to go over well enough.

"Maybe the supply train could stop for a rest," Alti wheedled. "Then I could practice on the ground and everyone, I'm sure, would be much happier for a rest!"

Shield hissed between his teeth. "There'll be no stopping along this stretch, my lord Prince. We shouldn't have come this way at all."

"Don't get so worked up about it, Shield," Alti said, and really, it must be awful to be a vassal, always so anxious about everything. "We hadn't any choice about it, for one thing, with the road washed out, so it's no use worrying. But anyway this area's been under Sedilan control for weeks!"

"Aye, and Drohaini control for weeks before that, and then us again before that, and then them again—it's the way the land lays, it's impossible to keep good hold of it. I won't draw an easy breath until we're out of these hills entirely."

Alti sighed, dropping down to swing one foot off the edge of the wagon, and magicked an apple out of nothing to peel with one of his knives. It wouldn't do anything for hunger, but he wasn't really hungry anyway, he just wanted to taste it.

"I still say it's improper, anyway," Shield grumbled, "for a Prince of Sedila to be running about dressed like a temple dancer."

"I could only wish to be as beautiful and talented a dancer as those Called by the goddess of love—unless you are impugning Mahana's chosen?"

Shield rolled his eyes. "They have their honored place, my lord Prince, and you have yours, which ought never to have included performing for the eyes of the masses, much less risking your neck to do so—"

That was when they first heard the screaming.

Alti had put little stock in tales of the inhuman battle cry of the Drohaini, but it was everything he'd been told and more—an eerie, echoing wail, almost beautiful, that froze his breath and lifted every hair on his skin.

The wagon jolted to a stop, knocking Alti half-off the edge, as everyone in the supply train spent a precious second listening in dawning terror.

Then the Drohaini came into view, dark horses and white armor spilling over the crest of the hill, with a wave of arrows flying before them like a cloud.

Hanging half-off the wagon, some panicked instinct drove Alti back up onto the roof—a mad chance that likely saved his life, as arrows studded the ground where a leap down would have placed him. Shield fell with a choked cry, an arrow jutting from the unarmored joint at his throat.

People were screaming, shouting, running, drawing weapons and dragging wounded friends, and for long incomprehensible seconds all Alti could do was stare down at the body of what had been his guard and protector all his life.

The commander of the supply train was shouting orders, trying to direct the noncombatant performers into and under the wagons, while the soldiers gathered to meet the enemy.

I should do something, Alti thought. I'm the prince, I should do something—at the very least I should hide so I don't get killed—but his body refused to move, plastered flat against the roof of the wagon even as another volley of arrows landed around him.

Then the wave of Drohaini slammed into the haphazard wall that was the supply train's defenders, and what was already chaos became nightmare.

From almost the first moment, some Drohaini cut right through the Sedilan line, and thundered into the midst of the wagons. One kicked in the door of the one nearest Alti, where some of the other dancers were hiding, and Alti found himself on his feet before he knew it, a throwing knife already flying from his hand. It lodged in the soldier's back, toppling him from his horse with a cry.

More soldiers, hot on their comrade's heels, looked round in alarm, and pointed up at Alti. One flicked a hand, sending a magicked ball of nothing-good speeding his way.

Alti flattened against the roof again, and rolled, dropping off the opposite edge—straight onto another soldier.

"Hey!"

Alti still had a knife in his hand. He twisted in the startled soldier's grasp, leaving a line of scarlet across arms and chest until the man released him with a howl of pain. By then the others had rounded the wagon—he ducked one, kicked another, and blinded them all (perhaps permanently) with a blast of white light that gave him time to scramble back up to the roof of the wagon. From there he leapt to the next roof, and the next, and up the flagpole that waved Sedila's colors from the top of the tallest wagon, where he clung tightly, unsure if the tremor throughout his body was his own terror or the imminent collapse of the thin pole.

Spread out below him was a massacre.

The Sedilan soldiers were reduced to a pocket here and there, surrounded and fighting back to back, while Drohaini pulled dancers, cooks and pageboys out of their hiding places and gathered them at swords' point against the wagons. A muledriver who tried to fight back was slashed viciously across the face and left bleeding on the ground. Alti caught sight of the train commander, just as his pocket of soldiers collapsed, disappearing under flashing swords.

I can stop this. The thought held its own deep and particular terror, yet it stilled the fluttering panic in his gut. I am a prince of Sedila and I can stop this.

"We surrender!" he shouted, as loud as his lungs would shout. He tore at the flimsy turquoise bolero that was almost all he wore at present, aside from beads and ribbons—it made for a lousy flag of surrender, but it would have to do—and waved it above his head. "Put up your arms! We surrender!"

Every heartbeat that it took for word to spread was like a stab to his chest. The Drohaini who heard him stopped, reached to stay their comrade's hands, spread the word—and the Sedilans collapsed in relief and despair, screams dying down into ragged weeping.

A rider, in the same blood-spattered white armor as the others but declared commander by a helm with a gleaming white horsehair tail, approached the flagpole and called up to him.

"And who are you, boy, to declare surrender?"

The pole was creaking and splintering under his hands; rather than fall, Alti dropped, landing hard but in a controlled crouch before the commander's horse. Neither commander nor horse shied from the movement, he noticed, though several surrounding soldiers tensed and readied their steel. The commander put out a hand to keep them back.

Alti drew himself up to his full, unimpressive height. "I am Alti Reizanda of Sedila," he said. "Fourth son of the Royal House."

"Well." The commander pulled off his—no, her—helmet, exposing mussed and frazzled red-gold braids, and a face no older than Alti's own. "Isn't that interesting."

 

****

If Princess Tassara was going to fight a pointless, horrifying and unnecessary war, she was at least going to do it right.

That meant leading troops herself, not staying safe at home while her people fought and died. It meant not even trying to retake the Ashland hills again, because enough blood had been spilled for a strategically unimportant region that the Sedilans could easily take back from them. And it meant capturing a Sedilan supply train, when it fell into their laps, because it would be an easy, morale-lifting victory and her men had been on thin rations long enough.

Capture, that had been the goal, not slaughter. She hadn't expected the supply train to put up such a fight—had hoped, in fact, that there might not be any fight at all. A small, surprised force, outnumbered and largely civilian—what did they have to gain by fighting? They ought to have surrendered at once, and called it victory for all.

The presence of the Prince, though, explained much. No commander wanted to be the one who handed a member of the royal family over to the enemy.

So the Prince had done it himself. She wasn't sure whether to be impressed with his pragmatism or repulsed by his cowardice.

Cowardice, she decided reluctantly, looking him up and down and trying not to let her face heat. The boy was dressed like a drinking-hole floozy, his bottom half clad only in some gauzy, fluttering thing that barely touched his thighs, his top half a bare expanse of lean-muscled Sedilan bronze, but for a few strings of beads. A distractingly pretty picture, to be frank, but definitely not the picture of a military leader.

He may not even be the prince at all, she thought. They would have to verify that somehow. "Tie his hands," she ordered the nearest lieutenant. "Keep him guarded. I'll be back for him when we're settled."

"Surely that's not necessary," the pretty princeling said, the words tilted and musical in the Sedilan accent. He drew subtly away from the approaching lieutenant and his rope. "I've surrendered to you. You can have my parole."

"Parole?" Tassara repeated. "That would require trusting the word of a Sedilan. Experience has taught me the error of that."

The princeling stiffened, outraged, and drew breath to say something hot and offended, she was sure—but Tassara didn't hear it, already walking away to get this fiasco of a battle properly locked down.

She circled the supply train, barking orders and verifying what her lieutenants had already reported, getting the wounded seen to (her own men first, then the Sedilans) and the dead gathered for burial (none of her own there, thank the lost gods).

Absently she took down her hair, which was itching with sweat and pulling uncomfortably against its pins, shook it out with her fingers and pulled it back with a band. Her horse, Zephyr, followed loyally behind her, occasionally bumping her shoulder with his nose to request a pat. Battles always left him on edge—excellent quality in a warhorse, but oh well. She'd get one of the horseboys to look after him as soon as they were done calming the supply train's mules.

She had mules now, and wagons, and prisoners both military and civilian—and a prince, oh, what was she going to do with a Sedilan prince? Killing him was always an option, but a distasteful one after he had surrendered (and offered his parole—was he that naïve a fool, or did he think she was?). No, she couldn't kill him unless he did something to really provoke it. She would have to take him home for her mother to deal with.

A plaintive male voice drifted across the slowly-calming mess of the supply train, distinctively royal and Sedilan.

"Must we continue standing about in the sun? You can't possibly be any more comfortable than I am. And how about some water, come to that? Couldn't one of you lovely lads fetch me some water?"

This was going to be a long journey.

 

            Tassara managed to avoid Prince Alti until nightfall, when she took dinner in an emptied wagon repurposed as something of a command tent. If she was going to accept his surrender and transport him back to Drohain, some measure of royal-hostage protocol had to be observed. That meant giving the captive prince the best seat at the table, even if that was camp stools around a broken desk.

She got her first truly clear look at him as he stepped into the wagon; it was dimly lit but she had her spectacles on now, which of course she had not worn into battle. Even if it had been safe to wear glass on her face when people were swinging swords at her, they wouldn't fit inside her helmet. Now she could make out every detail of his thick, tousled black hair, slim muscular figure and bronze skin—very little of it hidden by his ridiculous outfit of underdrawers and beads.

"Why are you still wearing that?" She hadn't meant to be so blunt, but something about the sight had made her brain skip in place.

"You haven't given me an opportunity to change," Alti said—snapped, really. "It's getting rather chilly, too."

Ah. Er. Yes, she could see that. Tassara crossed the wagon to the cloak she'd left piled on a chair and tossed it to Alti, who hurriedly wrapped himself in it. A relief to them both.

"Why are you dressed like that to begin with?" Tassara said, returning to her seat and scooping roasted potatoes onto her plate. "Were you hoping to hide amongst the dancers?" She'd been startled to discover that the supply train traveled with an entertainment troupe; apparently they put on shows at the camps and outposts, wherever they stopped for supply delivery.

Alti looked slightly confused. "I am one of the dancers."

"You said you were a prince!" Exasperated, she set down her fork with excessive force. She'd been right to suspect him, this was all just a ploy engineered for the sake of the surrender—

"I am a prince! I'm also a dancer! Is this hard to understand?" Glancing warily up at her through his lashes, he began helping his own plate.

"You mean to tell me," Tassara said slowly, "that you, a member of the royal family, a person in the direct line of succession, put on dancing performances? For audiences?"

"Audiences of my choosing," he said with an offended snort. "It's not like any old peasant could give a penny at the door and take a gander."

"But camps full of soldiers can?"

Again with the wary glancing, as if he weren't sure she was quite right in the head. "Men and women fighting for Sedila? I can think of no worthier audience."

Tassara refused to like him for that comment. "And the King and Queen approve of this?"

Alti laughed. "Not much. But I assured them…" The smile drained from his face. "I assured them I would be safe."

She felt a peculiar and pointless desire to reassure him, to reverse the loss of the radiant smile. "Well, you are safe, and shall be. My mother will consider your comfort a high priority, for honor's sake."

"Your mother?" He cocked his head, like a puzzled little dog, and she realized with a start that he had no idea who she was. Well, fair enough; she didn't recognize him either. In fact she still wasn't one hundred percent convinced he was Prince Alti at all.

"I suppose we skipped the proper introductions," she said. "I'm Princess Tassara Highspear. Heir to the throne of Drohain." She held out a hand, angled for a shake, not a kiss, as that seemed more appropriate in a stolen wagon wearing battle-blacks and no crown. Alti just stared at her.

"You rag on me for dancing," he said, "when you're going into battle? The heir to the throne? You're mad—and your mother must be mad to let you!"

"It was my mother's idea. I'm to be the head of state, I have to know how to be a leader, have to know what war really means." She frowned. "Are you refusing to shake my hand, princeling?"

"What—no, of course not." He threaded a hand out of the cloak and gripped hers with it, warm and unexpectedly strong. "But it's madness! What if you were killed?"

"Then my sister would be in for a rude rearrangement of her life's priorities." She sighed, pulling her hand belatedly away from Alti's. "I'm kept away from the hottest spots, of course. But my parents both served right at the front, and so did my grandparents before them. You keep your people's morale up by shaking your ass in a frilly skirt? I do it by leading them, by going through the same hardships they do and showing them they can trust me—what are you doing?"

"Leaving," Alti said, disentangling the cloak from his chair. "I find that childish insults impair my appetite."

"Oh, by the lost gods. Sit down, you haven't eaten."

"Apologize first." He crossed his arms over his chest, the movement dislodging her cloak to let candlelight play over brown muscle and glittering beads.

It was funny, really, that the populations of Drohain and Sedila had such different colorations, when they'd been one people once upon a time, at least according to legend. The Sedilans had combined their forces, and eventually their families, with the darker-skinned tribes on their side of the Sea, while Drohain remained pale and alone. Sedila was much warmer and sunnier than Drohain, too, and thus Alti would doubtless have been tan regardless, but even the most sun-kissed Drohaini would never have his night-black hair and eyes—

"Well?" Alti said. "Or do you not know how to apologize? I can walk you through it."

Tassara cleared her throat and tried to gather her strangely distracted thoughts. "Oh, very well, I apologize for my remark." She should have known a Sedilan would consider half-naked dancing a perfectly honorable pursuit.

Alti continued to glare, but returned to his seat and began eating voraciously.

"Leave a bit for the rest of us," Tassara said drily.

"Leave a bit," Alti repeated, around a mouthful of food, how elegant, "of our food for our troops that you killed half of us in order to steal? I'll eat as much as I want, thanks."

"You can stop with the hyperbole, we both know there was only half a dozen dead and only that—" Inexplicably she bit back the words, only that because you were there. The poor idiot probably didn't realize that, and it would be an unnecessary cruelty to point it out. "—only that because you're such terrible fighters."

"Seven." He swallowed, and set down the bread he'd been about to bite, looking suddenly nauseated. "Seven dead."

Tassara frowned, looking back through her memory—no, there'd been only six bodies to bury, she was perfectly sure.

"One was a vassal," Alti said. "They don't really leave a body, especially after a violent death. The magic holding them together just… dissolves in a flash of light. Mostly burns up their clothes, even. Nothing left."

"Oh. We have very few vassals in Drohain," Tassara said, cursing herself for inane chitchat, but not wanting to deal with the haunted grief in Alti's eyes. "It's a very complicated magic, and few of us have the trick of it. Or an interest in developing the trick of it, I suppose."

"His name was Shield. He'd been my bodyguard my entire life. And now he's just… gone."

Tassara knew that look, the empty horror of knowing someone you cared about was dead, and you were responsible. At least she didn't have to wonder anymore if this silly boy was really what he claimed; in spite of everything, that was the look of a prince.

"If he was your bodyguard," she said quietly, "then I'm sure falling in your service was an honor to him."

"Screw honor! He's napping on the job, is what! Who's going to look after me now?" Alti turned away, visibly struggling for control.

Startled by the outburst, Tassara decided it was best to politely ignore the boy until he had recovered himself. She forced down a few bites of her dinner.

"What is going to happen to me now?" Alti asked after a long silence, his voice very quiet now, subdued.

"Probably you'll be held for ransom, prisoner exchange or the like."

"It won't end well for you. My people will do whatever it takes to get me back, but probably not via negotations."

He was right. It would be very like the Sedilans to refuse ransom and instead mount a full-scale attack, however ill-advised, on wherever they suspected Alti to be. Tassara took a sip of her wine, trying to settle her stomach.

"You could just let me go," Alti said, persuasive now, almost playful. He tilted his head, dark curls falling in his eyes. "Give me back for free as a gesture of goodwill."

"Goodwill?" Tassara shook her head. "Where do you get these ideas? Our countries are at war, do you even understand what that means?"

"Maybe such a gesture could end the war."

Tassara couldn't help it; she laughed. "End twenty years of fighting with one gesture."

"It took only one incident to start it. One incident could stop it."

"I suppose I should expect a Sedilan to have such a simplistic view on the matter, but you're immensely wrong. There were hostilities between Sedila and Drohain, off and on, for generations before the sinking of the Swan—"

"So you think it would take a bigger gesture?"

"Much bigger."

"Like what?"

"I—how should I know?" Tassara wanted to inch away from the mocking sort of expectancy in his expression.

He was leaning over the table at her now. "You are going to be the head of state, as you said. Don't you think you should have some kind of plan for ending the war? Or at least knowing what it might take to do so? But perhaps you are content to keep fighting until we kill each other off."

"No, I am not," she snapped. He waited, but when she said nothing further, he eventually leaned back, shaking his head. He picked up his half-eaten plate and left the wagon with both it and her cloak; she could hear him peevishly shrugging off the hands of his guards as they escorted him away.

"Silly, stupid princeling," Tassara muttered under her breath, but only because she knew he was right. The war wasn't going to end by itself. She might be the only person with both the power and the desire to make it happen.

A gesture of goodwill, she thought, her mind racing in a direction it had never considered before.

 

****

 

Alti was accustomed to sleeping through all manner of noise and movement when necessary; his brothers' rowdiness, royal feasts and celebrations, evenings out with fellow performers. But he was not accustomed to sleeping on the hard ground with armed guards watching his every move.

"Explain to me again why I can't sleep in a wagon?" he called, trying to wrap himself more securely in the single blanket he'd been given. "Seeing as how they're my wagons? With my things in them? And everyone else gets to sleep in the wagons? I've a perfectly good bed and it's not as if you lads are using it!"

"We're to keep you under watch," one of the guards said, words slow and lazy and bored in his flat Drohaini accent. "Can't do that inside a wagon. Tight quarters. Not safe."

"Your biceps are bigger around than my head, do you really think I'm such a threat?"

A second guard spoke up. "My best mate's not been able to see anything but golden sparkles since he ran into you, so yeah, we're making sure we can conveniently get a sword into you if need be."

Alti resisted a brief urge to apologize. These men had been attacking him—these men had killed Shield and six other soldiers Alti had known, and he wasn't a bit sorry for making them bleed for it.

But that was exactly the kind of thinking that had kept the war going, wasn't it. Everyone had lost somebody they loved, and wanted the other side to pay for taking them away. And so they kept right on killing each other's loved ones as if eventually they'd run out of revenges to take, when they were only making more. From the very beginning, that's what the war had been about—two nations in mourning, each blaming the other for the loss of their prince or princess aboard the Trumpeter Swan.

"Your mate's sight might come back," Alti said, feeling oddly shy. "I can take a look at him tomorrow. Maybe figure out a way to reverse it."

All the guards' heads turned toward him, speechless for a long moment.

"No, I don't think I'll give you another shot at finishing him off," said the second guard eventually, sounding gruff and flustered. "Our healers can handle it."

Well, he'd tried, Alti thought. At least they considered him dangerous; that was a kind of compliment. He still grumbled under his breath as he curled down tighter inside his blanket.

At least he still had Princess Tassara's cloak; despite her prattle about sharing her men's hardships, the cloak was soft and thick. It smelled nice, too, like frycakes with cream and honey, like sun-warmed grass and rich earth, like—

Like Princess Tassara, most likely, he realized with an embarrassed jolt. Well. Too bad nothing else about her was so nice. Except her hair, maybe. He had to admit her hair was pretty, despite the lack of care she took with it.

Running into the Crown Princess of Drohain out here—that had been a surprise beyond reckoning. She was everything he could have expected a Drohaini Princess to be—cold, stubborn, insulting, and obviously determined to keep the family legacy of bloodshed alive. A right shame, when this mad chance could have meant something, could have been the first step down an important path.

In fact, the more he thought about it, the more insane it seemed, that a Prince of Sedila and Princess of Drohain could meet by chance like this, and have it come to nothing.

"Habri, Lord of Luck, is that your hand I sense in this mess?" he whispered. "Or Rachak War-master, what of you?" Neither god answered, of course, and he wasn't mad enough to bemoan that—clamoring for the gods' attention rarely ended well.

Still, there were ways to look into the matter. He had no cards to read, and the stars would not be helpful on so small a scale, but his own blood could hardly fail him. He wouldn't even have to cut himself; his body bore plenty of marks from earlier in the day, though he didn't really remember getting them.

One of the guards turned to watch, frowning, as Alti shuffled his arms out of the blanket and cloak and began picking at a scab on his elbow.

"Don't do that," the guard muttered, "you'll get it infected."

"It's sweet of you to care," Alti said, "but I'm afraid this is—well, it might be important, anyway. And if it does get infected, that's a sign all on its own, I suppose." He winced as the cut came open, and waited until he had a nice, large bead of blood there before murmuring a spell and touching it to one of the many unwelcome rocks littering the ground around him. A snap of his finger gave him a spark of light to see the result.

"Here now!" The guards were all drawing away, reaching for their swords. "No funny business, you!"

"Nothing funny about it, lads," Alti muttered absently. "Just a bit of fortune-telling. Nothing a good Drohaini puts any stock in, I'm sure."

Two blotches of blood on the stone, not his intention but clearly part of his results. He peered at them closely, trying to listen to his magic as much as his eyes, interpreting the shapes.

That one, it was very similar to the linked circles associated with Mahana, goddess of love. And the other…

The other was the clearest impression of Kinver's four-armed spiral symbol that he'd ever seen in his life.

Don't overthink it, he told himself, feeling cold down to the cores of his bones. She's also goddess of the sea. You'll be crossing the sea to Drohain, that's all.

Just as the Trumpeter Swan had once planned to do. Kinver, Queen of the Depths, had claimed the Swan for her own, as she did whenever she pleased. As she did to all, sooner or later, for Kinver was the Queen all bowed before in the end. Most gods were content with one realm to rule—fire, or harvest, or war, or love—but Kinver had two that were one. Death and the sea.

*

 

Alti did sleep eventually, but only when the night-richness of the sky had faded to gray, the weary stars winking out one by one. When he did, he dreamed of sun-warmed grass, rich earth, and the goddess Mahana condensing from the colors of the sunrise. Which was nonsense, as it was Marith who ruled the dawn, and while easygoing for a goddess, she still wasn't known for sharing her territory.

All of which had his head in quite a muddle when he was nudged awake by the unforgiving toe of a boot. Muttering curses, he squinted up at the most unwelcome form of Princess Tassara, leaning over him with the dawn sunlight blazing in her hair.

"Ugh, what?" he demanded.

Tassara put her hands on her hips. "I think we should get married."

Crackling flame and the smell of smoke; for a moment Leicho thought she was at her mother’s hearth on a winter morning. Time to milk the sheep.

No, the smoke smelled wrong. And her head hurt. Everything hurt. Leicho felt gritty rubble under her hands, and remembered. The transport had crashed.

Terror dragged her up through the fog of unconsciousness, and she sat up as quickly as she dared, everything spinning around her. They had crashed. On a seed world. This was surely the HWA’s ultimate nightmare, for a prison transport to crash on a seed world.

Her surroundings settled into a landscape of twisted metal, scattered fires against a night sky. It had been midday aboard the ship, which wasn’t helping her disorientation. The wrecked transport seemed somehow both larger and smaller than it ought to be, stretched out around her. Beyond it lay only dense blackness, no clues about the nature of this world. A few emergency lights glowed through gaping tears in the hull—one flickered out as she watched. The wrong-smelling fires were spreading.

Lord and Lady, is anyone else alive?

Leicho felt her face, her head and arms, with trembling hands. Blood from the head injury soaked her short thatch of white hair, streamed down her face and neck. Everything hurt. A jagged piece of bulkhead had her pinned in place by the torso and right leg, but she didn’t think anything was broken. She had to get free before the fires got to her. She had to help the other survivors. If there were any...

She shoved at the bulkhead pinning her down, and tried to twist out from under it. A mistake, she realized as the wreckage shifted beneath her; for a horrible moment she was falling, unable to keep from crying out, but then metal clanged hard against metal, and she stabilized again—suspended now over a vast chasm. She looked down into a ragged cross-section of the transport, corridors and crew quarters and cells, torn open like bread.

A shower of sparks caught her eye on the other side of the chasm, briefly illuminating golden hair and a guard’s uniform. Reill! They’d been walking together to their duty station when this happened, hadn’t they? Her mind was still foggy...

“Reill! Are you all right? Can you hear me? Reill, wake up! Can you help me?”

More sparks, and Leicho’s breath caught. No, Reill couldn’t help her, and he wouldn’t be waking up. Not with his body folded and twisted around like that.

“Reill,” she called again, helplessly, because he couldn’t just be gone that quickly, her first and best friend on the transport, he couldn’t just be gone.

But of course he could. She closed her eyes, arms aching with the strain of holding herself up over the chasm, and whispered a prayer for the dead.

She was interrupted by a sound of movement. A slithering, dragging sound, slow and unsteady. Another survivor!

“Help me!” she cried, straining upward. “I’m pinned here, I don’t—”

The words died in her throat as the survivor hauled himself into view—just a dark shape against the dark sky, but she knew him. Everyone on the ship knew this one.

“Hello, Summer Blossom,” she said, keeping her voice calm. “I’m glad to see you’re okay. Can you help me get free?”

The only reply was the rattle of leaves and seed-pods that passed as Summer Blossom’s laughter.

Lord and Lady, help your child, help me help me— She struggled wildly against the weight that trapped her, heedless of further damage to her body, or the chance of falling to her death. Above her, the wide leaves and tri-part maw of Transport 989’s most dangerous inmate loomed black against foreign constellations.

When vines snaked down the broken bulkhead and wrapped around Leicho’s body, she breathed deep and forced herself not to struggle. Summer Blossom was surely weakened, injured, or he would already have deployed his chemical ammunition. If she waited for an opportune moment, she might have a chance to get away.

Vines wrapped around the wreckage, pulling it away enough to lift her free. Leicho held her breath. If there was any chance at all that Summer Blossom meant well, this would be the moment—

He did not set her down. Instead, he opened the three flame-orange petals of his maw, and dangled her above it. The rattling seed pods formed something like a tune—the five-note song that denoted “lights out” for the prisoners.

Leicho wrenched her arm free of the vine and drew her stinger, jabbing it into a mouth-petal at full power.

Summer Blossom screamed, or the Green Ones’ equivalent of a scream—the hiss of air-pods clenching, a sudden flood of fear-pain-rage pheromone. Another stinger-jab numbed the vines clutching her, and Leicho dropped ten feet onto twisted metal. Something went wrong in her leg. She got up and ran anyway.

The surface of the downed transport was a nightmare, broken and burning and shifting underfoot. She passed the bodies of two more prisoners, clearly dead. One of the cooks, but only part of her. There was no time to stop, not with Summer Blossom pursuing her. She could hear metal shrieking as the Green One tore wreckage out of his path, not very far behind.

She limped and stumbled, choking on smoke and pheromone, and kept the stinger clutched tight in her hand. It was a herding tool, really, not a weapon. It wouldn’t come near putting Summer Blossom down. She veered, trying to put flames between them—and felt the deck give way under her feet.

She tumbled through darkness, rough edges and broken bits, debris falling in after her. She landed hard, stunned and breathless, wondering if she was dead.

Apparently not, she thought when her lungs began to work again. Being dead wouldn’t hurt this much.

She didn’t try to move at first, listening for sounds of pursuit, but all she heard was the drip and hiss of burst pipes, the crackle of flame—not as far away as she’d like. The debris had mostly caught on a crossbar a few feet above; a wonder she hadn’t broken on that herself. There was soil under her hands, she realized—deep, sucking mud, odd-smelling, the surface of a strange world. Carefully, she began to crawl.

It took an age to win free of the wreckage, and after everything else, it was the mud that nearly killed her. She had to fight free of it anew with every movement, even as she clawed at it for purchase. The transport, she realized gradually, was sinking, tilting the surface of the mud, threatening to drag her down with it. Her right leg was no longer working at all.

Transport 989 was dead, was a crushed drinking-can around her, burning and sinking into the mud. Her home of the last eight years, and near everyone on it, her fellow guards, her prisoners, the support staff... Once or twice she thought perhaps she heard voices, crying for help, but she couldn’t be sure over the roar of the flames. Perhaps it was better not to be sure.

There was a road ahead—surely it was a road, surely on any world a section of narrow, flat land, too clean-edged to be natural, was a road. Would someone stop to help her? Would anyone even pass by, in the middle of the night as it seemed to be?

She dragged herself into the road, where at least the mud couldn’t get her. It had just occurred to her to wonder what kind of vehicles were used on this world when a pair of bright lights came around the turn, blinding her. She raised a hand, half a plea and half a shield for her eyes. The vehicle belonging to the lights veered sharply away from her with a screaming noise, and came to a stop a few yards away.

Her eyes weren’t focusing, she realized, as she watched a door open in the vehicle, and a humanoid figure step out. She would lose consciousness soon. “Help,” she tried to say, but her translator brought her up short with a garbled signal she could only call a grinding of the gears. Lord and Lady, if my translator doesn’t work here...

The humanoid figure leaned over her, blurry and half-lit, speaking in a frightened tone. The translator strained and stuttered. Finally something pinged, and it began whispering information into her brain.

Planet: Earth/Di Qiu/La Tierra/Erde/Terre/Chikyu/Prithvi/Ulimwengu

Language: English

Translator database for Earth English updated: 56 years ago.

She was in luck, to have such a recent update. Translator companies often didn’t update from seed worlds for centuries at a time; too much risk for too little reward.

“Can you even hear me?” the man—she thought it was a man—was saying. He waved a hand in front of her face. “Are you all right?”

“No,” she said, and lost consciousness.

***

“Dad, can I get a henna kit? It would be so cool to have my own henna kit, then I could give myself tattoos all the time, for free, and I could practice on you, and maybe I could sell tattoos at school—”

“No, Briana, you cannot start up a temporary tattoo parlor on the playground.”

“But I am super responsible for my age! I heard you say so!”

“Yes, but that age is still eleven. No go, Bree.” Nate chuckled at his daughter’s sulky expression, then turned his attention back to the road. This swampy stretch between Hilton Head and Bluffton didn’t support streetlamps—most of it would be underwater, come high tide—and the road twisted through thick clumps of trees, so it paid to turn on the brights and stay focused. At least there was no other traffic at this hour.

Not that you’d know, from watching Briana, that it was nearly two in the morning. She was practically vibrating in her seat, still high on the energy of the convention. Her Princess Leia buns were falling and the white robe was scuffed and rumpled; Nate had abandoned his Vader suit in favor of jeans and a T-shirt, much to Briana’s displeasure. “I’m pretty sure you can peel that off now,” Nate said, nodding at the henna mockingjay Bree was still guarding jealously on her forearm.

“The lady said to leave it overnight.”

“It is overnight, Miss Bouncey Ball,” Nate muttered. “You didn’t get into the Red Bull again, did you?”

“No, I’m just happy!” Briana put her feet up on the dash, wiggling her toes. “That was the best Con ever! We’re doing it again next year, right?”

“That depends on funding, but hopefully.” Nate had been going to science fiction conventions for decades, but he’d never helped run one before. He had to admit it had been a blast. Chaotic and frustrating and way more complicated than advertised, but a blast. And it was nice to drive half an hour home afterward, rather than flying from Atlanta or—

“What’s that?” Briana straightened, taking her feet off the dash.

They had just rounded a corner, leaving a screen of trees behind, and instead of dark mudflat there was... some sort of wreck? Nate felt his mouth fall open. It was huge, easily the size of a multi-story building, and it was definitely on fire. What on Earth—

“Dad!”

Nate saw it just as Briana pointed—a figure crawling into the road, covered in blood and throwing up a hand toward them. He jerked the steering wheel and slammed on the brakes.

The car nearly went off the road before he got it to a stop, and for a second they both sat there, breathing hard. Nate’s seatbelt had tightened against his chest; he scrabbled to unlatch it.

“You okay, Bree?” he said, and Briana nodded, eyes wide.

“Dad, was that—that looked like something from The Walking Dead, Daddy, what was that?”

“Someone hurt in that wreck. Whatever that is. You stay put.”

“But—”

“NO.” He gripped her chin to make her meet his eyes. “You stay in the car. Whatever’s going on out there, my little girl is not getting in the middle. Understand?”

It was a measure of her fright that she nodded, and didn’t reach for her seatbelt as he got out of the car.

Nate had not had a panic attack in almost ten years. It occurred to him now, as his gaze wandered across the burning wreckage of something the size of a cruise ship, that that streak could be broken.

Get a hold of yourself.

He hurried to the bloody figure collapsed in the road. “Hey! Hey, buddy, I’m going to help you, okay? Can you tell me where you’re hurt? Can you tell me what happened?”

The person—woman, he realized, tall and muscular with very short hair, but her face was definitely feminine—looked up at him with frantic, glassy eyes. She tried to speak but he couldn’t make out words.

“Easy, easy, I’m going to help you.” The roar of fire from the wreck was surprisingly loud, competing for space with the gallop of his heart. “Don’t move, I’m going to call for help.” He reached for his phone, only to find an empty pocket. His phone was in the car, he remembered, with a dead battery; he swore under his breath. “All right. All right. Ma’am, can you even hear me?” He waved a hand in front of her face; she blinked, but her eyes didn’t track the movement. “Are you all right?”

“No,” she croaked, and lowered her head to the pavement, eyes drifting shut.

Nate raked hands through his hair, swearing steadily. There was no one around here for miles, they hadn’t even seen another car in ages. They had no phone. Moving her was probably not a great idea, but it beat leaving her in the middle of the road.

He ran back to the car, where Briana had her nose pressed to the driver’s side window.

“We’re taking her to the hospital,” he said. “Move the stuff out of the backseat.”

“Is that an airplane?”

“Just move the stuff.”

While Briana heaved their suitcases into the trunk, Nate carefully gathered the unconscious woman into his arms—but he wasn’t a particularly large or muscular man, and he simply couldn’t lift her. He swore a little more under his breath, and eyed the flames of the wreckage, which were definitely picking up speed. They needed to get out of here. What if the thing exploded?

“Bree, come get her feet!”

Briana looked about five years old as they eased the injured woman into the backseat—buns fallen into mere pigtails, white robe swallowing her body, eyes swallowing her face. "Is she dead?"

"No," Nate said, though the idea sparked unease in his gut. She had lost consciousness rather suddenly. "Get in, buckle your—No, Briana, get in your seat!” She had crawled into the back with the injured woman.

An explosion from the wreckage sent him stumbling against the car; flame mushroomed into the night sky. Without another word, he jumped into the driver’s seat and hit the gas.

If he passed something strange in the roadside brush—some kind of enormous plant with long vines trailing out across the pavement—he hardly spared a glance for it as they sped away.