Текст книги "Destroyer "

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 25 страниц)

“One did follow a certain few details, nandiin,” Jago admitted. “And if Mercheson-paidhi will repeat her information for us in Ragi, we shall take notes.”

“One will gladly do so,” Yolanda murmured, with commendable courtesies, “with apologies, Jago-ji.”

Maybe he looked as ready to fall on his face as he felt. He hated to leave his weary staff to endure one more briefing, but murmured a courtesy of his own and let Jago take Yolanda back down the hall, presumably to retrieve the duffle she had abandoned to the military guard near the lift.

“One might sleep,” Banichi said, touching his arm. “One observes you have not slept much on the flight, Bren-ji.”

“I never sleep on airplanes,” Bren muttered. Which was not quite true. But it wasn’t restful sleep. Banichi could sleep under the most amazing circumstances, and doubtless had, at least for an intermittent hour or so. So, likely, had the rest of them. And it was true they looked fresher than he felt. “An hour or so,” he conceded. “I take it as good sense.”

“Undoubtedly good sense, nandi,” Banichi said, as alert and bright as he was not.

But it was not bed he had first on his mind. He picked the other suite that had a view of the mountains and betook himself to that, immediately to the phone.

He knew his mother’s number. He both longed to call it and dreaded the call, not knowing what might have been the outcome of her last trip to hospital, two years past, not knowing if she had lived through that crisis. He had a choice of her number, or his brother Toby’s, up the coast, on the North Shore.

He decided on fortitude, and called his mother’s number, not even trying to think what he would say to her after his desertion, beyond hello, I’m back.

But the number, the lifelong number, was no longer working.

He clicked the button down, severing the connection, desolate. Even if she’d gone to some care facility, she’d have retained that lifelong number. And now it was just silence on the other end. And he knew he’d failed her. She was gone. Just gone. And he wouldn’t blame Toby for not speaking to him.

There was a lump in his throat. But he didn’t take for granted, ever again, that there would be time, that there would be a second chance. He rang Toby’s number. And it at least rang. And rang. And rang.

And clicked. “Toby Cameron here.”

“Toby, thank God.”

“Bren?”

“I’m on the planet.”

“I know you are, you silly duck. I’m downstairs.”

“What?”

“Downstairs in the hotel, in the lobby. The guards won’t let me upstairs.”

“My God.” He slammed the phone down and exited the room so fast his bodyguard and Ilisidi’s jumped to alert; and so did the marine guards down the way. He stopped half a beat.

“My brother,” he said to Banichi, and was off down the hall to the military guard. “My brother’s coming up. Toby Cameron. Tell the people down there to let him into the lift.”

The guards looked dubious, but one of them called down on his personal unit. “John? Have you got a Mr. Cameron down there?”

He didn’t hear clearly what the other side said, but the guard said, “Send him up,” and Bren folded his arms into a clench to keep the shivers at bay, not wanting to pace while the lift came up, but not knowing anything else to do with himself. His own bodyguard attended him, close at hand—they might be why the guards had folded. He thought so. He hadn’t been coherent.

The lift ascended. Stopped. The door opened. Toby was there, Toby, in a casual jacket, sun-browned, scrubbed and shaved and anxious to see him. He flung his arms around his brother, Toby gave him a bone-cracking hug, and they just stood occupying the lift doorway for a moment, until it beeped a protest and they broke it up and moved into the hall.

“So good to see you,” Toby said, holding him by the arms.

“How did you know?”

“Oh, it’s been all over the news. Amateur astronomers saw the ship had come back. Then the morning news said the shuttle was coming down. That you were on it. Indefinite whether you were coming down at Bretano or Jackson—I reserved a ticket to Bretano from here in case, but I bet on Jackson, and I brought the boat over. I saw you come in as I was coming into the harbor.”

“I can’t believe it. Damn, it’s good to see you.” His bodyguard knew Toby. Knew him well. Word was spreading to the few staff that didn’t know him, he was quite sure. “Come on. Come sit down.”

“The President was here, I gather.”

“Met us when we landed.” He had Toby by the arm, unwilling to let him go, and walked him down the hall toward his chosen rooms. “A quick move, up there. We weren’t sure we wouldn’t be shot at coming down, if we didn’t. At least that’s how we understand things stand.”

“It’s been dicey. Things have gone completely to hell on the mainland, by all reports.”

“I’m getting that impression.” He showed Toby into his suite, offered a chair. “Tea?”

“I’m fine,” Toby said. “No fuss.” A small silence. “Bren, we lost mum.”

He dropped into the other chair. “I’d tried to call her. Before I called you. But the number’d gone invalid. I thought that might have been the case.”

“Not long after you left,” Toby said. “About a week.”

He didn’t think the news would hit him that hard. He’d expected it. He’d known it had probably happened, two years ago. But he still felt sick at his stomach, guilty for the last visit not made, a skipped phone call, on a day when he’d had the chance and ducked out to get back into orbit. There’d been so many emergencies. There’d been so many false alarms. He’d put so much off onto Toby. Handle it, brother. Brother, I need you. Brother, I can’t get there. Can you possibly?

“She asked about you,” Toby said quietly. “I said you’d called.”

“That was a lie.”

“It was what she needed to hear. And I knew you would have called, if you could. I just glossed that bit.”

“You glossed everything, the last number of years. You glossed the whole last ten years. I don’t know what I’d have done without you. I didn’t know whether you’d be speaking to me when I got back.”

Toby shook his head. “You should never, ever have thought that.”

There was another small silence. Breathing wasn’t easy.

“So did you do it?” Toby asked. “Did you get the big problem solved out there?”

“We got the problem to talk to us,” he said, got a breath and chased the topics he lived with. “And this isn’t for public knowledge, Toby. I think it’s going to get into the news soon, but I don’t want it to spill yet. We established relations with a species called the kyo. They weren’t at all happy about the ship poking about in their business—they blew a bloody great hole in Reunion Station and they were all set to finish the job, except we talked them into just taking possession of it and letting us get the population off. They’re technologically ahead of us in some ways, they’re dangerous, and we got the station population safely out of their territory, humanity pretty well disengaged from them, the local Archive destroyed, which was another part of our job, but they did get the station itself, they got every other record aboard, and they’re watching us, even though they’re negotiating and probably studying us. They could show up here. I don’t know when.” He didn’t say what else the kyo had told them: that there was something more worrisome still on the other kyo border. That information was deeply classified information, and he wasn’t sure when or if he was going to let that detail hit the evening news.

And God help him, even while he was trying to figure how to explain things to Toby, his hindbrain was working on a plot to use that restricted information to scare hell out of certain factions on the island and among the atevi on the mainland. There was no decency at all in the automatic functions of his hindbrain. He just went on calculating and finagling, while trying to tell his brother as much truth as he thought he could, about something that had already cost their family dearly.

“Sounds like you’ve been busy the last two years,” Toby said, understatement.

“Busy. Busy with a ship full of refugees who still don’t know how serious their situation was.” That led into the kind of trouble said refugees might pose the current local station population, and that was a topic he didn’t want to get into. “How are you?” he asked, the thing he truly wanted to know. And the next painful question: “Did you get back with Jill?”

“No,” Toby said. Just, no, when there were two kids involved, and Toby’s whole life. “I gave her the house, the kids, I kept the boat… ”

“I’m glad you kept the boat.”

“She sold the house. Couldn’t stand to live in North Shore any longer.”

Bitterness in that. Jill had been the one who wanted to live on North Shore, far from their mother, which had led to their mother’s deep unhappiness and isolation, and a lot else that had gone wrong, with him living on the mainland. But apparently that effort, like everything else, hadn’t worked out for Jill.

“Are you happy?” Bren ventured to ask.

“Actually—yes. I am happy,” Toby said. “What about you?”

He didn’t live the kind of life where he expected to find that question coming back at him, as if he could sum everything up in the fact he owned a boat, or a house with a white picket fence. Or a wife. Or kids. He’d just never gone that direction—had skittered all over the map with his life, from obscure, ignored atevi court official to Lord of the Heavens, and was lovers with Jago, for what physical needs he had. No children there. Nor ever going to be.

He supposed he was happy. He was alive. Banichi and Jago were. Toby was. He’d be happier at the moment if he thought Tabini was, which he wasn’t at all sure about. He’d be happier if he didn’t have the business on the mainland looming ahead of him, and the prospect of everything their return might bring down on a peaceful countryside. But—

“Happy,” he said. “I think I’m happy. Happy being back. Happy seeing you again. Happy to have all my people safe. Except the mainland’s in a mess. And there are people I care about over there who have their neck in a noose—increasingly so, as the news of our landing spreads.”

“I take it you’re going across.”

“Fast as I can.” He couldn’t even apologize for the desertion. “I have to.”

“I brought the boat.”

He blinked. Twice. “No. I couldn’t possibly—”

“She’s small, she’s quiet, she has full instruments, and I know the atevi coast.”

“Damn, Toby.”

“Look, it’s a family outing. I’ve been waiting for this fishing trip for two years.”

Toby’s humor broke out unexpectedly, and it got right through his guard. He missed a beat in their argument, and Toby said, with a slap on his shoulder,

“Deal, then.”

“For God’s sake, no, it’s not. We’re arranging for the military to run us over there. People with guns and engines to stand off an atevi patrol boat. Or an air attack.”

“Noisy. Let the navy just keep a radar watch and be noisy somewhere between them and us. We’ll make it in when no one’s looking. I’m even provisioned, if you don’t mind hot dogs and chili. I can set you ashore with food in hand. I’ve got a whole box of survival rations. Where precisely do you want to go?”

He had no intention of listening to Toby. But he envisioned Toby’s fishing boat, the sort that was ordinary traffic on the waters of the strait, then envisioned, as Toby said, a noisy military move.

And, unhappily, he knew which he’d rather be on, given the certainty their enemies would have intercepted the news broadcasts which had detailed their landing. There was more than enough time for Murini’s crew to position Assassins on the coast, people who moved quietly and secretly, more than enough time for the Kadigidi to toughen the surveillance around Lord Geigi’s estate. That around his own, he was sure was constant and thorough. A military escort bringing them in on a fair landing on the coast could do nothing to protect them. Only secrecy and surprise could do that.

“You’re wavering,” Toby said, reading his face. “You’re wavering, brother. I have you.”

“Damn it, lend me the boat!”

“Lend you my boat, so you can run her in and abandon her on the mainland?”

“And leave you safe on shore this side of the strait.”

“While you wreck my boat? No, thank you, brother! I’ll get you there. I’ll get you there and get out again with my boat, with room to spare. I’ve made a fine study of the tides and the shallows over the last dozen years, with that nice set of charts I picked up over at your place. I know what I’m doing. I’ve got charts our military doesn’t have.”

He gazed at Toby, at a face he’d so longed to see. “No.”

“I know the risk,” Toby said. “You’ve done what you want with your life. You’ve made the grand gestures. For God’s sake, give me the chance for mine.”

Got him dead on. He sat there a moment not saying anything.

“So,” Toby said. “We’re going.”

“Toby. If anything should happen to you—”

“Sure, sure, mutual. When do you want to leave?”

He made his career persuading the powers of earth and heavens. And his own brother nailed him.

“It’s not a done deal. I have to talk to Banichi.” Meaning Banichi, Jago, and the whole atevi contingent. “Not to mention the dowager.”

“You think she’ll want to come ashore on a Mospheiran navy ship? How would that look?”

Got him again. He heaved a slow sigh. “I’ll see if Shawn will give me a few boats for a screen and a diversion.”

“I’ve no doubt he will. But it’s not our problem. We can leave after dark, just get everybody into a couple of vans and pull up at the dock. My crew had her at the fueling dock when I left. We’re at dock C, number 2, easy to pull up and get right aboard.”

“Your crew. Who else have you snagged into this crazy venture? Not one of the kids, for God’s sake.”

“Barb.”

His heart thumped. “God.”

“You aren’t involved with her any longer.”

“No,” he managed to say. “No.” Barb, who’d been his lover for years, who’d broken with him, married and divorced Paul Saarinson, taken care of his mum with a daughter’s devotion, and pursued him with a forlorn hope of renewing their relationship, right up until he left the planet… and now she’d gotten her hooks into Toby? He started to say: It’s certainly over on my side… and then had sinking second thoughts, that it wasn’t a very good thing to say to a brother who might, God help them, have gotten himself emotionally involved with Barb.

Toby was entitled, wasn’t he? Toby knew very well what the relationship between him and Barb had been, and wasn’t, and then Jill had left him, and he could picture it: Toby and Barb both had been taking care of mum when he’d left, two desperately unhappy people in an unhappy situation—

“You’re not upset,” Toby said.

“I haven’t got a right in the world to be upset.”

“You’re damned right you don’t,” Toby said, with the slightest amount of territoriality, serious warning, one of the few Toby had ever laid down with him.

“I’ll wish you both the happiest and the best,” he said, “fervently.” And he thought to himself that if Barb made a play for him on that boat and hurt Toby, he’d kill her. “I’ll behave. Absolutely. Nothing but good thoughts.”

“Good,” Toby said, and took his promise at that, and the deal was done.

It was a quick council following, Toby describing the yacht’s speed under power and under wind, for their staff’s benefit, and Tano suggesting precisely, if they were going in by boat, where they might hope to put in unseen—the northern coast, a region which, though not Ragi, would hold no sympathy for the south, and Tano had connections there. It was a region of independent fishermen, practicing kabiu—seasonally appropriate—catch, people whose small boats supplied the tables of the wealthy and philosophically conservative houses, and who were not greatly interfered with, in consequence, in any political upheaval.

“We shall be one boat among many,” was Tano’s summation of the matter.

One boat among many. They would be relatively unarmed, vulnerable to spies and ambush both on the approach and after they landed, but that would be their situation wherever they went on the mainland.

The particular beach, Naigi, was the recessed shore of a region where Toby had fished before, a stretch of small islands and stony reefs. Tano had been there. There was a consultation of maps, a discussion of neighboring villages.

It was not a place inviting to boats of deep draft, another good point.

Yolanda arrived in the conference. “I’ve provided a short list of names in that area,” she said. “I have no way of knowing whether they’re still reliable.”

“The worst thing,” Banichi said, “will be to make a move and hesitate. It would lose lives of those who may attempt to support us. We are here. We have transport, nandi. We should go.”

There was a simple way of looking at it: if anyone did attempt to organize anything on the mainland in their support, they could not leave them exposed and unsupported, and they dared not go asking for support in every possible place, for fear of Kadigidi assassins moving in on the situation.

“We should move as soon as possible,” Banichi said, “and get as far from our landing as possible. If the dowager agrees.”

Cenedi agreed, and went and waked the dowager, who, Cenedi quickly reported, ordered them to gather only their necessary baggage, and by all means, depart as soon as the night was dark enough.

Plenty of time, then, to reach Shawn, not by phone, but by the services of one of their marine guards, who simply went downstairs with a sealed note, got into a car and took the twenty-minute drive to the Presidential residence.

Shawn interrupted his supper with his wife to send a message back by the same courier: The escort will act with all prudence and cooperation. The shuttle is under marine guard and will remain so around the clock, come what may. Give whatever orders you need regarding supplies and support. This man has his instructions, and the authority to do what you need. Good luck, Bren, to you and all those with you.

Meanwhile they had done their re-packing, unnecessary personal items stowed in Yolanda’s care, the shuttle crew briefed—and privately informed of Yolanda’s limits of authority.

The only remaining difficulty was getting over to the marina, and for that the marines were ready: four large vans and an escort turned up at the hotel service entrance, out between the trash bins. Marine guards stood by to assure their safety from the curious in the hotel—no few curtains parted on floors above, letting out seams of light, but they proceeded in the dark, except the lights of the vans, and they packed in as quickly as possible, Toby accompanying them and all their baggage piled aboard, for the brief transit from the hotel to the waterfront.

Masts stood like a winter forest beyond the dark glass as they turned in at the marina gate, the dockside floodlit, boats standing white on an invisible black surface, as if they floated in space. The vans ripped along past the ghostly shapes of yachts some of which Bren knew—the extravagant Idler was one, and the broad-beamed and somewhat elderly Somerset—the Somerset had used to take school children out on harbor tours, happy remembrance, incongruous on this nighttime and furtive mission.

The vans braked softly and smoothly, at the edge of a small floating dock.

Toby led the way out of the van, led the way down the heaving boards toward a smallish, smartly-kept vessel among the rich and extravagant, a boat rigged for blue water fishing, not cocktail gatherings. It was not the boat Toby had once had, Bren saw, but a new one. The Brighter Days, was the name on her stern. A ship’s boat rode behind her, at separate tie.

The dowager walked down the boards with Cajeiri and Cenedi, using her cane, but briskly, with a fierce and renewed energy—a curious sight for her, surely, to find such a large gathering of lordly boats: one or two was more the rule on the atevi coast, yachts tending to tie up at widely scattered estates. But for all that, it might have been one of the larger towns on the other side, with a working boat, a fisherman, bound out under lights, a freighter offloading on the shabbier side of the harbor, in the distance.

And the city lights, the high rises—nothing at all like that on the mainland, where tiled roofs gathered, all dull red, showing very little light at night except the corner lanterns on streets as winding and idiosyncratic as they had been for a thousand years.

Towers, glittering with lights. Streets laid out on a grid, relentless, as strange to atevi eyes as the architecture of a kyo ship.

A long journey, there and here. And another, in the dead of night.

Toby reached the boat first, ran aboard and ran out a little gangway, with a safety rope, no less—on the old boat it had been a thick, springy plank. Bren moved up close behind, not sure whether he would dare lay a hand on the aiji-dowager if she should falter, but ready to help if she did.

No need to worry. The dowager waved all of them off and crossed onto the deck quite handily. It was Cajeiri that had to make a grab for the rope, and Cenedi grabbed him instantly and pulled him aboard.

“New boat,” Bren said to Toby in going aboard.

“My great indulgence,” Toby said. “The marriage was going. We split the investments.”

“Very nice.” The whole of Toby’s finance. Everything was in this boat. And Toby lent it to a hazardous effort that could get it shot up, could take him and all of them to the bottom. He walked the afterdeck, looking apprehensively around him—and, next to the boom, had a sudden thought of Cajeiri and that lethal item. “Young sir.” He snagged the heir unceremoniously—the boy seemed a little dazed. “This large horizontal timber is the boom. When the ship maneuvers, this may sweep across the deck very fast without warning. You may not hear it. It might sweep an unwary person right overboard or do him mortal injury. Kindly keep an eye to it at all times and stay out of its path.”

“Shall we spread the sails now, nandi?” Cajeiri asked, bright-eyed in the dark, with a whole boatload of unfamiliarity about him—but he had seen all those movies. “Do we have cannon?”

“We have no cannon. We have our bodyguards’ pistols. And whether we spread the sails—there are two—that depends on the winds, young sir. We have an engine as well.” Then he lost his train of thought completely, seeing Barb come up the dark companionway onto the dimly lit deck, a trim and casual Barb, with her formerly shoulder-length hair in bouncy short curls. She wore cut-off denims and a striped sweater—every inch the Saturday boater.

She saw him. And stopped cold.

“Good to see you,” he said as they confronted each other, a lie, but he was trying to be civil. “Toby told me you were here.”

“Bren.” As if she didn’t know what to say beyond that. Meanwhile Toby was trying to communicate in sign language and mangled Ragi where things had to be stowed, and Bren gratefully realized he had a job to do, directing duffles into bins and nooks, explaining where life-preservers were located, where the emergency supplies were, all the regulation things—and indicating to Ilisidi the stairs down to a comfortable bunk, a cabin of her own.

“A seat,” Ilisidi said, contrarily, “on the deck, nand’ paidhi. We enjoy the sea air.”

And the foreign goings-on, he thought. Those sharp eyes missed nothing, not even in the dark, where, one had to recall, atevi eyes were very able. They shimmered gold in the indirect light of the deck lantern, like the eyes of a mask, and the fire died and resumed again as she swung a glance to her great-grandson. “Boy! Stay away from the rail. Find a place and sit down!”

A sheltered bench beside the companionway, against the wall, a blanket for a wrap against the wind that would be fierce and cold once they started moving, although, Bren recalled, the dowager favored breakfasts on the balcony in Malguri’s ice-cold winds. She inhaled deeply as he settled her into that seat, her cane nestled between her knees, pleased, he thought, pleased and somber in the occasion. He had no wish to intrude into those thoughts, and went to help Toby.

No chance. Toby bounded ashore to unmoor them, tossed in the buffers as Barb started up the engine, a deep thunder and a rush of water. Toby hopped aboard, hauled in the gangway with an economy of motion and took the wheel as the boat began to drift away from the dock, bringing them away with a smooth, easy authority.

A team. Clearly. Bren stood against the rail, watched the water in front of them, the white curl of a little bow-wave, the space between the moored yachts reflecting a slight sheen of the few marina lights as they moved down the clear center of the aisle. Masts shifted past them, lines against the light.

Their own running lights flicked on. The bow light. There were rules, and they didn’t make themselves conspicuous by the breach of them, though their own lights blinded them and it would have been easier to steer by starlight. Barb had moved forward, past the deckhouse, to take up watch in the bows, and stayed there until they nosed into the open waterway.

Now Toby throttled up, and they ran the outward channel, just a fishing boat getting an early start, to any casually inquisitive eye.

They passed the breakwater, a tumbled mass of broken city pavings, and now Toby kicked the speed up full, getting them well away from the marina, well out into the dark. Wind swept over the deck, cold as winter ice.

Banichi and Jago had found a place to sit, on the lifejacket locker. Tano and Algini had gone forward, likewise some of Ilisidi’s men, and Cajeiri, leaving the bench seat near the companionway, immediately worked his way forward, too, into the teeth of the wind and the chill, staggering a little, this child who had grown accustomed to dice games in free fall and tumbling about like a wi'itikiin in flight—he had yet to find his land legs again, let alone take his first boat trip and find sea legs, and Ilisidi’s bodyguard was watching him closely everywhere he went. Cenedi got to his feet and quietly signaled one of his men to stay close to him.

Then Toby shut the engine down, walked over and began to hoist the sail. Bren twitched, almost moved to help his brother, old, old teamwork, that—he had taken a step in that direction, full of enthusiasm. But Barb turned up out of the dark, got in before him, working with Toby, all their moves coordinated—laughter passing between them, laughter which belonged to them, together.

A lot had happened. A great lot had happened, while he’d been gone.

The sail snapped taut—Cajeiri had run back to marvel at it, staggering hazardously against the rail in the process. The boat leaned, steadied to a different motion. The wind began to sing to them.

No right, he said to himself, no right to say a thing, or to insinuate himself into that partnership of Toby’s and Barb’s, not so early in his return, not while things were still fragile and both Toby and Barb were still defensive. He knew Barb, knew there was a streak of jealousy, sensed she’d moved particularly fast to get back and lend Toby a hand, nothing chance or unthought about it. He only sat and watched, letting Barb have her way, wishing his brother had twigged to that move, a little glad, on the other hand, if he hadn’t. He didn’t want to foul them up, didn’t want Barb’s worse qualities to get to the fore, things Toby might never yet have seen. Might never see. At the breakup, when it came, they’d both brought their worst attributes to the fray, he and Barb both. They’d seen behaviors in each other he hoped the world would never see again.

A feeling meanwhile crept up from the deck, that familiar thrumming sound of the wind in the rigging. The vibration carried into the bones, the gut, bringing him memories of past trips, past expeditions, fishing on the coast, a wealth of smells and sounds and sensations—it might have been a decade ago. The whole world might have been different, pristine, less complicated.

The wind moved, and the sea moved, and they moved over it, reestablishing a connection to the planet itself. Home, he told himself. Everything could be solved, in a breath of that cold air.

Had there been a voyage? Was there a space station and a ship swinging overhead? Was the whole world changed? He was back. He had never left. Nothing had changed.

Except him. Except what he knew, and what he had on his shoulders to do.

He drew a deep breath and hung isolated, between worlds, waiting for the sunrise to come over a planetary rim. Then his eyes shut, once, twice. He wrapped his arms about himself and slept his way to dawn.

Chapter 6

Sunrise still held a favorable breeze—indicative of weather moving toward the continent, in this season, and the Brighter Days ran before the wind with a continual hum of rigging and hull. It was a glorious motion, an enveloping rush of water.

And it was impossible to keep Cajeiri out of the works: Algini, taking his turn at Cajeiri-watch, took the young rascal in charge before breakfast, assuring he stayed aboard and uninjured, explaining the tackle and the working of the sail, explaining—Algini having once lived near the sea—how a wind not exactly aft drove the boat forward, and the mathematics of it all. Cajeiri sopped it up like a sponge—his other guards had not been so knowledgeable—and dogged Algini’s steps like a worshipful shadow.

Breakfast—chili hot from the galley—met universal approval, even from the dowager, who thought this strange spicy offering might go well on eggs, if they had had any.

Afterward Algini put out a line, baited it, set Cajeiri in charge of it, and the boy promised fish for lunch.

It was tight quarters, over all: everyone wanted to be on deck at all times, and atevi even trying to watch their elbows took up more room than the ten humans who might have been quite comfortable on the boat. Bren was constantly cold—Jago and Banichi found occasion to stand close to him, warming him and blocking the wind.

But the dowager, who had sailed often enough in her youth in Malguri, left her bench, and rose and walked about the tilting deck, to everyone’s acute concern, no one but Cenedi daring to keep close to her.