Chapter 26
“SIR?”
Brakely’s voice from the doorway cut through his thoughts. Paledan was both surprised and irritated, he’d given orders not to be disturbed while he went over the reports on losses to the Raider. But his irritation ebbed quickly; Brakely knew better than to interrupt him for anything minor, so this had to be something more.
“What?” he asked without looking up.
“There’s been an incident. At the mine.”
Paledan’s head came up slowly. “An incident?”
“A major cave-in. Two of the guards were killed, along with a handful of our trainees. Several injured. And the new equipment is buried.”
“Accident or intent?” Could the Raider have somehow engineered even this?
“They think accident, sir. The leader of the detachment agrees, since one of their own—a leader of the miners, in fact—was also killed.”
Paledan considered this. According to his study, Ziemites put a ridiculously high value on one individual life, so perhaps this was truly an accident. “Get me the details, and the identities of the dead.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And a report on the condition of the mine.”
“Yes, sir. They already say it will take weeks to clear it, and I’m told it will not be safe to even start again until the rock has settled.”
“For now, pull our men out. Our contingent is not so large I can risk more without replacements. But tell the miners I want it cleared and work underway again before I leave for legion command.”
“Yes, sir.” Brakely hesitated, but then added, “The miners are shaken. The man who was killed was the most knowledgeable among them.”
Paledan weighed what he was certain would be Legion Command’s demands against the need to keep the miners if not happy, at least not mutinous. Many of his superiors, he knew, would scoff at such a thought; the people of conquered worlds were to be used, and if not useful, they were expendable. There had, recently, been mutterings about simply wiping them out and taking over, eliminating the need for the native population. He had in fact been sent here with the authority, should it be needed, to use the fusion cannon on the city, but not before they had people trained to take over.
And even the most vociferous agreed this was a special case; while they were proficient with extracting other resources, planium mining was not a skill the Coalition could boast of, and they needed these men of Ziem not only to work, but work well. That was what made Ziem different than most Coalition conquests; they needed the population to work the mines and service the miners.
Fortunately that population was relatively small, and thus controllable.
But once they had enough people trained to take over, they would no longer be necessary.
He decided.
“Give them three days’ leave. A day to tend to the injured, a day to mourn their leader, and a day to prepare to return. Order the troops to show respect for the loss. The miners must feel valued, or production will drop.”
“Yes, sir,” Brakely said, and backed out the door.
KYE WALKED SLOWLY back to her rooms from Drake’s taproom, taking the circuitous route she usually did, just in case. She didn’t think she was being followed, and there was no reason for anyone to, but she wished to keep her hiding place secret as much as she could. Eirlys knew where it was, and Drake, but no other. She savored the peace she found there, and sometimes thought it was the only thing that kept her going.
But now she was only giving the route half her attention. The rest was consumed with something else. With something she had seen when she’d first entered the taproom. True, Paledan was impressive enough to suck up all the attention in any room, but she hadn’t missed the way Drake had been watching him as he left. The expression he’d worn, as if he were . . . calculating something. It was more than niggling at her, it was nagging, and she wasn’t sure why. It seemed both strange to see on Drake’s face, and yet at the same time familiar. Which made no sense at all.
When she arrived home, it was nearly dark, but instead of eating and resting as she had planned, she found herself pacing. She was so restless, she finally did something she hadn’t done in a long time. She pulled out her sketch pad for a reason other than maps and planning.
She had not sketched something not related to the rebellion in a long time. She had purposefully quashed that part of her. In fact, the portrait of Eirlys, staring into the distance, her hair in a loose, thick braid with wisps blowing about her lovely face, the portrait done nearly a year ago and that Brander had stolen, was the last thing of pure art she’d done.
Until now.
Until tonight, in a darkness lessened only by the glow of the lantern at her elbow, when she pulled out her book and a stub of charcoal and began.
It was the long spell of working on the map that had her unsettled.
“What is it?” she had been asked countless times. “What are you working on?”
“A map,” was always her simple reply. “A very large map.”
A very large map, in their minds, meant a very large plan. That alone quieted them, such was their faith in their leader.
And their faith was nothing as compared to hers. She would, freely and willingly if necessary, die for the man they called the Raider. She admired him, respected him, and gloried in the simple fact that here was a man who would stand, who would fight back and not be moved.
She also loved him.
She had given up trying to deny it to herself. It didn’t matter anyway. For it was unlikely that both of them would survive this conflict, and she would not, could not muddy the waters. He needed clear thinking, and she could not distract him with thoughts of things that could not be.
So now she sat in her room, the small sanctuary in the back of what was left of her parents’ old home. The front section had been turned to rubble by a Coalition strike, at last putting an end to her father’s helpless pain. She stayed here partly as reminder of what the Coalition had taken from her, partly for the quiet refuge it offered.
From the front it appeared uninhabitable, but in fact the back three rooms, which included the kitchen, a washroom, and what had been a storage room, were fairly intact. She had left the front uncleared. Not only as a shrine to her father’s death there, but there was some measure of safety in the Coalition thinking they had already destroyed this target, and she was far enough distant from the center of Zelos for them not to find the location attractive enough to clear out and rebuild.
So now she sat unmolested in the storage room she had converted to a living space, as comfortable as it could be under the circumstances. The light from the lantern was masked by the sheet of metal she had salvaged from a wreck and placed over the one window. It was her father’s extending chair she sat in, the only furnishing that had survived relatively unscathed. It now served her as both seat and bed, and it was large enough that she had had to have Drake’s help to move it out of the wreckage and back here.
Drake.
Her mind skittered away again, as it always did these days. Eirlys had suggested, when she had first seen the ruin, that she move in with them behind the taproom. At the time, it had been merely a stubborn refusal to abandon her home that made her turn the girl down, but it was soon after she was glad she had. For there was no way she would have been able to hold her tongue as Drake descended into the pit of meek capitulation where he now lived.
And yet that expression she’d caught this afternoon still hovered.
Shoving the thought aside, she turned to the task she’d realized she must do now, or it might never get done. She could be killed at any time, with this need unmet. Or worse, the Raider could be, and she would have to do it knowing he was gone forever, and it would likely drive her to follow him.
Which losing him might do anyway.
She shifted in the chair, angling so that the lantern light fell on a new page. She had few left, and there was no way to justify spending precious coin on such an extravagance when even food to keep living another week was so dear. But she had two, enough for this. And she needed to do this. She wasn’t even sure of all the reasons why, but she knew there was no denying it any longer.
Her hand trembled slightly as she moved the chalk to the top of the page. Whether because it had been so long, or that she was afraid to do this she was not certain. She began anyway, because she had to.
She began with his eyes. She needed no time to stop and recall. She knew them as well as she knew her own. The color rimmed with dark, surrounded by thick, black lashes, they were the icy blue eyes of Ziem. Typical of many—some said it was the mist that caused them—but in this man they were both intimidating and beautiful. And in the ruin of his face, they were the purest representation of the man within.
She let her heart, her subconscious, guide her hand, and found herself drawing the remaining undamaged parts. Although she had no intention of ignoring the scars, she went to that small part of his strong jaw line that was untouched, and then his mouth. That mouth, that she had too often found herself studying as if it were something she would later have to recreate. Perhaps some part of her had always known this day would come.
The way her hand was moving, swiftly, sure and true, with no need of the tiny bit of expunger she had left, told her that part of her she had smothered for so long was alive and well. It came pouring out of her, this need, as if every quashed bit of feeling she had for this man was rushing out through her fingers and a tiny stub of chalk.
Even the scars came easily, and she knew somehow she was capturing every curved ridge of flesh that twisted his face exactly as they were. Then she began the helmet, with the added sweep that covered the right side of his face, and realized she knew it almost as well, every curve, every dent, every battle scar, as well as the etched design she had long ago recognized as the work of Fortis, one of Ziem’s most famous sons, a planium worker of no small genius. He had been lost in the first attack on Zelos, and their world was much the poorer for it.
When she finished, she stared down at the portrait for a long time. Without self-pride she knew that it was some of her best work. She would have to leave it here, for it would not do for him to ever by chance see it. Not when her heart, and everything she felt for him practically cried out from every line. Nor could she risk it falling into enemy hands; it would tell them no more than they already knew about the Raider, but it was better than any image they had and she truly would die were he ever taken with help from her hand.
It was good, yes. And yet her hand, and that part deep within her that drove this inexplicable talent, were restless still, as if she were not truly finished.
When it finally came to her, what was yet undone, she resisted. She did not want to do this, had a down-deep certainty she would regret it. And yet she recognized the compulsion, and knew it would eat at her endlessly until she complied.
She turned the page, to her last sheet of untouched drawing paper. For a moment she didn’t even breathe. But then she lifted the chalk, calling up old lessons learned long ago, when Ziem’s teachers had included artists as well as scientists, lessons about faces and asymmetry. She knew how to do this. She had done it before, in a classroom, and she could do it now.
The question was, should she?
The question is, do I have any choice?
She knew she did not.
She began again with his eyes. Then the line of his jaw, extending it to the other side, and how she guessed it must have looked before the flames that had disfigured him. Although how anyone could look at him, even scarred, and consider him disfigured was beyond her. She went on, duplicating what she knew of his uninjured face on the damaged side, with slight alterations she knew were typical from one side of a person’s face to the other. She worked quickly enough that she knew that this, too, had been bubbling just beneath the surface.
Perhaps when she was finished she would ask Brander if this is what he had looked like, although she did not actually know if her cousin had known him before the injury. How strange, that she knew so little, yet felt so much. . . .
She focused on sections, going back and forth, filling in what she knew—the eyes, the dark hair, the strong jaw, corded neck—with what she was guessing at, the areas hidden by the helmet on one side and the mass of scar tissue on the other. She did not let herself think of what the helmet masked, what awful thing it covered if the mass of scars he let be seen were better. She quashed the whispers she’d heard, horrified tales of bare skull and sinew. None of it mattered now.
It was odd to be focused on the pieces and not the whole man as she drew. When she laid down the last stroke, a final shading of the taut cord of his neck, she closed her eyes. Her chalk was down to a nub she could barely hold, and she set it on the crate beside her that served as a table. She sat for a long moment, afraid to look at what she had done. Only the knowledge that the oil that powered her lamp would run out soon, and she would be hard-pressed to get more, forced her to it.
She drew in a deep breath, opened her eyes, and at last looked down to the sketchbook on her lap. Really looked at the whole for the first time.
Her breath shot out in a rush. She felt a swirl in her head, as if she were dizzy. She blinked, hard. Shook her head.
“No,” she whispered.
But there was no denying what she’d done.
She’d drawn the Raider. She’d extrapolated from what she knew to what she couldn’t see. And she knew she’d drawn it correctly. Knew she had drawn the man as he had been, before the mass of scars had deformed and twisted his face.
There was only one problem.
The image she was staring at was unmistakably Drake Davorin.