Chapter 23

HOME, GOVERNMENT HOUSE

Eldest Elizabeth closed the door to her private room in Government House at First Landing. With the Council in session, she found it almost impossible to get back home to the islands. Too much family business had to be done over the comm.

She ruffled the fur on the head of her cat. “How’s life treating you, Dumpling?” she asked. Dumpling arched into the petting and purred. Elizabeth scratched between the cat’s shoulder blades, and Dumpling’s tongue darted in and out in time with the scratching. Elizabeth turned to her closet to hang up her coat and sweater. The weather was mild. Winters in First Landing were warm and tame compared to the Fir Islands in the north. But lately, this last year or two, even the mild winters of First Landing seemed colder.

She fixed herself a cup of brew. It had been a long day. First, that busybody heading the trade delegation from Prenger had called, wanting to set up a preferential trade agreement. She had stalled him yet again. The Families owed Prenger a great deal, and Prenger knew it. But it was a quiet debt, and she had to be fair about things. She had scheduled a hearing for those Families with commercial ties to Prenger. She didn’t have any opinion on the matter herself, but she couldn’t see where a preferential trade agreement hurt or benefited the Families as a whole.

Then there’d been that messiness with the Raid. She’d stood in the Control Center at the base at First Landing, watching, but powerless to influence events. That had been a feeling she wasn’t used to. They’d lost Almirante and 8,000 dead; it would have been worse except for Marie’s granddaughter. She was going to punish the Matsukos for that. They’d been treating the Navy as their own private little fiefdom, and she had to put a stop to it.

She was tired of all the killing. It had been going on her entire life. Gloria’s Hope had been lost the year she was born. She had heard about the war, distantly, as she had grown up, but it had never sunk in.

As a young girl, she had talked to members of the Family who had come home from the stars. She had even talked to a few who had fought the raiders. And once, the year she became Eldest in her Sept, she had seen a raider’s ship as it came looking for victims. Fleet had chased the raider away, but she still remembered her fear as that strange ship tried to land at Blind Girl’s Cove.

As she did whenever she remembered the past, she took out her album. There were her sibs. They were brave young sailors then, she and Mary and Charlene, and that summer, just after their 18th birthday, when they had taken a sailing boat south to the inlets and valleys owned by Family Northern Coast. She remembered that little inn; oh, how they’d danced and sung the night away. Mary was already making a name for herself with her little songs and ditties; she had blushed red, bright red, to hear others singing them. They hadn’t told on her, of course, but they’d made her get up and sing the new verses she had written. Everybody stamped their feet and hollered out the choruses of each song. What a night that had been.

There were trips with the others of their age before they settled down with family and children. There were the nights spent lying out on the deck looking up at the stars, the nights as they mended nets or tended to sails or rode out a storm. Life was hard in the islands, hard, but fair. The Sea was impartial, much as she thought Space must be.

She touched the holopic again, remembering their restless cockiness, Liz, Mary, and Charlene. There wasn’t anything they wouldn’t dare together. There wasn’t anything they wouldn’t try together. She missed them. It had been too many years. Charlene had gone first, dying in childbirth despite everything the doctors could do. But her children survived, and Elizabeth and Mary had raised them as they had their own. And then it was Mary’s turn; gentle Mary with the clever fingers and the golden voice.

She could still remember that night as if it were yesterday, the storm lashing the island. It was none of these gentle rains they called storms down here in First Landing; no, this was a real howler that made you stand sideways if you could stand at all. The shelter on the other side of the island—the wave-tossed tree—one woman had survived the night. One woman out of more than a dozen, and she was half-frozen, numb with terror, still surprised that the tree which had torn through the house had spared her when it had taken everyone else. The North, as they said, had claimed another.

Elizabeth looked at the holopic again, touching it one more time. So young and so brave, the three of them, then two, and now there was just her.

“You’re thinking morbid thoughts again, Liz,” she told herself. It was her privilege to live in the past, one of the few benefits of old age. She took a last loving glance at her youth before putting the album next to the bed; she’d put it away in the morning. She sipped her brew as she got ready for bed. She could hear the wind rattling the branches of a tree outside her room. “Hmmph. And they call this a storm? Mary would have laughed at it.” Nonetheless, she pulled her covers up to her chin. She felt cold and tired, so very tired.

She looked up at the lights in the sky. They were bright tonight, so far, and yet so near. Watching them through the window like this wasn’t the same as watching them from the deck of a ship. That was where she belonged, on the deck of a ship, not here in a stuffy room 40 kilometers from the sea. She needed to hear the lap of the ocean against the hull and smell the sea as it broke in spray on the rocks. She needed to be back in the world she had been born into, not this world of meetings and scheming and filled with decisions you never knew were right or wrong. She needed her sibs beside her. She felt alone, alone these too many long years.

Dumpling hopped up on the bed and began to make a place for herself, kneading at the covers with her claws as she purred. Eldest Elizabeth moved over for the cat, folding down a bit of the covers to make a nest for her. The cat circled round once, twice, then curled into a ball, her whiskered head resting on her owner’s hip.

Marci Davenport was studying late, trying to catch up on some of the reading the Eldest had so casually assigned her. Government was complex. It wasn’t as simple as running a Family, as if that was easy. But if she persevered, if she studied and learned the things the Eldest could teach her, she might lead the Family some day. She had jumped at the chance to work her intern year as an aide to her Eldest, but it came at a cost. She missed the sea. Her sibs were probably out sailing right this minute, and she was stuck on land, the largest body of water she could see being the lazy river that wound slowly through First Landing.

Dumpling interrupted her, hopping up on the desk to stalk back and forth between her and the lamp. Half smiling, Marci marked her page. Lincoln’s problems with his Cabinet would have to wait a moment. Dumpling would keep this up until she got her snack. She was already fat and lazy, even for a cat. Marci opened the top drawer of her desk and took out the little pack of kitty treats, laying out a couple next to her book.

Dumpling glanced at them, ignoring them. Instead, she walked over and stood on her small shunt plate, looking up expectantly.

“Sometimes I think it was a mistake breeding cats that are so smart,” Marci said to herself. They couldn’t actually speak, but you could get a sense of what they wanted. And their emotions clearly came through the shunt.

“All right, lazy bones,” she said. She laid the back of her hand on her own plate. “What is it?”

Pain. Emptiness. Loss.

“What?” That was the trouble with cats; most of the time, they thought in emotions instead of coherent thoughts.

Loss. Gone. Where?

Dumpling looked up at her with her dark, mournful eyes. “Miaaow?” She hopped off the desk and headed for the little cat door to Eldest Elizabeth’s room. Twice she turned back, making sure Marci was behind her. Marci followed, curious. What could be making the cat act that way?

Moments later, she closed the door softly behind her and stumbled across the room to her desk. Through blurry eyes, she stared at the list beside the comm, blinking away the tears until she could read the numbers. She punched in the number slowly and carefully so she would make no mistake. It was critical now not to make any mistakes.

“Eldest Kihei’s apartment,” said a sleepy voice. “Gwylln speaking.”

“Gwylln? This is Marci. C-could you have Eldest Kihei come to Eldest Elizabeth’s apartment? No hurry. But she has to come.”

“What is it?”

“She’s gone, Gwylln. She’s gone.”

“She’s ... gone?” Gwylln caught the meaning from Marci’s voice.

“Uh-huh. Look, I’ve got to call the others.”

“Are you sure?”

“I thought she was sleeping, Gwylln.” The words began to tumble out. She had to fight to hold back the tears. “I honestly thought she was just sleeping. She’s lying there so still and peaceful. But ... but she’s gone.”

The silence stretched between them. “Look, Marci. I’ll call the others. You call the doctor.”