She laughed and grabbed him in a hug. He embraced her, laying his cheek on top of her head. They stood that way for several moments and then released each other.
Althor gave a self-conscious grin. “Good luck, eh?”
“You, too.” She glanced toward her entrance, feeling as if an invisible cable were pulling her.
“Go on,” Althor said. “I’ll see you.”
Softly she said, “And I you, my brother.”
They went on then, each to their own doorway into the universe of ISC, the massive interstellar machine that someday one of them—and only one—would command.
“Come on. Drink.” The voice ran over Shannon like liquid, with such a lilt and so many chimes, he barely understood the words. “Drink,” it coaxed. Cool, smooth pottery touched his lips.
He tried to swallow. It didn’t work. He tried again, and a trickle of water ran down his throat. Relief spread through him, and a certain satisfaction. Opening his eyes, he looked up into the silver irises of a man with a pale, almost translucent skin. White-gold hair framed the man’s face. He looked like a—
Blue Dale Archer.
“Hai!” Shannon sat up with a jerk and knocked the man’s arm. The glazed jug spun out of his grip, splattering water as it flipped through the air and thunked into a drift of old glitter.
“Ah, no!” Mortified, Shannon grabbed for the jug. Or tried to grab. His arm just barely lifted, sluggish and heavy, and then dropped back again. Dizziness swept over him and he swayed. Before he embarrassed himself by toppling over, though, someone grabbed him and eased him to the ground.
The man with the white-gold hair moved aside. Another took his place, exactly like the first, except he had longer hair, down to his waist. A third appeared, his face next to the second. He could almost have been a twin to the first two, except somehow he looked like a girl. He—she?—had a small nose and a fey quality about her face. Her eyes slanted upward, fringed with long lashes. The two men crouched behind her, studying him.
Shannon squinted at them all. He was fairly certain the first two were men, but they were smaller than he was and less muscled. For the first time in his life he experienced what his brothers must feel all the time, being larger, heavier, and less graceful than the people around him. It was an odd experience. Pleasant, though.
He tried once more to sit, struggling to pull himself upright. The Archers moved closer, nudging him back, pushing on his arms, his shoulders, his legs. It took all three of them to hold him down. Bewildered, he closed his eyes, too tired to fight. Then he opened them again. The Archers remained.
“You’re real.” Shannon’s voice came out in a rasping whisper. He was lucky these people had found him; otherwise, he might have died. Except he had never believed in luck. He wet his lips and spoke again. “You’ve been following me, yes?”
They spoke among themselves in low tones, their melodic voices flowing over him like sparkling water. He barely understood their dialect, though he felt certain that if he could listen a little harder, a little longer, it would become clear. He tried sitting up yet again, and this time he resisted their attempts to stop him, even weakened as he was by lack of food and water. He picked up the blue-glazed jug and peered inside. It still had water. Holding it up, he turned a questioning look toward the Archers.
“Drink,” the man with long hair said, his voice chiming.
Relieved, Shannon put the jug to his lips and tilted back his head. The water went down his throat smooth and cool, a blissful respite from his thirst. He drained every drop. When he finished, he lowered the jug and took a deep breath. His fascinated audience watched, kneeling around him, staring with their tilted silver eyes.
“My greetings,” Shannon said. His voice cracked. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. He had dreamed all his life of finding the Blue Dale Archers, but he had never believed it would happen. Yet here they were. Whether or not they would accept him was another question altogether.
The second man, the one with waist-length hair, spoke slowly. “Why are you here?”
“Searching for you,” Shannon said.
“Why?” That came from the first man.
“To find my own kind.”
“You are not one of us,” the second man said. “You are too big,” the first one added.
The third Archer spoke. “Your eyes are wrong.” She touched her eyelashes. “They glitter.”
“They do?” That surprised Shannon. His siblings had metallic eyelashes, inherited from their mother; in comparison, his hardly glittered at all. Compared to these people, though, he supposed his were unusual.
“Is that why you hid from me?” Shannon asked. If he hadn’t gone into a trance, making them think he was dying, he suspected they would have remained hidden.
“You are a stranger,” the second Archer said.
The first one added another comment, but it sounded like a melody of chimes rather than words.
“Say again?” Shannon asked.
“You are not welcome here,” the first man said.
That felt like an arrow into his gut. Shannon answered with difficulty. “I am not welcome among my people. If you refuse me, I have nowhere to go.”
“You are exiled?” the woman asked.
“I caused my father to banish my brother.” Shannon wanted to stop, but the truth needed telling. If they accepted him, it would be despite his shortcomings, not because he hid any wrongs he had done. “I left then.”
They regarded him with unreadable faces. The long-haired man asked, “How did you cause your brother’s exile?”
Shannon wasn’t all that clear on it himself. “I went to talk with him one night.”
They waited. The second Archer studied Shannon with what might have been a frown, though their faces were so ethereal it was hard to read their emotions. Nor could he sense their moods well; he hesitated to lower his mental barriers with strangers.
When it became clear Shannon would say no more, the long-haired Archer said, “Why did this lead to banishment?”
“I am unsure,” Shannon admitted.
“Is your father a Blue Dale Archer?” the first asked.
“No. He is from Dalvador.”
“Ah.” The woman inclined her head. “The people of Dalvador and Rillia are odd.” The others nodded, apparently accepting this as sufficient explanation for the behavior of Shannon’s father.
The first Archer spoke too fast for Shannon to understand.
“Again?” Shannon asked.
The man spoke more slowly. “If your father is of Dalvador and your mother has eyelashes that glitter, why do you look like a big Archer?”
Shannon smiled. Big indeed. “One of my father’s ancestors was an Archer.”
“Who is your father?”
“The Bard of Dalvador.”
A murmur went among them and they conferred together, their voices soft and lyrical. Shannon caught a few words, but they spoke too fast for him to pick up much.
Finally the first man said, “The Dalvador Bard is an important man. As his son, will you not be the next Bard?”
“I am the sixth son.”
“Ah.” They seemed satisfied with that answer. A second or even third son might entertain some prospects of inheriting a portion of his father’s work or his mother’s land, but a sixth was unlikely to receive much of anything.
“Have you a name?” the Archer with long hair asked.
He hesitated. “Shannon.”
“Shannon.” They murmured his name together.
He waited, uncertain. His family had never understood his hesitation to reveal his name, and he had difficulty articulating why. To give a name was an implicit appeal for acceptance, one neither casually offered nor taken.
The Archers sat watching him. Unease prickled Shannon.
Then the first one said, “I am Tharon.”
A man’s name. Shannon inclined his head in greeting.
“I am Elarion,” the long-haired Archer said.
>
Another man’s name. Shannon nodded, disappointed, though he didn’t analyze why.
“I am Varielle,” the third said.
His pulse leapt. A woman. He suddenly felt shy.
“Can you shoot a bow?” Tharon asked.
“I have some small skill.” Shannon had bested every one of his brothers, even his father, as well as all the other boys.
“Yet you have no bow,” Elarion said.
Shannon blinked. Of course he had a bow. He had strapped it to his travel bags.
It finally struck him what was missing. Moonglaze. He looked around the woods, frantic. “Where is my mount?”
“It went in search of water, we think,” Elarion said. “That is why we came to help.”
“He guarded you for many hours,” Varielle said in her musical voice. “He tried to awaken you. Finally he left.”
Perhaps he had been in worse shape than he realized. “Do you know where he is now?”
Tharon answered. “We were not here when he left. We were hunting. When we returned, you were alone. We stayed to see if you would awake. When it became clear you would not, we awoke you.”
Anger at himself sparked in Shannon. He should never have put Moonglaze in that dilemma, uncertain whether to stay with his rider or seek help. Had the lyrine headed back to the Rillian Vales? He wouldn’t realize that Shannon would die long before he returned with aid.
A disturbing thought struck Shannon. A shattering thought. Moonglaze had the jammer. If he had left, then nothing hid Shannon now. Yet no one had come for him. His family had stopped searching. Or perhaps they had never begun. As much as he knew it was right and proper that they let him go, deep inside he had believed they would look for him. He had secretly thought they would want him back despite everything.
Just as suddenly, hope stirred. Perhaps he hadn’t been free of the jammer long enough for anyone to find him. “How long since my lyrine left?”
“Two circles of the suns,” Tharon answered.
His hope died. It took three and a half hours for the suns to complete an orbit. He had lain here for seven hours. If his parents had been searching with ISC help, which they surely would do, they could have located him within an hour without the jamming field to hide him. He could think of reasons it might have taken longer, but seven hours was too long to justify.
They weren’t trying to find him.
Tears gathered in Shannon’s eyes. He truly was exiled. The father he loved, the man he had looked up to all his life, who had loved him for so many years, would no longer see him. Why should the Dalvador Bard harbor a son who brought demons against his own father? It was right Shannon had gone, but nothing could stop his grief. The tears ran down his cheeks.
The Archers watched, their beautiful faces unreadable. Even so, it felt right, more bearable than the compassion his family would have shown when they had loved him. He would never recover from this. Perhaps someday he would learn how to bear the loss, but he couldn’t see how right now.
“Come.” Tharon extended his hand. “We must feed you.”
Shannon grasped the offered hand and let them help him stand. When Varielle put her arm around his waist so he could lean on her, his heartbeat increased. She felt slight against him; for the first time in his life, he felt strong and large.
“You must recover your bow,” she said. “A man cannot be an Archer without one.”
Shannon bit his lip, unable to respond, caught with an emotion he didn’t understand, both joy and sorrow all rolled together. He could neither call himself an Archer nor a man, having never used his bow except for practice or hunting for his own recreation, nor had he yet to enjoy his Night of Moons, the coming of age ritual for young men and women. Yet with her words, she accepted him into their group, however small it might be. He would become a Blue Dale Archer, one of a dying breed.
It was all he had left.
12
The Cliff
The academy dormitories were set in a quadrangle to the west of the main buildings and the training fields. The dorms where the cadets slept and ate were more modern than the academy proper. Soz entered hers through tall doors of dichromesh glass polarized to mute the intense sunlight. Inside, she walked down a spacious hall peering at her mesh-card. Directions scrolled on its surface, informing her to cross a white and chrome lobby, wherever that was. She looked up just in time to keep from running into a column with hologlyphs announcing the dinner menu tonight in the canteen.
She did see the lobby beyond it, though, an open area with displays of historical objects like ancient Jumbler guns or gauntlets worn a century ago by early starfighter pilots. After wandering through the lobby, she entered a common room with blue couches, white walls, and holo murals of the pale Dieshan sky, sometimes blue, sometimes hazy red. She kept going, squinting at the mesh-card, with a glance up every now and then to keep from running into unyielding objects. Beyond the common room, she entered a long hall with murals of the Dieshan desert that were darkening, their time of day apparently set to match the actual day outside.
She found the room she sought, fourth on the right.
Soz stood before the door, contemplating. Its mural showed the Redstone Cliffs in the mountains above the academy. She hesitated, uncertain what to expect inside. Had her roommates arrived yet? Supposedly DMA chose the four of them for compatibility, based on their psychological profiles. Even so. They had only her preliminary exams and those nebulous Assembly dossiers Colonel Tahota mentioned. Soz felt unprepared.
“You going to dawdle there all year?” a curious voice asked.
Soz spun around. A young man stood behind her, his dark hair curled haphazardly on his forehead, very nonregulation. He could wear it long enough to pull back in a queue, as she would do, or he could cut it short. Having it stick up in appealing curls wasn’t in the rules. He had spoken Skolian Flag, the language they would all use here, since they came from so many disparate backgrounds.
She put her hand on her hip. “Who are you?”
He laughed, his dark eyes crinkling. “I’m the person who lives in that room you’re staring at with such ferocity.”
Her cheeks flamed. She had known male and female cadets might be assigned to the same rooms, but she hadn’t expected it to happen to her. They all knew fraternization meant expulsion from the academy. Why the blazes they bunked men and women in the same quarters if they didn’t want them to misbehave was beyond Soz. Well, almost beyond. In combat, they would have to live, fight, and survive together. They had to get used to it now, when their lives didn’t depend on how well they dealt with the situation.
Even so. She couldn’t live with this person. “You can’t be my roommate.”
“I might not survive it, eh?” His grin flashed. “With a glare like that, you could incinerate me.”
Glare indeed. She hadn’t even used a mild one. “You hardly look burnt.”
“I have state-of-the-art heat shielding. You can land me from orbit and I won’t burn up.”
Soz couldn’t help but laugh. “Sounds useful.”
“It is.” He offered his arm. “I’m Jazar Orand.”
She extended her forearm, grasping his elbow while he grasped hers. “Soz,” she said. “Soz Valdoria.” She liked him, mainly because he wasn’t cowed by her glare. It scared off most people in Dalvador, except Ari, but she was thoroughly fed up with Ari, who hadn’t even said good-bye.
“Greetings, Soz.” He indicated the door. “You do the honors.”
“All right.” She pressed her thumb into the lock and the door slid open with a hum. It relieved her that it responded; it would have been mortifying to go through all this with Jazar and then find out the door wasn’t keyed to her fingerprints.
Soz walked into the room. Well. So. Two bunks stood against the blue wall next to her, one on top of the other, each covered with a dark green holo quilt, and another two stood against the opposite wall. Four deskconsoles took up most of what little space remained, top-notch
stations of white Luminex, with screens, comms, displays, and flat areas where they could study. The outline of four narrow lockers showed in the wall to her right; to the left, the bathroom door stood ajar, revealing a tiny cubicle beyond. What caught Soz’s attention most, though, was the room’s sole holo mural, the brilliant image of a Jag fighter soaring above the Red Mountain starport.
She motioned at the mural. “That’s gorgeous.”
“Yeah.” Jazar grimaced. “It makes up a little for the rest of the room.”
“Ah, well.” She walked inside. “We’re the lowly novices. We should be grateful they let us sleep indoors.”
“You mean you don’t know?” His eyes gleamed as he followed her. “We have to camp out on the track every other night.”
“You laugh now,” Soz said darkly. “Just wait. If you get one demerit, they’ll make you clean spamoozala.” Even the best filters couldn’t completely counter the endless plague of junk mesh-mail, commonly known as spam-ooze or just spamoozala. Sometimes humans had to get into the cesspools created by overworked EIs and clean out the junk.
“Gods.” Jazar gave her a look of horror. “I know you five minutes and already you threaten me with a fate worse than—than catching the flu.”
“No one catches the flu.” That wasn’t absolutely true, but it was so rare that she hardly recognized the word.
He flopped down on the lower bunk bed next to the door. “I caught a cold once.”
Her mouth opened. “No.” She went to the opposite bunk and sat on the lower bed. “You’re making that up.”
“It’s true. It was a mutated strain. None of my nanomeds caught it.”
“What was it like?”
“Miserable. The station master quarantined me in our house.”
“Station master?” That intrigued her. “Where did you live?”
“Habitat. It’s called Taurus-delta, after the Taurus star system. It orbits the fourth planet, a gas giant.”
“You grew up on a space station?”
“That’s right. This is my first time on a planet.” He reddened. “I mean, I’ve visited planets before. I just never lived on one.” He sounded disconcerted.