The Magpie Goes Down
Nova
The lightning on Vex was purple, and it was hunting me.
That was not a scientific observation. My flight computer would have told you the storm cell was a convective system eleven kilometers tall with a charge differential that made Earth weather look like static on a sweater. My flight computer would also have told you, in its calm little voice, that my port engine was on fire.
“I know,” I told it. “I can see it. It’s very bright.”
“Port thrust at thirty-one percent,” the Magpie said. “Recommend immediate landing.”
“Recommend you find me a place to land that isn’t a cliff.”
Below me, the surface of Vex rolled past in sheets of black basalt and shining glass. Whole plains of it, fused by ten thousand years of lightning, catching the strikes and throwing them back up at the clouds so the world looked like it was flickering on and off. Somewhere out there, under the glass, lay the Meridian, a colony ship that had gone silent ninety years ago with a hold full of terraforming cores. One of those cores would pay off my loans. Two would buy me a new engine. All of them would buy me a life where I never again had to say the words final notice.
I had followed her ghost signal across four systems. I had threaded the storm belt in a hauler older than I was. I had been so close I could taste it.
Then the sky reached down and touched my ship.
The strike came through the hull like a hammer through a tin roof. Every screen went white. My teeth hummed in my skull. When the cockpit came back, half my panels were dark and the other half were screaming, and the Magpie was no longer flying so much as falling with good posture.
“Okay,” I said, and my voice did not shake, because I was thirty-two years old and had been flying salvage since I was nineteen and I had a rule about panicking in front of my own ship. “Okay, baby. Glide with me.”
I fought the yoke. The Magpie fought back. The glass plain came up bright and hard, and at the last second I saw a ridge of black stone and hauled us left, and the ridge took the starboard wing instead of my face.
The world turned over twice.
Then it stopped, and there was only rain.
I woke up because something was hitting me in the forehead.
Drip. Drip. Drip. Warm, oddly fizzy water was coming through a crack in the canopy and landing exactly between my eyebrows. My harness had locked. My left leg was pinned under a buckled console, and when I tried to move it, the pain arrived first as a sound and then as a color. It was red. It was very red.
“Magpie,” I croaked. “Status.”
Nothing. Not even a polite chime.
I tasted copper. I smelled ozone and hot plastic and something sweeter underneath, coolant leaking somewhere it should not leak. Outside, through the spiderwebbed canopy, the storm lit the sky violet, then black, then violet again, and in one of those flashes I saw a shape moving across the glass toward me.
It was big.
I want to be precise about this, because later people would ask, and big does not cover it. It walked upright on two legs through rain that hit the ground hard enough to bounce, and it did not hurry and it did not hunch. Its shoulders were a doorway. When the next strike came, light ran over it, and silver lines on its skin caught the glow and held it a heartbeat too long.
I did the reasonable thing. I reached for the emergency pistol clipped under my seat.
It was not there. It had, at some point during the rolling, gone somewhere else, possibly into another dimension.
The shape reached the cockpit and put a hand on the canopy.
The hand was grey-blue and roughly the size of my head, and the fingers were long and clawless and careful. It braced against the frame. Then, with a groan of metal that I felt in my back teeth, it peeled the canopy open like the lid of a ration tin.
Rain poured in. So did the smell of him: storm, smoke, oiled leather, and something warm and resinous I didn’t have a name for.
I looked up. And up.
He was the tallest person I had ever seen, and I had worked dock crews on Callisto where some of the loaders were gene-tweaked for low gravity. Seven feet if he was an inch, built heavy through the chest and arms, wearing dark leather harness over a sleeveless tunic plastered to him by rain. His skin was the grey-blue of slate after weather. Black hair hung past his shoulders in braids threaded with small rings of dull metal. And over his arms, his throat, the sides of his face, ran lines of silver, fine as wire, curving and branching like the lightning had written on him and he had let it.
His eyes were pale gold. They took in the cockpit, the blood on my temple, the console on my leg. Then they took in me.
He said something. It was low and rough and full of consonants that clicked at the back of the throat.
Behind my left ear, my lingua implant crackled to life for the first time in two days.
“Small loud creature,” it translated, in its prim corporate voice, “you are badly placed.“
“Excuse me?” I said.
He tilted his head, the way you would at a bird that had started reciting poetry. Then he spoke again, slower, and this time it was in Standard. Old Standard, heavy and formal and accented so thickly it sounded like gravel being poured very politely.
“You are hurt. Do not move.”
“I can’t move,” I said. “That’s sort of the main problem.”
“Then you are obeying already. Good.”
He leaned into the cockpit. He had to fold nearly in half to do it, and his shoulder blotted out the sky. One huge hand slid under the console pinning my leg. The other came to rest, very lightly, over my sternum, holding me back against the seat.
“This will hurt,” he said. “Breathe out.”
“Wait, what are you—”
He lifted.
The console came up with a shriek of tearing metal, and pain went through my leg like a struck bell, and I swore in four languages, one of which I did not technically speak. When I could see again, he had tossed the console somewhere outside. A whole console. Like a cushion.
“Your harness,” he said.
“It’s locked. The release jammed—”
He took the strap in his fist and pulled. It parted with a snap. He did the other one. Then he slid one arm behind my back and the other beneath my knees, and before I could say I can probably walk, which would have been a lie, I was out of the seat and against his chest and the cockpit was falling away beneath us.
He was warm. That was my first stupid, clear thought. The rain was warm, but he was warmer, a furnace under wet leather, and my body, which had been cold since the crash, curled toward him without asking my permission.
“My ship,” I said into his collarbone.
“Your ship is burning.”
“Yes, I’m aware, I was there, I mean my things—”
A strike hit the glass plain half a kilometer away. The thunder came at once, so loud it was physical, and he turned his body around mine without breaking stride so that whatever came at us would hit him first.
Under his skin, along the lines of silver at his throat, I saw it. A faint glow. Brightening as I looked. Pale as moonlight, then brighter, as if something inside him had been switched on and was trying very hard to be switched off.
“You’re glowing,” I said, because I had a head injury and no filter.
He looked down at me. The gold eyes narrowed.
“No,” he said, “I am not.”
The glow at his throat flared brighter. He looked away, toward the dark line of cliffs on the horizon, and kept walking.
The Magpie went up behind us about ten minutes later.
I felt it more than heard it. The pressure of the blast, a hot gust at my back, a light that threw his shadow long across the glass. I twisted in his arms to look and he let me. My ship, my home for nine years, the only thing I had ever owned outright, was a column of fire under a purple sky.
I didn’t cry. I want that on the record. I made a sound that was not crying and he pretended not to hear it, which was the first kind thing anyone had done for me in a long time.
“She was a good ship,” I said, when I could.
“She brought you through the storm-wall,” he said. “No ship of the outer people has done that in my lifetime. She was a very good ship.”
I looked up at him. Rain ran down the hard planes of his face, beaded in his lashes, dripped off his jaw. He wasn’t handsome the way humans were handsome. He was handsome the way a mountain is, or a blade, in a way that made your body sit up straight before your brain had finished thinking about it.
“Who are you?” I asked.
The implant crackled. He answered in his own language, a long rolling phrase, and the chip behind my ear chewed on it and spat out:
“I am Kael’ran of the Ashkar, Warlord of the Seven Cliffs, Breaker of the Drovek Line, Holder of the Storm Gate, and the one who is currently carrying you.“
“That last part’s a title?”
“That last part,” he said in Standard, “is a fact.”
“I’m Nova. Nova Reyes. Captain. Of a ship that’s on fire.”
“Captain Nova Reyes,” he repeated, trying the shape of it. On his tongue my name sounded heavier, like it had been carved out of something instead of just said. “You are a long way from your sky.”
“Tell me about it.”
He did not tell me about it. He carried me for what felt like an hour, across the glass and up a switchback trail cut into the black cliffs, through rain that changed from warm to stinging and back again. My leg throbbed with every step. Twice I drifted off and woke to find my cheek on his chest and his heartbeat under it, slow and heavy, a war drum played at half speed.
The second time, I realized my hand was flat against him. Over the silver lines. They were warm under my palm, warmer than the rest of him, and as I watched, they brightened again where my fingers touched.
I took my hand away.
He let out a breath through his nose that might have been relief and might have been disappointment.
“Does that hurt?” I asked. “The glowing?”
“There is no glowing.”
“There’s definitely glowing. You’re like a nightlight.”
The implant, eager to help, translated my sentence back into Vexi for him in a tinny little voice from somewhere near my ear. I didn’t know it could do that. Apparently the crash had shaken some settings loose. Whatever it said made him stop walking.
He looked down at me with an expression I could only describe as profoundly offended.
“What did it say?” I asked.
“It said,” he answered, very carefully, “that I am a small lamp for children who fear the dark.”
“Well. That’s not wrong.”
Something moved at the corner of his mouth. It wasn’t a smile. It was the place where a smile would go if he were the kind of man who let them out.
“Rest, Captain,” he said. “You talk too much for someone who is bleeding.”
The Ashkar hold was carved into the inside of a mountain.
We came through a gate of black iron set into the cliff, past guards in leather and bronze who dropped to one knee as he passed, and into a hall so tall that the ceiling vanished into shadow. Fires burned in long troughs down the center. The walls were veined with something that glowed faintly blue, a mineral that drank the lightning, I would learn later, and gave it back as light. Everywhere there were people. Tall, grey-skinned, silver-marked people, men and women, and every one of them stopped what they were doing to stare at the warlord and the small, bleeding, very human woman in his arms.
The murmur that went up was in Vexi. My implant tried to catch all of it at once and produced a sort of soup.
“—outer creature—“
“—from the burning star—“
“—he is carrying her—“
“—he is GLOWING—“
That last one came from a little knot of warriors near the fire, and it came with laughter.
Kael’ran turned his head and looked at them. Just looked. The laughter stopped so fast it left a dent in the air.
He carried me through the hall and down a corridor and into a room lined with shelves of jars and bundles of dried plants, where an old woman with silver markings gone almost white sat by a brazier, grinding something in a stone bowl. She glanced up. She looked at me. She looked at the glow fading along his throat. She looked back at me.
Then she said something that made him close his eyes as if praying for strength.
“Ah,” the implant translated. “So the sky finally dropped something in your lap.“
“Maer’vah,” he said. A warning, in any language.
“Put her down, then. Gently. You’ll break her. They’re made of eggshell, the outer people.”
“I’m not made of eggshell,” I said, as he lowered me onto a padded stone bench like I was in fact made of eggshell. “I’m made of spite and coffee.”
The old woman, Maer’vah, came over and peered at my leg. She had a face like a cliff that had been rained on for a hundred years, and eyes the same gold as his. She pressed her thumbs along my shin. I made a noise that should not come out of a captain.
“Not broken,” she said, and my implant passed it along. “Bruised to the bone. A gash at the head. She will live.” She looked up at Kael’ran. “Which means you know what you’ve done.”
The room went very quiet.
He was standing by the door, arms folded, rain still dripping off his braids onto the stone floor. His face had gone carefully blank.
“I pulled her from a burning ship,” he said, in Standard, for my benefit. “In the open, under the storm. Before witnesses.”
“Before Dhoren,” the old woman said, “who has told the whole hold by now.”
“What did you do?” I looked between them. “What’s happening? Is this a medical thing? Am I dying? Am I being eaten? I feel like you’d tell me if I was being eaten.”
Kael’ran crossed the room. He went down on one knee in front of me, and even kneeling he was taller than I was sitting. Up close, in the firelight, I could see the fine scars across his knuckles, a nick at the edge of one ear, the way the silver lines feathered out across his collarbones and disappeared under his tunic. His eyes were very steady.
“Among the Ashkar,” he said, “there is a law older than the cliffs. When one saves a stranger’s life, the two are bound. Tharen. The saved one carries a debt, and the savior carries the keeping of it. They are not to be parted until the debt is repaid.”
I stared at him.
“Bound,” I said.
“Bound.”
“Like a contract.”
“Like a blood oath.”
“And how exactly,” I said, slowly, “do I repay a debt like that?”
He held my gaze. Behind his ear, a single silver line began to shine.
“Life for life,” he said. “You save mine.”
The implant, which had clearly lost track of who was speaking what, decided his last word needed translating anyway. It arrived a half-second late, in its prim corporate voice, stripped of everything around it:
“Mine.“
The Law of the Saved
Kael’ran
She did not take it well.
I had not expected her to. In the old stories, when a warrior pulled a stranger from the river or the rockfall, the stranger wept and thanked the storm and swore the oath with shining eyes. The stories did not account for a small brown-haired woman with a split eyebrow and a bruise the size of my palm, sitting on Maer’vah’s healing bench and looking at me as if I had just tried to sell her a lame skarra for the price of a sound one.
“No,” Captain Nova Reyes said.
“It is not a question,” I said.
“Everything’s a question if you’re stubborn enough. No. Thank you for the rescue, truly, I’d have been toast, but I am not bound to anybody. I have a business. I have a partner waiting on a station four systems away. I have creditors who will sell my organs if I don’t turn up with something shiny. I need a radio, a ride, and a very strong painkiller, in that order.”
Maer’vah, who had lived a hundred and eight winters and enjoyed very little anymore, was enjoying this.
“She’s sharp,” she said in Vexi. “I like her. She’ll make your life miserable.”
“She is a guest,” I answered in the same tongue. “And she is hurt.”
“She is tharen to the Warlord of the Seven Cliffs, before half the hold. You know what happens if you let her walk out that gate unbound.”
I knew. Every Ashkar child knew. A debt of life left unkept was a crack in the cliff. The clan would see it. Our allies would see it. And Sarrik of the Drovek, who had spent five years telling the lesser clans that the Ashkar line had gone soft and rotten since my father’s day, would see it most of all.
My father had walked away from a bond once. He had been saved by a stonecutter’s son in the deep tunnels and had laughed off the debt as a peasant’s superstition. The stonecutter’s son had died the next winter in a Drovek raid my father could have stopped. The clan never forgave him. I was nine. I remembered the silence in the hall when he walked through it. I remembered how nobody met his eyes, and then how nobody met mine.
I had spent twenty-seven years since then making sure no one ever had reason to look away from me again.
“Captain,” I said in Standard, and she lifted her chin. “You are free to be angry. You are free to curse me. But until the debt is settled, you will stay within my keeping. That is the law.”
“Within your keeping,” she repeated. “What does that mean, exactly? Leash? Cage? Do I get a little collar?”
The device behind her ear, the noisy one, helpfully rendered collar into Vexi as the word we use for the braided neck-ring a woman gives a man on their joining night.
Maer’vah choked on her own tea.
I felt the heat climb my throat before I could stop it. The silver along my neck lit like a struck wire, and I knew, because I had felt it, that it was visible from across the room.
Captain Reyes looked at my neck. Then at my face. Her mouth, which was wide and full and had been flattened into a hard line of outrage, softened into something far more dangerous.
“Okay,” she said slowly. “What did it say that time?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“You’re doing the nightlight thing again.”
“There is no—” I stopped. There was no use. I was thirty-six standard years old, I had held the Storm Gate against three Drovek sieges, and a woman the size of a battle shield was making me shine like a boy at his first harvest dance. “It means,” I said, through my teeth, “that you will sleep near me, eat with me, and go nowhere outside the hold without me. It means my sword is yours and my roof is yours and my protection is yours, until the day you save my life in return.”
She was quiet for a moment. The fire popped.
“And if I never do?”
“Then you will be very old,” I said, “and I will be very tired.”
That startled a laugh out of her, a real one, sharp and bright. It went through me like the first warm wind after a long storm season.
I did not let it show. I would like that recorded somewhere. Only the markings betrayed me, and I could not control them. No Vexi male can. That is the whole point of them.
She fell asleep on the healing bench while Maer’vah stitched her brow.
One moment she was arguing, telling the eldest through that clattering device that she had a very high pain tolerance and also a very low tolerance for needles, and the next her head had tipped sideways against the wall and her mouth had gone soft. Fire-tea will do that. Maer’vah brews it strong.
I stood by the door and watched her breathe.
“She’s saying something,” Maer’vah said, tying off the last stitch. “Go and listen. My ears are old.”
Her ears were not old. I went anyway. I crouched beside the bench, and Nova’s lips moved, and I bent close enough to feel her breath against my cheek.
“My box,” she mumbled, in Standard. “Dad’s box. Left it. Under the seat.”
“What box?”
“Tools.” Her brow creased, even in sleep. “Only thing he ever gave me that we didn’t sell. Kael. Don’t let it burn.”
She had said my name. Asleep, drugged on fire-tea, she had said my name like she had been saying it for years.
I stood up.
“It’s dark,” Maer’vah said, without looking at me. “And the storm’s not done.”
“I know.”
“And the outer ship is still burning.”
“I know.”
“Take Dhoren.”
“Dhoren talks.”
She snorted, and went back to her grinding, and I went down the mountain alone.
The Magpie had stopped burning by the time I reached her, mostly. The hull was a black ribcage ticking and hissing in the rain. The cockpit, where I had pulled Nova out, had fallen in on itself. But the seat had been thrown clear when the frame buckled, and under it, wedged against the twisted rail, was a small metal box, scorched and dented, with a name scratched into the lid in letters I could not read.
It was hot enough to blister my palms. I carried it back anyway, inside my tunic, against my chest, the whole way up the cliff.
She was still asleep when I came in, soaked and steaming, with my hands burned and soot in my braids. I set the box on the floor beside the bench where her hand hung down, close enough that her fingers would find it when she woke.
Then I went to wash before anyone could see my face.
Maer’vah saw anyway. She sees everything. She only said, “Hm,” in the particular way she has said it to me since I was in swaddling, and that was worse than anything.
Maer’vah tied the cord that night.
It is a small ritual, as such things go. The saved and the savior sit before the hold-fire. The eldest braids a length of silver thread, spun from the same mineral that lights our walls, and loops it once around each of their wrists, the savior’s left, the saved one’s right. It is meant to be worn until the debt is paid. Then it is cut, and the two are free.
The whole hold came to watch. Of course they did. The warlord had never bound himself to anyone. And now he had done it with an outer creature from the burning stars, small and limping and loudly unimpressed with all of it.
She sat beside me on the stone bench before the fire with her bandaged leg stretched out and a borrowed cloak around her shoulders, one of Maer’vah’s, which on her pooled to the floor. She kept leaning toward me to whisper questions.
“Why is everyone staring?”
“Because you are new.”
“Why is that man grinning at you like that?”
I followed her look. Dhoren, my second, was leaning against a pillar with his arms crossed and his scarred face split in the widest smile I had seen on it since we were boys.
“Because he is an idiot,” I said.
“Why does the old lady keep saying finally?”
“Because she is also an idiot.”
Maer’vah, who was not an idiot and whose hearing was excellent, rapped me sharply on the knuckles with her spindle.
Then she took Nova’s right hand and turned it over.
Nova’s hands were small and scarred and capable. Calluses on the pads of the fingers, a healed burn across the back of one knuckle, nails cut short. A pilot’s hands, a mechanic’s. I had seen her try to reach the release on that jammed harness with them, again and again, while the cockpit filled with smoke. They had not stopped trying.
Maer’vah looped the cord around her wrist. Then mine. Then she wound the loose ends together between us, and for a moment, before she bound them off, our hands rested side by side on the old woman’s knee, my fingers nearly twice the length of Nova’s.
Nova looked down at that. I heard her breathing change.
“Big hands,” she murmured.
The device behind her ear did not translate it into Vexi. I was grateful. Half the hold would have died laughing. The other half would have looked at my neck.
I looked at the fire instead, and recited the old words, and felt the glow crawl up my throat regardless.
Dhoren found me before the hall had emptied, and he was not smiling anymore.
“Riders on the eastern ridge at sunset,” he said in Vexi, low, close to my shoulder. “Four of them. Red-dyed leathers. They watched the outer ship burn and then they rode north.”
North was the Drovek pass. Red was Sarrik’s color.
“They saw her,” I said.
“They saw the ship come down through the storm-wall. Every clan for a hundred leagues saw that. They saw you carry something out of it.” He glanced past me to where Nova sat, still turning her wrist in the firelight to watch the cord catch the glow. “Sarrik will want to know what.”
I knew what Sarrik would want. He had spent his whole life wanting what lay past the storm-wall. Weapons that did not need a sword-arm. Ships that flew over cliffs instead of besieging them. The tales of the outer people were old on Vex, from the days before the storm belt thickened and the traders stopped coming, and Sarrik had grown up on all of them the way other boys grew up on hero songs.
“Double the gate watch,” I said. “And the ridge.”
“Already done.” He hesitated, which Dhoren never did. “Kael. If he comes for her—”
“Then he comes for the Storm Gate. He has done that before.”
“He has never had a reason this good.”
When I turned back, Nova was watching us. She had not understood the Vexi, but that clattering device behind her ear had, and her face had gone sharp and thoughtful.
“Who’s Sarrik?” she said in Standard.
Dhoren, wisely, discovered somewhere else to be.
I sat down beside her again. The cord between our wrists, still a little slack, settled across the bench.
“The warlord of the Drovek,” I said. “Our neighbors to the north. Our enemies for nine generations.”
“And he wants me?”
“He wants what you came from. He believes your kind carry the power to break the cliffs. He has wanted it since he was old enough to lift a blade.”
She considered this. Then she looked down at her own small, scarred hands.
“I fix engines,” she said. “Badly, sometimes. I once rewired a whole coolant line backward and gassed myself for an hour. If that’s what he thinks the outer people are, he’s going to be very disappointed.”
“He does not need you to break cliffs, Captain. He needs only the rest of Vex to believe you can. And to believe the Ashkar could not keep you.”
She was quiet for a moment. Then she lifted her bound wrist between us, the silver thread glinting.
“Good thing,” she said, “I’m in your keeping, then.”
She said it dry, the way she said most things. But her eyes on mine were not dry at all.
I gave her the chamber that joined mine.
It was the warlord’s consort’s room, though the hold had not had a consort in two generations, and it had stood empty so long the furs on the bed smelled of cedar and dust. The law said the saved must sleep within the savior’s reach. There were other rooms. None of them was within reach.
Dhoren carried in her things. They were few. A soot-stained flight jacket. A pair of boots. The small scorched box of tools, which she had found beside the bench when she woke and had not let out of her arms since. She had not thanked me for it. She had looked at my bandaged palms for a long moment, and then at my face, and then she had looked away very fast, and that had been better than thanks.
“Your outer woman,” Dhoren said to me in the corridor, low, with great relish, “has asked me three times tonight where you sleep, how thick the walls are, and whether the doors lock.”
“She is planning an escape.”
“Is that what we call it?”
“Dhoren.”
“I’m only saying, the walls in the old consort’s rooms are very thin. Your grandfather had eleven children.”
I put my hand on his face and pushed him gently into the wall. He went away laughing.
When I came back she was standing in the doorway between our rooms, in a borrowed shift of undyed wool that reached her ankles and left her arms bare. Her leg was bandaged. Her hair was loose. In the light of the wall-veins, her skin was warm brown, flushed along the cheekbones from Maer’vah’s fire-tea, and her eyes were the dark grey of a sky right before rain.
I had been carrying her for an hour that afternoon. I had felt the whole length of her against me. It had not occurred to me then, in the rain and the burning, that she was beautiful.
It occurred to me now, very thoroughly.
“You lied to me,” she said.
“I do not lie.”
“You said the debt could only be paid one way. Life for life. I asked the old lady while you were glaring at your friend. She says there are three ways.”
I let out a breath. “Maer’vah talks too much.”
“She says I can save your life, sure. Or I can perform a deed of equal weight in the eyes of the clan. Or—” she held up a finger, “—you can choose to claim the debt in another form, and if both of us agree, it’s paid.”
“Did she tell you what the other form traditionally is?”
“She did not. She just cackled. It was very ominous.”
I folded my arms and leaned in the doorway opposite her. The space between us was a pace and a half. For me, that is one step.
“In the old days,” I said, “when a warrior saved a stranger and the debt could not be paid in blood, the warrior could ask for a joining instead. One night. Freely given. If the stranger agreed, the debt was considered settled.”
She was very still.
Then her eyebrows climbed, the uninjured one and the split one both.
“You’re telling me,” she said, “that your sacred ancient law says I can pay you back with sex.”
The device crackled. It translated sex into the Vexi word, which is a coarse one, and which nobody uses in front of their eldest, and which it pronounced with perfect clarity at a volume I am certain carried through the very thin walls.
Somewhere down the corridor, Dhoren howled.
“I am telling you,” I said, and I could feel my whole throat lit like a beacon, I could see the silver light reflecting off her eyes, “that it is a law nobody has invoked in three hundred years. That I will not invoke it. That I would never ask it.”
“Why not?”
The question hung there. She seemed as surprised to have asked it as I was to hear it.
“Because a debt,” I said, “is a weight. And I would not want any woman in my bed because she was carrying a weight. I would want her there because she had set it down.”
Her lips parted. She didn’t say anything. She looked at me for a long moment, at the glow along my throat that would not dim no matter how hard I commanded it, and then lower, to where the silver lines ran across my collarbones and vanished under my tunic.
“What do they mean?” she asked quietly. “Really. The markings.”
I could have lied. I do not lie.
“They answer,” I said, “when a Vexi male wants.”
“Wants what?”
I said nothing. I did not need to. The light did it for me.
She swallowed. I watched her throat move. Then, slowly, as though approaching an animal she was not sure would bite, she crossed the pace and a half between us and lifted her right hand, the one with the silver cord around its wrist, toward the brightest line along my neck.
I caught her wrist an inch from my skin.
Gently. I could have closed my hand all the way around it twice. Her pulse was going hard against my thumb, quick as a bird’s.
“Among my people,” I said, low, “you do not touch the markings of a male unless you mean the question you are asking.”
Her eyes came up to mine. Grey, and wide, and not afraid.
“And what question would that be?” she whispered.
I held her there, her hand trapped in mine, her pulse racing against my palm, the light from my own skin painting her face silver.
“Ask me again,” I said, “when you are not hurt, and not owed, and not trying to leave. Then I will tell you.”
I let go of her wrist. I stepped back into my own room.
And I closed the door between us, and leaned my forehead against it, and listened to her stand on the other side of the wood for a very, very long time.
Glass and Lightning
Nova
By the sixth day, I had learned four things about the Ashkar.
One: they ate breakfast at a volume that suggested the food might otherwise escape.
Two: they had no word for privacy, which my implant rendered, when I asked, as “the condition of being sad alone.“
Three: their forge-master, a broad woman named Teshka with burn scars up both forearms, could do things with bronze wire and lightning-glass that would have made engineers on Ceres weep. Together, in five days, with my father’s scorched tools and her steady hands, the two of us had turned a dead comm unit from the Magpie‘s escape pod, and a heap of blue-veined crystal into something that looked like a beehive having a nervous breakdown and might, if I could find it a strong enough power source, punch a signal through the storm belt to Teo.
And four: Warlord Kael’ran trained shirtless.
Every morning. In the yard below the forge, in the warm grey rain, with his braids tied back and his tunic off and nothing but a strip of leather between him and the sky from the waist up. I had a perfect view from Teshka’s workbench. I had noticed this on day two. By day four I had started moving my stool.
“Your solder is smoking,” Teshka said.
I looked down. It was. I had soldered a contact to my own thumbnail.
“Ow,” I said, belatedly.
She followed my gaze to the yard. Kael was sparring with Dhoren, two staves against one, and he was winning without looking like he was trying. He moved like weather. Slow, slow, slow, and then everywhere at once. The rain ran off his shoulders in sheets. The silver lines curved down his back in patterns like branching rivers and wrapped his ribs and dove under the leather at his hips. They were dim this morning, almost dull, the color of old coins.
Then he glanced up at the forge window, and our eyes met, and every line on his body lit up like a city at dusk.
Dhoren’s staff caught him across the shoulder.
The yard erupted. Warriors along the walls pounded their fists on their thighs and shouted things my implant translated with gleeful accuracy.
“Struck by the outer woman’s EYES!“
“Down goes the Storm Gate!“
“Somebody throw water on the warlord, he’s on fire!“
Kael straightened, rolled the shoulder, and said something to Dhoren that made the other man stop laughing. Then he looked up at me again, steadily, his skin still glowing through the rain, and did not look away until I did.
Teshka sighed and took the soldering iron out of my hand.
“Go,” she said. “Before you burn the hold down.”
The problem with the beacon was power.
“I need a core,” I told him that evening at dinner, over a bowl of something red and savory that I had decided not to ask about. I sat at his right on the high bench in the great hall, my bad leg propped on a stool someone had brought without being asked. “A real one. Fusion, or at least a high-density cell. The Magpie had two. If one of them survived the fire, I can wire it in and call my partner.”
“And if neither survived?”
“Then I need the Meridian.”
He set down his cup.
I had told him about the Meridian on the second night. Not everything. Just enough: an old colony ship, a ghost signal, a hold full of terraforming cores, a crash ninety years ago on the edge of the glass plains. He had listened without interrupting, which most men can’t, and then he had said only, “The Sleeping Star,” and changed the subject.
“The Meridian,” he said now, quietly, “lies in the Shattered Reach. On the border between Ashkar land and Drovek. Neither clan crosses it.”
“Why not?”
“Because the last time a war party did, the sky killed forty of them in an afternoon. The metal of the Star calls the lightning. It is a bad place.”
“It’s a salvage place. I’ll be quick.”
“You will be dead.”
“I’ll be quick and careful.”
His hand rested on the bench between us. The silver cord on his wrist lay right beside mine. Every time either of us moved, the threads brushed. Six days of that. Six days of sleeping on the other side of a door that did not lock, of hearing him move in his room at night, of lying awake under cedar-smelling furs and thinking about the weight of his hand around my wrist and the way he’d said ask me again.
I had not asked again. I had told myself it was dignity.
“First the Magpie,” he said at last. “Tomorrow, if the sky allows. If there is a core in your wreck, there is no need for the Reach.”
“And if there isn’t?”
He picked up his cup again and did not answer, which I was learning was the Ashkar way of saying absolutely not, and I’ll fight you over it later.
That night I couldn’t sleep.
I lay under the cedar furs and listened to the storm walk the mountain, and to the other thing, the thing I had been listening to every night for a week: the sounds from the other side of the door. Him moving. The creak of a bed frame built for a body that size. Once, a long low exhale that went through the wood and straight down my spine.
“Kael,” I said, before I could stop myself. Not loud. “Are you awake?”
A pause. Then his voice, close. He must have been lying right against the wall.
“Yes.”
“Can I ask you something?”
“You will regardless.”
I smiled at the dark ceiling. “Have you ever seen the stars?”
The silence went on so long I thought I’d offended him.
“The storm belt has covered Vex since before my grandmother’s grandmother,” he said finally. “There are songs about them. Small fires behind the clouds. My mother said they were the eyes of the dead, watching to see if we were brave.” Another pause. “No. I have never seen them.”
I rolled onto my side, facing the door. I could see a thin line of blue light underneath it, from the veins in his walls.
“They’re not small,” I said. “And they’re not fires. Well, they are, but they’re so big and so far away that the light takes longer to reach you than your whole clan’s been alive. When you’re out past a planet, out in the black, there’s no up or down, and they’re just everywhere. Under your feet. Over your head. So many you can’t count them. It’s so quiet out there you can hear your own blood.” I swallowed. “It’s the only place I’ve ever felt like I wasn’t leaving something.”
The wood creaked. I imagined him pressing his palm to it. I did not imagine it hard enough to get up and open the door, but it was close.
“Tell me more,” he said, very low.
So I did. I told him about the rings of Saturn from the cockpit of a hauler, about the blue-white of Neptune, about the time Teo and I parked the Magpie in the shadow of a moon and turned off every light and just floated there for an hour, saying nothing. I told him until my voice got slow and the storm got distant.
The last thing I heard before I fell asleep was him, on the other side of the door, saying something in Vexi. My implant was too drowsy to translate it.
I wished, later, that it hadn’t been.
We rode out at dawn on something called a vharl.
It had six legs, a long armored neck, and the temperament of a bored housecat the size of a shuttle. Kael swung himself up into the saddle in one motion, then reached down, took me under the arms, and lifted me up in front of him as if I weighed nothing, which, relative to him, I suppose I didn’t.
The saddle had been built for one Vexi. It was big enough for one Vexi and one human, barely, provided the human sat in the cradle of the Vexi’s thighs with her back against his chest.
“This is very efficient seating,” I said, after a moment.
“It is the only saddle in the hold not being used.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Dhoren took the others.”
“All the others?”
“He is very thorough.”
The vharl started down the cliff path with a lurching, rolling gait. Every step rocked me back into him. His chest was a wall of heat at my spine. His arms came around me on either side to hold the reins, and his forearms, bare and corded and lined with silver, rested along my thighs. When I looked down, I could see the markings on the backs of his wrists, and I watched them warm by slow degrees, like coals someone was breathing on, as we wound down toward the glass.
Neither of us said anything about it.
I did not lean back into him on purpose. I would like to be clear about that. The vharl did it. Mostly.
Somewhere around the bottom of the path, his chin came to rest lightly on top of my head. I don’t think he meant to do it. I felt him freeze when he realized. I held very still, and after a while, he didn’t move it away.
The Magpie was a black skeleton on the glass, half-buried in her own melted hull.
I knew it would be bad. I’d seen her go up. It still hit me in the stomach to walk through what was left of her cargo bay, to see the twisted frame where my bunk had been, the fused lump of plastic that had once been my coffee maker. Nine years. She had been the first thing that was mine and stayed mine.
Kael didn’t say anything. He just walked behind me through the wreckage, close enough that I could feel him there, and when I stopped in what was left of the galley and stood looking at nothing for too long, he put one hand on the back of my neck. Just rested it there. Warm and enormous, his thumb at the base of my skull.
I let myself lean into it for exactly three seconds. Then I went to find the engine room.
The port cell was slag. The starboard one was intact.
I made a noise that echoed off the walls. Kael’s hand went to his sword before he realized it was joy.
“It’s fine,” I said, hauling the casing open. “It’s fine, look at it, it’s at sixty percent, oh, you beautiful thing, I could kiss you.”
I meant the cell. We both knew I meant the cell. The look he gave me over the top of the engine housing suggested he was willing to reopen the question.
It took me two hours to disconnect it safely. He held the light, and passed me tools I named and described with my hands, and only once handed me the wrong thing, a hydraulic jack instead of a spanner, which he then inspected with great curiosity and asked to keep. By the time we had the cell packed in padding and strapped to the vharl‘s flank, the sky to the west had gone the color of a bruise.
“We need to move,” he said.
We did not move fast enough.
The storm came over the ridge like a wall falling. One minute there was distant thunder, and the next the rain hit, not the warm grey rain of the cliffs but a hard, stinging, electric downpour that made my skin crawl and my hair lift off my neck. Lightning struck the glass plain a hundred meters away. Then fifty. The vharl screamed and tried to bolt, and Kael held it with one arm and me with the other.
“The Magpie‘s metal,” I shouted. “It’s pulling the strikes—”
“I know.” He swung us around toward the cliffs. “There is shelter. Hold on to me.”
I held on to him.
The shelter was a crack in the black rock at the base of the ridge, so narrow he had to turn sideways to get through it, and on the other side it opened into a tunnel. Not cut. Grown. The walls were glass, rippled and glossy, threaded through with veins of the blue mineral that lit the hold. Lightning had made this, striking down into the rock over and over until it fused a hollow path through the stone. When the next bolt hit the ridge above us, the whole tunnel lit up from inside, glowing blue and violet and white, and I gasped out loud.
“Ker’tha vhen,” Kael said behind me. “The storm’s veins. We use them to shelter on the plains.”
“It’s beautiful.”
“It is cold,” he said, practically, and pulled the soaked cloak off my shoulders.
He was right. The storm-rain had gone right through everything I wore, and in the cave’s still air my teeth had started chattering so hard I could hear them. He tied the vharl at the entrance, where it settled down with an offended grumble. Then he came back and sat with his back against the glass wall and opened his arms.
“Come,” he said.
I hesitated.
“For warmth,” he said. “Vexi run hotter than your kind. I could feel you shaking on the ride. Come, Nova.”
It was the first time he had called me by my name without the Captain in front of it. It did something low and liquid in my stomach.
I went.
He drew me down between his knees and wrapped his arms around me, and then he pulled his own cloak, dry on the inside, around us both, and I was cocooned in heat. He was a furnace. He was a hearth. I tucked myself against his chest and felt the shivering go out of me in long shuddering waves, and his heart beat slow and heavy under my ear, and outside, the sky went on breaking itself apart over the glass.
“Better?” he said, into my hair.
“Mm.”
“Your leg?”
“It’s fine.” It ached. I didn’t care. “Kael?”
“Hm.”
“Why do you do it? All of it. The law. The cord. Carrying me up a mountain. Glaring at people for laughing at you. You could have just pulled me out and dropped me at the nearest outpost. Nobody’d know.”
He was quiet so long I thought he wouldn’t answer.
“I would know,” he said finally. And then, lower, slower, as if each word had to be pried out of the stone: “My father broke a tharen once. He laughed at it. A man died because of it. The whole clan watched him walk the hall in shame for the rest of his life, and they watched me walk beside him. I was a boy. I swore that no one would ever look at my name that way again.”
I lifted my head. In the blue glow of the tunnel his face was all shadows and planes, the gold of his eyes dimmed to amber.
“So it’s not about me,” I said. “The bond.”
“It was not.” His throat moved. “At first.”
The tunnel lit up. Lightning struck the ridge directly above us, and the glass walls blazed white, and in that light I saw every silver line on his body ignite at once, his throat and his arms and his collarbones and the side of his face, as bright as the storm itself.
“And now?” I whispered.
“Now,” he said, “you are sitting in my arms in the dark and I can feel your heart, and you are asking me questions you know the answers to.”
I should have pulled away. I knew all the reasons. I had a partner waiting. I had a life four systems over that I’d spent thirteen years building out of nothing. I had never once in that life let myself stay anywhere long enough to be left, and I was not going to start on a storm planet with a seven-foot warlord who glowed when he wanted me.
My father had raised me on freighters. Never more than six months on a route. Never more than a season on a station. Every time I’d made a friend, we’d moved. Every time I’d started to love a place, we’d left it. I learned young that the trick was to be the one who leaves first, so it never hurts when they let you go.
“I’m still leaving,” I said. My voice came out rough.
“I know.”
“The minute that beacon works, I’m calling Teo, and I’m getting on a ship, and I’m going.”
“I know.”
“So this would be a terrible idea.”
“Yes,” he said. His hand came up and cupped my jaw. His palm covered half my face. His thumb traced the line of my cheekbone, the edge of the bruise there, so lightly it barely touched. “A very terrible one.”
“You said to ask you again. When I wasn’t hurt, or owed, or trying to leave.”
“I did.”
“I’m all three.”
“You are.”
“I’m asking anyway.”
His thumb stilled on my cheek.
For a long moment he only looked at me. The tunnel flickered blue, then dark, then blue. I could feel the heat coming off his markings like the sun on bare skin. I could feel the restraint in him, too, in the way his other arm had gone rigid around my back, in the faint tremor in the hand at my jaw, a huge hand that could peel a ship open and was holding my face like it was blown glass.
“Nova,” he said. It was a warning. It was a plea.
I leaned up and kissed him.
It was clumsy for exactly one second. I had misjudged the distance, which was easy with a man that size, and caught the corner of his mouth. Then he made a sound low in his chest, rough and startled, and his hand slid back into my hair, and he tilted my head and took my mouth properly.
Oh.
Oh.
He kissed like he fought. Slow, slow, slow, and then everywhere. His lips were hot and firm and he tasted like smoke and something sweet, and when I opened for him, he groaned into me and the sound went all the way down my spine. His arm hauled me up against him. My hands found his chest, his throat, the silver lines that burned under my palms like live wire. He shuddered when I touched them. Every place my fingers went, the light flared brighter, until the whole tunnel seemed to be glowing with him and not the storm.
He broke the kiss. Barely. His forehead pressed to mine. He was breathing hard, and so was I.
“You touched them,” he said, hoarse.
“I meant the question.”
“Do you know what you are asking?”
“I think,” I said, “I’ve known since you peeled my ship open.”
A sound came out of him, half laugh, half something far hungrier. His hand tightened in my hair, just enough for me to feel it.
“Then hear me,” he said. “Once I begin, I will not want to stop. Not for the storm. Not for the law. Not for anything but your word. So if you want me to stop, Nova, you tell me now, and I will carry you home and never speak of this again.”
Lightning cracked across the ridge. The glass blazed around us. In its light his eyes were pure molten gold and fixed on mine, waiting.
I put my hand flat over the brightest mark on his chest, right over his heart, and felt it pound against my palm.
“Don’t,” I said, “stop.”
