Lords of the Sea (19 page)

Thank you so much! It was such a thoughtful gift. I just feel awful that I didn’t know.”

He reddened faintly, looking both embarrassed and angry. She caught his arm, moving around to face him when he merely stopped instead of turning to look at her.

“Are you angry with me?” she asked cautiously.

He met her gaze then. “No,” he said shortly. “I am angry with myself. I had meant them as a peace offering, but you were so angry I had thought ….” He shrugged and then looked sheepish. “It is my own fault for being a coward. You were so angry, I thought that you would throw them at me if I tried to give them to you myself. I decided it would be better if Natara were to bring them to you.”

Cassie bit her lip as she studied him, struggling to tamp her amusement that he’d decided to use a go between rather than test her temper again. It dawned on her after a moment, though, how much trouble he’d probably gone to to get them for her. She’d seen for herself that they had almost nothing. “And when I didn’t acknowledge the gifts you decided I hadn’t appreciated them?”

He shrugged but finally grinned. “At least I knew you had not thrown them away.”

Cassie tried not to take that badly since she was pretty sure he hadn’t intended to insult her.

He didn’t seem to have any trouble reading her expression, though. He rolled his eyes heavenward and ground his teeth. “I did not mean that the way it sounded.”

109

“Good,” she managed, “because it sounded insulting.”

“I am not very good with your language,” he said tentatively when she said nothing else.

“You’re using a translator.”

“Was. I had thought that I no longer needed it,” he said wryly.

Cassie pulled him to a halt again and lifted a hand to push the hair back from his ear. She was surprised to see he wasn’t wearing the translator.

He gave her a look.

She shrugged, smiling faintly. “Just checking to make sure you weren’t making up excuses.” She shook her head in bemusement when it dawned on her that he’d
learned
English in a matter of days—and hardly even had an accent! “You are amazing!

I can’t believe you learned the language so quickly!”

He glanced at her uncomfortably. “I used the
sublimn
. It feeds the information directly into the brain and takes only a matter of minutes or hours to input, depending on the amount of information. Unfortunately, it feeds into short term memory. The knowledge has to used to be retained by the long term memory.”

Cassie absorbed that with surprise and finally chuckled. “Oh, I’d be a rich woman if I had that invention! Every kid would fight for one to crash for exams!”

He slid her a look of doubt and disapproval. “That would be dishonest.”

“I wasn’t serious,” Cassie retorted, mildly irritated at the rebuke. “It would not only be dishonest, it could have disastrous consequences. Cheating is already a problem, but I don’t blame the kids. It’s the pressure put on them that makes them desperate to achieve … some of them,” she added conscientiously. “Some are just plain lazy.”

Conversation between them lulled after that, but it was a more comfortable silence in spite of the fact that they couldn’t seem to have a conversation without a dispute of some kind arising. She noticed immediately that he was leading her along what must have been a road at one time that wove between the shells of buildings that had been built in a long row. People were moving in and out of the buildings as before, busily cleaning and in some places beginning to repair. Other partial structures were being demolished and the materials apparently scavenged for use in those building deemed sound enough for repairs.

After a while they passed through that area, the area Cassie remembered Raen had pointed out as their commercial center. When Raen stopped at last, she saw they were standing before a small structure within sight of the channel. The building actually overlooked it.

It seemed to be a building of particular interest to Raen. He studied it over critically and finally stepped inside. Mystified, Cassie followed him.

110

“Take care!” Raen warned just before Cassie skidded on loose gravel on the floor.

He caught her as she wobbled, steadying her. A frisson passed through her as she became aware of their proximity, of the weight of his hand at her waist. His gaze flickered over her face when she looked up at him, settled on her lips for a long moment, and then moved beyond her. She stepped away from him, carefully, and glanced around.

“This was the foyer.”

Cassie glanced at him when he spoke. Returning her attention to the room they stood in, she tried to imagine what it might have looked like. There wasn’t much to go on. The floor was intact, however, and she saw that it was a mosaic of stones. She couldn’t make out the design for the rubble lying about, but the colors were pretty. She could also see the remains of the walls that had separated the foyer from the rest of the house. “It must have been a very nice house,” she commented.

He nodded, his expression lightening. Settling a hand in the small of her back, he guided her into a room that had opened off the foyer. “The structure is still sound—what is left of it. Still, there is a good bit here to work with. This was the gathering room for entertaining guests.”

“It’s really big,” Cassie murmured in surprise. “It didn’t look this big from the outside.”

“It was never grand, but I thought it was comfortable. It had four bedchambers.”

When Cassie looked at him sharply, she saw that his head was tilted back and he was looking up at what must have once been a second floor. She saw as she followed his gaze that there were beams of some sort of material crisscrossing the area—not wood, certainly, or it would’ve rotted, nor iron either. That would’ve rusted in the time the Atlantis had been submerged. Undoubtedly it was some of the same material used in the building of the ship itself—which had weathered the passage of time as if there’d been no time wearing upon it.

Whatever it was, the US government would cream all over themselves to get their hands on it, she mused, realizing that they suspected there was a wealth of alien technology practically within their grasp. Which explained why they were so determined to claim the Atlantis.

She discovered that Raen was studying her when she emerged from her thoughts.

His expression was hard to decipher, but she sensed an air almost of expectancy in him and perhaps a bit of tension, as well. Uncertain of what to make of it, she looked around again, trying to imagine what the place must have looked like before. She couldn’t. It must be heart-breaking, she thought, deciding maybe that was what she’d sensed in him.

She supposed men didn’t think in those terms, but it would have to be disturbing on many levels regardless of whether their feelings toward their home was the same as a woman’s or not. A lot of hard work went into building a house, and even more in making it into a home.

111

“You must hate seeing it like this,” she commented finally, fairly certain he wouldn’t take anything more sympathetic well. He’d looked at her before as if she was an oddity because she felt sorry for them for the loss of their city.

He shrugged. “It was not even hit. All of this is from time only, but there is a good deal to start with. It should not take as long to renovate as it took to build to begin with. There are three bedchambers for children.”

Cassie sent him a startled look at that, feeling a wave of horror wash over her. It hadn’t occurred to her that he might have had a family that he’d lost. She hadn’t, in fact, considered that possibility with any of them. She realized now that the city couldn’t possibly be all that was lost. As massive as the destruction was, lives would’ve been lost, too, probably a lot of lives.

She didn’t know why she hadn’t thought about it before. She considered herself an empathetic person, sensitive to others. Why hadn’t she thought about the loss of lives a disaster of this magnitude would entail?

Because she’d been too caught up in her own woes?

Maybe, and maybe also because there was still a bizarre unreality about the whole situation she’d found herself in—finding herself in the Atlantis of legend. To her mind it was ancient—not many people even considered it ancient history. And the place looked ancient, even if the people didn’t. It was hard grasping that the people living here had lived here when this had happened.

Mostly, though, she hadn’t considered it because no one talked about those they’d lost. If she’d seen their grief, she couldn’t have distanced herself from the tragedy of the situation, wouldn’t have been thinking only in terms of broken buildings when the real tragedy was the broken lives these buildings represented.

She didn’t think that meant they didn’t feel it, though.

They weren’t cold, unfeeling creatures.

They just didn’t want to share it—not with each other, and certainly not with the outsiders. Natara was the only one she’d met who’d even come close to revealing the emotional trauma they must feel, and she was very young, less able, she supposed, to guard her emotions than the older Atlanteans.

“You want children?” she asked tentatively. “Or were you thinking about renovating it and selling it to a family?”

He flicked an assessing gaze over her. “I would like to have children.” He looked up at the second floor again. “I had wanted four. We are—were only allowed two, but in my position I could petition for two more and easily obtain permission—especially now.”

As relieved as she was when he didn’t mention having had any, she was both surprised and amused that he’d decided how many he wanted to have when he didn’t even have a wife—A little shocked, too. Not too many people set out to have that large a family anymore.

But then, he wasn’t one of the ‘people’ she was familiar with, she reminded herself. “Does the lady you have in mind know you’re planning for her to have four?”

she asked with amusement.

An odd little half smile played about his lips as he studied her. “She does. I have told her.”

112

Something about his expression made her heart flutter. She looked away after a moment. Uncomfortable, she moved to the window that looked out over the channel.

“It’s a beautiful view, but I’d think a mother would worry that her children would be drawn by the channel.”

He moved to stand beside her. He was studying her curiously when she looked up at him. She shrugged. “I’d be worried about them drowning.”

She’d no sooner gotten the comment out of her mouth than she realized what she’d said would only be a concern of someone just like her. The Atlanteans didn’t have to worry about it. Her face still felt uncomfortably warm when she peered at him to gauge his reaction. To her surprise, he was smiling faintly.

Folding his arms over his chest, he leaned back against the edge of the window.

Tilting his head to one side, he studied her, smiling faintly. “What do you think that I should do to keep them out of the water? Besides scolding them when I catch them?”

She thought he was teasing her, but she was too embarrassed about the slip to feel like being teased. “You know I forgot.”

“I know.” Unfolding his arms, he reached for hers, slipping his hands slowly downward along them until he’d clasped her forearms and drawing her just as slowly toward him. She didn’t resist, though she looked at him questioningly. “I like the way you see the world, Lady Cassia.”

She looked at him doubtfully, struggling against the breathlessness that had invaded her as she settled fully against him. Releasing his hold on her when she leaned against him, he looped his arms around her. “The little ones should certainly not be in the water—something might nibble on them. A fence, you think?”

Thoroughly bemused by this side of him, she glanced toward the canal again, trying to picture it. “A white picket,” she agreed after a moment, “not so high it would destroy the view, but high enough a toddler would have difficulty getting over it.”

“There were flowers there once,” he said after a few moments. “My mother loved flowers. Apparently I did, too, when I was a little fellow. She said I was always trying to eat them and whenever she would catch me at it, I would try to stuff as many in my mouth as I could before she could reach me.”

Cassie settled her cheek against his chest, smiling faintly at the image his words created in her mind. “You must have been a terror in the garden.”

He chuckled, and she smiled again at the sound. “I was,” he agreed ruefully.

“When I outgrew trying to eat them, I began to see the garden as my own private battle ground. I would crawl through the beds, pretending I was evading enemy soldiers, and I would use the flowers for target practice … and then my mother would use the green stems as switches on my backside.”

“Did it teach you not to do it?”

“It taught me not to get caught,” he said with a chuckle.

“Did you have brothers?”

He was silent for so long she knew his brother was one of the casualties. “One.”

She wished she could take the question back. It had been thoughtless to ask, and she’d ruined the moment, bringing bad memories into his mind to crush the good ones.

She pulled away after a moment, and he allowed his arms to drop to his sides. “I should get back.”

He nodded, pushing away from the wall and guiding her out of the house again.

113

“I’m glad I came,” she said when they’d reached the main part of the city once more.

His gaze flickered over her face. “I am glad you came, too.”