The Dark Reaches (2 page)

As she watched the fire, the wind rose, and the black pillar of smoke tilted, diffused, spread. The sky beyond was almost as dark, and spatters of rain began to fall. Marra shook her head and left silently with the children for the shelter of their room down at the guesthouse.

Linnea knew she should go, too. There was nothing more to see. Nothing but the message the burning had been meant to send her.

And there was nowhere to go. So she turned her back on the guesthouse, the church refectory, and breakfast, and walked instead past the fenced yard of her ruined house, up the steep path to the ridgetop overlooking the sea.

At the crest, the wind met her like a wall, and her eyes streamed tears from the force of it. The sea stretched out below her, cold, bleak, and empty, the surf near the shore clotted with yellowish foam. Farther out, a glimmer of pure white through the mist told of heavy breakers offshore. She could hear the rumble of surf, taste the salt on her lips.

She wished Iain were here. He would remind her that he had warned her—yet he would also understand, too well, what losing her old home meant to her. Knowing that it was here, even if not for her, had given her another reason to fight.

But Iain was not here. No, the notorious ex-Line pilot Iain sen Paolo had stayed in Santandru’s one city of Middlehaven, declining to exhibit himself to her village.

And maybe that had been wise. She’d heard the inevitable whispers about her Pilot Master lover. One of
those
, one of the aristocratic brotherhood of jump pilots who had controlled travel and communication throughout the Hidden Worlds for six centuries. She shivered in the cold, remembering.

Iain had never been one of the Line, not truly—a great scandal. Even though he was a pilot, with the rare gift that allowed him to guide jumpships through otherspace, he was one of her own humble people by ancestry. A grandson of this backwater world of Santandru. The revelation of that long-held secret had helped put an end to the powerful mo nopoly of the Pilot Masters, the lords of Nexus.

And, some said, it had broken the will of the best defense still left to humans in the Hidden Worlds. She pushed the thought away and walked north along the ridgetop, picking her way carefully in the steady wind.

Even knowing that Iain was really one of them had made no difference to her people. To them he was what he’d been bred up to be—as corrupt as the world that had reared him.

Linnea’s coat, rain gear borrowed from Marra, flapped behind her like a flag snapping in the wind. No, she could understand why Iain had stayed in Middlehaven. He’d be working to prepare their two jumpships for the next leg of their planned loop through the scattered worlds of the Rimini Fading, to inspect the newly trained jumpship patrols assigned to watch out for any hint of Cold Minds ships.

The need to make this trip had grown in Linnea in the months after she and Iain returned from Nexus, from the brief, sad victory the remnants of the Line had won there. That fight had cost what remained of the power of the Line; and the new patrols in the fringe worlds were reporting contacts with what had to be Cold Minds scout ships. She rubbed her hands along her arms, reaching for warmth that was not there. It was only a matter of time until the Cold Minds moved again—until another world fell to them, or was destroyed in order to save it.

But still Iain had agreed that he and Linnea should come here: He knew how desperately she needed to see her home. Because, of course, they traveled first to Santandru, to take Marra and three of her children home from their temporary refuge on Terranova—back to Marra’s husband, Asper, a government official in Middlehaven. Linnea had flown Marra and the children out to Moraine together for this memorial ceremony—to lay their wreaths, to see their home village again.

And now she only wanted to be away from here, to travel away with Iain again, travel anywhere. He would be ready to leave. She knew he’d tried to hide his worry about the danger signs from the Cold Minds, his urgent wish for them both to return to their duties; but if this was what she needed first, to give her peace, then with all the great generosity of which he was capable, he wanted her to have it.

Yet Iain hadn’t been able to hide his dislike for the bleakness of her world, the unfriendliness of her people toward a former Pilot Master, the bitterness of Santandru’s leafless spring. She did not turn to look back at Moraine, but she knew the patches of dirt behind the houses and down toward the bay, knew that potato and cabbage plants were just beginning to straggle, pale green, up from the sodden earth. She knew the houses glistening dark in the rain, low against the slopes beyond, barren gravel rising toward the glacier and the mountains beyond.

Once this place had seemed warm, welcoming. Now she understood how small it was, how worn, how cold and comfortless. Perhaps two years living in the Terranovan capital of Port Marie, vividly sunny and lush with life, had changed her eyes.

Or perhaps it was the people here, once
her
people—turning away, pushing her away, resentful of the gift she had given them. She had been a fool to expect anything else.

Now she did turn, looking down toward the harbor, where the new fishing boat lay snugged against the quay. Marra had told her how glad they were to get the money Linnea had earned on Nexus to replace their fishing boat, how eagerly they’d used it to bring Moraine back to life. But in the end, in the result, proud people hated nothing so much as an obligation. Especially an obligation to an outsider.

She looked down at the rock of the ridgetop, splotched with pale green and orange lichen, but worn bare where generations of women had walked back and forth, watching for the
Hope
, for their husbands and sons returning safe from sea.

No. This place was not her home. And never would be again.

Icy rain stung her face, blurring the view of the village below. She was
not
weeping for this place, these people. She would not give them even that; she would give them
nothing
more—no power over her mind or over her heart.
Shake it off, shake it off.

She bent her head. But if this was not her home, where was it? And if these were not her people, who was? Those she happened to love? Those she happened to fight for?

No one?

A hand touched her shoulder, and she jerked with surprise. A looming figure in black—Father Haveloe. “It’s foolishness, to be up here when you’re not dressed for the weather,” he said.

“I don’t own any clothes for this weather,” she said flatly. “But you’re right. I’ve got to go and pack. It’s time to leave, Marra needs to get the children back to school in Middlehaven—”

“The children that remain to her,” the priest said. “Marra and I have talked. I’m worried about her, and I feel that I must speak to you.”

“Then I’ll listen,” Linnea said coldly.
For Marra.

He gave her a dark look. “Your sister is heartbroken that you lured away her oldest son to stay behind on Terranova. To study piloting—and who knows what else.”

“He asked Marra’s permission, and she gave it to him,” Linnea said.

The priest looked sorrowful. “But how much did Marra understand? How much did you tell her?” He shook his head. “Left on Terranova, his mother gone, a boy of fourteen in the hands of the Pilot Masters—”

“He has the gift,” Linnea said. “He has the right to learn to use it.”
To be one of us, a pilot, maybe to die with us—
Oh, Marra had known.

“And then you come to our world, traveling openly with your Pilot Master lover—”

“I will not,” she said, “allow you to speak to me about that.”

“I once asked you to marry me,” he said mildly.

“And I said no.” She dug her hands deeper into the pockets of her borrowed coat and shivered. But she couldn’t seek shelter yet. She would outwait him, see which way he went, so she could take a different path.

He showed no sign of turning to go. To make him angry, to drive him off, Linnea said, “They tell me you’re going to marry Pirie Stayart, now that she’s of age.” His head went back, indignation of course, and she pressed on. “She’ll make you happy. I never would have.” She shook her head. “It’s time for me to get back to my work. To my home.”

He lifted an eyebrow. “And where,” he asked, “is that?”

She looked into his pale eyes, knew he would not understand, but answered honestly anyway. A debt to herself, not him; she had lied to these people when she was younger, when she’d pretended even to herself that she was one of them.
Never again.
“My home is where Iain sen Paolo is. And his, where I am.”

“Sad and rootless,” Father Haveloe said, “with no future in it.” He looked at her searchingly. “I could have made you happy here on Santandru. If you had been willing to try.”

She lifted her chin.
I am happy,
she wanted to say, but he would hear the doubt in it; he sensed any hint of weakness, it had always been what he saw best in everyone. “I’ll find my own happiness.”

He looked at her for a long time. “No,” he said at last. “No, I don’t think so.” His voice was low. “It’s not your gift, Linny.”

She jerked her gaze away from his, stared out to sea, into the wind and rain. He was wrong, wrong.

He set his big hand on her arm and squeezed gently. “Good-bye.”

She could not help herself; she jerked her arm away from his touch. He only shook his head again, gently, sadly, and left her there. She watched him pick his way down the path, waiting stubbornly for him to pass out of sight.

She pulled the coat closer around her. His words had stung like a slap.
No gift for happiness.
Better to say she’d never had the gift of peace. Childhood here, poor and or phaned. Then servitude on Nexus, and torment from Rafael sen Fridric, who marooned her on a world infested by the Cold Minds. Then the war that began last year, salvaging the bitter loss the Pilot Masters had suffered in their attempt to retake Nexus from the Cold Minds. No rest, no home, never standing still.

The only constant was Iain. A man, not a place; not a home. Not enough of a home. She remembered Ma’s words, years ago when she was dying:
Only fools depend on feelings.
Linnea’d had a place, here, years ago; and she’d thrown it away. For Marra and her children—because she’d loved them. For something better—the chance of something better—for all of them. It had come to very little in the end.

But not to nothing. Iain was waiting for her in Middlehaven, waiting with the patient warmth he had shown for so long. And then, back in their jumpships, they would return to otherspace—to the freedom, the sense of power Linnea found only there, piloting her ship between the worlds.

She closed her eyes against the failing light, and her heart raced. On the jump from Terranova to Santandru, she had felt the call of otherspace more strongly than ever: a yearning, a need, pulling her onward. And there were flashes, images, of strange, rich beauty—places she had never seen. Images that now filled her dreams—even here.

Those dreams, that beauty were all that still fed her spirit, giving her strength for the fight that would certainly consume her life: against the Cold Minds, endemic now in the Hidden Worlds. Perhaps never to be defeated. Humans had overcome the Cold Minds’ first major attack, on Nexus, but the danger to every other one of the Hidden Worlds would never fade. Constant vigilance, constant work, patrols around every world to be maintained and inspected. A long, losing battle of attrition, Linnea foresaw it: falling back and back, surrendering bit by bit what she and Iain had once condemned the Line for refusing to defend. Maybe in one cruel way the Line had been right; maybe the few worlds they had proposed defending would be all that could, in the end, be saved.

If that much.

But Iain was waiting. Otherspace was waiting. That would be enough, for now. She started down the path toward shelter from the rain.

 

 

 

Linny, I was afraid of this from the start,” Marra said. “I didn’t want to say anything. But I thought something like this might happen. Maybe not this bad, but—”

“You thought they might turn on you, just because of me?” Linnea stood, leaning against the sill of the window in her tiny room in the guesthouse, the plastic pane cold against her back. Though it was past sunset, she had not lit the lamp, not even when Marra knocked and came in. There was nothing here that Linnea wanted to see. The room’s air oppressed her, stale and cold, even though she’d set the little heatbox going at midday. The greasy fish stew from supper sat like a lump in her stomach. “Then why didn’t you tell me to stay behind in Middlehaven?”

Marra folded her arms across her chest. “I wish now I had. If you hadn’t come they—they might have left Ma’s house alone.”

“I’m sorry for that,” Linnea said. “Iain and I will find a way to make it up to you. Pay you.”

“No,” Marra said, her voice steady. “We—Asper and I don’t want any money from you. From
him
.” She took a deep breath. “But, Linny, it’s my fault, too. I was the one who talked you into coming here for the memorial service. I talked myself into hoping they’d welcome you back.”

“Iain knew better,” Linnea said bitterly. “He was right to stay in Middlehaven.”

“He stayed because I told him to,” Marra said.

Linnea’s head jerked up.

“I warned him,” Marra said. “If they—if the village saw you with him, there would be no chance they would forgive you.”

“Forgive—” Linnea stared at her sister. “
Forgive
me for saving this village!”

“Forgive you for
how
you saved it,” Marra said. Her voice was harsh, but Linnea knew there was compassion behind the words. Marra did understand; but Marra couldn’t, wouldn’t try to explain it to anyone else here.

“They accepted my money,” Linnea said flatly. “They have no right to judge me. No right at all.” She looked down at the worn plastic floor. “I did feel ashamed. At first. But that was—that was this village, thinking and judging inside my head. Father Haveloe, thinking and judging. Not me.” She straightened. “I know who I am now, Marra. I know what I want.”