brand new colony

It's rare for Aloth to call any of the boys to his study unless they're in trouble; in fact, Gadriet has been there most often of late, and tends to leave pale-faced and uncommunicative. So when he orders the two eldest to meet him, first one and then the other, there's some reason to be concerned.

But Gwalchmai seems to get off all right, though there's not much time for any hurried conferences. As soon as Soredamor escorts him out, she turns to Medraut.

"He's ready for you."

Within three months of their marriage, Anna's pregnant. The pregnancy is an easy one, not least because this time around she isn't on her feet fourteen hours a day running a makeshift med center. She spends most of her time either with Medraut or reading, takes dinner with Aloth every evening, and is always smiling and on point during public events that require her presence.

Outwardly, she seems mostly all right. She's functional, she gets along reasonably well with the staff; she's a bit isolated, but that's easy to chalk up to the notion that it's in her nature to be reticent, and besides -- it wouldn't do for her to try to make friends with the help. But Anna knows the truth: she's very carefully working on not feeling much of anything at all, on not thinking about what she no longer has, on avoiding the notion that she is an exile. The worst of it is, she doesn't want to go home. She doesn't want to call home, or send a wave to anyone, or try to find her sister. She just wants to be alone and not have to think, anymore, about anything.

By the time Gwalchmai is born, they're approaching their first wedding anniversary. He's born healthy and sound, and Anna's physical health is good -- but somewhere within her a dam has broken, and everything she's tried to suppress for the last year comes boiling up. A few hours after delivery, she starts to cry; she hates herself for it, but she can't seem to stop it. Anna cries until they sedate her the following day.

Four days later, she's still in bed, awake now but still medicated, though they're tapering those off. They bring her new son to her three times a day, and keep Medraut in the nursery, away from her. At this moment she's alone, lying on her side with the blankets pulled up, gazing out the window.

It's not every day a man is fortunate enough to make so useful a political alliance, and Aloth is feeling fairly pleased with himself when he goes to meet the ship coming in from New Britain. He's dressed in his best suit, more for the ambassadors' benefit than his new wife's, and he waits on the docks with his hands folded behind his back, watching the ships.

He's seen her picture; the Merdhin sent a holograph before Aloth agreed to the marriage, and she's pretty enough to suit him. She looks healthy, and he's optimistic about her ability to bear sons. New Britain is only a small planet, but it has potential, and Aloth has always been willing to invest in potential -- throughout his life, his success has been largely due to his investments.

Now he's waiting. Everything has already been prepared for his wife -- he doesn't know her name -- so all that's left to do is wait.

There comes a point in every celebration when, barring emergencies, it will run itself. The guards know their places and the caterers have handled the food and the music has all be arranged. Cai has tripled checked the amount of wine, and has made himself available to every person that he's spent weeks planning with, but they all have one answer: they'll call if they need him. Go enjoy the party.

Unfortunately, Cai suspects he's lost the ability to enjoy parties. Even his brother's wedding.

In fairness, he doesn't look unhappy, he just looks out of place. There's a reason why Cai has the job he does; take him out of his element, and he's left with a wretched lack of talent for small talk and a decent ability to hold his liquor, both of which conspire to end up with him watching, on the fringes, even if he's mostly pleased with how everything has gone.

He won't leave early, in case anything does go wrong. But Aythr doesn't have eyes for anyone but Gwen tonight, so he's left mainly to his own devices.

[Open to anyone who'd logically be at the wedding.]

Until he's about thirteen, Gadriet Lloyd is a perfectly ordinary boy -- shy, reserved, studious, but fully capable of laughing like an idiot when he plays with his brothers and sulking in the stables when he gets in trouble. Geffreyn likes to tease him because he's the one who never resists lessons and even likes to learn, but Gadriet shrugs off the teasing fairly well. If he's genuinely hurt, Gwalchmai usually steps in.

Then things change.

He turns oddly jumpy and disconnected, staring into the distance with his head cocked as if he can hear something the rest of them can't hear. Twice Gahereth catches him scraping on the walls of his room with a kitchen knife, muttering furiously to himself, "Come on, where are you? Come on, come on, I know you're there."

At first his tutors try to overlook it as a bad spell, or maybe a subject that doesn't interest him, but finally they're forced to report to Aloth Lloyd that his clever son, the brilliant scholarly one whose potential caught the eye of a visiting Alliance official, is failing miserably in all his lessons. Lloyd has Gadriet whipped, then forced to eat in his room for a week instead of at the family table. It barely makes a difference.

One night he sits out on the front steps of the country estate, smoking the dockhands' brand of cheap, smelly cigarettes, his eyes fixed on a point in the distance. He was always skinny, but over the last few weeks he's lost more weight; his sleeveless jacket and trousers seem to big for his small pale body. Without seeming to realise it, he's scratching the skin on his wrists and the undersides of his forearms, scratch scratch, his nails raking steadily.

He hasn't smiled in weeks. He hardly looks like a thirteen-year-old boy; his black eyes are weary and frightened, and he hunches over like an old man when he sits, lifting the cigarette to his lips and taking it away, breathing grey smoke into the night air.

By the time she leaves to head back down to her own quarters, Gwenore is back in control of herself, although she's not unscathed. She takes the pins out of her hair as she goes, and pushes her fingers through till it's ruffled as ever, and makes her a little more recognizable; the soft blouse and skirt are less uncharacteristic than her expression, distracted and a little pained.

The trade convoy to Manassah lands in the docks outside of Temple Bay and deposits wine, beef, and a bleary, wrinkled Marguel, who has never been good with stasis. She makes a face, collects her baggage with several sharp words for the crew, and then finds a cabman to take her to the commuter rail, which in turn takes her out to Aloth Lloyd's country estate, where his family lives most of the time. There she and her suitcases escape the small, dark train and step out into the planet's sunlight, much richer than it is after being filtered through the New Britain dust.

A young man is waiting there to take her things up to the guest quarters, and she herself is shown into the main hallway, where she brushes down her clothes and tries to look presentable.

It's Merdhin who points out the need to know what's going on with Aloth Lloyd postwar, where his sympathies lie and whether he's still loyal, and Merdhin who tells Athyr, one heavy hand on his shoulder, that the best way to find out is to use his contact in the Lloyd household. As usual, he explains it all so neatly and forcibly that it doesn't seem reasonable to do things any other way than the way he suggests, and Athyr nods dumbly when he's finished speaking.

He puts off making the call, though, and when he finally does it's with his office door locked, and orders for no one to disturb him for the rest of the afternoon. His hands shake a little as he patches the call through, and the glass of double-strong coffee spiked gently with raw synth liquor has done nothing to steady his nerves.

When the console screen flickers into a connexion, his cow-mild eyes gaze at her in washed-out colours, his face looking weary and grown-up with its new beard and worry lines.

"Anna?"

Anna's days have a predictable pattern to them, now. She gets up very early and sets the household in motion: Anna sorts Aloth's schedules; she doesn't plan the menus herself but she approves them all personally; Aloth won't let her handle the money yet, but she has to organize all of the invoices for the kitchens. It's boring, but she does everything here with just as much focus and skill as she did everything else before it.

Mid-morning, she usually goes down to the nursery to check on the boys. Sometimes she stays quite a while, reading to them herself or playing. Her tolerance for this varies, however, and today is one of the days when she doesn't quite have enough patience for both Medraut and Gwalchmai.

She's pregnant, again, and her calm comes and goes. Anna has had her sister on her mind for more than a week, now, and at last she decides she'd better just put in the call request. She clears her afternoon, and lets one of the girls know that when the call from New Britain comes in, it's to be routed to her office.

Marguel is thinking about getting married.

Vriens Gore is boring, but he means well, and he's well-off. Physically he's very similar to Antor, even if he's not like him in any other way; it means that when she looks at him she can pretend without too much trouble, especially in bed if she keeps the lights off.

It isn't going to make Antor jealous, or really accomplish anything, which she's known since she began seeing him, but there's nothing to be done about that. And it's something to do in her spare time. She can't just keep spending all night at the Menw working on her poisons -- although sometimes she thinks she might as well. At least that's fun, and it keeps her busy. The cloned white lab rats she goes through at a ridiculous rate, but the results are interesting. Sometimes she thinks about submitting an article on bioengineering to the Alliance medical journal, and then she thinks about what the Alliance might do if they realised what sorts of things she's been playing with, back here where they can't see her, and she changes her mind.

So instead she sends Athyr a microbial disorder, sealed up neatly in an orange, and waits to see what will happen.

Maybe it will cheer her up a little. At least it might take her mind off sitting here in her office wondering if Antor ever thinks about her at all.

They've been sleeping together for a while -- probably not exclusively, Athyr figures, though he doesn't like to think about that; the idea of another man with his hands on Gwen makes him feel queasy in a way he doesn't understand. He hasn't been with many women since Anna. To be honest, he's been half-afraid, even if it is statistically unlikely that he'd end up sleeping with another long-lost half-sister -- but he can't shake that feeling that when he finds someone he wants to love Merdhin's going to take her away from him again, hit him with some out-of-the-blue bullet that makes him lose her, or talk him into selling her to a political rival without evening arguing, like the ignorant little coward he was then--

It makes him sick to think about Anna, so he doesn't.

But Gwen he can't get out of his head, and every time she's on base in Camallate she spends the nights with him, even when they aren't fooling around. He's used to waking up to find she's come in sometime in the early morning and settled into his bed, and to burying his face in her short blonde hair, his arm around her waist. It's a good feeling. It's -- gorram it, it's a feeling he doesn't want to give up, he wants it to be every day, he wants it to be a sure thing.

He's getting dressed slowly this morning, throwing glances over his shoulder to her lying in the bed, stripped of all her guns and leather and just as strong and beautiful for that. It smarts. It smarts that between Merdhin and the way she reacted last time he doesn't have the guts to ask her.

Athyr swears and starts to button up his doublet. He'll put in an order for dinner with her, just the two of them, no work to-night. Get Cai to clear his schedule. Dammit. To-night. It's time to stop letting the past hobble him like a dog-bit horse. He isn't going to lose her the way he lost Anna, and no matter what Merdhin says he'll go through with it.

It's not as though he makes many decisions any more for things he wants. He deserves the chance for Gwen.

All their lives, Ector has made it Cai's business to look after his foster brother. Athyr is young and reckless, with the unfortunate combination of nearly overwhelming charisma but no substantial ideas of his own; it's easy to persuade him to take idiotic risks, and he often does. Ector has spent a fortune on his education -- not that it would have happened without the considerable gifts the old man brings every year for Athyr's birthday -- but still, it's a lot more money than he's ever spent on Cai in any capacity. Athyr is gently spoiled, has private tutors for reading and writing and mathematics, was taught by celebrated instructors in the fields of riding, shooting, and hand-to-hand combat. He's Ector's prize; the better he turns out, the more money the old man brings.

Then, in the midst of the war that's been going on already for a year, the old man turns up again. It's a few days before Athyr's fifteenth birthday, and the winter is as cold as winters on New Britain ever get, more of a depressing temperate rain than anything else. The whole frontier is mud. The old man takes Athyr up to his room and talks to him with the door closed for three full hours.

When they finally emerge, Athyr's face is flushed with excitement. He's holding a pistol -- an old-fashioned make, with silver filigree and a monogramme, V.L. -- and wearing a gunbelt around his slim hips, looking younger than usual because the belt was made for a bigger, heavier man. Ector tries to catch him and talk to him, but Athyr slips past, leaving him with the old man, and heads straight out to the stable where Cai usually spends his spare time.

He rounds the door eagerly, loading a clip into the pistol as he does, in direct defiance of every gun safety rule ever. "Xiongdi!"

If she's being honest, Anna's glad to head home from the Medical Academy over intersession break. She's told her classmates that she wishes she could stay -- they all have plans for the social season that's about to spring up -- and she put off a research internship to give herself time to go home. But she doesn't regret her decision; she misses home, she misses New Britain, and she misses her sister.

Besides, the trip home will allow her to accompany Marguel back to the Academy so she can start her own studies. And then they'll be together, and no end to what they might accomplish.

By the time she reaches Til Tomeil, she's both wound up and half-exhausted, all at once. She drags her own bags in through the back door, and then shouts up the servant stair, just as if she hasn't been away for over a year, "Mèimèi, come make my tea!"

It's the fifth year of his kingship, and Athyr is used to Marguel's attempts to kill him. It's a sort of a game, to be honest, one that he almost enjoys -- she plots, he escapes, the same pattern. Usually the escapes are due to Cai or Gwenore's good sense, although Athyr has caught one or two of them himself.

But this one he missed. In fact, this one was bio-engineered and came in an envelope that he made the mistake of opening himself (honestly, someone else is supposed to open his mail for him, but he thinks this is a stupid idea and tries to steal it first whenever possible), and the next person who comes to his office finds him facedown on the floor.

The first three people the medical staff notify are Gwenore, Cai, and Lanselos. Athyr is in the Menw, in one of the suites, hooked up to an IV and doped up to the ears, humming tunelessly along to the radiator. When the nurse comes in to tell him that Lanse is there, he just grins.

"Yeah, yeah, I want to see him. Send him in."

When Athyr finally leaves the conference room, two hours later, he has a sick feeling in the bottom of his stomach that makes it feel shrunken. His throat is raw from shouting, his chest feels thin and airless and his clenched hands are shaking.

Merdhin knew. Athyr's sure of it. He's certain. Merdhin knew from the very beginning about Anna--he was just waiting for the right moment to tell, for the point when it would have the most impact. It wouldn't have been useful before now to have Aloth Lloyd as a political ally, the diplomatic ties wouldn't have benefited him, but he needs Lloyd's money and now he has something to offer, a stake in his kingdom and a beautiful wife Athyr has to get rid of.

Fucking old sorcerer. He knew.

You can't tell anyone, Arthur, Merdhin said. You can't tell anyone. Not even Cai. Just tell them she betrayed you, tell them you have to get her off the planet and Lloyd's the best man to take her. Tell them she has to disappear. Athyr can't even remember everything he said--he remembers himself, he remembers yelling, protesting, he remembers that he broke one of the chairs in the conference room, which isn't like him at all and he can't really think why he did it. And now he has to tell Anna. Merdhin's right--Athyr can't remember why he's right. He just knows he is.

And he knew all along.

Ending up effectively dry-docked on New Britain was not the plan. Then again, it's not like you plan for a string of bad luck that goes on for months, while you hop blindly from rock to outlying, newly terraformed rock hoping that this will be the one that turns things around.

By the time he hit New Britain, it was pretty clear that his little boat wasn't going anyplace else. Not for a while. She wouldn't hardly start, which was probably for the best, seeing as Lanselos was starting to think that it was long past time for him to lay low a little while. He'd been pushing his luck, bad or good, and there are only so many hops you can make on an expired registration. ('Specially when the Alliance is already eyeing you; it was getting to be an awful short hop to one of the work-planets. Which is a nice way of saying that soon enough they'll pull his card and jail him.)

Not that he'd take his own advice and sit still.

Lanselos hadn't been entirely forthcoming with the foreman at the dock about his status or what was in his hold, and he didn't much intend to be. He was only setting out, here, to sell enough of what was in his hold to get the damned thing in the sky again. Shouldn't be hard, since the talk seemed to point to a government on New Britain that was friendly toward guys like him running under the radar, and with a real need for what he had -- an entertainingly mixed up assortment of above-board construction materials and decidedly not above-board Alliance small-caliber weaponry, which he'd cleaned up himself, enough to make them worth having, anyway.

He's been here about a week. And today he's out in the hot sun, leaning against a guardrail and looking perfectly at ease. He has good reason to think today might be the day that gives him an opportunity to talk to one of the government men, arrange a sale. If he can do that, he might get himself and his boat off this rock and back in circulation.

Anna's been happy -- or as happy as anyone can be running this kind of infirmary in the middle of a war that waxes and wanes. But she's doing good work for a cause she believes in; a man she believes in, a man she loves.

She has known for about six weeks now; she started to suspect she might be pregnant when no amount of sleep ever seemed to catch her up after on-duty hours. She'd missed a cycle, but figured that could just as easily be stress, too much work -- a war is on, Athyr has so much on his plate and it worries her, some work days stretch out past twelve hours if things are heavy enough. But the fatigue seemed wrong, and after a few more weeks of this she ordered a spare test kit and took her own sample. Positive.

It's been three and a half weeks since that test result, and she has yet to tell Athyr. At first, things seemed too strenuous to add one more thing for him to think about. But she's reaching the point where she so badly wants to share it with him that she can't keep her own silence, and besides, he'll notice, if he hasn't already.

So she's asked to take dinner with him, alone in their quarters. Anna's made sure his schedule is clear, and so she's waiting for him, dressed casually in a skirt and loose blouse, and unusually nervous.

It's been a long day.

Anna's been on her feet since early this morning, making rounds, doing follow-up on some of the nastier injuries, stopping to talk with anyone she can get a few moments off to the side with. A lot of the nurses and most of the field medics like her, seem to trust her. She knows what she's doing, she's shown them, and she knows if she's got their backing it'll make it easier to press the issue of command when the time comes.

She's just gotten back from the showers, and is sitting on the little bed that's been given her in the cramped little room in one of the outbuildings, plaiting her wet hair. She's worn out, to be honest, but strangely wired. Anna doesn't mind the work, the hours; there isn't anywhere else she'd rather be. There's so much to be done, but she'll impose the downtime on herself.

It is, Athyr is sure, the worst night of his life.

Five hours earlier, Anna left on the ship to Manassah, as fiancee of Aloth Lloyd, taking their year-old son with her, and as of then all her connexions to Athyr have been erased, with the help of Merdhin and Cai, other than the fact of their siblinghood.

And now he is huddled in his room in a state of abject misery with a bottle of the strongest synth he could get hold of, trying to get over the fact that he is eighteen years old and the love of his life is gone. "Get over" here apparently means "black out". You win some, you lose some.