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."

Gadriet arrives back in Temple Bay as the night is finally starting to give way to the first suggestion of light. His fear of and his urge to defy his mother have been struggling in him ever since he got the call, and the first thing he did when he got out of stasis was to take a shot of general anesthetic; his eyes are cloudy and distant, but he seems relatively steady when he gets off the bullet train at the country estate.

A maid lets him into the house when he knocks, and he goes up to his old room, where everything is as he left it when he went to vetacad. In here it's as if time has been keeping still. He lies down on top of the soft blue coverlet of his bed and stares up at the ceiling.

He's glad he gave himself the shot. If he hadn't, he thinks, he'd be screaming.

Anna keeps to her quarters for the better part of the day following Aloth's death and her subsequent call to her sons. She conducts the business of preparing a funeral and trying to sort the immediate legal issues from her little office -- going into Aloth's space feels strange without him there. A little later in the afternoon, she calls Clarissant in and spends two hours or so going over what will be expected of her and what her brothers will need. Soredamor is in and out, at Anna's request.

Finally, a little before dinnertime -- which will be happening on time, as always, at least for the girls -- Anna straightens her skirt, and heads for Marguel's room, knocking with the sharp insistence that comes from being the lady of the house.

It takes the better part of the day to get things sorted -- the physician takes care of Aloth's body, following Anna's specifications, and Anna reads through Aloth's will and instructions. She steers clear of Marguel, though she does take part of the afternoon to sit with Clarissant (who seems as unfazed as ever). Eventually,late in the afternoon, she gets a few minutes to herself and although it's getting late in Bredigan she doesn't want to put this off any longer. She puts the call through to Medraut.

It's been nearly five years since Anna saw her sister face to face; it takes work to clear Marguel's schedule, but eventually the trip to Manassah is arranged. She travels on her own, and arrives at the little spaceport early in the afternoon. The driver is there to meet her -- Anna rarely leaves the estate, particularly when they're out at the country house as they almost always are during the summer -- and when Marguel arrives she'll find the sprawling house to be largely silent, except for the noise of staff keeping busy.

Once Marguel's luggage is settled in her quarters, she's shown to a little sitting room off of the cluster of rooms that Anna has claimed as her own. (A small library, an office, a rather austere little bedroom with a single bed -- everything painstakingly in its place.) Someone brings a tray with tea and sweets, and assures her that Mrs. Lloyd is on her way, then leaves her alone to wait.

Gahereth and Lianor have been married for almost a year and a half before they're finally able to make the trip to Manassah. Gahereth actually seems excited about the trip in the weeks leading up to their departure, telling Lianor all about the house and the planet and his sister, talking even more than he usually does (which is a lot) and telling her stories as they lie in bed at night.

They touch down in the big spaceport, and as they make the trip from the Temple Bay docks out into the countryside, Gahereth is busy pointing things out. As they come up to the estate, though, he gets a little quieter -- a lifetime of training kicking in, maybe -- and though he still looks happy enough to be there, it's apparent from the moment they step out of the hired transport that the Lloyd household is one of discipline and rules, and not very much like life with the Sheas.

The beginnings of this visit go just like every other time one of her sons has brought his wife home to meet them: one of the staff gets their luggage in, and Gahereth gets the two of them settled in his old room; they're left to their own devices for several hours, and though the expectation of being dressed and ready for dinner at eight isn't a direction that either Anna or Aloth issue, Gahereth is suddenly weirdly particular about their getting ready and being at the table on time. Dinner goes as most family dinners go, which is to say it's quiet, with polite conversation and a degree of formality that Lianor was probably not expecting.

After dinner, Aloth takes Gahereth back to his office for a debriefing of what things are like on New Britain, and Anna shows Lianor to one of the cozy little parlour rooms she's had done up now that the boys are all away. Waiting for them is a tray of sweets and a tea service; Anna settles into one of the chairs with the same poised, quiet air that she's had all evening.

As she's pouring the tea, she says, "So, Lianor, tell me more about you."

It was easier when they were all children: he told them what to do and they obeyed. Now they're getting increasingly difficult to manage. Gwalchmai, who was always far and away his favourite, and Anna's son Medraut have already left for New Britain, and Gadriet is thankfully away at the VetAcad (Gadriet especially disappoints him; to have gone from so promising and brilliant to the shifty-eyed addict he is now. Aloth has made it clear to Anna several times that he blames her).

That leaves Geffreyn and Gahereth at home. Geffreyn is a trouble-maker, with no sense of proportion, prone to bouts of rage and completely untrainable. By contrast, Gahereth consistently goes out of his way to be kind to people he has no business paying any attention to in the first place.

Aloth has been disappointed in them for years. Five children with Anna, and the only one who's really turned out the way he'd like is Medraut, who isn't even his. The Estrans' children in Arden have done better, but his hold over them gets more tenuous all the time.

He tends to avoid the two at home -- lately he's taken up more and more of his time with business, so as to avoid his family altogether whenever possible -- but Gahereth's tutor sent him a report earlier that's got to be addressed. So this afternoon he's in his office at the house, drumming a staccato with his stylus while he waits for Gahereth to emerge from whatever charitable endeavour he's been wasting his time with now.

He's five minutes late already. The drumming picks up in speed and volume while Aloth frowns at the door.

It's been a long day, and Aloth Lloyd is not in a very good mood. Usually he leaves the care of his children to his wife -- because, as far as he's concerned, they're not really his business until they're old enough for him to impart some lessons, as he's been doing lately with Medraut. But Gadriet has been out and out a disappointment lately, and his patience is wearing thin.

He's in his study, tapping irritably with his stylus on the glassy surface of his console. It's past dinnertime, and his ordinary routine is out of place, which puts him even more into a poor humour. The children aren't allowed to eat until he gets there, but he doesn't move.

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.

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.

It isn't long after Mr. Lloyd visits him on Arden that Mrs. Lloyd sends him a message asking him to come back to Manassah to see her. At first, Saigremort wants to feel resentful; it was her husband who tricked him, after all, her husband who came to his home, his safe beautiful home, just to remind him that he could still be bought and paid for.

But Mrs. Lloyd was always kind to him and to Clarie, sometimes kinder than to her own children, and he can't stop himself from feeling he owes it to her. All her children have grown and left home except Gadriet, who works away for nights at a time (Saigremort doesn't remember much about Gadriet, just that he was strange and quiet and made him nervous). Mr. Lloyd, Saigremort knows, will be on Arden for another month on business.

And it's in this way that he convinces himself that he's got to go; so he does, taking his last opportunity for time off before he begins his second year with the diplomatic service. He can always make a little money in Manassah if he needs to. He shows up on the doorstep of the Temple Bay townhouse, looking neat and sophisticated and much more grown-up than he feels at the moment.

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?"

It's the day before Medraut's fifteenth birthday, and Anna's pleased to see that there's a break in the weather. It's been cool and wet for the last several weeks, but today it's toleraby warm and there's even something that might be mistaken for sunshine. Anna is not superstitious, but she'll take whatever good omen she can get today.

She's been thinking about this for more than a year. In the last few weeks, it's been just about all she can think of. It's time, she knows it's time, and she knows her son, knows that he's got it within him to take this in stride.

Tomorrow, there will be the same quiet family 'party' there always is -- dinner and cake and this time wine for the older boys. Today, though, she wants Medraut to herself. So she sends a note down to his room in the morning -- dress for walking, meet your mother in the courtyard in fifteen minutes. And then she goes to wait for him.

She's only a little nervous.

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.

The trip to Manassah is the first time she's ever been off-planet, and she spent the transit time anxiously pacing back at forth in the berth of their room on the ship. Medraut keeps telling her it's all right, but Lenomie is finding it hard to believe him on this front: she finally caved and let Divdan take her clothes shopping, in a last-minute fit of panic that all his comments about her grey dress might be true.

But the first night at his parents' house went well enough, it's true. She wore the pink gown Divdan bullied her into getting, and felt stupid and out of place, but at least nobody said anything about it and she didn't get soup on it or anything. Still, the meal was reserved, and she's used to Medraut's dry, stinging wit and Divdan's boisterous amusement -- and she's sure not used to scrubbing her skin raw and clean every day and leaving her hair down so it looks nice. Hell, she's not used to spending this many hours consecutive not mucking around in the engine of a skimmer or transport.

In the morning Medraut's old man hauls him off to look at something that Medraut swears is boring as hell, so Nomie's all right just to stay in their room. Which is where she still is, flipping restlessly through the tapes in the case on the wall, looking for something she can stick in the console until Medraut gets back. Honestly she's still nervous, but there's no real cure for that.

Of all the things for Anna and Aloth to argue loudly about, no one around the Lloyd household would have guessed that Gadriet's acceptance to the Academy and the scholarship award that's come with it would set them off. Anna's typically more likely to go stone quiet when she's truly angry, and so the fact that the two of them can be heard shouting halfway down the hall from their shared quarters is more than enough to send most of the staff quickly seeking something else to do, elsewhere.

The fact is that Anna isn't angry, exactly, but more like hurt and a little panicked. Aloth isn't hearing any of it, though. What's sparked the fight is his insistence on sending Gadriet to Mirielle early to get himself settled. After over half an hour of back and forth, Aloth comes stalking out into the corridor and collars one of the cleaning girls.

"Go get him and send him to his mother." There's little question about the him in question; Gadriet's the only one of the boys left at home. Aloth heads to his offices; Anna's in her private room with the door open, waiting for him.

The telescope was a gift from Gwalchmai, who knows his brothers well; Gadriet takes it every night on the balcony of his room and sets the tripod up, all with extraordinary delicacy.

His hands are graceful enough to merit the veterinary scholarship the academy on Mirielle awarded him--he can cut open a cow, slice a window into its heart, remove the smallest obstruction, and suture everything back up again with roughly half the anaesthesia most other students need. The Academy has already sent commendations to the Lloyd family for his senior thesis work with prion disorders in sheep. He could be working anywhere in the Alliance planetary network, honestly, but he hasn't left Manassah since he came back from Mirielle.

He's always been a withdrawn child, but since the Academy his reticence has gotten even worse, and he goes out of his way to avoid the rest of the family. It's not that hard now that all his brothers have gone to his uncle's planet-kingdom to get work.

The only time he really seems happy any more is at night when he puts up his telescope and stands for hours under the stars. He even smiles sometimes, his skillful hands turning clarity into the lens, turning the distant planets into focus, as the cool moons of Manassah pass through the sky.

Anna has always run the estate on Manassah with a kind of firm, formalized particularity. Everything runs like clockwork, and there's usually hell to pay if it doesn't. The truth of it is that when she first arrived here -- when she was first told that she wouldn't be practicing medicine, not while there were children to be had and raised -- she set to organizing the household in much the same way as she had once set to her studies. Focused, orderly, no room for error. It's kept her busy, at least; and it makes Aloth look good.

So it's to be expected, then, that when Medraut visits he's usually informed on his second day at home that he has a meeting with his mother, in her study. She's always done this, since he left home; she generally refuses to conduct any kind of real conversation with him in front of her husband, and she'd rather see Medraut alone anyway.

When Medraut arrives, he'll find her going over accounts at her desk.