brand new colony

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.]

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.

Cai feels, sometimes, that he's built himself from scratch into the person Aythr needs him to be. Some people give him guff for being too rough around the edges, too Britain - people want their leaders to be better than them, not the same. Good thing I'm not leading, he thinks, wry. He wears the right clothes and stands at his brother's shoulder and keeps his mouth shut and quietly makes sure everything runs.

That middle part is important.

But he can't change his nature entirely, and he wouldn't if he could. Aythr's his king, but Aythr also relies on him in ways he doesn't think Cai notices. Or maybe he does; his brother, Cai thinks, has always been stupid in very limited and selective ways that have more to do with being a good man than one without any brains

Part of him wants to keep quiet, because he saw how it was before, with Anna. And he likes Gwen, or did. Grudgingly, maybe, but she kept Aythr in line and pulled him out of the misery his first romance had put him through. Now this. If they were private people living private lives, he might have gone to Gwen, but they aren't, and he doesn't have the luxury.

So he clears part of Aythr's schedule, which is easier when he's in charge of it, and they find themselves alone in a car that Cai's carefully checked for bugs, with a ride that's long but not too long in front of them.

Cai's thoughtful, quiet, and doesn't speak right off.

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.

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!"

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.