brand new colony

It's the first night he's spent with Gwenore in more than a month -- they've both been busy, particularly him, and it's been as hard to make time for her as to find a night he doesn't think she's already planned to spend with Lanse. So it's a relief, a pleasure he wasn't expecting. He makes love to her earnestly.

He's thrice grateful when the next morning finds him so dizzy he can hardly stand. Gwen is already up, her duties don't let her linger in bed with him, and he staggers to his feet, focusing hard to get into his clothes.

(It's not so bad but he wishes Marguel were more circumspect. It's hard enough defending her to Cai and Gwen and Lanse every month, swearing up and down that she won't let anything bad happen to him, that it'd be worse to do something about it. He's toyed with the idea that maybe she wants him to do something about it, maybe it's some kind of test, but he can't reconcile himself to punishing her, and maybe he's thinking of Anna, maybe he's just got something to atone for, but that's the way it is.)

He's not entirely sure what time it is, though he hopes it isn't too late. He could ring, he knows -- there's an emergency alarm next to his bed, the same one sewn into the lining of all his street clothes. But he feels strangely anxious, and instead of doing any of the sensible things he slips out of the room, sliding along the wall for support, until he gets to Lanse's room, where he rings the bell and then leans against the door, pressing his sweating forehead to the cool metal.

It's a long shot. Lanse should be out on the parade grounds by now. He concentrates on breathing slowly, trying to wrap his head around the idea of what he'll do if Lanse isn't there.

Lanselos has been out of Camallate for three weeks, seeing to the King's business in one of the little towns out past Bredigan -- a town that's growing somewhat faster than anyone expected it to, and which now needs a peace enforcement presence to ensure that what's orderly stays orderly. When he gets back, the first place he goes, as always, is to Arthur. The second is Gwen. And the following morning, he's up early to go find Galade.

The two of them get along easily enough, these days, but Lanse often feels a little guilty. His son should be more of a priority, but habits are hard to change, and he feels Gwen and Arthur's lack far more keenly than he misses Galade. Which is wrong, he guesses. So he sometimes over compensates; this morning is like that. He plans to take breakfast with his son, and then to see how Galade wants to spend the day. Maybe they can go to the range, or down into the city. Whatever Galade wants, Lanselos will try to give him.

It's well before the regular morning activity gets underway when Lanse knocks on the door of Galade's little room, just down the corridor from his own. He looks only a little sleep rumpled, and his easy smile is convincing enough.

Lanselos is just coming off the range; it's early evening, and he's had a full day, but his head is finally clear. Or close to it, anyway. He can't quite get Gwenore out of his thoughts.

It's only happened a few times, and he still thinks it will stop. It has to. No matter what he feels for her, or her for him, or what it's like when they're together. It has to stop, for a hundred reasons. And yet -- he's grinning, now, with just the faintest memory of it. He's never known anything like it; like her.

And a moment later, there comes the bolt of guilt. Lăotiān Yé, if Athyr knew, his heart would break. Lanse would lose everything -- his job would be the least of his worries. He can't stand to entertain the thought; he's suddenly gripped with the urge to make up for this, just a little. But... without saying anything.

He's up the courtyard stairs and into the Hall, still smiling at folks as he passes, on his way to Athyr's office. Lanse knows what he can give him. It's been a long time since they hung out, had drinks, goofing around like they used to. He knocks the way he always does, and makes sure he's grinning for real by the time the door opens.

The trial of Lamerok is a disaster.

He knows it very nearly from the beginning, from the moment Dr. Shea brings her husband into Camallate in stasis -- from before that, when he gets the wire from the Bredigan sheriff that Anna Lloyd is dead. But first he's too angry, and then he's too heartbroken, to stop and think, and he doesn't wait for evidence (it doesn't help that Gwalchmai's as angry as he is, in a different kind of way), he just tells the judge they'd damn well better find Lamerok guilty and get him shot as soon as possible. And the judge does as he's ordered by his king.

Two days later Gadriet's stable enough to pull out of stasis, and when he says he's the one who killed her and Athyr realises he's misjudged it that bad --

But they hush it up; Gwen and Lanse help him, like they always do, and even Bedwyr spreads a few unkind rumours among the barracks about Lamerok's conduct, which is a sacrifice Athyr never meant him to make.

In the aftermath, Athyr turns solitary. Between the way he all but murdered Lamerok, and the realisation that he's never going to see Anna again (as if some part of him really believed that if he just waited long enough he'd get the chance to apologise to her, to tell her he was a stupid boy and if he weren't married now, if he didn't love his wife, he'd beg her forgiveness, he'd tell the world Medraut is his son, his own beautiful child -- a thousand fanciful ideas that would never have happened even if she had lived), he doesn't feel fit for the court. He shuts himself in his office and keeps the door locked, and has meals sent up to him.

He can't bear the thought of talking to Gwen. It's as much a betrayal of her. Lanse is even worse, because he's always been honest with Lanse, but he can't be about this. He can't tell anyone. Five years ago he might have confided in Cai, but Cai is dead.

So he shuts himself up and tries to hide from all the responsibilities he owns as king, breathing out the sorrow gingerly: his lungs ache.

Everything aches.

After the long conference in his private office, Athyr heads for Lanselos' quarters; it's late enough that he knows Lanse will be in, and Gwen's got business elsewhere, so he doesn't need to worry about them being together.

He's still dressed in his official robe and tunic, all yellow silk that makes his slightly olive skin look sickly, and there's a pallor about him that worsens the effect. At the same time, the grim set of his mouth gives away that he's angry as much as he's worried. He stops in front of Lanse's door and knocks sharply.

"Lanse. Need to talk," he says through the door.

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."

She turns up in Lanselos' doorway the night before he leaves for Escalot, leaning there with her arms folded. Her fair hair is coming out of its pins, and the leather jacket -- Gwenore sticks stubbornly to offworld style -- hangs a little loosely on her shoulders; but there is nothing waifish in that steady look.

"Hey."

The first few days in Camallate, Galade wasn't sure he'd be happy. The capitol city is nothing like any place he'd ever been before in his life--tall, imposing buildings, the scores of people, and the rich market culture. The tight-knit freighting community with its house tattoos and coded language is secretive and undemonstrative. Everything in Camallate seems bigger and brighter and louder, and at first it was hard to imagine he'd ever feel comfortable.

And then the Voice sent him to the library.

Camallate's library is tiny and underfunded, squeezed into an old transport station a block from the Hall. Most of it's tapes for the consoles, either the entertainment kind that project holos or the kind that just spill text across a screen. But the bored librarian directed him to a side room full of real, genuine books, stacked into aging metal shelves, completely uncategorised, full of everything from manuals on animal husbandry to a text on obscure Chinese characters, and Galade is about as in love as he's ever been in his life. Best of all, though, there's the past.

His new project is mapping the history of the planet. There's enough here, both in paper and in tapes, to get a good start, and halfway through raiding the archives he found a series of recorded interviews with the first colonists to the planet. The librarian seems baffled by his fascination with the inventory, but willing enough to let him do what he wants. The Voice helps, keeping him company and giving advice.

Galade has always been grateful for the Voice, for telling him what God wants and for being his friend; he's not had many friends.

And the library has eased his passage into the city considerably. Almost every day he's there, copying and rerecording and making notes for his records. He's been diagramming battles, collecting inventories of products shipped in, keeping lists of the live births per hundred women, and the cattle farms, and as many details as he can find about the life of Vtere Liung.

It's a warm day outside, but Galade is in the side room with his things, working away steadily. He's humming an obscure hunting song Brinol taught him as a child, and tapping his brush against his shoe as he reads. The Voice is silent, but then some days it is. He's happy.

It's been a strange time in Camallate, particularly among King LeGuin's family and inner circle. Lanselos can't quite get his head around all of it, but it's enough to know that Athyr's grief over his sister's death is compounded by the complications of family and justice that surround it. For his part, Lanselos has be putting extra effort into both helping his friend cope with a situation that seems too big to really deal with and keeping up the external face of a government that's running as smoothly as can be expected, given the circumstances.

This afternoon, though, he needs to find his son -- he's planning to delegate some of his more administrative duties to Galade (scheduling, for one, which Lanselos has always found to be both dull and sort of infuriating). Hopefully, this will free up a little more of Lanselos' time while pleasing Galade with the kind of increased responsibility the boy seems to want.

The library seems to be one of the most likely places for Galade to be, and so Lanselos heads that way. He has a way of sort of just barging into a room, and given how preoccupied he is he's already talking as he enters -- assuming that the dark head bowed over a book must be Galade.

"Galade, kid, we got some stuff to go over." At which point he actually looks. And, that's not Galade.

When Amite's letter arrives, Lanselos has to read it four times over just to get it to make sense to him. It's not that it's badly written or somehow indecipherable -- it's that he can't really get his head around the thought that she's dead. And yet here she is, asking him to take on their son. The letter had been written ahead of time and then dispatched as a provision of her will. You could say a lot of things about Amite Brisen, and God knows he has, but the woman was organized.

The first thing he does is go hunt down someone who'll have been monitoring trade channels and news postings from Escalot, to confirm that this isn't a trick of some kind. (He feels bad about that, but it's her own damn doing, him thinking this way.) But it all checks out -- a hit on her convoy, the same sort of thing that brought him to her the first time, and Amite shot. He doesn't know how to feel about any of it.

Lanselos spends an afternoon locked in Athyr's study, sorting arrangements and getting his head right. (Kind of right, anyway. Athyr always has perspective Lanselos lacks.) Two days later, he's in Escalot, heading toward the Brisen compound to find his son.

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.

Athyr is down in the training grounds, cleaning his pistol, a lone figure sitting in the open space wearing the same clothes he's been wearing for three days now.

A part of him is saying he should have been expecting this all along. He couldn't just go on pretending that Lanse and Gwen were only good friends for the rest of his life. And part of him is saying it's his fault, it's his fault that Geffreyn and two of Gwalchmai's sons are dead and buried in one of Camallate's dusty cemeteries, because he wouldn't break down and admit it was going on himself.

And part of him is saying his heart is going to break from losing Lanselos, but it's the only thing he can do now if he really wants to prove Camallate isn't just built on nepotism, favouritism, and corruption, which God knows is getting to be popular opinion. Medraut hasn't done anything to calm those feelings, especially not since the farce that was Lamerok's trial.

Besides, the last part of him is furious. A little rutting discretion, just a little--Lanse had to have known he knew, but that's no gorram reason to get so careless even Geffreyn Lloyd could figure it out.

He's going to have to challenge Lanse. He knows how their skill compares, he knows he'll probably lose unless Lanselos feels sorry for him, wángbā that he is, but it doesn't matter, he's running out of options. He has to issue a statement to-day, and it's going to have to include a challenge.

Athyr closes his eyes and feels the sweat running down his back in the hot-grit sun.

It takes longer than he'd expected for the hazy numbness to wear off, which he blames on the drug and not on his mental state. Lanselos has never been much inclined to sitting around doing nothing -- even out in the black, at least you know you're moving, going somewhere, even when it doesn't feel like it -- and in the end, he's back on duty two days before Athyr had told him he had to be.

Not that that's going real well.

He goes and does his usual check-ins, runs a round of workouts that center largely on him punching the hell out of the sandbag (this goes on until the man-at-arms who logs the drills comes over and makes him stop, for fear he'll ruin the hand he's already injured). By the afternoon, he's in the armory, checking rifles. It's a place that makes him feel at home, useful. It's a place that makes him feel focused. And though he's usually the guy who is making conversation and checking in with everyone, he feels like keeping to himself.

He has managed to avoid Athyr so far, which he's sure is sending up red flags. He took dinner with Gwen last night, though not in the mess hall, and he's sure she's worried, but he has no idea what else to say to her. And he can't help but notice that by now most of folks he works with on a daily basis are giving him a pretty broad berth -- he wouldn't think it, but the fact is that he's a little scary when he's gone all quiet this way.

It's not until that evening that Gwenore finds a moment to go looking for Lanselos. She doesn't bother this time to change out of her everyday clothes, or take down her hair; just cuts down the corridor to his door at the end, and taps lightly: twice, three times.

"Hey, you."

That Athyr sends for Lanselos and not someone else is partly a conciliatory gesture--he wants Lanse to know he's forgiven for the fight in the mess. His intention is to talk to him for a little while before he sends him out, but as usual the combination of responsibilities and the need to reenter the Glamorgan negotiations steals most of his time.

All he really has the opportunity to do is to tell Lanselos, "I got word from Marguel that a freight convoy from Escalot went down early this morning. Gorram thing crashed and burned--I need you to get out there now and find out what happened, scout me any survivors, pick up any of the freight that's still worth takin' and chase off the scavengers, do whatever you can. You got the authority to take as many men as you need." He squeezes Lanselos' shoulder. "Thanks. Know you're the man for the job."

Then he finishes buttoning up the official jacket and disappears back into the negotiation room with a smile over his shoulder for Lanselos.

Lanselos is in a fine mood. So fine, in fact, that he's changed his usual plan for the day around to accommodate a lunch in the mess hall with everyone else -- he's in a mood to be around people. Then maybe after that, he'll take himself back down to the range and shoot things.

Once he's got his food, he heads for the first open spot he sees. Which just happens to be next to one of those Lloyds; sometimes, he can't keep a few of the nephews straight, he can admit. He swings into the seat & claps the other man on the shoulder, with a cheerful, "Hey there, man."

Lanselos has been out of Camallate for about a fortnight, on the King's Business. Which makes it sound so much more official than what it is, which is mostly making sure that folks see that their government is functional and busy, and picking up some parts & supplies while he's being visible. It's nothing special, really, but he does his best to make it look like it is. And if he has a few somewhat rowdy nights in backwater bars, then so much the better for him.

This trip, he's managed to avoid starting any trouble -- he's been known to jump into a bar fight or two -- and he's been successful in getting a few second-hand parts for the transports and generators, as well as a good lead on some potential livestock coming up for auction. But it's what he's got tucked away in his own pack, a gift for Gwenore, that's got him anxious to get home.

Once he's back, he gets the goods for Arthur squared away and most of the dirt out of his hair before he goes looking for the Queen.