The Price of Desire (The HouseOf Light And Shadow Book 1) Page 10

  The other thing that arrested her was how positive both women were. If this lunch had taken place on Solaris, the conversation would have turned almost immediately to what was wrong with men, women, and life in general. But Bilal and Parvati, who had more reason to complain than any two women she’d ever met, seemed as happy as clams.

  She finished lunch more confused—and worried—than ever.

  FOURTEEN

  Aria was storming back to her cabin when she walked straight into Kisten.

  She was furious over having had to endure such a wretched afternoon and doubly furious that her one place of refuge, her cabin, wasn’t even her cabin! After chatting with Bilal and Parvati—or, rather, letting them chat while she stared, poleaxed—she’d pled exhaustion and left before the lieutenant could return and claim her. Garja had hurried along behind, asking questions that Aria refused to answer. She simply didn’t have the energy. And where to begin? Garja, the poor thing, didn’t even know that slavery was wrong!

  Renewed in her belief that the Alliance was a bunch of soul-stealing drones, she resolved again to ignore Kisten—and might have kept that resolve, if she hadn’t run into him precisely when she did.

  Had she had time to calm down and think things over, she almost certainly would have succeeded in burying her rage underneath a layer of indifference as she’d done since childhood. Withdrawal had been her only protection against her mother’s wild, alcoholic tantrums and her father’s hesitant, apologetic fumbling and the constant assertion that there was nothing wrong. As a result there were few things, as an adult, that Aria couldn’t ignore if she had to. Indeed, she might never have told Kisten anything of her true feelings—and what then? She’d never learn the answer to that question, because this was one of those rare moments where, if she’d only known it, the course of a life hangs on a single decision.

  This is such a revolting place, she fumed, head down as she strode along, I have to escape. Shipboard life went on all around her, a cheerful chaos of laughing women and screaming children and harried-looking crewmen, but she might as well have been alone. In fact, so intent was she on going somewhere, anywhere to actually be alone that she didn’t see the obstruction in her path until she’d walked face first into his chest. Jumping back, she found herself staring at the dark blue wool of an officer’s uniform, broken only by buttons and braid.

  Looking up, she found herself staring at Kisten.

  He flashed her that strange, sardonic half smile. “We meet again.”

  Just seeing her face made her want to hit him, and all her resolutions were blown away by her sudden bolt of white-hot rage—and her need to make this insufferable man understand how horrible both he and his culture truly were. He, clearly, thought he was perfect and he had an answer for everything—or thought he did, the supercilious wretch! And it drove her insane! By what right did he—Oh!

  “Just when I thought that there might be some prayer,” she hissed, “that you were a decent human being!”

  His expression grew fixed. “I see,” was all he said. He turned to Garja, who’d taken refuge against the wall and looked to be on the verge of tears again. Useless, stupid chit, fumed Aria, on the verge of tears herself. “You’re dismissed,” he told her. Garja all but ran. He turned back to Aria, who was now somewhat regretting her outburst in the face of his glacial demeanor. “Come with me,” he said. “This is not the place for such a conversation.”

  “I don’t care,” she said in a small voice.

  His eyes hardened. “I do.”

  She followed him down what seemed like miles of corridors until they reached a small—and mercifully empty—observation lounge. An upholstered bench ran under the window and there was something like a conference table, lined with chairs. Aria guessed that this room was either reserved for senior staff meetings or was Kisten’s, to do with as he pleased.

  She’d expected some sort of outburst about the impropriety of dressing down the commander of a naval vessel in front of his own men, but he said nothing and his silence was even more eloquent. He watched her, expression unreadable. She wondered if, now that she had the opportunity, she had the courage to continue. She didn’t want to discuss things politely; she wanted to rage at him, tell him how much she despised everything about him and—and then leave.

  While she vacillated, she returned his stare. Alliance naval uniforms were very different from what she was used to—in fact all the clothing seemed to be, including what had been found for her. She’d never worn dresses much, before, and the few she’d owned had covered little more than the average bandage. All the women aboard Atropos, however, seemed to be wearing various versions of the same modest, feminine garb.

  Kisten was wearing a high-collared, long sleeved jacket that fitted tightly through the shoulders and chest and flared out slightly just below the waist, hitting him just above the knee. His collar bore the gold stars of a naval commander and his epaulettes bore the corresponding stars. It was trimmed with gold braid. His pants were the same dark blue wool.

  He obviously took great care of his appearance: his short hair was recently cut, his nails were perfectly manicured and his boots had been polished to a mirror shine. And for reasons that Aria couldn’t even begin to fathom and would prefer not to explore, this made her hate him. She had to tilt her head back to meet his eyes and that bothered her, too. She’d been a pale, undersized child who’d grown into someone people described, to her chagrin, as elfin. But there was nothing small or fine-boned about Kisten, and he was tall by almost any standard. He towered over her, silent and intimidating.

  “Please,” he said in his cultured, emotionless voice, “do continue.” Although his tone was deceptively calm, she could tell that Kisten was furious. It was in the tightness around his eyes, and how they glittered as they searched hers.

  Suddenly losing her nerve, she began to sob. Her own reaction took her utterly by surprise. She buried her head in her hands, wanting that cold-eyed goblin to disappear. That he was here, witnessing her weakness yet again was beyond intolerable. What must he think of her? And why did she care? She didn’t care! Or if she did, she only did so, because he was so insufferable someone needed to put him in his place and no one ever would and he certainly wouldn’t listen to some wailing ninny….

  She felt his arms around her, and then her nose was pressed into his coat.

  “I hate you,” she said, still sobbing.

  “I know.” There was an odd note in his voice. He stroked her hair.

  She hadn’t even been conscious of the sharp, constricting pain in her heart until it eased. In its place was a different, even more bewildering kind of pain that she didn’t know how to analyze. He smelled of sandalwood, and wool, and something that was just him, and his arms were warm. The temptation to just stay there was overwhelming, and that realization brought her back to reality. What was she doing?

  Stiffening, she placed her small hands on his chest and pushed back. After a minute, he let her go. She felt confused and flustered and now even angrier because she was feeling something that she didn’t want to feel and, moreover, knew was an illusion—had to be. The product of stress, loneliness and depression over an inescapable situation.

  He touched her shoulder and she flinched. “Please,” he said, his tone surprisingly gentle. “Sit down. You’re unwell.”

  He led her to the window seat and left her there. A few minutes later he returned with a glass of water and, handing it to her, sat down beside her. Her thirst outweighing her principles, she drank.

  “Now,” he continued, “tell me what’s wrong.”

  To her horror, she did. Years of her parents’ unpredictable rages had schooled Aria to keep her own counsel; it was safer to be invisible than to risk making herself a target by having the wrong opinion, or by expressing a need that no one wished to fill. She’d grown up hearing that she was obnoxious if she had an idea of her own, lecturing if she wanted to share her excitement over some favorite subject, and purposefully c
ruel if she chose to do her homework rather than cook and clean for a mother who was too bad of a drunk to do either.

  But she’d been pushed too hard, for too long, and she had to let off steam or she’d explode. The discovery that fidelity played no role in Alliance culture—that men were expected to be with, and even own multiple women—seemed somehow like a personal betrayal. Did no one love anyone on Brontes? Or anywhere else in the Alliance?

  Kisten handed her a handkerchief, a curiously quaint gesture that brought back a stab of her old annoyance. “Not all men are like your father,” he said quietly.

  Aria thought of her former fiancé and said nothing. There was a time when she’d believed that, too. She forced herself to meet those astonishing violet eyes. “How many women do you own?” she asked, tone accusing.

  He laughed. The wretched man laughed. “None,” said. “I don’t have time.”

  “You don’t have time to subjugate women? How noble of you!”

  That speculative expression had returned. “Aria,” he asked, “how old are you?”

  “I just turned twenty-one,” she replied, with as much dignity as she could muster.

  “You’re very young.”

  “You’re very condescending,” she countered. “I suppose you’re ancient.”

  “When I was your age, I was fighting in a war.”

  “Well bully for you!” The words left her mouth before she could stop them, and she clapped her hand over her mouth. This man had her completely within his power and he was not her friend. She shouldn’t do anything to provoke him. Except, she couldn’t seem to help herself. No one else had ever had such an effect on her, and she was wholly unprepared for the rage, hurt and confusion—and fear—she felt every time she talked to him. Or even thought about him.

  He smiled slightly. “Indeed.”

  “I…didn’t mean to be rude,” she said lamely. And then, “tell me about it?”

  He did. She was drawn in despite herself, fascinated by this window into an alien world. War, Kisten explained, had been on the horizon for decades: a looming specter that those in power did their best to ignore. Charon II had always been a restive colony, never quite adapting to Alliance rule with the same success as her sister planets: Charon and Charon III. Complete disregard on the part of the Alliance for their religious beliefs had only exacerbated the tensions between the native people and their overlords. Many, of course, got along fine and there had been a great deal of intermarriage in the hundred or so years since Charon III had been brought into the empire. But growing political and social tensions at home had translated into increasingly rigid rule abroad—and insistence on conversion.

  Kisten himself hadn’t agreed with the new policies or with the fact that those sent to enforce them were for the most part incompetent to do so. Promotion within the civil service had been—and still was—based on seniority rather than on merit, which meant that a great many of those in power were simply too old. They’d been made responsible for situations that they couldn’t—or wouldn’t—understand. Some were incompetent and others were senile, but all were from the best families. Which, in the eyes of men like the crown prince, Kisten’s Uncle Karan, was sufficient. And although Kisten himself had seen the danger, along with others, by the time he’d entered the Imperial Naval Academy at Mirzapur war had become inevitable.

  Owing to initial heavy losses and a shortage of officers, he was graduated early in his third year and sent to serve aboard the Predator-class starship Defiant as a junior sub-lieutenant. Within the space of four years he’d been promoted to first lieutenant aboard the Callisto, another Predator-class starship, serving as its second in command. Before his twenty-ninth birthday, he’d seen two of his best friends die: one in space, after a near-catastrophic hull breach and the other in his arms after having taken several direct hits while covering the retreat of a group of colonists.

  Women and children, he told Aria bitterly, who’d made themselves targets for the Rebel Coalition by having the misfortune to live on the planet. All over Charon II, both the home-grown rebels and their adopted allies had fallen on the cantonments like packs of hyenas. Thousands more civilians were killed trying to escape. The native Charonites who’d sheltered these miserable, starving people—and there were many—were dragged out into the streets and shot as collaborators.

  Native and Alliance-born alike had fought against the mutineers and then, later, the men who’d joined them. Even those sympathetic to their cause were revolted by the atrocities the rebels committed. Many from the Home Worlds had come to view Charon II as their home; their children had never lived anywhere else, and couldn’t understand the sudden hatred and distrust of a people they’d grown up believing were their own.

  The Rebel Coalition knew, even if the Charonites did not, that there could be no victory against the Alliance. Hundreds of thousands of people died for no purpose as, having gotten what they came for, the Rebel Coalition quietly withdrew and left their so-called “brothers” to their fate. They’d plundered the planet while both sides’ backs were turned, stealing everything from plasma cannons to iron ore to women and children who could be sold as slaves. The Rebel Coalition, Kisten told her, was no more high-minded than any other group of thugs; its operatives used terms like freedom to lure people in and manipulate them.

  “I never knew,” said Aria softly. In school, she’d been taught that the rebels were heroes.

  “I was captured and imprisoned for a time,” he said.

  “That sounds awful.” She felt a pang of unexpected sympathy, which she pushed down ruthlessly.

  “Yes,” he said shortly. “After I returned to Brontes, I was sent to Goliath V.” He didn’t elaborate, and she let the subject drop.

  “I’m sorry about your friends.” The platitude sounded painfully inadequate in her own ears.

  They sat there, not speaking, and it occurred to her that she’d never thought about him as a real person before—someone who’d loved and been loved in return, and who’d lost, and who’d fought for what he believed in and been afraid. She didn’t know how one minute she’d been castigating him for his people’s treatment of women and then literally in the next breath they’d been sharing their life stories, but now that she knew more about him she found it harder to hate him.

  She still didn’t like him, she’d never like him, but he’d become real to her in a way that he hadn’t been before. She wasn’t sure when, exactly the transformation had occurred, only that at some point during their conversation the pasteboard cutout had been replaced with a man. And his eyes weren’t really all that strange, she decided. In the low light, they looked almost exactly like her own.

  “I think we’ve been talking at cross purposes,” he said finally.

  “Maybe,” she allowed, although she wasn’t entirely sure what he meant. Turning, she looked out at the stars. From behind the window, space looked so peaceful—not like the death trap it was.

  “I had a rather trying interview this afternoon,” he told her, “with a man whom I loathe; and before that, I played nursemaid to colonists. The reason I’m still upright and in uniform instead of passed out on the nearest horizontal surface is that I’d hoped to ask you to dinner.”

  The comment caught her completely by surprise and she turned, meeting his eyes. He was smiling that crooked half-smile, as if he realized how ridiculous the whole thing sounded.

  She hesitated, unsure of what to do.

  “You have to eat,” he pointed out. “Would it hurt so much to have me there?”

  FIFTEEN

  They shared a table in the officer’s mess, which was almost deserted.

  It was a beautiful space, even more luxuriously appointed than the rest of the ship. A row of beautiful old-fashioned windows lined one long wall. Stretching from the carpeted floor almost to the high ceiling, they looked exactly like the kind of windows that one might find in any exclusive club or stately private home; except for the fact that they looked out onto space. Custo
m drapes curved over beautiful Palladian arches, and the walls were paneled in some sort of dark wood that had been polished to a lustrous sheen.

  “Trust me,” said Kisten, gesturing, “we didn’t have this aboard the Nemesis.”

  He was referring, of course, to his old command. He was the only man she’d ever met who seemed nostalgic for cold showers, spoiled stores, and all the other privations of life in the navy. During the time they’d been talking, two courses had come and gone. She’d eaten mechanically, without particularly noticing what was on her plate.

  She looked up at the elegant, understated chandeliers. “It’s quite something.”

  “It’s my father’s ship,” he told her. “I’m just on it.”

  The far wall had been painted with a frieze obviously depicting some scene from myth, but one she didn’t know. The carpet featured an intricate geometric pattern, all in muted tones. She felt the weight of his gaze as she glanced around. It disconcerted her. “You know all these things about me,” she said, “but I know nothing about you.”

  “What would you like to know?”

  She flushed, embarrassed at having shown interest. But it seemed wrong for him to possess so much intimate knowledge about her when all she knew about him was what he’d told her earlier that evening. Maybe if they evened the scales a bit, she’d feel less powerless and could think of a way to convince him to let her go. “What about your family?” she asked. “Your parents…?”

  She couldn’t even begin to imagine what sort of family structure he might have or even what the possibilities might be; marriage clearly didn’t mean the same thing to them that it meant on Solaris.

  “My parents,” he began, sipping his cocktail, “have been married for almost thirty-three years. My mother grew up on Goliath V, a mining planet even less desirable than Tarsonis. Her father, a notoriously eccentric academic, was stationed there as he was, at the time, conducting research for the civil service. My father met her while he was on a state visit with his father, and they had something of a whirlwind romance. He was quite a bit older, and her family was scandalized. And as that state of affairs appeared unlikely to change, they eloped.”