Blood Will Tell (11 page)

Of course there were the gorgeous pink beef filets, but along with the steaks she concocted a rich side dish of delicate rosy-veined tubers with cream, accompanied by fresh-baked bread and a salad of various off-world fruits that she’d found in a back corner of one of the freezers. The wine cellars located just below the kitchens yielded all kinds of riches, but Miala had no real idea of what she was looking at or what would work best with the meal she had prepared. After scanning the various labels (those that she could read; several were in alien scripts), she stood there for a moment, irresolute, and finally grabbed two bottles: one red wine and one pale straw-colored one. Thorn could decide which kind he wanted—if he drank at all, she realized suddenly. Still, from what she had read and what she had seen on the various ’net programs, wine was usually expected with dinner, and she did not want to appear ignorant.

Mast of course had had no real use for a dining hall, but the compound had first been built by a group of Buddhist monks…before they figured out that the frontier world had very little use for such a peaceful philosophy…and so the old dining room was still there, more or less intact. The other kitchen drudges had mentioned that it was used every once in a while, if Mast had important enough visitors, but that had never happened during Miala’s tenure at the compound.

She wiped down the old polished travertine dining table and dusted off the rustic wooden chairs, then found an ancient pair of carved stone candlesticks and a box of candles in one of the kitchen cupboards, along with some faded but clean table linens. The candles intrigued her; she’d seen lighted candles once years before at a friend’s home as part of their holiday celebrations, but they were a rarity in Aldis Nova, an archaic tradition that even then Miala had found strangely charming. Now she thought they would add an elegant touch to the table.

Allowing herself once last quick glance around the kitchen to make sure everything was in hand, Miala then ducked out and hastened up the steps to the slave girls’ dormitory. It was almost 19:00, and she’d told Thorn she would call him on the handheld when dinner was ready, but she had one last thing to take care of. Off went the serviceable but now stained tunic and pants she had been wearing, and she drew out of the wardrobe an outfit she’d spied several days ago but hadn’t thought she ever have a reason to wear. Like Genna’s other pre-slave castoffs, it consisted of a fitted tunic over narrowly cut pants, but this one was of shimmering copper-colored fabric, embroidered in black and gold around the deeply cut neckline and side-slit hem. It was sleeveless, and in the trinket box the slave girls had shared Miala found a stack of gold-colored bangles, five for each wrist, and a pair of dangling earrings to finish off the look. The flat sandals she had been wearing all along would have to do.

Once she was done, Miala paused in front of the mirror in the dressing area and surveyed herself carefully. Thorn had obviously liked seeing her hair down, and she had to admit the effect was good, especially the way the long coppery-red strands blended into the silky fabric of the tunic. There were pots of cosmetics stacked neatly along the counter, but Miala didn’t really know what to do with them, and now was not the time to for experimentation. Instead she settled for giving her hair a few quick brush strokes before she turned away from the mirror and hurried back downstairs, all the while telling herself she was making a fuss over nothing. Thorn did not seem like the sort of man to be impressed by fancy clothes—far from it—but Miala told herself that it would be disrespectful to the meal she had prepared to sit down at table in the same disheveled garments she had been wearing. Let Eryk Thorn make of her appearance what he would.

The sun was low on the horizon when she returned to the dining room. Miala lifted the mechanized lighter she’d found in the kitchen to first one, then the other of the two candles she had set out on the table, and watched as the flickering light combined with the ruddy glow of the sunset to turn the chamber into a swirl of red and copper that reflected off the polished stone of the table and the faded frescoes on the walls. The color found an echo in her hair and the clothes she wore, and for a second she felt as if she were suspended in light, floating on the edge of another world. Then she blinked, and the impression was gone, though the room was still awash in copper-tinted hues.

She lifted the handheld. “Any time you’re ready,” she said.

Thorn’s voice came through immediately. “Got it.”

Miala set the handheld down on a sideboard and returned to the kitchen, where she transferred the food to its serving pieces and began moving it to the table. She’d already unstoppered the wine and set the red bottle in front of Eryk Thorn’s place setting and the pale yellow one in front of hers. The plates she had set out were old, old metal, probably left over from the monastery days as well. The monks had been ascetic to the extreme, but even they had had to eat—well, at least before one of Iradia’s crime lords decided their compound was the perfect place for his base of operations and came in and exterminated the lot. The oversized wine goblets were newer and bore all the signs of Mast’s trademark ostentation—glass bowls set into dark metal bases that looked like writhing serpents—but she hadn’t been able to find anything more appropriate and so had set them down on the table with a sigh.

“Expecting company?” Thorn asked, pausing at the entry to the dining chamber and eyeing the elaborate spread.

“Just you,” she replied, hoping the ruddy light that spilled in through the arched windows hid the flush in her cheeks.

He made no reply, instead taking in her elaborate costume with a slightly arched eyebrow. Then he gave an almost imperceptible shake of his head before moving to the chair at the head of the table and sitting down in it.

Miala gritted her teeth and told herself,
Count to ten
...
 

If that was how he was going to be, fine. She pulled out her own chair with a rough scrape of wood across stone and settled a napkin in her lap. “I thought it would be nice to celebrate my last night on Iradia,” she said evenly. “I’m sure planet-hopping is old news to you, but I’ve never been anywhere but here.”

After a quick survey of the table, Thorn nodded. “This looks about as good as anything I’ve had off-world.”

“Well—thank you.” Once again he had caught her off-guard with a compliment. To cover her confusion, Miala lifted the ruddy-hued bottle and asked, “Wine?”

“Normally, no, but—” He lifted his shoulders. “I suppose it couldn’t hurt.”

She poured him a glass, filling it only halfway. Those goblets were enormous, scaled apparently to Mast’s prodigious appetites; it would be far too easy to overindulge if one didn’t pay attention. After she did the same with her own goblet, she set the wine bottle back down, then noticed with some surprise that Thorn had lifted his glass and apparently was waiting for her to do the same.

“To Arlen Mast,” he said, a sly glint in his eyes, “without whom this feast would not be possible.”

“To Mast,” she echoed, unable to repress a smile.
 

Really, Thorn had the oddest sense of humor. She lifted the glass to her lips and drank, feeling the warmth of the heavy wine work its way down her throat. The sensation made her feel very adult and somewhat wicked. She’s only tasted wine once before, at an engagement reception for a school friend of hers, and it had been nothing like this. At the time she had thought wine rather sour and nasty, and certainly not worth the fuss. But this deep red vintage tasted of fruit and earth and an alien sun that made things grow instead of burning them into dust, and Miala thought she could definitely get used to it.

After that they were silent for a few moments as she loaded Thorn’s and her own plates with all the various foods she had spent the afternoon preparing, and they began to eat. It seemed years since she’d had a proper meal besides hastily scrounged bites. The drudges had never gotten that much to eat, and she had been careless about meals once she was on her own. Now the tender meat and carefully seasoned side dishes tasted like a little piece of heaven.

Thorn appreciated the meal as well, she could tell. She’d spent too many years feeding her father not to know when a man was enjoying his food. He ate efficiently and quickly, but not so rapidly that she couldn’t see him pause every once in a while to savor a bite.

“Computers and cooking,” he said at length, after taking a small sip of wine. “Any other hidden skills I should know about?”

“Not that I’m aware of,” Miala said, pleased that he seemed to be enjoying himself. “Although I should warn you that I play a mean hand of poker.”

“I don’t gamble,” he said flatly. “Waste of time.”

Lifting an eyebrow, Miala replied, “My father preferred to think of it as a game of skill. He found it an interesting way to teach me probability.”

“Mmm.” Thorn applied himself to another piece of filet.

“My father didn’t gamble,” she said, suddenly irritated by what she saw as a silent condemnation. “We liked to play cards together.”

He looked up from his food and gave her a slow, measuring stare. “Did I say anything?”

She had to admit that he hadn’t, really. What was it about him that always made her feel on the defensive? There was no way, after all, that Eryk Thorn could have known her father’s fascination with poker was one of the chief reasons they never had enough money to get off-planet. In silence she poured herself another half-glass of wine, trying to ignore Thorn’s pointed stare as she did so.

“So what about your father?” she asked finally.

“My father didn’t play poker, either.”

“Funny. I mean, what did he do?”

Was it her imagination, or did his jaw muscles tighten involuntarily, just for a second? It was hard to tell in the flickering light, but she noticed he lifted his own glass and took another drink before replying. “I have no idea. Besides spend money on whores, that is.”

Oh. She knew she’d hit a sore subject, but Miala couldn’t think of a good way to backpedal without sounding even more tone-deaf. “So you didn’t know your father?”

“No. I was born in a brothel on Mykiel V. Anything else you want to know?”

She shook her head, wishing she had just kept her mouth shut after all, and watched as he refilled his plate. The man definitely could eat when the opportunity presented itself, but she supposed that was just another survival tactic.
Might as well eat when the eating’s good
, she thought. She wondered who Eryk Thorn’s father had been, and from there tried to imagine what the mercenary must have looked like as a little boy and failed miserably. He was one of those people who seemed to have sprung full-grown into the universe.

The silence between them had grown tense with that one brittle sentence of his. Miala, at a loss but sensing she should say something, commented, “My mother took off when I was six months old, so I only knew one of my parents, too.”

She hadn’t expected sympathy, and she got none. Thorn speared another piece of filet, then chewed it carefully before saying, “That’s not always a bad thing.”

How in the world was she supposed to reply to that? Casually she lifted her wine goblet and made an off-hand gesture before taking a sip. “You never went looking for him?”

He lifted his shoulders, but the dark eyes watching her were careful, measuring, almost as if he had told her these things just to see how she reacted. “I didn’t see the point. Anyway, it turns out he died before I was even born.”

Miala considered his words. She’d always thought if she did get the chance to get off Iradia, then she would do what she could to find out what had happened to her mother. Whether she’d have the courage to confront the woman who had abandoned her so many years ago, she didn’t know, but somehow the notion of at least knowing whether her mother was alive or dead appealed to her.
 

For the first time she contemplated the notion of just letting it go, of getting on with her life. What difference would it make, after all? Even seeing her mother wouldn’t return all those years Miala had spent without her.

“I guess I can see why you’d feel that way,” she said, after a long pause.

He lifted his glass toward her, as if in salute. “Now you’re getting it.”

Was he mocking her, ever so slightly? Sometimes it was impossible to tell. However, she chose to believe he wasn’t, mostly because she had grown weary of feeling that she was a source of private amusement to him.

“Anyhow,” she went on, wondering whether it was between the ninth and tenth or fourteenth and fifteenth sips of wine that she had begun to feel a little dizzy, “what’s the plan after we leave Iradia?”

“I was going to ask you the same thing. You’re the one who wanted off-planet.”

I knew that
, Miala thought. “Right, then.” Frowning slightly, she gazed at Thorn, realized she was staring at his mouth, and shifted her glance so it appeared she was looking past his shoulder to the age-smudged fresco on the wall behind him. “So how much is my take, anyway?”

“Don’t know for sure. Probably five, six million.”

Blinking, Miala studied his face carefully to see if he was joking, then decided that he probably wasn’t. With a hand that shook just a little, she tore off a piece of bread and put it in her mouth, chewing thoughtfully. Five million units. With that she could go anywhere in the galaxy, do pretty much anything she wanted. But she knew what she should do, what her father would have wanted her to do.

“I need to go to a university. A good one,” she said finally.

He appeared nonplussed. “What for?”

Surprised, she looked at him for a moment, studying his features in the uncertain candlelight as she considered her reply. Going to a university—or maybe one of the GDF’s training academies—was the only ambition of anyone Miala had known who had the slightest bit of gumption. It was the only way to get off Iradia and earn some respectability at the same time. And her father had certainly drummed into her the necessity for a formal education. Her thoughts had run in that path for so long she had never considered any alternative, never believed there could be anything else for her. But obviously Thorn thought differently.