Desert World Rebirth (10 page)

“I know how much you want this farm to be a success.” Temar had a tight rein on his emotions, so that when he looked up at her, Shan couldn’t even tell what he was thinking.

“And it can be. I can—”

“No.” Temar stood. “No, let me talk.” Cyla rolled her eyes, but she fell silent. Maybe she was starting to understand that she didn’t have the power here.

“I love you, and I know how much it would kill you to ruin this farm.”

Her mouth came open, and Temar held up a hand to stop her from interrupting.

“And if you keep fighting Naite, you
will
ruin the farm. He knows what it takes to make one profitable, and he’s the one I picked to manage the farm. So, either you will start treating him like the farm manager, a man who has the right to say what happens—”

“But,” Cyla said, and Temar raised his voice without losing the reasonable tone.

“Or I will hire you an apprenticeship somewhere far, far away and ban you from this land.”

Cyla lost all color from her face in one heartbeat’s time. “You wouldn’t,” she said softly, but she sounded scared now. Shan could see Temar flinched from the pain, but he had to give the man credit for pressing forward.

“I would. I would rather have you angry with me forever than watch you destroy this farm and then live with the guilt and shame of that. Our family doesn’t deal with grief well, and you don’t deal with failure well,” Temar said firmly. He drew himself up straight and looked at her. “One more example of you disrespecting Naite or trying to make decisions for the farm, and you will be out. You will not be allowed back here until you’re trained as a skilled worker.” Without waiting for agreement, Temar turned and hurried out of the house.

Shan was left alone, Cyla staring at him as if he’d had some part in this. She might be a hellcat, but right now her pain was so close to the surface Shan could see it. If he were still a priest, he knew how he’d start the conversation. As Temar’s lover, he wasn’t sure what to say. He wasn’t a neutral party in all this, and part of him wanted to take this moment when her defenses were down to yell at her for making Temar’s life more difficult. Rather than do that, he turned and followed Temar back out into the midday sun.

It took him a second to find Temar where he stood in the shade of the barn, watching the fields. The workers had vanished. At noon, even the screens that covered the valley and caught the dew offered only minimal protection, so they were probably doing indoor chores. Either that, or they’d all decided to give Temar some privacy for that fight. Of course, on a farm, privacy was relative. Most of them had probably stayed close enough to hear at least part of the fight. They’d want to know if Temar planned to back down to Cyla. If he had, they probably would have gone out looking for other jobs.

Shan covered the distance between them, pulling off his sand veil and wiping the sweat from his neck. “You handled that well,” he offered.

“I think I’m going to throw up.” Temar leaned against the bleached white wood of the barn, his eyes closed and sweat gathering along his nose.

“You gave her a choice, and you did it without being cruel.” That last part wasn’t entirely true, but Temar had gone out of his way to avoid being intentionally cruel, and Shan was impressed. He’d never handled his brother that well, that was for sure. Considering how he and Naite had treated each other when they’d been on the council together, Shan was surprised the other council members hadn’t killed them both.

“I don’t want to send her away,” Temar whispered. He really was a ghastly shade of white.

“Will you?”

Temar opened his eyes and looked at Shan, misery etched into his face. “Yes.”

Shan nodded and looked around at the farm with its neat rows of potato plants and solid buildings. “Good, because you’re right that she’s going to hate herself if she ruins all this,” Shan said.

“Well, hopefully she’ll see that eventually, because right now, she hates me.”

“At least she’ll have something new to obsess about for a while.” Shan waited until Temar looked at him with a confused frown. “She can try and come up with ways to make money off the crazy people from space.” Shan pointed up toward the sky.

“Oh God.” Temar thunked his head back against the barn and closed his eyes. “Can you believe I actually forgot that for a few minutes?”

“Yeah, I can.” Shan watched as the barn door opened and Naite stood there. He looked pretty damn self-satisfied, which meant he’d probably eavesdropped on the whole conversation. Shan bit down on an urge to say something very cutting about Naite’s morals. The problem was, Naite wouldn’t give a damn what Shan thought, so it wasn’t worth saying.

“Are you two going to stand out in the heat like idiots?” he asked.

Temar rolled his head to the side and looked at Naite wearily. “I was thinking about it. I was also thinking of vomiting.”

Naite snorted. “Get your asses in here. Idiots.” He disappeared inside, the barn door thunking shut behind him.

“Naite will have the fans going in there,” Shan offered. It really was miserably hot, and the heat wouldn’t start breaking for a couple of hours. Of course, on the open desert, it wouldn’t really break until sundown, but at least the ride to Landing was a short one from here.

“Fine. I guess I can throw up in there as well as out here,” Temar said. He pushed away from the barn, and his hand came up and caught Shan’s shoulder as he steadied himself.

“You okay?”

“Not really. I’m not even sure I’m joking about throwing up.”

“But you followed through and did the right thing,” Shan pointed out. “So if you have to throw up, remember that.”

“Great,” Temar said dryly before he headed for the barn door. Shan followed, his hand coming down to rest on Temar’s back. Temar smiled at him.

“So,” Shan said as he pushed the door open. The fans moved the air quickly enough to give an illusion of cool, but Shan could still feel the sweat gathering along his spine. “Guess who we talked to today?” he said to Naite.

Temar lost his balance and stumbled a bit as he gave a rough laugh that sounded almost like he was choking. Shan got a hand under Temar’s arm to make sure he didn’t fall.

“What the hell is wrong with you two?” Naite demanded.

“Oh, you’re not even going to believe this one,” Shan said. This was going to be one hell of a story, and as a council member, Naite was going to get a chance to call Shan all kinds of an idiot for stepping in this pipe trap. “It all started when Temar asked about the war,” he started the story, wondering how many times he was going to have to tell it.

Chapter 9

LILIAN sat with her hands steepled in front of her, but Shan had never seen her look so utterly shocked. Kevin and Bari had both pushed back their chairs, their faces utterly devoid of emotion, and Dee’eta Sun clutched the edge of the table as though she needed to hang on to something. Shan had expected Div to represent the church, but the new priest who’d trained at White Hills sat in Div’s place, her mouth literally hanging open. She was a heavy woman with a large belly and more years than a newly trained apprentice usually had. Shan had heard rumors that she came to the priesthood after losing her two children to a cave-in in one of the local caverns, where they’d been playing. The kids over at White Hills had deep, cool caves to explore, and it wasn’t all that unusual a story for the town.

“Twenty years,” she asked, her voice squeaking, and Shan wished her could remember her name.

“So many years of rationing and fights over water, and they’ve been finished with their war for twenty years.” Kevin slammed his hand down on the table so hard that the sound echoed off the metal walls of the council room. Lurching up out of his chair, he turned his back on the group and stood looking out the same window Shan had once looked out, when the group had debated enslaving Temar. It felt like another lifetime.

“Lilian, you should go,” Shan offered. “I’ll use the communications station to introduce you to the commander.” If anyone could handle recalcitrant alliances, Lilian could. However, she shook her head before Shan even finished.

“No, I won’t go,” she said firmly.

“You would be the best choice,” Bari pointed out. “All the towns and valleys respect how much you’ve done to help negotiate peaceful solutions in some tricky cases.”

“No, Bari. I’m too old to even properly run a farm,” she said with a wave of her hand. “If my children have to take over my farm chores, I’m certainly not strong enough to go running off to space. We need to send someone, but it won’t be me.”

“You’re no older than I am,” Kevin disagreed, turning around to pin Lilian with a hard look.

“And you’re old,” she snapped right back. “Stars above, Kevin, our grandchildren are old enough to have children. I would have retired from the council a long time ago, but I enjoy intimidating the local idiots.” She sighed and rubbed her eyes, a gesture that Shan had never seen the woman use.

“Which is why you’re the best choice,” Kevin insisted.

Lilian shook her head. “Ten years ago, maybe. But I don’t know that I’d survive the pressures of the travel, and if I go up there, they’ll have leverage to hold over me.”

“Leverage?” Bari jumped on the word.

Lilian looked around the room, and Shan leaned forward, not sure what was wrong, but something was. Of all the people in the room, only the new priest didn’t look worried, but then she hadn’t known Lilian as long as the rest of them. She wouldn’t recognize that this was the sort of verbal tap dancing Lilian did before dropping some verbal bomb into their midst.

“Leverage,” Lilian said firmly. “Frankle says I have a few months to live, but there are hard growths inside me. I’m dying, and I won’t go up there and have them hold out some miracle if only I make a bad trade for my world.”

Shan stopped breathing. For one instant, it felt like the world itself had stopped spinning for Lilian. He’d been so sure she would go up there and she’d fix all of this, force someone to finish the terraforming contract. Dying. Lilian Freeland dying.

“Oh, stop looking at me like I’m going to drop dead in the next two minutes,” she barked at all of them. “I have months, maybe a year, and given the mess up there in the universe, it sounds like I’ve had a longer and better life here than I would have if I’d been born to those idiots up there.” She gave a dramatic roll of her eyes. “But that means we need to send someone else to negotiate for us, and I vote to send Shan.”

For the second time, the world seemed to pause as Shan blinked in shock.

Naite didn’t hide his skepticism. “Shan?” he asked.

Lilian pinned Naite with a sharp gaze. “He’s not strongly tied to any group: landowners, skilled workers, unskilled workers, child raisers, artists. He’s not even aligned with the church anymore, so that will minimize the accusations that he negotiated for one group over another,” Lilian said firmly, and even if she was dying, her tone made it clear she still intended on insisting that the council do what she wanted. She had a force of personality that had always made others look to her, and Shan couldn’t compete with that. Without her to negotiate, his view of the future had dimmed considerably.

“Lilian,” he said, gathering his words carefully, “you yourself once commented that you wished there was another representative from the church to take my place on the council. I’m not a negotiator or a statesman, so I don’t think I’m the best choice for sending up there.” Shan didn’t add that he wasn’t sure he wanted to go up there.

“Because you lose all logic when you’re within six feet of your brother,” Lilian said with another sharp look over in Naite’s direction.

“Don’t blame me. He’s always illogical,” Naite said. Considering that this was the man Shan had trusted with his life, with Temar’s life, their relationship clearly hadn’t improved all that much.

“Only when he’s around you,” Lilian said wearily. “Bari, what do you think?”

Bari blinked at Lilian for a second, clearly not willing to jump into the debate this quickly, but he swallowed and gave a short nod before answering. “I think he has as good a chance as any of us. I don’t expect anyone up there has a whole lot of respect for us, so winning any sort of negotiations won’t be easy.”

Dee’eta spoke up. “They colonized this planet because they needed high-quality glass. I’ll get samples together, both the best glasswork, and the purest. If they want circuit-quality glass, they have to know that we have it. We have so much of it that we make drinking glasses out of it.”

“But we don’t,” Temar said. Shan didn’t know enough about glassblowing to understand the conversation, so he looked to Temar with a questioning expression. “Glass that pure takes sustained heat that is very hard to maintain. No one makes a simple drinking glass after putting in that much effort,” Temar explained.

“I will,” Dee’eta said. “If they want to know what we have to trade, they’re going to find out,” she added firmly. “But if you can negotiate for a high capacity and regulated solar smelter, it would make any future circuit quality glass a lot easier to produce,” she admitted.

“Shan knows the computer systems better than anyone,” Kevin added. He looked over. “Face it, if any of us go up there, we’re likely to make ourselves look like idiots because we don’t know how to open a door or use their slosh stalls. You’ve had months at the relay to get used to the tech.”