For Darkness Shows the Stars (13 page)

“I
S
R
O YOUR HANDMAIDEN
?” Felicia asked as Elliot caught her breath.

But she was spared from answering, as Horatio laughed. “More like her assistant. Elliot’s always working with the plants, and Ro’s a gardener herself. She’s pretty good, too, for someone Reduced.”

“Intriguing.”

“Ro and I are precisely the same age,” Elliot said, forcing herself to pay attention to the conversation instead of the massive sinkhole that had just opened in her heart. “I’ve always felt a certain degree of protectiveness over her for that reason. And yes, she is very good with flowers.”

“But Captain Wentforth really gave her that scarf?” Olivia asked in disbelief. “It’s silk—it must be.” She held out her hand toward Ro. “Let me see your scarf, girl.”

Ro put a hesitant hand to her head, and looked to Elliot for assistance.

“It’s okay, Ro. She’ll give it back.”

Ro pulled the scarf from her hair and handed it over.

“Why would he do that?” Olivia asked. “Real silk? Just handing it to some laborer?”

“You forget he’s a Post, Olivia,” said Elliot, though not as unkindly as she wished to. It wasn’t Olivia’s fault. She was a sweet girl. Kai no longer loved Elliot. She’d known that for weeks. For years, if she was completely honest with herself. “You see some laborer. He sees someone who could be his sister.”

For years, Ro had practically
been
his sister. Elliot had been something even more. But it was all over now.

“True,” Olivia replied, letting the material slide through her fingers. “But still . . . silk. I don’t own anything in silk.” There was no need for her to say anything more. Captain Wentforth hadn’t given
her
anything in silk. Elliot hated the small thrill of triumph she felt when she realized that.

And thinking this conversation had gone on long enough, she took back the scarf. “Come here, Ro. I’ll braid your hair.” Ro slid into place, and Elliot began the tedious process of finger-combing her tangled red locks.

Around them, the light began to fade, and Felicia asked Olivia if she intended to sing that evening.

Olivia blushed prettily. “I’d be quite outdone by Donovan.”

“Yes. He has a beautiful voice,” Felicia said softly.

“That’s an understatement,” Horatio said. “It’s unearthly. I’ve never heard anything like it.”

Felicia looked a bit uneasy. “It’s something truly special. I just wish he’d choose a different subject.”

Olivia’s expression turned grave to match her host’s. “Perhaps you’d accompany me to the cider kegs, Mrs. Innovation? I think I might be persuaded to sing if I can get something to drink.”

“Thank you, dear,” said Felicia. “We both seem to have lost our escorts this evening.”

“And what am I?” asked Horatio with a chuckle.

“My chaperone,” Olivia said and stuck her tongue out at him. Elliot concentrated very hard on Ro’s braid.

“Let us all go get some food and drink before the concert starts,” said Felicia. “Perhaps I can even track down my husband. Elliot, can we bring you and Ro anything?”

“Cider for me, and cider and soup for Ro, please,” Elliot said, and the Groves and Felicia departed toward the buffet tables.

Ro would love the idea of another special meal so soon. The Norths had never withheld food from their Reduced as some other Luddite lords did, but they only got special meals three times a year—midsummer, midwinter, and harvest. Elliot remembered their feast days as they’d been when her mother had been alive—they’d decorated and everyone had cooked for days. The Reduced had gorged themselves on sweets and pies and food they never saw the rest of the year. They’d burned lanterns and bonfires, and everyone had slept late and ignored their chores the following day.

Since the bad time, the feast days had turned into perfunctory affairs—the Reduced were given extra food, but with none of the pomp and circumstance that had come before. Their most recent harvest feast had been more lavish than others, given the Fleet money, but Elliot still hadn’t had the courage to include more than extra food and a few meager decorations. The bad time was too recent a memory to risk it, even with her father out of town.

At least this party was thrown by the Cloud Fleet on the Boatwright estate. It would be difficult for her father to find fault with it here.

“There,” she said to Ro, tying the scarf in a knot around the end of her braid. “Done.”

Ro tossed her head, admiring the part of the braid she could see, then scampered off to show her new hair to some of the North Posts who’d been gathering on the blankets nearby. Elliot laughed, watching her descend upon Dee and Jef.

“Pretty girl,” said a voice from above. Elliot looked up to see Andromeda balancing some mugs and bowls. “Is she your pet?”

“No,” Elliot snapped. “She’s not my pet, and she’s not my handmaiden, either. Ro is my friend.”

“I find that difficult to believe,” Andromeda said, kneeling beside her and handing over her food. “I’ve been sent by Felicia to bring you dinner.”

If Andromeda hated her so much, why did she always come around? At least Kai had the decency to avoid her. “I don’t care how difficult you find it to believe, Miss Phoenix. It’s the truth.” She shut her mouth before everything else she wanted to say came pouring out. That Kai could vouch for Elliot, that Andromeda should not assume all Luddites were the same—was she so unfair to the Groves?—and that regardless of either, it was none of her business. Ro and Elliot’s relationship belonged to no one but them.

Andromeda regarded her for a long moment, staring until Elliot was forced to turn away from the penetrating look in the Post’s crystal blue eyes. “Do you think it’s dangerous for us to give a concert on your lands, Miss Elliot? I know what your family likes to do to musical instruments.”

Another line of attack, because she wasn’t getting so far with her first? “You rent this land,” Elliot said. “You may do as you wish.” She turned her attention to her cider. If Andromeda Phoenix was determined to be rude, she would steal a card from Kai’s playbook and ignore her presence.

But Andromeda made no move to leave, and the others did not return to the cushions. As the night turned cold and violet around them, the musicians began to play a slow, mournful melody underscored by a drum that sounded like a beating heart.

“Oh no,” Andromeda said softly. She looked about the crowd. “Do you see Felicia anywhere?”

Elliot shook her head.

“There’s no talking to him,” Andromeda went on. “He insists on singing it, even when she’s here to listen . . .”

“Who?” But Elliot needn’t have asked, as Donovan climbed the porch steps and began to sing.

My eyes open to the sun

The brightness of a brand new world

The wave of our tomorrow breaks

Beneath our ships, our sails unfurled.

And yet a streak of darkness

Swirls throughout this cloudless dawn

And even my eyes cannot see

Into the place where you have gone.

So I don’t want to see anything now

Not the sun or the sky or the distant shore

I don’t want to see anything new

Because I can’t see you anymore.

Your sightless eyes could always see

To distances I could not reach

Without you I am truly blind

You’ve fled to shores I cannot breach.

You were the lantern in my heart

You were the first star in my sky

As far as I could ever roam

You were the light that showed me home.

And I don’t want to see anything now

I am lost inside our yesterday

I don’t want to see anything new

Now that you are gone away.

A
HUSH FELL OVER
the crowd as Donovan’s deep, clear voice faded into the gathering darkness. Elliot surveyed the lawn. Even Ro, still engaged with a few of the North Posts, looked subdued. She’d never heard a voice like that in her life. His lyrics might break your heart, but it was the pain evident in every note he sang that would grind all the shards into irredeemable dust.

Elliot turned to Andromeda in shock and under-standing. Now she knew why Donovan had been so cowed by Felicia’s lecture in the sanctuary. “He’s singing about Felicia’s daughter, isn’t he?”

Andromeda sighed. “Yes. Sophia Innovation died six months ago. She was sixteen. It has been hard on the admiral and on Felicia, but most of all on my brother.”

That much was clear to every person in attendance. Donovan walked off the porch steps, and nearby Elliot caught sight of Horatio wildly gesturing to his sister, who looked near tears. Eventually Olivia took the stage and began to sing an old folk tune. The spell over the attendees broke at the more familiar sound, and a few even began to clap along.

“I am so sorry for their loss,” Elliot said to Andromeda.

“All our loss. Sophia was . . . special. I don’t expect you can imagine it.”

No, Elliot was sure Andromeda wouldn’t expect that.

“She was the first free Post I’d ever met,” said Andromeda.

“You must have known her a long time.”

“Three years,” Andromeda said, shrugging. “When the Fleet was formed. She was the embodiment of everything we all wanted. She was the future. We all knew it. We all loved her.”

“I
can
imagine that,” Elliot said.

But Andromeda did not, for once, rise to the bait. “If you want to know why Felicia is always so motherly, now you do. She can’t turn it off for anyone—not even—”

“Not even me?” Elliot finished, unable to keep her tone from turning snide. She could no longer bear the older girl’s casual cruelty. Though her primary objective when visiting the Boatwright estate was avoiding Kai, she was going to have to start steering clear of Andromeda as well.

“Not even you,” Andromeda said. “Motherless you, poor little rich girl you, the Luddite who gets her hands dirty in the mud, who plays at farming while she allows her family to let the farm burn—”

“Miss Phoenix,” said Elliot, “I think you are done assuming you understand anything about my life, no matter what you may have been told.” If she was done putting up with abuse from Kai, there was no way she’d accept it from Andromeda. “In return, I will not assume that I can guess what it is you have against me.”

“You know one at least.”

“That I’m a Luddite?”

“No. That you betrayed him when he needed you most.”

Elliot lifted her chin. No one, least of all this girl, would know what it had cost her. “Yes, I did. It was either him, or everyone else I knew.”

Andromeda opened her mouth, then shut it again and stared very intently at Elliot. Even in the gloom of twilight, her eyes seemed more intense, as if she could see through Elliot’s skin and divine the inner workings of her brain.

But Elliot had had enough. “If you can’t be civil to me, Miss Phoenix, I wish you’d leave me in peace. I have never done anything to you, and if you seek to punish me for past misdeeds, there is nothing you can devise that I haven’t already suffered.” Four years of worrying about Kai, followed by all these weeks of having him back here, but hating her. Was that not punishment enough?

“You baffle me, Miss Elliot,” Andromeda replied in the same high-wrought tone. “I can’t reconcile the young woman I see before me with the reports I have had.”

What lies had Kai been spreading abroad? “I’m sorry to hear that, but it’s none of my concern. I am the same person I’ve always been.” She turned her face away from Andromeda, away from the crowd and from Kai. “Maybe you should ask yourself why, if I am the person you’ve been led to believe, someone would put their faith in me at all?”

“People are foolish when it comes to love.”

Elliot hadn’t been. She’d been rational, logical, reasonable, prudent. She’d been cold and cruel and disloyal and distant.

She hadn’t been foolish.

She’d been the most foolish girl on the island.

Olivia’s song ended and behind her, on the porch, Donovan reemerged, carrying his fiddle. He started playing a familiar song, and the other musicians took up the tune on their pipes and string-boxes. Olivia kept singing, but Donovan easily outshone her voice, and everyone else’s playing, too. Elliot had never heard music like that. The finesse and precision she’d witnessed in these Cloud Fleet explorers came across in his musical abilities. His rhythms were complex but perfectly controlled, and he somehow managed to weave in any misstep of the other players. It was a good thing Tatiana wasn’t here to listen or she’d be green as grass.

“He’s amazing,” Elliot said, mostly to herself.

“Yes.” Andromeda shrugged. “He’s got a special talent. And he’s been funneling everything into his music, lately. It’s the only thing left that gives him any peace.”

“Was Sophia sick for a long time?”

“Always,” Andromeda replied. “She was born blind, and she had a weak heart. Had she not been born a free Post, she probably would not have survived at all. The Innovations were able to properly provide for her. Whatever medical attention she needed, Felicia would find it. If it didn’t exist, Felicia would create it.”

“Create it?” Elliot asked. That wasn’t a word she heard often.

For a split second, Andromeda appeared discomposed. “Does that word frighten you, Luddite?”

Elliot bristled. “Create” might not frighten her, but the way these Fleet Posts used “Luddite” as an epithet was beginning to. If only Andromeda knew what a bad Luddite Elliot was. “No.”

“But you believe in the protocols.”

“Of course I do.” Spoken like any good Luddite who didn’t have notes in the barn detailing the steps she’d taken to create some rather troubling wheat. She’d say nothing else—and certainly not to Andromeda Phoenix. Instead, she recited the lines given by every teacher she’d ever had. “They are there for our protection. Without them, humans would risk trying to become gods.”

“And what if breaking them would have saved Sophia’s life? What if they’d save your grandfather’s?”

At that moment, Elliot hated Andromeda. She hated being forced to play devil’s advocate for, of all things, the Luddite protocols! “Is there an answer here that wouldn’t bolster what you’ve already decided about me?”

“Which is?” asked Andromeda with an evil glint in her odd eyes.

Elliot wasn’t going to spell it out.

Olivia’s song ended, but Donovan merely turned his music into something wilder, a more obvious dancing tune. A cheer went up from the assembled crowd. Several couples even rose from their picnic blankets to dance beneath the glowing lanterns. Kai gave his hand to Olivia to help her down from the porch steps. She tugged him toward the dancers, and after a moment, he joined her. Elliot stared down at her lap.

“Aren’t they a lovely couple?” Andromeda said.

“Please go away.”

“As you pointed out, Miss Elliot, we rent these lands. We may do as we please.”

Yet Elliot was not forced to remain, and she highly doubted that Felicia had invited her to the party that evening merely to receive sarcastic remarks from Andromeda. The older Post might imagine they could be friends, but Elliot knew better. She’d had a lifetime of experience learning how few people she could count on to be her friend.

She rose and went over to the blankets occupied by Ro and the North Posts. Judging by the number of empty plates and mugs strewn about, they were enjoying the party immensely.

Here, at least, were some true friends. “May I join you?”

“Certainly!” Dee was sitting cross-legged, cradling her belly in her lap and keeping her eye on Jef, who was twirling with a few of the young Grove Posts several yards away. She lowered her voice and leaned in to Elliot. “I caught a few words of your talk with that Fleet girl. She’s not very fond of you, is she?”

“Not that I can tell.”

Dee chuckled. “Do I need to have words with her?”

“She’d probably think I beat you into it.”

Dee put a hand to her heart in mock shock. “You beat your CORs, Elliot North?”

“Haven’t you heard?” Beside them, Ro clapped along to the music, watching the dancers with delight. Elliot wondered if she should have brought the girl a string-box from the stash she still kept safely stowed away in the barn. But then, Ro’s clumsy plucking might mess with the music, and Ro didn’t seem to mind.

“Well, someone ought to enlighten her, and that’s a fact.”

“I don’t care what Andromeda Phoenix thinks of me, Dee.”

“And what of
Captain Wentforth
?”

Elliot hesitated. “What he thinks isn’t likely to be changed, is it?”

“You did the right thing, Elliot. We all think so, and I’ve no qualms telling him as much, either.”

“Please, Dee,” Elliot begged. “Don’t. We’re long past all that now.”

“Not if he’s badmouthing you to the Fleet Posts.”

“I don’t need to be friends with Andromeda Phoenix.” Elliot threw her hands in the air. “I don’t need to be friends with Kai. I don’t even need to be friends with the Innovations.”

“But you want to be,” said Dee.

“No, I don’t,” Elliot insisted. Whatever it took to keep her people fed, that’s what she wanted. And for that, it wasn’t necessary to make friends with these people. In fact, it was preferable not to socialize with them. Less danger, then, that she’d miss them when they were gone. “I want to take their money and let them build their ship and get them off my land. That’s all I want.”

“Good to know,” said a voice above her head.

Elliot and Dee looked up, and there, shadowed against the light from the swinging sun-lamps, stood Kai.