The Hero Strikes Back (26 page)

“Look at your face, Lee!”

“Not unless I have to.”

He was not pleased by my witticism. “This is no joking matter.”

Actually, it probably had been funny to watch, me stumbling around like an idiot. “And getting melodramatic about it will help, how?”

“I'm not being melodramatic.” The kettle started whistling. He poured the water into the coffee. “You were assaulted last night.”

“I did the assaulting.”

“I meant the music.”

Oh. An odd way of looking at it, but that was a Source for you. “It's done now.”

“It won't be done until that bruise is gone and that cretin is punished.”

I sighed. “You've got to learn to let things slide, Taro.”

“You let too much slide. Something has to be done about this.”

“Something is being done. Risa is reporting it. Firth and Stone are going to do their best to make sure no one ever walks into the Red Onion ever again. So leave it. It's over.”

He pulled a mug out from the jumble on a shelf and blew the dust out of it. “Does it hurt?”

“Not really.”

“Huh.” He poured out the coffee. I watched him with curiosity. My Source had once loftily declared coffee the merchant class' joke on the world, for look at it. Liquefied mud, and people were willing to pay for it. What had made him decide to drink it?

Oh, lord, the effects of coffee on a person who'd never had it before. This was going to be fun.

Only he set it on the table before me.

That set off the bells. What did he want and how much was I going to hate giving it?

He sat in the chair opposite mine, pulling it close under the table. As was his wont when he wasn't thinking about it, he sat ramrod straight, his spine nowhere near the back of the chair.

I took a sip of my coffee and grimaced.

“Did I not make it right?”

It was actually quite awful. Far too strong. “What's this about, anyway?” I hefted the mug.

Karish assumed an expression of offence. “What, I can't do something nice once in a while?”

“You frequently do nice things, but something about this rings of buttering up.”

He grinned ruefully. “You know that party Lord Yellows is having for Prince Gifford?”

“Aye.”

“And you know I've been invited.”

“Aye.” Not so cut off from his aristocratic circle after all.

“And you know I can't refuse an invitation commanded in the name of the Prince.”

“Aye.” Sucker.

Karish's grin turned feral. “I hope you've ordered something appropriate to wear.”

I set my mug on the table with a bang, eyes growing wide with alarm. “No!”

“You have to go, Lee.”

“I do not!”

“It's your duty.”

“In what alternate reality?”

He assumed that air of patience that always made me crazy. “You're my partner.”

“Your Triple S partner. Not your social one. Take one of your lovers.”

“
One
of my lovers? What, do you think I keep a stable?”

“Take Michael. He'd love it.” All the high fashion and good food, Michael would think himself in the best dream.

Karish appeared scandalized. “I'm not sleeping with Michael.”

Oh. Not that either of them had ever said they were lovers. I'd just assumed it from their interactions. They were all over each other every time they met, and Karish never called Michael anything but “Michael, my love.” Could anyone blame me? “One of the others, then.”

“This is fascinating. Who do you recommend? Who else do you think I'm sleeping with?”

The little edge snapping off each of his words warned me to clear off. Karish had always been touchy when it came to talking about his lovers. Which was fine. It was none of my business. “The point is, I'm not going. The place will be crawling with aristocrats.”

“Including Her Grace.”

“Just another reason to refuse to go.”

“An option I don't have.”

I glared at him. He learned too fast, that one, and was nowhere near above manipulating people to get what he wanted. “You bastard.”

He grinned, knowing he had won. “You can't wear the gown you wore in Erstwhile, lovely though it was,” he said, speaking of the dress I had worn to meet the Empress the previous year. “That's a winter gown.”

“I hate you.”

“You've left it very late. My fault, actually. I'd originally planned on going alone, else I would have given you more notice. But you'll be able to get a gown in time if you put enough pressure on the tailor and get your name put at the top of the list.”

“I really hate you.”

“Do you want to practise some small talk?”

“There's a special place for you in hell, you know.”

He blew a kiss at me. “You know you think I'm adorable.”

Aye. He knew it, too. That's what made him so dangerous. The prat.

But I would have my revenge. “Ready to experiment?”

He groaned. “We're not getting anywhere with that.”

“We don't stop working on this until it's fixed. That's the deal.”

“What if it doesn't get fixed?”

“But Taro,” I widened my eyes at him, “you promised me it would.”

“Do you
have
to remember every single thing I say?”

“The sterling words of the beautiful Lord Shintaro Karish.”

“Please shut up.”

“I will when you do.”

I couldn't be sure, and I certainly wasn't going to admit it to anyone, but I suspected I was the cause of the blizzard that hit us that night.

Chapter Sixteen

I arrived at the Lion by order of my mother. Not the first time that had happened, but something about the note, the stiff formality of it, gave me an uneasy feeling. I really didn't want another Erin incident. I had told my mother there was no possibility of anything happening with Erin, but she hadn't shown any inclination to listen to me so far.

He didn't appear to be in the private dining room, but that didn't mean anything. He could be coming by later, as he had before.

“Oh, Lee,” my mother said in deep disapproval. She was seated in the settee, sipping a sherry.

I shrugged. “It started raining on the way over.” So I was soaked. If Erin was on his way over, he wouldn't be getting “something pretty to look at” that night.

He wouldn't have anyway. Some little demon had prompted me to wear loose brown trousers and a brown shirt, both of which I loved to wear for the sheer comfort of them. I did recognize, however, that they looked hideous and were too big for me.

My mother's gaze flicked over my clothes, but she made no comment. Maybe she was finally learning.

She sent Celia away for towels and a robe and I stood near the door and watched my mother fiddle with the flatware on the table and avoid looking at me.

I decided to just dive in. “Are there going to be any surprise guests tonight, Mother?”

She stopped fiddling long enough to look at me. “If there are, it's not due to my arrangement.”

The maid returned. I took a towel from her. “Is something wrong?” What had I done this time?

“You should get out of those wet clothes, Dunleavy,” she said.

She'd called me Dunleavy.

I took off my wet clothes and gave them to the maid, quickly drying off and donning the robe.

“So how was your day, dear?”

About to get bad, I had no doubt. “It was all right.” I wrapped my head in one of the towels. “Karish expects me to accompany him to that party thing Lord Yellows is holding for Prince Gifford.”

“Of course he does.”

There was no of course about it. “I have to get my hands on some kind of ball gown. I'm relying on you to help me choose something.” That should make her smile, a chance to order clothes for me.

But she didn't smile, or demonstrate any other symptom of enthusiasm. She sat down at the table. “I won't be able to help you, Lee. I'm going back to Seventh Year. I'll be leaving the day after tomorrow.”

I frowned and fought the urge to ask her to repeat herself. I'd heard her the first time. “You just got here. I thought you were staying a few months.”

Mother fiddled with her fingers, examining the paint on her nails. “You know I love you, Lee, don't you?”

This definitely bad. “Aye.”

“And I know you love us.”

“Good.” I waited. “But . . .”

My mother took a deep breath of her own. “I don't know exactly how to say this, so I'll just say it.”

Really, really bad.

“Do you remember when you left for the Academy?”

“No.” She knew that.

“You were four.”

“Yes.”

“You were four. And we packed you up and took you to the Academy. You understood that you would be living there from then on. That you wouldn't be seeing us for a long time.” She finally looked up from her fingers, looked at me, and I was surprised to see tears filming her eyes. “You didn't seem upset.”

I had no idea how to respond to that. What did it have to do with anything?

“You didn't cry. You didn't cling. You put on your best company manners and politely said good-bye.”

Should I be resenting the fact that my mother apparently wished to see me in emotional distress?

“The Head Mistress assured us this was perfectly normal. Shield children don't feel things, express things, as other children do. It didn't mean you didn't love us. We shouldn't take it personally. But it was hard not to. It was hard.”

There was no point in becoming angry, but I was. I couldn't help what I did or didn't feel as a child. I didn't even remember.

“Then next time I saw you, it was about two years later. You were only six. But you were so reserved. So well-mannered and . . . distant. You were happy to see us, of course, but not . . . I don't know . . . not as excited as I would have expected a child to be on meeting her family for the first time in years.”

That was so unfair. “We are taught . . .”

“Yes, I know,” my mother interrupted me with a tone of impatience. “The Head Mistress explained it all to us. It is essential that you learn to keep yourself under control. It is an essential part of your role. It is a threat to yourself and your Source and to everyone you will eventually be protecting, to let your emotions run free. Except no one could tell me why, exactly. Why it was so important for Shields to be so restrained, any more than any other professionals should be while performing their tasks. Or why, if you're naturally less emotional than the average person, it would be so dangerous to let you display what you did feel.”

Because that wasn't quite right. It wasn't like the sky would fall if I let it out when I got angry or scared or anything else. It was merely that it was my job to stay calm while I was working, to counteract the impact of a Source who wasn't expected to be calm, ever. It was a matter of balance.

“I understand that it was important for you to learn to be calm and in control,” said my mother. “But can you understand how hard it is to have your own child treat you like a mere acquaintance?”

Obviously I could not, being as I was all child-free.

“But it wasn't just that.”

There was more? Oh, joy.

“The rules, the values you were being taught, they were so different from what we would have had you learn. Not bad,” she said hurriedly, seeing something in my face. Seeing more than I could interpret myself. Because to be honest, I didn't know what the hell I was feeling. “Just different, and nothing of what we would teach. About bartering. About trading. About sizing up your opponents. About how to make a customer feel he's better than you so he doesn't notice how much you're overcharging him. But no one was better than you. Or below you. Because you were outside such considerations.”

I frowned, because now I was intellectually confused as well as emotionally. “I wasn't ever going to be a holder or a—”

“That's not the point!” my mother snapped. Then she sighed, closed her eyes, and rubbed her temples for a few moments. “I knew you were never going to be a holder or a trader. I knew that as soon as I realized what you were.” And there was a bitterness in my mother's voice. “I'm not claiming that what I felt made sense. But here was my daughter, my little girl, being taught to believe in things that I would never understand.”

But she had three other children who would be learning exactly what she wanted them to know. Kaaren was a holder, Dias and Mika were traders. She had exactly what she wanted in them. The family assets were well looked after. What was wrong with having one child who did something different?

Mother took a sip from her goblet. “From the day we left you at that school,” and she said the words—that school—as though they tasted badly on her tongue, “you didn't need us.”

And I made no response to that—not that she appeared to be waiting for one—because it was kind of true. I guessed.

“Someone else was teaching you what you needed to know, taking care of you, disciplining you—”

“Kaaren and Mika and Dias all went to Whitewood,” I reminded her. Everyone who could afford it sent their children to board away. It was considered normal and healthy not to have children becoming too dependent on their parents. It was the way of things.

“I've already told you it isn't the same,” she said sharply. “We got to see them for months out of every year. They knew us, knew what we expected. You treated us like strangers.”