THE REFORGED TRILOGY: BOOK 3 — HAMMER OF TIME
Chapter 33: He Said
“Better dead than grounded.”
– Tiberius Myles (232 PA)
Duaal Sinnay stepped out onto the white sand. Salty seawater streamed from his braids and down his muscular bronze back. He tucked the board under one arm and jogged up the beach to where his friends waited. They all applauded and cheered. When he reached the shade of the collapsible filter, Duaal bowed.
“Thank you, thank you,” he said, grinning. His perfect white teeth flashed. “Well, don’t stop clapping.”
“Great curl,” Haan congratulated. “It’s choppy as hells out there, Du. I can’t believe you pulled that off.”
Haan gestured out to the aquamarine ocean. Hyzaar’s largest moon, Beven, hung huge and pale in the sky, outshining even the suns. In just three more days, Beven’s orbit would bring it closer than any moon in the Alliance. The seas would become a tidal riot, churned by Beven’s gravity into an impassable twist of foaming waves. And then it would be time for the Beven Races, the most dangerous aquatic competition anywhere in the galaxy. There would be swimming, boat and board races of all kinds across Hyzaar. The winners wouldn’t have to buy their own drinks for the rest of the year and never go to bed alone, except maybe out of sheer exhaustion. But then, Beven winners didn’t get tired.
Haan draped a long bronzed arm around Duaal’s neck. Shaala was on Duaal’s other side, fingers already hooked into the waist of his trunks. She kissed his ear, pausing to nibble a little.
“So are you signed up yet?” Haan asked, trailing his finger up Duaal’s spine.
“Signed up? For what?” Duaal asked, feigning innocence.
Haan laughed. So did everyone else.
“For the races! When are you finally going to enter?” Haan asked.
“Oh,” Duaal said dismissively. “Those. I’d forgotten all about them.”
He hadn’t, of course. His friends — hells, his parents, too, and all their friends — told Duaal every year that he should enter. He grinned at Haan and Shaala.
“Tell you what,” he told them. “Why don’t you two show me what victory is going to taste like tonight and I’ll sign up in the morning.”
Shaala giggled and Haan nodded gravely.
“Let’s get you back to my place,” he said.
Haan took Duaal’s hand and winked. Shaala held Duaal’s other hand and waved back to their friends as they swiftly retreated up the beach, followed by whistles and ‘phin-calls.
Duaal whispered some suggestions to Haan on where they might start and it began before they made it to his apartment. Duaal enjoyed an audience. Haan flushed, sending Shaala off into more gales of laughter. But Haan did exactly as Duaal told him to. They always did. Duaal didn’t need to win a single Beven race. Why risk losing when he already had exactly what he wanted?
The days passed in tense, worried bursts on the Blue Phoenix. The whole ship was as taut as a guitar string. There were several minor injuries as people moved too fast, incautious and distracted. Xia tended each one with a silver scowl and terse advice.
The ship didn’t escape unscathed, either. Few starships were made for the long flight out to the galaxy’s edge and the Phoenix wasn’t one of them. By the end of the second week, Gripper had already run through most of his replacement parts and complained loudly about it at dinner.
Meals were a problem, too. Xia promised that she had properly calculated their daily caloric needs, even factoring in the addition of Anthem. But they were going through their food faster than expected. If they were going to make it back from the Tower, Xia argued, then everyone on the Blue Phoenix had to cut their daily intake by fifteen percent. No one bothered to point out to her that a return journey might never happen.
Duaal found Maeve pacing down in the hold again. As supplies dwindled, there was more and more room there. At least they had one increasing resource, Duaal reflected sourly.
As usual, Sir Anthem Calloren stood nearby, watching the little black-haired queen. She looked strange without her crown, Duaal realized. He had gotten rather used to seeing her in it.
Logan and Gripper were in the cargo hold, too, working in the hanging garden planters. The dangling crates of dirt were the Blue Phoenix’s only source of fresh produce. Xia must have been lonely, too — she had one of the medical supply boxes laid open and was counting out emergency oxygen canisters and plastic bags of keline inside. The computer inventory was doubtlessly up to date, but she dutifully marked everything down on a datadex anyway.
Duaal leaned against the stairs. The old fibersteel creaked.
“Have you got a minute?” he asked Maeve.
She paused in her pacing. “What is it?”
“Are you alright? Never mind. Of course you’re not. Nothing’s gone at all according to plan. That’s sort of what I wanted to come and tell you.”
Maeve had started moving again, but now she stopped. Duaal sat down on one of the steps and laced his fingers under his chin.
“Something’s been weighing on me,” he admitted. “And I want to apologize. To you, Maeve.”
“For how you have treated me since you were a little boy?” she asked, hands on her hips. She brushed a hand across her eyes. They were red and bloodshot. She sighed. “Forgive me, please. I am tired. You and I have not always had an easy relationship, Duaal, but that was more my fault than yours. I was bitter and broken. That is no fault of yours.”
“Not really, no. But I still did my part being a little brat,” Duaal agreed with a smirk. “Sorry. Still, that’s not what I wanted to say. This is… a lot more serious.”
“What?” Maeve asked.
“It’s about Prianus,” Duaal said. He had been thinking about it for weeks, long before Panna’s news, and before Maeve’s decision to leave Kaellisem. Everyone else in the hold had stopped what they were doing to watch Duaal. He rolled his eyes and raised his voice.
“Alright, since you’re all going to listen anyway, I guess everyone deserves to hear it,” Duaal announced, then looked over at Anthem. “Except you, maybe. But you’re not leaving Maeve alone, are you?”
“Not yet, no,” Anthem said.
“I really could have left you on Stray. You have Maeve to thank for this chance to die on the edge of nowhere,” he told the knight, who nodded gravely.
Duaal turned his attention back to Maeve. “Alright. It’s about Prianus and what I did there, banishing Xartasia and the Devourers. Hells, I shouldn’t even use the word banished at all!”
Duaal ran fingers through his hair and then stared down at his hands. They were shaking.
“I… I’m saying that it’s my fault that Xartasia’s still around. If I had just done my job better, this could have been over months ago. I’m sorry, Maeve. I’m so sorry for all of this.”
He heard light footsteps and looked up to find Maeve standing in front of him with a small smile on her face. “This is not your fault, Duaal. You bought us valuable time on Prianus. We would not have survived against the Devourers. They would have swarmed all across Prianus. Billions would have died. You did what none of us could.”
There were slow nods all around the cargo bay. Duaal frowned at Maeve.
“But you’ve talked about Tamlin,” he said. “When you closed the Waygate there, the Devourers vanished from Arcadia, right?”
“Yes,” Maeve admitted. “That is true. Though I admit that I still do not know where they went or by what mechanism they were recalled.”
Gripper hung from a support and scratched his chin.
“Remember what the Pylos Waygate said?” he asked. “It called for technicians because something had gone wrong.”
“The opening spell had been interrupted,” Maeve said. “It was the same in Tamlin. I did not know the spell as well as I hoped and I faltered.”
“When you closed it, you probably fixed the problem, as far as the Waygate was concerned. No need for technicians,” Gripper said. “So it sent them back.”
“But I didn’t close the Waygate.” Duaal laced his fingers together in his lap and sighed. “I used it. Maeve and Xartasia were wrestling for control. I just seized some of the Waygate’s power to move them, to send them away. It wasn’t the same thing, I guess.”
Anthem stared at Duaal.
“You seized some of the Waygate’s power?” he repeated, clearly stunned. “While another sang the spells? How?”
“Duaal has a far deeper and more intuitive grasp of magic than we do,” Maeve told her consort. She made a looping gesture with her hands. “He knows some of our battlefield charms, but he does not need the songs. He understands the underlying mechanics well enough to use them in ways we cannot, though Panna could better explain why. She has an impressive theory about how and why our spell-songs work.”
“It seems to be correct,” Duaal said. “What she taught us makes it possible for me to do the magic I do. But it wasn’t enough to truly get rid of Xartasia. Look, I don’t apologize much, Maeve. Don’t lose sight of this rare chance.”
“You saved us all, Duaal,” the Arcadian queen said stubbornly. “What is happening now is Xartasia’s fault, not yours.”
“How can you say that?” Duaal asked in a loud voice. Something inside him ached. “You spent a century blaming yourself for the fall of Arcadia and finding weird ways to kill yourself to make up for it.”
“And Titania forgave me for what I had done. As you ask me to do now,” Maeve said. “But her forgiveness meant nothing, in the end. Not because she is herself a monster, but because the fault was never mine. Some of the responsibility, yes… Most of it, in truth. But not the fault. That belongs to the Devourers. They killed my people and destroyed my world.”
Duaal considered that. Could Maeve be right? All this wasn’t his fault?
The idea was appealing, of course, and Duaal’s admittedly inflated but often fragile ego seized on the chance to escape blame. But was it true? Maeve had no reason to lie to him. She was right. Duaal and Maeve never had what anyone could call a close relationship. She wasn’t looking to do him any favors. So why did Duaal still doubt her?
Duaal closed his eyes. What… what would Tiberius say? Did it matter? The old Prian was dead. Tears stung behind Duaal’s lids. But he knew. He knew what Tiberius would tell him.
That was a damned fine piece of work, boy. Stop smirking and get up to the cockpit. Do your job.
He opened his eyes and stood, clapping his hands against his thighs as he rose.
“You’re right,” he said, ostensibly to Maeve and the rest of the Blue Phoenix crew. “I’d better get back up front. It’s about time for another sub-SL check. If we’re going to die horribly, then Xartasia will just have to do it herself. Some uncharted asteroid’s not going to finish the job for her.”
Duaal made his way up the stairs, through the mess and up to the cockpit. The tiny room full of dials, monitors and control panels glowed in green, yellow and red. He paused at the pilot’s seat. He could have repaired the multitude of talon gashes in the chair or the cracks in the controls left by Tiberius’ frustrated fists, but he never had. He never would, Duaal realized.
He sat in the captain’s old chair and checked the navigational computer. Just twelve more days and they would reach the Rynn system and the Nnyth Tower. Duaal reached for the superluminal engine controls.
Gripper inspected the air filter. It wasn’t just dirty — it was broken.
What was going on? What could possibly be damaging so many pieces in the ventilation system? The Blue Phoenix had picked up a couple of rats before, even a chuulo one time. The rodents chewed up wires and seals, gummed up filters with their droppings, but nothing like this. Gripper frowned.
“Hunter, can you hand me my soldering stuff?” he asked.
Logan sat on the end of the workbench. Right in the spot that Maeve liked to perch. The human reached behind him and handed Gripper a bent soldering iron and a spool of wire. Gripper took them and got to work. He felt Logan watching him.
“When’s the last time you talked to Xia?” the Prian finally asked.
Gripper thought for a moment. “This morning, at breakfast. She needed me to look at the locks in the medbay. One of them was broken. You know, a lot of things are breaking on the Blue Phoenix.”
“It wasn’t that long ago that you kept track of everything she did. And got in her way to give her flowers.”
Gripper laughed. “Yeah.”
“What happened?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why aren’t you… falling all over yourself to get her attention anymore?”
The Arboran finally looked up from his work and found Logan watching him intently. Those pale blue eyes were still more than a little unsettling. When they weren’t as cold as ice, their intensity seemed to burn like that Talon laser he carried. Gripper set down the solder and leaned against the workbench.
“I… guess it was watching you and Glass,” he answered slowly. “Everything you two have been through.”
Logan’s jaw set. “We showed you just how fragile and painful love is.”
“No. Well, maybe a little.” Gripper pointed at the glass-armored cybernetic hand now clenched around the edge of his workbench. “Glass can be fragile and sharp… Or it can be really, really strong. Yours is strong, Hunter. It is. You have to watch Glass and Spear together all the time. She’s nearly died and so have you, sometimes because of one another. But you still love each other.”
Gripper could hear Logan’s teeth grinding and winced.
“You do,” the mechanic told him firmly. “I’m not dumb, Hunter. I know you don’t want to, but you still love Glass. And she loves you, too, even if she can’t say or do anything about it.”
“What does that have to do with Xia?” Logan asked.
“It’s just different with her. With us. What you and Glass do for each other… You let her go, Hunter. You hated it, but when she had to become queen, you let her go to Anthem. It tortures you every single day, but you’ve never tried to stop them. Not like Shimmer and I have. We interfered because we’re Glass’ friends. And yours. But you love her, so you weren’t stupid like us.”
Gripper examined the broken filter and then looked back down at Logan.
“But it’s not like that with me and Silver. I like her. She’s pretty and smart and I want her to be proud of me. But I’m not proud for her like you are for Glass. You don’t love Glass just because she’s beautiful and makes you feel good. You love Maeve for all that she is, including being an Arcadian queen, even if it takes her away from you.”
Logan couldn’t seem to meet Gripper’s eye. The bounty hunter stared at the floor instead so intently that it was a wonder the fibersteel didn’t melt.
“I just don’t love Silver like that,” Gripper told him. “And if what you’re going through is what real love is like, I think I’ll happily wait until I’m a lot older to go find it.”
“Wise decision,” Logan said. “But you may not get to choose.”
Gripper nodded and picked up his soldering iron, then got back to work fixing the filter. He had no more replacements… This one had to hold up until they reached the Tower and that was still five days away. Gripper crossed his fingers that the filter was still repairable. Xartasia and the Devourers awaited them at the Tower, along with all the Nnyth. Gripper wondered if any of them were going to live long enough to worry about the future, but he said nothing. Sometimes being a good friend meant shutting up.
