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  The pounding came again. “Open the door.”

  “If you insist,” Drake said blandly, knowing his adversary well, “but I warn you, we had a party of over-drunk Coalition troops in here until the early hours, and we have yet to finish cleaning up the vomit.”

  Kerrold, ever fastidious, recoiled. He even stepped back from the door, as if he feared the vile waste would somehow seep out and envelop him.

  If only.

  “Perhaps if you returned this afternoon,” he suggested, putting as much unctuousness as he could into his voice, although it made him want to vomit in truth. “A bottle of our best lingberry would be waiting.”

  “Your floor had best be unsoiled when I return,” Kerrold warned. “And I shall expect that bottle. Without charge,” he added, “for my inconvenience.”

  “Of course,” Drake said, thinking even the expensive liquor a small price to pay for the sight of the man’s retreating back.

  He pushed the slider closed over the door slot. He saw Kye looking at him assessingly. For once not condemningly. Oh, she tried to hide her disappointment in him, but he knew her too well. And it ate at him, in a way few things did anymore.

  “Clever,” she said, with a flicking glance at Eirlys. She well knew that Kerrold had an eye for his sister, never mind her age.

  The approval stabbed deep, telling him how much he had missed it from this fierce, bright flame of a woman. He had to look away before she read the unwanted emotion in his eyes. He could never, ever let her see the longing he felt. Not when she might realize she’d seen that same look in another set of eyes.

  Eirlys walked toward him.

  “I can deal with him, you know,” she said.

  “I know, sister mine, but I would prefer not to have to break you out of the cell he would throw you in if you insulted him too harshly.”

  “He’s loathsome.”

  “Yes.”

  “And repulsive.”

  “That as well.”

  “And weak.”

  “I will have her, Davorage.”

  “You will not.”

  “And how are you going to stop me, taproom keeper?”

  The exchange echoed in his head, and he had to force himself to calm. He needed to choose his words very carefully, for ordering his impulsive sister had little effect. He had sacrificed most of what control over her he had to secure the one, most crucial promise, that she not join the Raider.

  And in but a few months she will be eighteen and beyond even that control.

  He tried not to think about that. Or what he would do when the inevitable happened.

  To his surprise—nay, shock—Kye spoke. “He is all of those things, Eirlys. Loathsome, repulsive, and weak. But he wants you. And he has the power of the Coalition behind him.”

  Drake stared at Kye. He would never have expected to hear such understanding from her. Not since her father had been killed by that same Coalition.

  “I will die before I let him put his filthy hands on me,” Eirlys declared.

  “That,” Drake said quietly as he turned back to her, “is exactly what I’m afraid of.”

  “You underestimate me.”

  “Never. But what do you think would happen to you when you killed him?”

  She appeared gratified that he said when, not if. “Better than the alternative.”

  “Spoken like one who has never seen the inside of a Coalition jail—”

  “They’d never find me. I know the mountains like no one else except the Raider.”

  He knew this was true; Eirlys had roamed the mountains since childhood, even after the Coalition had conquered Ziem. He studied his sister for a long, silent moment. The ten years between them had never seemed more; he felt old and tired and worn, while she still bubbled with the energy and determination of youth.

  He hated this, but he was going to have to mute her obstinacy with some blunt realism.

  “You would have to escape, first.” At her frown, he clenched his jaw and went on. “Do you really think Kerrold would not call in Coalition troops to hold you? Perhaps even to strip you and hold you down while he raped you?”

  She paled; clearly she had not thought of this. On the edge of his vision he saw Kye stir, but she said nothing nor made a move to stop him.

  “I warn you he would not hesitate. He has done it before. He likes them young.”

  “I—”

  He went on relentlessly, because he had to. “And even if you succeed in killing him, will you savor your life when they collar you, and you are required to not only service any Coalition member who wants a moment’s amusement or pleasure, but to have your brain so twisted by their controls as to believe you want it?”

  She was even paler now, shocked by his blunt words. He rarely spoke to her so coldly; he loved the bright spirit of her too much. But she must see this was not something to take lightly.

  “He has set his sights on you, not just because you are young and beautiful, but because you are Torstan Davorin’s daughter. He and the Coalition fear that more than anything, that the people will rally to a Davorin if they are in the least encouraged.”

  Her head came up then. “Yes. I am a daughter of Davorin.”

  She said it proudly, fiercely, and his heart sank. She was more on fire than he’d realized, more aware of the power she held on Ziem by virtue of her name alone, and it would take very little to prod her into acting on that power. To offer herself up as that rallying point for the people.

  He let the fear that thought engendered into his voice. “They would slaughter everyone, Eirlys. Everyone.”

  She simply stared at him, silently. He did not like the look in her eyes, because he recognized it, having seen it often in the eyes of others. Perhaps not contempt, but on the verge.

  “I only wish,” she said, her voice cold, “that my brother was a true son of Davorin.”

  She turned on her heel and strode out, not even looking back. After a long moment in which he waited for Kye to agree, waited for the flash of pity that from her was so much harder to bear than even his sister’s hot anger, Kye turned and followed Eirlys out the back door.

  Drake closed his eyes, denied the churning in his gut, fought down the part of him that so wanted to scream the truth at Kye.

  He spent the next hour making the already clean floor as unsoiled as Kerrold had demanded.

  Chapter 3

  “SOMETIMES I hate him.”

  Kye looked at the girl who sat beside her on the rock overlooking the pond. She wasn’t really sure why she had followed her, except perhaps that she hadn’t wished to look anymore at Drake. The hollow, agonized expression in his eyes had told her how his sister’s strike had stabbed home. And yet since she herself had made the same wish, she had nothing she dared say to him.

  “You don’t really mean that,” she said.

  “All right, then I hate who he’s become.” She had no answer for that. Eirlys gave her a knowing sideways look before adding, “And you do, too, don’t you?”

  “I admire what he’s sacrificed for his family,” she said carefully.

  “Don’t dodge.”

  She turned to face the girl then. “It is not a dodge. Do you realize that when your mother died and he had the responsibility for three children below the age of ten descend upon him, he was barely a year older than you are now?”

  Eirlys blinked. Kye guessed that while she’d known how young he’d been, she hadn’t really put it in those terms before, terms of her own age.

  “Yes,” Kye said. “How would you like to be accountable for a nine-year-old girl and a pair the likes of Nyx and Lux at four, right now?”

  “I wouldn’t.”

  “Neither did he. But he did it, because he loves you. He’s your brother, and he takes
that very seriously.”

  “I know. He’s so protective of me I want to screech to the sky.”

  “He is very aware you are becoming a beautiful woman.”

  “That’s what he said.” Eirlys couldn’t have been more glum about it if Kye had said she was starting to look like a blowpig. She smothered a smile at the girl’s reaction, but she was grateful she had apparently successfully turned the subject.

  “He’s afraid Kerrold will attack me,” Eirlys said.

  Kye took in a quick breath. So much for grateful. She had long suspected that Kerrold wished a daughter of Davorin to be his conquest for very particular reasons, but she did not wish to go into that just now. “Not an unfounded fear,” she said. “He has always had an eye for you.” And better him than that torturous muckrat, Jakel. Maybe.

  Again Eirlys gave her a sideways look. “As you always had for Drake.”

  Not so successful on the subject turn after all. “We are friends.”

  “But you once wanted more. Don’t deny it; I used to spy on you when you were together.”

  “And you think we did not know this?”

  That took her aback, Kye thought. But she knew Eirlys well enough to know when she was fixated on a subject, and true to expectations, she recovered quickly.

  “Can you truly say that you do not wish—”

  She interrupted before Eirlys could say something Kye had no answer for. “I wish many things. Or did, before I grew up and realized the futility of wishing.”

  “‘Wishing is nothing without action,’” the girl quoted.

  Her father’s words, Kye thought. Famous words. Words from the speech that had rallied a town, then a region, then an entire planet.

  And had brought the fiery wrath of the Coalition down upon them.

  “Can you truly say,” Eirlys repeated, clearly determined to say the words, “that you do not wish he was more like my father?”

  “Your father,” Kye said, “spoke out against Coalition tyranny. He was dead within months.”

  “And we could all be dead tomorrow, if the Coalition decided it. The fusion cannon would see to that. But my father is remembered as a hero still. His name could unite, if only Drake would use it. If only he would stand against them, instead of serving them like a—”

  “He does not have that luxury.”

  She had to stop this. She could not bear anymore. It was truth that she admired and respected Drake for how he had stepped into a parent’s role when he had to, but she, too, wished he had stepped into his father’s huge footsteps as well. No matter that the two paths were mutually exclusive, for following the one would surely get him killed and thus make the other impossible, not to mention putting those he was supposed to protect at even greater risk. She knew that too well; had she not had to do the same with her helpless father, before that random Coalition bomb had finally put an end to his misery?

  But she knew Eirlys was right, the son of Torstan Davorin could rally the people of Ziem like no other, even the Raider. Just the spark of his name would light a fire that even the Coalition would pay a high price to extinguish.

  Eirlys stared at her. The bright intelligence and perceptiveness she knew the girl possessed shone in her eyes.

  “Are you not saddened by what he has become?”

  Kye had no answer for her question. The real answers were too grimly depressing to be faced. For she had once loved Drake Davorin with all the fervor of her young heart. They had been of one mind, similar in all things.

  But she was a woman now, and other things were more important to her than a handsome face and a wicked grin. When that Coalition bomb had finally ended her father’s torment, proving once and for all that toeing the Coalition line did no good, kept no one safe, her life had been shattered along with the blinders she’d been wearing. She knew then the only recourse was to fight, for expecting the Coalition to leave you alone if you behaved was a fool’s notion.

  She had expected Drake to see it that way too. That the time had finally come to fight, that the only thing to do was join the Raider. Instead, he had withdrawn, pushing her away as if he feared her newfound commitment to the freedom of Ziem might be catching. He made excuses not to be with her, and no longer smiled as he once had the moment he spotted her anywhere. And so she saw little of him, only when the ache became too much, and then later she regretted it because seeing what he was now, that man too frightened of the Coalition to even speak ill of it, bore no resemblance to the man she’d loved. And so she had accepted the wall now between them.

  “Do you still love him? As he is now?” Eirlys’s voice was barely above a whisper now.

  She could not answer. Despite it all, including the obvious fact that he no longer cared for her in the same way, she still did. How could she not, when she saw so clearly what it was costing him to protect his family, and yet he kept on? If her father were still alive, would she not still be there herself? It tore her inside, twisted her up. It made no sense, but nothing in this world had truly made sense since the day twelve years ago when the first Coalition battleship had slipped into orbit and begun the conquering of Ziem.

  And suddenly an image rose in her mind, fierce and undeniable. Drake, young Drake, younger even than Eirlys now. Eleven years ago, sixteen to her own fourteen, he had been the personification of everything her girlish heart longed for. Eleven years ago, when his father had been practically obliterated in front of his eyes, only his head left and placed on that pike as reminder, he had joined the battle with a passion that both thrilled and frightened her. He had picked up the gauntlet dropped by Torstan Davorin, and had charged into the fight like someone possessed. And even at sixteen he had won the admiration of those many times older, surprising them all with his courage and sometimes unusual tactics.

  And then his mother had thrown herself from Halfhead and it had all ended for him. Drake Davorin was finally beaten, cowed, and turned to a life so ordinary and inconspicuous that eventually even the Coalition had almost forgotten whose son he was. He was just the servile taproom keeper seen most often in an apron. She’d heard Barcon belittle him often enough to realize they considered him properly broken, and no longer a threat.

  And for over a decade now, she’d seen or heard nothing to show they were not right.

  Drake Davorin could not more thoroughly appear a coward if he tried.

  It ate at her, and, after parting from Eirlys, she felt compelled to do something, anything. And when she later saw a Coalition guard chivvying along two citizens who had dared to exchange more than a passing greeting on the street, leaving his sheltered guardstand momentarily unmanned, she could not resist.

  “YOU COULD HAVE been killed.”

  Kye lifted her chin. “I was not.”

  “I weary of saying those same five words to you.”

  Kye gaped at her commander. “You? You of all people, wish to confront me about risking my life?”

  If the Raider was taken aback by her boldness, it did not show. But something else did. She knew he had been injured in the last raid, and she could see the pain in his slightly off-balance stance, favoring the leg that had been carved by a laser pistol. It made her ache inside with the worry she always felt for him.

  “We are not,” he said evenly, “discussing me.”

  “We should be,” she retorted. “For you risk your life all the time.”

  He held her gaze steadily. “Yes. For a reason, not for the risk itself. I don’t want to die, I want to live to fight.”

  She forgot to breathe for a moment. She hadn’t expected him to see that deeply.

  “I want to fight,” she protested.

  “I know this. You could not fight as fiercely as you do, were it not in your blood.” There was admiration in his voice, and it made her shiver. As did the way his Ziem blue eyes lingered on her face.
The way his gaze made her feel was strange, yet familiar, and the paradox only added to her turmoil.

  “Then what are we talking about?”

  “I believe it is called a death wish.”

  She spun away, unable to meet those steady eyes. Eyes that sparked something in her that she’d only felt once before, for Drake. And no amount of telling herself she was a fool and worse, that she should be ashamed that this man stirred her so easily when she knew little about him outside his courage, and his brilliance as a warrior and planner, seemed to quash it.

  She stared at the far wall of his quarters, as if there were something more than his ceremonial Ziem saber there.

  “I do not wish for death,” she finally managed to say.

  Not yet, anyway, she silently added. In the end, when the battle was either won or lost, when there would be no fighting left to do, then . . . what would she do with herself? What would she have? Who would she be?

  “Feeling you have nothing to live for amounts to the same thing.”

  She turned back then, as much because of the suddenly gentle tone of his voice as the words.

  “I just . . . wonder what will be left. In the end.”

  “And you have not the courage to face it?”

  She drew back, stung. Never had he questioned her courage, only her recklessness.

  “I understand, Kye,” he said. His voice had softened, into a tone she’d not heard from him before. It made her pulse kick up even as it soothed her roiled emotions. “I once felt the same, that I did not care, that I wished myself dead rather than go on, or face the end of the world I had known.”

  “You would never give up,” she declared.

  “Now,” he said. “But there was a time when I wished for the decision to be taken out of my hands.”

  “Do you understand we who live in constant fear of that happening? That you will die?”

  “If it happens, it happens. The fight will go on.”

  “You underestimate your importance.”

  “You overestimate it.”