The nurses were dozing in the back of the wagon. Her mother had taken Johanna away to ride on her saddle in front of her, to show Nora how bad she had been. The drover on his bench had his back to her. She felt as if nobody could see her, as if she weren’t even there.
She didn’t want to be a king anyway if it meant being mean and yelling and carrying people off by force. She wanted to be like her mother, but her old mother, the good mother, not this new one, who lied and broke promises, who hit and called names. Alais had said, “Your mother is wicked,” and she almost cried again, because it was true.
She would tell Richard when he came back. But then in her stomach something tightened like a knot: if he came back. Somehow the whole world had changed. Maybe even Richard would be false now.
“You’ll be a Crusader,” he had said to her.
She didn’t know if she wanted that. Being a Crusader meant going a long, long way and then dying. “Be good,” Richard had said. “Be brave.” But she was just a little girl. Under the whole broad blue sky, she was just a speck.
The wagon jolted along the road, part of the long train of freight heading down toward Poitiers. She looked all around her, at the servants walking along among the carts, the bobbing heads of horses and mules, the heaps of baggage lashed on with rope. Her mother was paying no heed to her, had gone off ahead, in the mob of riders leading the way. The nurses were sleeping. Nobody was watching her.
Nobody cared about her anymore. She waited to disappear. But she didn’t.
She stood, holding on to the side to keep from falling. Carefully, she climbed up over the front of the wagon onto the bench, keeping her skirts over her legs, and sat down next to the drover, who gawked down at her, a broad, brown face in a shag of beard.
“Now, my little lady—”
She straightened her skirts, planted her feet firmly on the kickboard, and looked up at him. “Can I hold the reins?” she said.
Melinda Snodgrass
A writer whose work crosses several mediums and genres, Melinda M. Snodgrass has written scripts for television shows such as Profiler and Star Trek: The Next Generation (for which she was also a story editor for several years), a number of popular SF novels, and was one of the cocreators of the long-running Wild Card series, for which she has also written and edited. Her novels include Circuit, Circuit Breaker, Final Circuit, The Edge of Reason, Runespear (with Victor Milán), High Stakes, Santa Fe, and Queen’s Gambit Declined. Her most recent novel is The Edge of Ruin, the sequel to The Edge of Reason. Her media novels include the Wild Cards novel Double Solitaire and the Star Trek novel The Tears of the Singers. She’s also the editor of the anthology A Very Large Array. She lives in New Mexico.
Here she takes us to a distant planet to show us that even in a society where spaceships thunder through the night and aliens mingle with humans on crowded city streets, some of the games you might run into go way back.
Glass met glass with dull, tuneless clunks as the human bartender filled orders. A Hajin waitress with a long and tangled red mane running down her bare back clicked on delicate hooves through the bar delivering drinks. The patrons were a surly lot, mere shadows huddled in the dark dive, and carefully seated at tables well away from each other. No one talked. Substituting for conversation were commentators calling the action of a soccer game playing on the wall screen over the bar. Even those voices were growling rumbles because the sound was turned down so low. The odors of spilled beer and rancid cooking oil twisted through the smoke, but they and the tobacco smells were trumped by the scents of despair and simmering anger.
This dank hole was a perfect match for Second Lieutenant Tracy Belmanor’s mood. He had picked it because it was well away from the spaceport and he was unlikely to meet any of his shipmates. He should have been happy. He had graduated from the Solar League’s military academy only last month and had been assigned to his first posting. Problem was, his fellow classmates had walked out as newly minted first lieutenants, but such was not the case for the lowborn tailor’s son who had attended the academy on a scholarship. When he had received his insignia, he’d stared down at the stars and single bar and realized that he was one rung below his aristocratic classmates, even though his grades had been better, his performance in flight the equal of any of them save Mercedes, whose reflexes and ability to withstand high gee had put them all to shame. When he’d looked up at the commandant of the High Ground, Vice Admiral Sergei Arrington Vasquez y Markov, the big man had casually delivered the explanation, totally unaware how insulting it had been.
“You must understand, Belmanor, it wouldn’t do for you to be in the position of issuing orders to your classmates, especially to the Infanta Mercedes. This way you will never hold the bridge solo, and so be spared the embarrassment.”
The implication that he would be embarrassed to issue an order to highborn assholes, including the Emperor’s daughter, had ignited his too-quick temper. “I’m sure that will be a great comfort to me as I’m dying because one of those idiots wrecked the ship.” But of course he hadn’t said that. The unwary words had been at the edge of his teeth, but after four years being drilled in protocol and the chain of command, he managed to swallow the angry retort. Instead he had saluted and managed a simple “Yes, sir.” At least he hadn’t thanked Markov for the insult.
Later, he wondered why he hadn’t spoken up. Cowardice? Was he really intimidated by the FFH? That was a terrible thought, for it implied that he did know his place. If he was honest with himself, that was why he hadn’t attended the postgraduation ball. He knew that none of Mercedes’s ladies-in-waiting would have accepted him as escort. He couldn’t bring a woman of his own social strata. And Mercedes was the daughter of the Emperor, and no one could ever know what they had shared, or that Tracy loved her and that she loved him.
So he didn’t go to the ball. Instead, he stood on the Crystal Bridge on Ring Central and watched Mercedes, out of uniform and a vision in crimson and gold, enter the ballroom on the arm of Honorius Sinclair Cullen, Knight of the Arches and Shells, Duke de Argento, known casually as Boho, and Tracy’s nemesis and rival. It should have been Tracy at her side. But that could never be.
Tracy took a long pull on his whiskey, draining the glass. It was cheap liquor and it etched pain down his throat, and settled like a burning coal in his gut. Unlike the other morose and uncommunicative patrons, Tracy had chosen to sit at the bar. The bartender, a big man, the stripes on his apron imperfectly hiding the grime, nodded at Tracy’s empty glass.
“Another?”
“Sure. Why the hell not?”
“You’ve really been hammering these down, kid.” Tracy looked up and was surprised by the kindness in the man’s brown eyes. “You gonna be able to find your way back to your ship?” Whiskey gurgled into the glass.
“Maybe it would be better if I didn’t.”
A rag emerged from the apron pocket and wiped down the steel surface of the bar. “You don’t wanna do that. The League hangs deserters.”
Tracy downed the drink in one gulp, and fought back nausea. He shook his head. “Not me. They wouldn’t look for me. They’d be glad the Embarrassment has been quietly swept under the rug.”
“Look, kid, you got troubles. I can see that.”
“Wow, you always this perceptive?”
“Cut the attitude,” but the words were said mildly and with a faint smile. “Look, if you want feel better about the state of the galaxy and your place in it, you should talk to that guy.