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  She nodded a bit as Tano demonstrated how she was handling. Then she cut through the water with a steady rush, fast under sail, beautiful in her spread of canvas. And Jase had the helm now, delighted.

  Perfect day. Perfect finish.

  “You can feel the speed pick up,” Jase said. “Amazing how it feels in your hands.”

  No readouts, no numbers here, no helmsman nor navigator, nothing like a starship’s bridge at all, just the wind aloft and salt water running under her keel. The sounds and vibrations all around them were like nothing else in the world, readout without a dial or a blinking light. Bren would have taken Jaishan in himself—he got few chances to enjoy it. But Jase should have this run, something to think back on when he got back to his own reality, up in space.

  Maybe this last outing would be a lure sufficient to bring Jase back to the world. Jase hadn’t been so much for fishing. The notion that they were going to kill and immediately eat a creature was just more than Jase liked to inspect too closely, much as Jase appreciated fish when it appeared from a kitchen, spiced, plated, and sauced.

  So they’d just sailed this day, skirted the picturesque if hazardous offshore rocks off the end of the peninsula, and at least gone far enough from shore to see the haze on the horizon that was the island of Mospheira.

  His aishid, his personal bodyguard, had done all the fishing on the other side of the boat, and brought back a sizeable catch for Najida’s cook to deal with.

  But the fatality to fish needn’t trouble Jase, who had happiness on his face and the wind in his hair.

  They were dressed atevi-style: trousers, boots, and, since the sun had started down, warm outdoor coats. The bay could be chill. One wanted to keep hands in pockets when Jaishan was moving like this, and Jase’s bare hands would be quite cold, gripping the wheel, but the air was clean and good.

  The wind played little tricks as they came past the jut of the Edi headland that sheltered the little fishing harbor there, and Tano anticipated it, turning up by Jase’s shoulder as the wind first fell off and then came back stronger. Jase coped without help. Jaishan steadied, a thing of beauty in the dying light, chasing her own shadow on the water.

  And when the shore loomed up in the twilight, and the lights of Bren’s own estate at Najida showed on the hill above the landing, they had a feeling of real homecoming, a sense that they had indeed sailed away from the world today, and were coming back to a lingering fantasy of country life and rustic warmth.

  They were arriving too late for dinner at the house, however: that had happened early, before sunset. Bren had asked the youngsters and Jase’s two-man bodyguard to pack for their return, and his staff had intended a special early supper for their guests, with all the youngsters’ favorite dishes.

  Bren hoped that affair had come off well, and that the youngsters were having the time together he had intended. He and Jase had had their own light supper at the first of the twilight—sandwiches, nothing extravagant—and they were holding out for wine and dessert once they got in.

  • • •

  They could have been out on the boat all day if he had really pitched a fit. Cajeiri knew that.

  They could have been. But nand’ Bren had hinted, quietly and hopefully, that it would please him very much if he could have some time to talk to Jase. Nand’ Bren had offered Cajeiri and his guests a dinner party instead, just themselves as the sole focus of the Najida staff, and Cajeiri had not argued, because nand’ Bren was seeing his guest go home tomorrow, too, and of course he wanted some time. Nand’ Bren had done everything in his power to make their visit the best it could be, and nand’ Bren had taken them all out on the boat every day but this one.

  So all in all, and largely thanks to nand’ Bren and Jase-aiji, the birthday had been excellent, and Cajeiri was sure his auspicious ninth year had had the very best beginning it could have. His guests were here from the space station and his baby sister was born safely and his father had named him officially his heir, in front of the whole aishidi’tat.

  Not to mention the Guild had gotten rid of the people who were causing the trouble, and was now doing what it was supposed to do, which was to keep peace in the aishidi’tat. The Marid, the district to the south that had made war not so long ago, was peaceful, and that meant they were safe enough to be out at nand’ Bren’s estate, sailing whenever they wanted and without any great worry about enemies.

  Everything would have been perfect this evening, if only there could be endless days in front of them.

  But no, Gene and Artur and Irene were going back to the station, leaving on the shuttle tomorrow with Jase-aiji and his bodyguard.

  That meant he would not see his guests for another year, and maybe longer than a year if stupid grown-ups got to feuding, again, as grown-ups were always apt to do.

  Or if his mother got her way and his guests could never visit the Earth again.

  But no feud and none of his mother’s objections was going to stop them meeting forever. He had made up his mind to that, and he was sure his father, the aiji of the whole aishidi’tat, was on his side this time.

  Besides, his mother had his new sister to take care of. That meant she was spending less time worrying about him. And when she was not thinking about him, she was surely in a much better mood.

  “This time you will have to write,” he said to his guests, as they were sitting in their suite, well-fed, with all their belongings and souvenirs strewn on the master bed. His valets and his bodyguard were doing the actual packing. They were better at it. Boji, small, furry, black, and large as a baby, was traveling with them, and he was bounding about his cage, keenly aware of the packing, and upset about it. He wanted to be out. And that would not be a good idea, in case the door should open.

  “We will write,” Gene said in Ragi, and added: “I did write.”

  “You did write,” Cajeiri agreed.

  “We all tried,” Artur said.

  “This time my father will give me the letters you send. I am sure he will. And I shall write as often as I have something to say.”

  “My mother may not give me the letters,” Irene said, also in Ragi. “She can be happy. And then she is unhappy. One does not know what will happen when I am back. She will surely be angry that we stayed more time.”

  Upset mothers were not in anybody’s control. Cajeiri understood that very well. “We shall meet next year. Don’t worry.”

  It was conniving, that was what Great-grandmother would call it, and Irene would do what she promised she would do, no matter what Irene’s mother said. They could be sure of that. Irene was much braver than anybody might think.

  So they connived together. And planned their next meeting.

  It felt, on this last night, a little like the old association again, except that Bjorn was not with them—Bjorn had decided to stay with his tutor, or whatever people had up there: school was the ship-speak for it. Gene said Bjorn had had to stay in the program or he could have lost his place with his tutors, and his parents would have been really upset. A place in tutorage was not easy for a Reunioner to get—and Bjorn was smart, and older, and it was a program that, right at the start, just after they had arrived on the station, had let in just the best and smartest of the Reunioner young folk. And now that program was on the verge of being phased out. Cajeiri understood how desperate life was for Reunioners, how short supplies were, and how important it was that Bjorn stay where he was and not be dismissed and lose his chance.

  His father being aiji, Cajeiri thought, might have negotiated something that would have let Bjorn come down and not lose his place—but his father had already been extraordinarily accommodating in allowing his guests at all, and he had wanted to create no extra problems with station politics.

  They had resolved they were going to be sure that Bjorn could come next time.

  And they had set up in detail how they were going to ge
t around obstacles during the next year, arranging for messages to get where they needed to go, and when they should expect the first one, and how he was always going to mention a number in the ending that would tell them what the number of the letter was. That way they would always know whether all the messages were getting through.

  They would do the same for messages to him.

  He was too young to use the Messengers’ Guild on his own, and there was a scarcity of paper for printing things on the station, so the messages he sent would be real letters on paper, which would go up in packets on the shuttle missions. That meant his packets would go first to Lord Geigi, on the atevi side of the station—that was how it would work. And their answers would all come in the same packets as Lord Geigi’s reports home, on stationery that was part of the souvenirs going with them.

  Along with his own little packets he could send any little light thing, if his father allowed and if it fit within regulations. So he decided he would always pack in some fruit sweets for Lord Geigi. He was sure Lord Geigi would appreciate the gift, and send the letters on to the human side of the station. Lord Geigi knew very well how his mail had gotten held forever, this last year. And Lord Geigi was on their side, and he would do it, and make sure things happened.

  “Tell Bjorn, too,” he said. “Tell him to write to me. Often. One wishes to hear about his program.”

  “We tell him,” Irene said. “I see him sometimes. Not often. But I shall tell him everything we did. He will be—” She changed to ship-speak. “He wanted so much to come. But the rules say no. He cannot be absent.”

  “Next year,” Gene said. “Next year for sure. And you keep in touch with me, Reni, do you hear?”

  Irene lived in a different section than Gene and Artur. Reunioners were divided up in residencies by sections, and Gene was not allowed to go where Irene and Bjorn lived, which was some sort of special place.

  But they had set up their ways to deal with that, the same that they had had on the starship—tunnels, just like on the starship, that ran beside the public corridors, or over or under them. They had mapped them on the ship. They had mapped them on the station, and Gene had explored all the way to the place atevi authority started. They had made maps together, and added a whole new section to the little notebook that Cajeiri always kept close—the little notebook that had always helped him remember, and now helped him imagine places he’d never seen.

  He could imagine now where they lived, and how their place related to the atevi side. And before, all last year, politics had gotten in the way of their even getting letters to each other. But now they had an ally, and if someone tried to keep them from writing, the tunnels meant ways they could get to the atevi side, where atevi made the rules.

  “Lord Geigi will definitely always help us,” Cajeiri said. “And if people try to stop us from writing to each other, just get to the atevi side. Just walk right up to the doors and say my father said so and they should let you in.”

  “Did he say so?”

  “Well, he will,” he said, and they all laughed a little, which was disrespectful, but he was also determined it would be true. “And do not tell your parents any sort of things that may scare them!” Humans and atevi might be different, so very different they could have very dangerous misunderstandings. And if one added parents into the numbers, one could only imagine what sort of misunderstanding could happen. “Whatever your parents ask about the trouble, always say, That was very far from us, or . . .” He put on his most innocent face. “Was there something going on?”

  Artur laughed, and they all did.

  “We never saw the gunfire,” Gene said with his most innocent expression.

  “Never!” Irene said. “We just had nice food and pretty clothes and we went to parties and met your parents. How could there possibly be a problem?”

  They laughed. There had been scary moments, particularly at Tirnamardi, when nand’ Bren and nand’ Jase had gone to deal with Lord Tatiseigi’s neighbor; and that had been a scary time. They had ashes drifting down onto Lord Tatiseigi’s driveway, and there had been bullet holes in the bus when nand’ Bren and nand’ Jase had come back.

  It had been even worse, when Great-grandmother had had to send nand’ Bren right into the heart of the Assassins’ Guild to take down the Shadow Guild. They had had to pretend everything was perfectly normal that evening. But they had not known whether they might all be running for their lives before morning.

  That had been an extremely scary night, and nand’ Bren and Banichi and several of Great-grandmother’s guard had come back wounded. But Father had had Cajeiri and his guests inside the tightest protection, and they had had Jase-aiji and his bodyguards with them as well as Father’s and Great-grandmother’s bodyguards around them. Jase-aiji’s bodyguards had weapons that could take out half the apartment and maybe the floor under them, and he was very glad those had never come into question.

  So, no, they had never been in that much danger.

  And right after that, while everything was still in confusion, his father had turned his birthday into a public Festivity and he had had to make a public speech and be named, officially, his father’s heir.

  His associates had been there when he had become “young aiji,” not just “young gentleman,” so they knew what had happened, and how everything had changed. And so far the title had not been a great inconvenience, but that was, Cajeiri feared, only because he still had his foreign guests. When they left, tomorrow—when they left—

  He feared there were going to be duties, and more appearances in court dress, and that his life for the next whole year and forever after was going to be just gruesome.

  But he would do it.

  He would do it because behaving badly could mean his guests could not come back. Priorities, his great-grandmother called it.

  He would definitely have to go back to living in his suite, inside his father’s apartment, with his mother—and his very new sister, who was a baby, and who was going to cry a lot.

  He would have his bodyguard for company. And he would have his valets, who were grown men, but they understood him and they were patient. His little household was his, and no one would take that away.

  He was sure he was going to have to go back to regular lessons. His latest tutor was not a bad one—even interesting sometimes, so it was not too awful. And he was coming back with a lot of things to ask about.

  But he had still rather be out at Najida or Tirnamardi.

  He would not get to ride his mecheita until the next holiday, and that only if he could get an invitation from Great-uncle Tatiseigi and if he could get permission from his father to go out to Tirnamardi. And all that depended on whether there were troubles anywhere near. It might be next year before he could go, because there were currently troubles in the north. During the whole year, there was still going to be the question of the succession to the lordship of the Ajuri and the lordship of the Kadagidi, either one of which could break into gunfire or worse and just mess everything up in Tirnamardi, where his mecheita was.

  Worse, Ajuri was his mother’s clan, and the upset in Ajuri was going to keep her upset all year.

  But maybe being “young aiji” meant even his father would be more inclined to listen to what he wanted.

  And what he wanted was to go riding for days and days; and what he wanted even more than that was his guests back again—before next year if he could somehow manage it.

  But third, and what he wanted most of all, and had no power at all to arrange—he wanted his guests to live safe from politics up on the station. The situation up there, the Mospheirans feuding with the Reunioners—that quarrel really, really worried him.

  There were over twice as many humans on the station as there were supposed to be, and the half of them, who had come up from the island of Mospheira, hated the other half, who had arrived last year from Reunion, out in deep space.
There was not enough room. So things had become crowded and difficult.

  More, a treaty said that there would always be as many atevi up there as there were humans—and that agreement was thrown out of balance, with the Reunioners arriving. Now there were twice as many humans as there ought to be, but only the same number of atevi. Maybe it would have been kind for atevi to give up some of their room to make things better, but for some reason they were not doing that. He had to ask his father why. It was possibly because they did not want the Reunioners staying there and fussing with the Mospheirans. Or possibly just that they did not want to interfere in a human feud.

  And then there was the accident with one of the big tanks that grew fish and such that fed the station—when the station had already had trouble feeding everybody before the Reunioners had come. Atevi were not willing for humans to be short of food, however. So they had helped with that, with workers and metal to repair the damaged tank. And Lord Geigi had sent workers and materials that modified a number of public areas into living spaces. But it was all still a mess.

  And there was no easy way to fix it. The ancestors of the Mospheirans had had a disagreement with the ancestors of the Reunioners, and now, just when the Mospheirans had gotten themselves through a very scary and dangerous time, and built everything to make themselves comfortable and well-fed again—the Reunioners showed up to overcrowd them.

  Mospheiran humans on the station wanted to pack up all the Reunioners and send them out to go build a completely new station at the barren ball of rock that was Maudit, far across the solar system. Mospheirans wanted never to see them again.

  He did not agree. His three guests were Reunioners, and he did not want them sent out to Maudit.

  So if the Mospheiran stationers won and the Reunioners were set to leave, he intended to get his guests and their parents over into the atevi section of the station, under Lord Geigi’s authority, where no human order could reach them. He had not gotten his father’s agreement that that was what they would do—but that was his intention, and he intended to do what he could to arrange that, quietly, so as not to upset adults.