She leaned against him, resting her head against his shoulder. He was surprised by the closeness. He put his arm around her.
Her voice, when it came, was quiet, barely audible over the engines. “Jean-Pierre hunted Angus Powrie since he was a youth. He spent a fortune on investigators, on newsmen. They hounded Powrie all over the world. Powrie had to stay in hiding because of Jean-Pierre. When they found each other, one of them had to die. Harris, Jean-Pierre killed himself. He broke cover, he leaped upon his enemy instead of shooting him. He forgot in his anger that Powrie always incapacitates his victim with a blow to the groin. Powrie is expert at that attack; it is his favorite. Nothing you did could have saved Jean-Pierre. Nothing.
“But I will not lie to you. You did fail, in a way. You failed to make the best of Jean-Pierre’s death by avenging him. Perhaps he will not be too angry with you.”
“I hope not. I’d hate to have him chewing me out through eternity.”
She chuckled.
“How well did you know him?”
“He was my husband.”
“What?”
“We were married three years ago.” He heard her sigh. “It was not a good idea. He had lost the fiancée his father had picked for him. She was frail and prone to fits of despondency as pureblood princesses tend to be, and she leaped from a high cliff, though Jean-Pierre tried to catch her. He and I had been friends, sometimes lovers, and he turned to me in his grief . . . and stayed with me in his passion.
“But afterward, nothing changed. He chose not to make plans for the future. Not of life, nor home, nor children. After a year we decided to look different ways. But he would not let me divorce him yet.”
“Why not?”
“His father did not favor me as a match for the prince. Jean-Pierre took offense. He told me that one day they would pay me an immense bribe to cast him aside. He insisted that I accept. That way, he said, the insult would be avenged, and yet everyone would have what he wanted.”
“That sounds like Jean-Pierre.”
They rode on in silence for a while.
He asked, “Do you know if he liked me?”
“You did not know? Yes. He did. He liked the way you could talk to everyone. Ignoring rank. Ignoring concerns of light and dark and dusky. He liked it that you taught me.”
“I wish I could go back and just tell him, JayPee, I’m glad you’re my friend. And good-bye.”
“I, too. Harris?”
“Yes?”
“You should worry less about whether people like you.”
“Maybe.”
“Not maybe. Yes.” She sighed. “Promise me you will remember what I have asked.”
“Okay.”
Doc heard three clangs, the notes of a hammer on an anvil. They trailed off into the distance. He opened his eyes.
Joseph sat a few feet away, studying him. His face was as grave as ever, but there was some deeper sorrow in his eyes.
“Tell me,” Doc said.
Joseph told him. When he was done, Doc was silent a long moment. “Joseph, when you said that death followed in my wake, you were right.”
“I am sorry I ever said that.”
“Why?”
“Because it was wrong. Death does not follow you. It is ahead of you, Doc, like a line of enemies. Ahead of you because you aim yourself at it. You and your allies hurl yourselves at it to keep it at bay. You pass through it. Inevitably, one of you is caught. But I hate to think what things would be like if no one hurled himself at that line.”
Gaby woke feeling rested but, for once, not grateful for it. She’d prefer to sleep until the heaviness inside her went away.
She dressed in her new jeans—a little baggy, in the fashion of fair world men’s clothes, but a reasonable fit—and went back to the lounge. No one else was there. The sky outside the windows was just lightening with dawn; the eastern faces of high clouds were striped with orange sunlight.
She sat in her usual place and stared at the talk-box.
Time to stop relying on other people for everything. She closed her eyes. She tried to reach out for that familiar loneliness she’d felt twice before.
Slowly, the engines’ roar dwindled to nothingness. She felt a pressure grow behind her eyes and heard a static in her ears.
The static became voices. They blended and blurred into a mass of words. “Can’t authorize the when it sets sail not before the equinox operator help so there we were married your sister instead and came out soaking wet set aside some forest lands cost you eighty libs mi espada se rompio forty is the best you can when will you come . . . ” The pressure in her head grew greater but did not quite hurt.
She opened her eyes.
Her room. Walls of irregular stone, dark with age, no door or window allowing exit. An ornate rug, handwoven, on the floor. Her four-poster bed of dark wood with curtains of transparent silk in pastel blue. Her table. Her doll. The silvery mirror the height of a man on the far wall. The dress she wore, heavy but somehow not hot, not cumbersome. All hers.
Gabrielle’s.
But she remembered Gaby, too. There was no conflict; the memories fit together like lovers’ fingers intertwining. She smiled in sudden delight. She’d found her missing sister at last.
She listened for certain names, for specific voices. Eventually she found them.
“Goodsir Blackletter, we were attacked . . . -plete success. Goodsir Powrie has been to see a . . . left Siluston in that flying boat . . . dead, but Roundcap still lives . . . the storm cloud?”
She tried to make an eye open where she heard the voice, but there was no eye. They were speaking over a voice-only set. She could not hear any reply. She could not clear up the transmission; words went missing despite her best effort, and the pressure in her head increased. It distracted her, annoyed her.
“Gabrielle.” Doc’s voice. That eye she could open, and did. She saw the mirror brighten, her own reflection fade. Then, through it, she saw herself, dressed as Gaby; her eyes were closed. Doc was beside her, concern on his face.
“Gabrielle, you need to come out. I think you’re hurting yourself.”
“You can call me Gaby. I remember everything.”
“Gaby, just come out now.”
“I don’t want to. I’m just getting it right.”
“Do it.”
“Not yet!” Anger flashed through her.
She heard a shattering noise. Doc disappeared.
She couldn’t open that eye again. Uh-oh. She sighed, closed her eyes, and relaxed her hold on her surroundings. She felt them slip away. The floor rocked and she felt the sofa appear beneath her.
And the odd pressure inside her head resolved itself into pain, a solid steel spike of hurt driven deep into her brain. She cried out, clutched her head, tried to curl up into a ball. The pain wouldn’t let go.
She felt Doc hold her and heard him speak her name, softly, insistently. Finally the spike of pain began to withdraw. “I’m all right, I’m all right,” she said.
“You are not. You’ve dangerously extended yourself. I want you to promise me that you won’t do that again unless I’m around.”
She straightened in spite of the hurt. She looked him in the eye. “No.”
His face registered surprise. “Well. Will you at least take it under advisement?”
In spite of the pain, she grinned. “That much I’ll do.”
Then she saw the talk-box.
It was ruined. The glass of the tube was scattered in tiny pieces on the floor before it; Gaby found pieces on her legs and in her lap. The electronic elements behind were blackened and melted. “What the hell happened to that?”
“I think you did.”