"Tell me, Stanislaus," she said quietly.
He twitched as if she'd touched him with a live wire. His eyes jerked up from the wine glass in his hand, and despite everything she'd already seen, all of her suspicions, she was shocked by the fear she saw in them. Fear-the one thing no one would ever have expected from any Skjorning, she thought.
"To be telling what?" he asked.
"Don't pretend that you don't know what I'm talking about," she said gently. "I've been with you all day. You haven't made a single joke, haven't produced a single real smile, haven't said any of those absurd, wonderful things you always say. You're a ghost, Stanislaus-the ghost of the man I met on Novaya Rodina. And I want that man back. I want him back now, here. And you're going to tell me where he's gone so I can bring him back."
She stopped and cleared her throat, surprised at the way tears had fogged her voice, prickled at the backs of her eyes.
"Tatiana-" he began, then closed his mouth. Jaw muscles bunched, and he looked away, over the terrace's rail at the sparkling lights of First Stop, Cimmaron's planetary capital. From here, in the gathering dark, all they could see were the lights, sparkling with the purity of Heaven's own stars. The damage, the wreckage left by the fighting which should never have happened, was invisible, but both of them knew it was there.
"Lass," he said finally, still looking away, "don't ask me to be telling you. It's-It's not to be something I'd want you to be carrying with you. Bad enough that I-"
He cut himself off, chopping one hand in the air between them.
"I can't do that," she told him softly, and he looked at her, obedient, manifestly against his will, to the unwavering determination of a voice as stern as Beaufort bedrock. "I thought you were only going to be someone to have a good time with for a few days before you shipped out," she continued. "And I did-have a good time, I mean. But that wasn't all that happened, and I don't think it was all that happened for you, either, Stanislaus. And I won't-I can't-walk away from that, or from you. If it hurts you, I'm sorry. But I'm not going away, and I'm not letting you go away from me. So tell me. You've got to tell someone."
"I . . . I can't," he said, and his voice was hoarse.
"I didn't see what you've seen here, Stanislaus," she said with an odd, quiet serenity. "I doubt I can even imagine what you saw here. No, I'm sure I can't-I saw your face when Higgins was telling me about the school." His nostrils flared, and he flinched as if she'd just punched him. "But I saw Pieter Tsuchevsky shot. I knew they were going to shoot me next. And I saw Marines-Marines in the uniform of my Federation-murdering people I'd known from the day I was born. I saw them firing into the crowd, and I saw that crowd go over them like the sea, Stanislaus. I saw them in some cases torn apart-literally torn apart-by the bare hands of my neighbors, my friends. So no, I can't imagine what you've seen here, but I think I can at least begin to understand, to share it with you, if you'll just let me in. And knowing that there is someone to share it with you . . . that's important, Stanislaus. That's so important."
"But-"
"Start at the beginning," she told him, still with that note of implacable, serene command. "I've cleared my schedule for the entire night. So take your time. But start now."
He looked at her squarely for the first time since she'd begun speaking, and she kept her own expression calm and attentive as she saw the tear trickling down his right cheek. For an instant longer, he wavered. But then he closed his eyes, his shoulders seemed to sag visibly, and he sat back in his chair.
"It wasn't to be this way," he began finally, slowly. "Not like this. But after we'd broken into the system, after they'd had the killing of Longbow, Brigadier Lyman assigned us to the occupation of Selkirk's Landing."
He inhaled deeply.
"We'd the wording that the planet had surrendered," he continued, "and-"
Tatiana Illyushina sat there in the chill of the gathering night and listened as Stanislaus Skjorning surrendered his pain to her one slow, anguished syllable at a time.
The larger of Cimmaron's moons was high overhead, shining down on a city which had largely turned off its lights and gone to sleep. But on one terrace balcony, the lighting still burned dimly as a young woman sat on the long, padded bench against the terrace's outer parapet. A tall, broad shouldered Marine captain lay stretched out on the bench, his head resting in her lap, and her hand lay gently on his huge chest.
Stanislaus' face was no longer the armored mask he had shown that Tatiana from the moment of her arrival on Cimmaron. The mask was gone, crumbled into ruin, and if the face which had hidden behind it was older, more worn, than the one she remembered from Novaya Rodina, at least it belonged to the same man once more. She stroked his chest gently, her hand scarcely moving, and she knew her own face showed the tears she'd shed as he told her about the people he'd lost, the people he'd killed . . . those tiny, broken bodies in the flaming charnel house which had been a school. It was the children, she knew. That was what had threatened to destroy him. And the fact that he'd known that it truly wasn't his fault, hadn't meant that it wasn't his doing.
But they'd survived that. He'd gotten it out, shared it with her, and he'd been right about the horror she would feel, the grief. But she'd been right about his need to let her in so that he was no longer alone with the crushing weight of those murdered children. And now, hours later, in the hard-won tranquility that came after the storm, they floated together in the quiet hollow of the night's hand.
"Look at the moons, Stanislaus," she murmured. "Aren't they beautiful?"
"Aye, they are that," he agreed. "A mite on the small side, they're to be, for a proper moon, but beautiful."
"You and Lad!" She laughed softly and hit him on the chest with a small fist. "To hear the two of you talk, every single thing on Beaufort is bigger and better than anywhere else in the known universe!"
"Bigger, aye. That they're to be, I'm thinking. But better?" He shook his head. "Not always better, and right this minute it's in my mind that it may just be Novaya Rodina has the most beautiful sight I've ever had the seeing of."
"What are you talking about now?" she asked, but her voice was low, soft, and her eyes softened as he reached up one hand to touch her cheek gently.
"I'm thinking you're to know that already, love," he said very, very softly, and something inside her trembled as he called her "love" for the first time.
"I don't know how you passed the Marine physical with vision that bad," she said, and he shook his head.
"No, love. It's past the time for us to be hiding behind jokes. It was a dark place I'd gone to, and it's the light of you that's to be bringing me back from it again. So let's not be pretending any longer, you and I."
"It'll never work, you know," she told him . . . in the voice of someone who believed exactly the opposite. "You're from Beaufort; I'm from Novaya Rodina. I've never seen a body of water larger than a pond in my entire life-not close up and personal. And you-! I can just see you as a megaovis rancher on Novaya Rodina!"
"Somehow, I'm doubting that you're to be one bit less stubborn than me," he said. "And that being so, aren't you thinking that it's to be a mite silly to be dwelling on niggling little details like that? Besides, you're to be Vice President, and Congress has already had the deciding that Beaufort's to be our capital." He smiled, a smile that was more than a shadow of the infectious grin she remembered. "So I'm to be having the inside track, I'm thinking."
"You do, do you?"
She arched her eyebrows, then laughed suddenly. The sound was throaty and low, and it bubbled with a sort of wicked joy. Of relief, and the feeling of life in her veins. She thumped his chest again, and then she pushed at him-a bit like a miniature poodle pushing at a great dane.