“Your family really thinks this is all right?” Sula asked. Earlier in the evening he’d told her what had happened to Sempronia, banished for loving a man of insufficient rank.
“They’ll have plans for you,” Martinez said. “They’ll want to load you with a few million zeniths and buy you a showcase palace in the High City and a country estate where we can entertain.” He grinned. “And if youdon’t want any of that, you’ll have to bevery firm with them.”
Her eyes narrowed. “And in return for this, I’ll have to do what exactly?”
“Pry open some doors in the High City that are otherwise closed to provincials.”
She gave a bemused shrug. “I’m much more a blunt instrument than I am a pry bar,” she said. “I could get the doors open, maybe, but I wouldn’t answer for what the folk on the other side might think about it.”
“Best let Roland work that out on his own.”
Sula gave a sudden bright laugh and swung herself like a child on the end of his arm, shoes skipping on the pavement. “So what happens next?”
“We could make the announcement tomorrow afternoon at the reception after Vipsania’s wedding.” He grinned at her. “That’ll serve her right for diverting the guests’ attention atmy party.” He swung her laughing on the end of his arm. “And before that, in the morning, we could pay our visit to the Peers’ Gene Bank and get the paperwork out of the way.”
She gave him a startled, half-believing look and dropped his hand. “Thewhat?”
“Don’t worry. They just take a drop of blood.”
“Thewhat bank?” Her voice turned insistent.
“The Peers’ Gene Bank,” Martinez said. “Just to get all the bloodlines on record.”
She turned down the street, and he fell into step with her. He saw her face reflected in window glass, a wavy dark-eyed ghost. Skepticism invaded her face. “Is this strictly necessary?” she asked. “I never heard of this place.”
“I don’t suppose the Gene Bank advertises,” Martinez shrugged. “But then they don’t have to. It’s the law, at least here on Zanshaa, if you’re a Peer and want to marry. We have a gene bank on Laredo, too, though it’s not just for Peers.”
“There wasn’t anything like that on Spannan.” The planet, Martinez knew, where she’d been fostered after the execution of her parents.
“Some Peers care more about their bloodlines than others, I suppose,” Martinez said. “It’s a stupid old institution, but what can you do?”
They came to one of the Lower Town’s canals and turned left to the bridge they could see in the distance. The scent of the canal filled the air, iodine and decay.
Sula’s face hardened. “So what happens to the drop of blood once they draw it?”
“Nothing. It just goes into the record.”
“And who consults the record?”
A canal barge chugged by, its running lights shimmering on the dark water. The greasy wake slopped against the stone quay. Martinez raised his voice against the sound. “No one consults it, I imagine. Not unless there’s some question about the parentage of the children.” He slipped up behind her as they walked and wrapped her in his arms. He nuzzled close to Sula’s ear and said, “You’re not planning on having children by anyone but me, are you?”
He could feel surprising tension in her shoulders, and then the deliberate attempt at relaxation. “No one but you,” she said abstractly. She slowed her walk, then turned to him and gave him a quick kiss. “This is so sudden,” she said. “A few minutes ago I was just a woman with a medal and no job, and now—”
“Now you’re my partner for life,” he said, and was unable to restrain his grin.
She looked at him with an expression he couldn’t read. “You’re not getting carried away in some kind of stampede, are you? How many marriages are going on in your family, anyway?”
“You and I will make three. Or four, but I’m not sure Sempronia rightly counts, and I don’t know if she’s actually getting married or just threatening to.”
Her arms tautened around him like wire, and she pressed her cheek hard to his chest. Sandama Twilight floated through the air. “Three marriages at once,” she said. “Isn’t that unlucky?”
“It sounds lucky tome, ” Martinez said.
“I can hear your heart beating,” Sula murmured irrelevantly. He stroked her pale gold hair. A cold gust chilled him. Water slopped against the quay.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
There was a moment’s silence, and Martinez felt a wariness touch his nerves. She loosened her arms and looked up at him.
“Look,” she said. “This is all very sudden. I’m not used to the idea yet.”
He looked at her with the dizzying sensation that he had just stepped onto the edge of an abyss, and that a single misstep would send him spinning into the void.
“What,” he said carefully, “are you trying to tell me?”
She gave him a gentle kiss and offered a tentative smile. “Can’t we just go on as we are for a while?”
He looked at her. “We don’t have a lot of time. I want this to happen before…”
A door opened ahead of them, and music boomed out. Torminel in the brown uniforms of the civil service spilled into the doorway, then stood there calling to one another while the music shouted out around them, stringed instruments shrieking in a minor key. Sula bent her head, put her hands over her ears as discordant cymbals crashed.
“I need tothink, ” she insisted over the noise.
Sudden anger drew a hot slash across Martinez’s chest. He found himself raising his voice over the blaring music.
“I’ll spare you the trouble,” he said. “A moment’s thought would tell you that this is your best chance for security and the restoration of your family name, not to mention your difficulty in finding a patron in the service. So my own brief analysis would seem to indicate that your problem isn’t the money or the palace or the place in the country, your problem lies withme ….”
Sula’s eyes lifted to his, wide and sea-green and cold. “Spare the commentary,” she said in a voice hard as diamond. “You don’t knowanything about my problems.”
Martinez felt his spine stiffen under Sula’s gaze. His mind raced, a dark turmoil illuminated by jagged flashes of anger. “I beg to differ, my lady,” he said. “Your problem is that you lost your money and your position and all the people that you loved. And now you’re afraid to let anyone love you, because—”
“I won’t hear this!” Sula’s voice cut like a lash. Her hands were still flat over her ears. The gold light that poured from the open door glowed in her eyes like angry fire. “I don’tneed this pompous idiocy now! You don’t knowanything!”
The Torminel were staring at them now with their huge nocturnal eyes. Cymbals, tuned to strange minor keys, crashed again and again in Martinez’s ears.
“I—”
“It’s not about you!” Sula shouted.“Will you please get it into your head that it’s not about you!”
Then she spun on her heel and marched away, pale legs flashing beneath the hem of her black dress as she shouldered her way through the Torminel. Martinez stood on the pavement and watched her, a wild disbelief throbbing through his veins.
It was happeningagain.
Once before he had watched Sula walk away through the night, her heels emphatic on the surface of the street while the lights of the Lower Town gilded her hair. Once before he had stood stupidly and watched while she walked out of his life, while a cold morning wind blustered along the canal and his heart filled with a mixture of bewilderment and anger and knife-edge anguish.
Not a third time,Martinez swore to himself. His fists clenched.Not again.