Artemis Invaded

Julyan was losing track of how long they had been in Leto’s complex. Without the passage of the sun through the sky, the feeling of free air on his skin, the slow wheel of the stars as they turned against the blackness of the night, he felt uneasy. He knew he had slept, eaten meals, made trips to the privy, washed, and done other chores that must have taken up time, but some other part of his mind told him that no time—or an infinity of time—had passed.

The food didn’t help, being monotonously similar, taken from supplies the Dane brothers had carried with them. At first those little cubes that expanded into a variety of intensely flavored edibles had fascinated Julyan, but now he was growing to hate them. Each yellow cube tasted exactly like every other yellow cube, every blue cube like every other blue cube. The predictability was numbing, especially for a hunter, who was accustomed to eating according to the finds of the day. Even one cut of venison didn’t taste like all the rest, and there was variety from deer to deer, gazelle to gazelle, kudu to kudu.

The Old One ignored Julyan most of the time, as did Siegfried and Falkner, except when they reluctantly came to relieve him on some watch. Alexander was a more frequent visitor, but even his torments had a certain sameness to them, as if his thoughts were elsewhere.

A few times, Julyan suggested he go out into the valley of Maiden’s Tear to hunt or forage. No one took him seriously. They had food and drink enough. If they needed more, a message to the mysterious Gaius would supply it. Julyan’s initial fear that the Danes would decide to use him to test one of the spaveks became a sort of longing—at least being a test subject would be different.

However, following Griffin’s dramatic collapse, experiments with the spaveks were halted while Falkner compared what schematics Leto would supply to the actual suits. When Falkner could tear himself away from these, he cross-examined Griffin. He even tried discussing the spaveks with Ring but, if anything, Alexander’s command that Ring cooperate had made Ring harder to understand than usual.

Julyan understood that several more suits had been pulled apart and were being inspected. He had no part in this. His prisoners were kept busy by being given a section of a spavek and told to clean it carefully, with nameless but dire consequences promised if anything was damaged. Despite the threats, when the prisoners worked on the spaveks they were stationed at a long table where they could be watched.

Julyan was told to keep chatter to a minimum and to make sure the prisoners treated the artifacts with respect. He didn’t think they would break anything—not deliberately, at least. These Dane brothers didn’t understand the respect for artifacts the loremasters had ingrained into the people of Artemis. Julyan was glad when the prisoners were put to work. Even if he didn’t get to do anything, watching them work was better than standing alone in the corridor.

As minutes grew into hours, hours into days, Julyan’s soul congealed into a semblance of contented routine within which was encapsulated a festering mass of insanity. Since he was not permitted to hate Alexander, Julyan’s thwarted desires came to focus on those he blamed for failing to come and break the monotony of his existence. He envisioned amber eyes, blue-black tresses, a catlike tread …

Adara would come. She must come. She had been promised to him. He must have her. When he did, all would be right. Surely when Adara was his, Alexander would finally let Julyan kill Griffin. These dreams became the dark twin stars around which his galaxy swirled.

Griffin used the intensification of his link to Terrell to assure his friend that no matter what his brothers wanted, Griffin would never agree to work with them, especially if this meant having Old Empire technology released upon an unsuspecting universe. Additionally, Griffin warned Terrell to do his best to deny that he had any psionic ability. The legend of the factotum’s abilities was hardly known, even on Artemis. It was possible that Terrell might be able to pass as unable to operate one of the suits. Even after their waking contact faded, a touch in sleep remained. Griffin desperately needed that anchor as his nerves settled from the riot of confusion wrought upon it by his intense contact with the blue spavek.

When Falkner came to debrief him, Griffin steered a careful course between resisting and being too cooperative. Resisting would probably lead to him not being permitted to associate with the other prisoners. However, if he was too cooperative that might awaken suspicion, if not in Falkner or Siegfried, then certainly in Alexander. Therefore, Griffin allowed Falkner to coax him into talking, acting flattered that his older brother—the acknowledged expert on things mechanical in the Dane family—would ask his opinion.

Griffin wanted to share some of his experiences, if only to protect his friends from being used as test subjects without appropriate precautions. Griffin let Falkner know his suspicion that the suits needed time to adapt to each wearer. He also explained that different suits might mesh better with different talents—and that Ring’s advice in this matter should not be ignored.

“What do you make of Ring?” Falkner asked again, during one of these cross-examination sessions. “You say he was the first to try one of the suits, that he even selected the blue one from all the rest. How could he manage that? He can barely frame a coherent sentence.”

“I’d ask the Old One what he bred Ring for,” Griffin evaded. Whenever possible, he tried to put pressure on the Old One, never letting his brothers forget that their obedient “Maxwell” had an agenda of his own. “He had stud books going back at least a couple generations, probably notes based on his research.”

“I have asked,” Falkner said. “Maxwell says that Ring was a mistake. He’d been trying for clairvoyance, and ended up with something more like unreliable precognition. Ring was a dead end, useless even as breeding stock. When he got away, Maxwell says he didn’t look too hard. He admitted he thought Ring was probably dead within a day or two of leaving his protection.”

“How I do or don’t find Maxwell isn’t the point. He’s useful. His studies in the lore, combined with a fine sense for history, has given him insights we can use.”

“If the lore is what interests you,” Griffin said, “you should speak with Terrell. Factotum get a very solid grounding in the lore. You could use what Terrell was taught to corroborate what the Old One tells you.”

Falkner laughed. “Maxwell made a similar suggestion. He knows you have undermined our trust in him and is eager to win it back.”

If Falkner was enjoying himself, Siegfried had been heard to complain that he felt like the prince in the fairy tale who was told to sort grains of corn from equal-sized pieces of gold, except that he didn’t even know what was corn, what was gold. He would have liked to take everything back home, but that was impossible. As to what Alexander wanted, Griffin had no idea. Indeed, his only hint as to what Alexander did with his time came in the form of Terrell’s nightmares.

Griffin had tried to communicate with Leto but, since the prisoners were forbidden to speak when they were in their cells and Julyan had proven incredibly adept at hearing anything but the softest utterance, he hadn’t had any luck. Griffin didn’t know if Leto was ignoring him or if her audio pickups had been set to ignore sounds below a certain level. Either explanation was plausible. From what he’d overheard, he had gathered that Leto was being minimally cooperative with the Danes. Perhaps that lack of cooperation extended to him as well.

Then, during one of their armor cleaning sessions, Bruin passed on a scrap of news that made Griffin’s soul sing a chorus of mingled hope and fear.

Taking advantage of a blind spot created by the heaped parts, Bruin dipped his finger into his glass of water and drew a quick sketch on the table. A cat’s head, a woman’s body. A bear. A long-bodied cat.

“Give that polish here,” he said, tapping one finger for emphasis. “I want to get this scuff out, but I need to figure out how the polish will work.”

That Terrell also understood Bruin’s message that Adara had returned and was trying to figure out how to free them was evident from the joy that lit his shadowed eyes.

Terrell shoved the jar of polish to Bruin. “Careful. It would be terrible if something was damaged.”

Bruin nodded. “I couldn’t bear that. I don’t need you to tell me to be careful.”

Griffin interpreted the stressed words. “Bear tell be careful.” That confirmed that Bruin was getting his news through Honeychild, also that he’d passed on their desire that the others not act until they felt certain of success.

Why don’t I feel happier about this? Griffin asked himself. I should be thrilled, looking for ways to find information that Bruin can pass on. Instead I feel so frustrated, so angry. Am I afraid for Adara? For the risks she and the others must take?

As he dipped polish onto a tiny brush and brightened some contact points, the truth hit him with such abrupt force that he nearly dropped the piece of armor he was holding.

It’s fear, yes, but more … I’m frustrated at having to be rescued—again. I don’t want to be rescued. I want to get myself and the others out of here on my own … I want to retake this facility and show my brothers I’m not some worthless kid.

And I’m realizing that in feeling that way, I’m letting my pride get in the way. I’m proving just how much a kid I am.

Adara felt a certain amount of hope as she crept through the maze of rock that hid the meadow door. She knew Leto’s perceptions extended to the area surrounding the entrances into the valley and for some short distance into the valley itself. Although Leto didn’t seem to feel proprietary about the valley in the same way she did the complex, Adara hoped it was significant that Leto hadn’t called guards out after them when Adara and Sand Shadow had rigged their deadfall and a few other traps. Nonetheless, the huntress waited for the slight advantage full dark gave her before making her approach. The curved shape of the crystal key hung on a cord about her neck, but she didn’t need it. The door opened to her touch.

“Leto?” Adara whispered, her voice soft in contrast to the pounding of her heart.

No response. Adara took a step inside, then wedged a short, thick log to keep the door open. She didn’t know if this would work—perhaps a door made by seegnur could close with sufficient force to break even the stout chunk she’d used—but she felt better for the effort. She’d have to hope that the night remained summer still, so that motion in the air wouldn’t alert the lab’s occupants that someone had opened a door.

As she padded silently down the corridor, Adara’s mind swirled with what she’d learned from Kipper about how a few syllables from Alexander Dane had turned Terrell, Bruin, and Ring instantly obedient. She was terrified that the same might be done to her. Only her greater terror as to what might be happening to her friends had brought her to this place.

“Leto?” A few more steps, straining to listen. Had the corridor always been so long? It hadn’t seemed so when she had freely passed along it, intent on her destination. “Leto?”

In the far distance, Adara’s keen hearing caught sound: a person moving about or a bit of deep-voiced conversation. It might even have been some sort of machinery at work. She couldn’t go much closer to the lab without risking discovery.

She paused, hesitant as to whether to risk a few more steps, when a little girl’s voice whispered, “Why are you here?”

Adara’s heart leapt. She had to fight down an urge to yelp in panic. Disembodied voices were not something she had grown accustomed to.

An image in her head. Sand Shadow sending a detailed picture of a talking toadstool.

All right. So how is this different from voices in my head? Courage, Adara. Didn’t you come here to talk to Leto?

The huntress registered for the first time that Leto had been whispering. Surely that was encouraging. If she had meant to turn Adara over to the Dane brothers, why whisper? That didn’t mean Adara was safe. It meant she had a chance to win an ally.

“I came,” Adara replied, every nerve wildly alert, “to learn if you would help me free Griffin, Terrell, Bruin, and Ring. I know they’re prisoners.”

“But you like Griffin,” Adara said. She eased herself a few feet closer to the exit. “I thought you liked Terrell and Ring, too. Kipper says you didn’t mind Bruin experimenting with one of the spaveks.”

The stress on the final word was meant to sting. Adara was embarrassed that it did. Why should she care if a person who might not even be a person liked her or not?

“Sometimes Terrell and Bruin are quite happy,” lilted the childish voice, “especially when Alexander tells them to be but, no, I don’t think that any of them are really, truly happy.”

“Well…” Leto’s voice stretched the one short syllable into two very long ones. “If I set them free, they’ll go away and I’ll be all alone again.”

“Do you really think the newcomers mean to stay?” Adara asked. “And when they go, do you think they’ll leave Griffin and the rest?”

“No…” Leto paused thoughtfully. “I don’t think they do mean to stay. That Siegfried has been in contact with a Gaius. They talk about what they can move. But I don’t think they’re going for a long time, yet. They want to figure out the spaveks. I’ve been hiding the research files. I was going to show the files to Griffin, but I won’t show them! I don’t like them.”

She sounded triumphant, like a child who has secreted away a torn frock and expects to escape punishment.

Adara shook her head as she might have at one of Bruin’s younger students caught cheating. Then she remembered that it was possible Leto couldn’t see her.

“Do you think you can hide forever and ever? These off-worlders have some funny ideas. What if they figure out a way to control you like they can control Terrell and Bruin? I bet there’s a way…”

Adara was guessing, but thought she must be right. The seegnur would not have left themselves without a way to get around Leto, especially if she had been as stubborn with them. The length of Leto’s pause made Adara think she was right, especially when Leto didn’t directly answer her question.

“That Falkner has been poking in my private areas,” Leto said primly. “I shocked him once, but he’s persistent. He has no respect.”

Fleetingly, Adara thought it was interesting how—for lack of a better word—“human” Leto seemed, especially in contrast to Artemis. Especially here in the dark, she could forget she was talking to a building or burrow or whatever this complex was, and think she was talking to an intelligent, if rather spoiled, child. She never made that mistake with Artemis.

Adara forced herself to focus, knowing she had to push the point. “So, will you set Griffin and the others free? I bet they’d help you to get rid of those others…”

Leto made a hissing sound. “The others have real weapons. They have defensive shields. Their machines aren’t models I know, so I can’t deactivate them—though I think I could damp them, some. But how could any of you—even Griffin—defeat them with your knives and bows?”

Based on what she’d heard about the spaveks, Adara had some idea of what Leto meant by “real” weapons and energy shields. They were terrifying, but she felt confident that they could be gotten around.

“These are still humans,” Adara said, “and that means they can be defeated. Will you help us?”

Only the persistence of a faint hissing let Adara know that Leto hadn’t “left.” At long last, the voice spoke, sounding very young and childlike indeed.

“I can’t risk helping. What if you lose? Then they’ll be after me, too, and you’ll all be dead and not able to help me.”

That actually made sense. Adara didn’t blame Leto for being afraid. She’d seen how horribly damaged Leto’s complex had been. As with Artemis, the events of five hundred years ago were as fresh as yesterday.

“How about this, Leto?” Adara offered. “You don’t help us, but you don’t help them either. You don’t lock anything extra. You don’t offer warnings. You don’t turn out the lights or stop the air circulating.”

“Tell them that their poking around messed something up so you couldn’t sense as you usually can.”

“I could do that…” Leto’s voice held a note of malice. “I haven’t been talking to them much anyhow. They act as if they can order me around like I’m no smarter than one of their scooters.”

“So get quieter,” Adara suggested. “If they do talk to you and you feel you need to answer, act dumb. Don’t do anything that could be taken as acting against them—you’re right, that’s too much risk for you to take. Just don’t help them.”

“Or you,” Leto said. “I still don’t like you, much, though maybe I do a little better than before. Do you think that if you get Griffin free he’ll come back?”

Adara laughed soundlessly, the way Sand Shadow laughed. “Oh, I think nothing will keep him away. Maybe once he’s free to move around, he’ll find a way to beat his brothers and take control.”

But, remembering Leto’s words about real weapons and energy shields, remembering that Terrell, Bruin, and Ring could not be counted on to act of their own accord—and might even turn against Griffin—she thought this was a very thin chance indeed.

Julyan was half-dozing at his post when he heard Falkner and Siegfried coming along the corridor. After they’d been in the complex a few days, the Danes had decided that sleeping in the labs and manufacturing areas was unnecessary hardship. Instead, they’d adopted quarters in the residential areas. Leto had made this easier by supplying running water and sanitary facilities. She’d even gotten a machine that did laundry working, so they all had fresh bedding and towels.

The prisoners were being kept at the outer edge of the residential area, in rooms that Alexander speculated might have been offices or parlors, rather than living quarters. The original furnishings in these rooms had been reduced to ash so, until someone figured out how to make Leto give them detailed facility plans, the rooms’ original purpose was a matter of guesswork.

The Dane brothers had chosen suites of rooms, each with enough space to accommodate an entire family where Julyan had been born. He wondered if the Artemesians of olden days had realized that the approved home designs had been deliberately quaint, rather than meant for the comfort of the residents. He wondered if they would have cared.

Siegfried and Falkner were deeply absorbed in their conversation—it sounded as if it was on the verge of becoming an argument—and had forgotten that their voices would carry to where Julyan sat.

They probably don’t care. The prisoners are locked up and sound doesn’t carry into their cells unless the door is open. Me? I’m just good old Julyan, faithful retainer, and Alexander’s little pet.

He ground his teeth, but his frustration didn’t keep him from listening carefully. Anything that could get Falkner and Siegfried sounding so agitated was worth noting.

“I still think it’s too soon,” Falkner was saying. “We have only the slightest idea of how those suits work. The one thing we do know—and I don’t think Griffin is lying about this—is that they play tricks with the wearer’s mind. Castor is unstable enough without that.”

Siegfried retorted, “Castor is unstable, I give you that, but he is also the only one of us we know is definitely, absolutely, without a doubt psychic. That makes him the best candidate to try one of the suits. We cannot trust the natives. We can, however, trust Castor.”

“True…” Falkner’s voice was fading with distance. “But why now? Why not wait a few weeks? We have plenty of supplies. There’s no rush, and Castor’s in the sleep. Once we wake him, we won’t be able to put him down again for months. You know he doesn’t handle the sleep drugs well.”

“We brought him,” Siegfried said, “because of the theories that Old Imperial technology relied on psionics. Using him might be a shortcut to what we want to know.”

Their voices were so faint that Julyan couldn’t make out the words, but from the inflection he guessed that Falkner was asking once again why this need for rush.

Julyan laughed to himself. The need for rush was exactly what made Siegfried the leader of the Dane brothers. He was a man of action and decision. This was useful in combat, but could be a handicap in times like this. Julyan suspected that Siegfried could be perfectly patient if working toward a specific goal—say during a siege or during the early phases of an elaborate attack—but the unspecificity of their current action was making him restless.

Julyan considered what he’d overheard. The only good thing about Alexander was that he liked to talk. From his monologues, Julyan had gathered that each of the Dane brothers was special in some way. Sometimes Alexander talked about himself and his siblings as if his parents had bred them like the Trainers did dogs, seeking for certain qualities to fill certain needs. The Dane brothers and sisters had been educated to bring out specific qualities as well.

Julyan gathered that the older Dane siblings had been trained to fulfill military roles. He was less certain about what the parents had intended for Griffin or even Alexander. They were more scholarly, though, as Julyan had learned to his detriment, even introspective Griffin could fight very well if pressed.

Alexander rarely mentioned Castor. He had said that Castor had been a twin, that Castor’s twin, Pollux, was the only one of the Dane siblings to have died.

He smiled slowly. Maybe we of Artemis will take down a couple of them. I’d love to see their expression when they realize that what they took for worms are actually vipers—vipers with very sharp fangs and very deadly poison, indeed.

When Alexander came to the door of Griffin’s cell, Griffin was flat on his back, reading from a hard copy book of verse that had been brought to him along with his midday meal by the very odd boy called Seamus. Seamus had apparently been given the job of general housekeeper and cook—if the term “cook” could be applied to doling out ration cubes and hot water for rehydration.

The verse was handwritten in the language of Artemis, but Griffin had yet to decide whether it had been written by an Artemesian or by one of the off-world residents of the facility. The subjects were bucolic and not very challenging. Nonetheless, piecing through them beat staring at the ceiling.

“Griffin! I have a surprise for you,” Alexander sang out as he opened the door. “Come along. He’s waiting in the labs.”

Griffin put down the book and swung his feet to the floor. He tried to look slightly interested—something that was easier than it might have been, since Alexander had said “he.” That meant Adara and Sand Shadow remained at large. It was too bad that Kipper had been caught—he couldn’t think what else would awaken that particular look of malicious glee in Alexander’s eyes—but so far the prisoners had been treated well enough.

He was trying to decide which response would get the most out of Alexander, and had just about concluded that a mixture of astonishment and anger would certainly cause Alexander to start gloating, when they entered the main lab. There Griffin saw his brother Castor standing next to one of the consoles, looking about, an expression of mild interest on his thin features as he munched on a food cube.

Castor was only of average height, though so thin that he looked taller. His hair was such a brilliant orange that no one believed that the color was natural. His eyes were an equally impossible green: the wet, brilliant hue of melted peridots. The slight lump that showed on his chest under his coverall was a device that fed him highly concentrated calories. When Castor shifted to stuff the last of the food cube into his mouth so that he could offer a hand to Griffin, a tattoo beneath his floppy bangs was revealed. In the minimalistic script used for scientific notation in the Kyley Domain were the characters that spelled his name.

This had been viewed as necessary because, unlikely as it might seem, given Castor’s appearance, once there had been two identical versions of him. Their parents had intended to have the tattoos erased when the boys were adults, but somehow no one had gotten around to it. When Pollux had died in an accident, the precise details of which Griffin still didn’t know, Castor’s grief had taken the form of the purest denial.

The twins were named for figures in a myth so ancient that it likely would have been lost, except that the names had been used for everything from constellations to a type of racing bike. In the myth, one twin was mortal, the other immortal. As Castor explained to anyone who would listen—and to many who did not—Pollux was the immortal twin. Therefore, Pollux could not be dead; therefore the tattooed name was still necessary.

Griffin did not know Castor well. Castor and Pollux had been fourth and fifth in the birth order—actually, they’d been “born” simultaneously, since their gestation had been within an artificial womb. Moreover, they had been raised in very controlled circumstances, meant to encourage them to develop the traits for which they had been bred.

Those early tests had been very promising. The theories that telepathy was more likely to develop between identical twins seemed to have some basis in truth. But when Pollux had died, Castor’s abilities had vanished. Castor himself had nearly died, until he became convinced that Pollux still lived.

I was innocently searching for a mythical paradise with no greater goal than being able to say “Here it is!” It seems that others had far more complex motivations. Were Castor and Pollux created for the same reasons that the Old One—in a much cruder fashion—sought to breed the adapted back to some creature that could interface with the devices of the seegnur?

Griffin felt his skin crawl and the hairs along the back of his neck prickle. If so, the plans had been in place since long before his birth. Was his quest even of his own doing, as he had always imagined, or had he been steered to it as his brothers and sisters had been steered to their own professions?

Did our parents know or did they merely suspect, hope, dream? What lay at the end of those dreams?

Griffin decided that playing dumb would do him no good. As he grasped Castor’s proffered hand, feeling it just a little damp as it always was, he shaped his lips into a rueful smile.

“So they’ve brought their own test subject in,” he said, watching carefully to see how Castor would react.

Alexander intervened before Griffin could say anything more. “We’ve brought Castor down because we believe that we might have something he and Pollux have long desired. Come along.”

As he led the way to the bunker where the spaveks waited in the arms of their squires, Alexander expanded on his theory. “Ever since the accident, Pollux has been short a body. It occurred to me that if Castor put on one of the spaveks, Pollux might be able to—well, slide in—make himself at home.”

Griffin frowned. He remembered how the spavek had felt as if it had an intelligence of its own and guessed what Alexander was doing. He was trying to condition Castor so that when Castor put on the suit he would come to the conclusion that the suit’s operating system was actually his long-lost brother. If he did so, then his psi powers—rumored to be quite potent—should become active once more, because he would be communicating with his lost twin.

The idea was diabolically clever—just the sort of thing Alexander would think of. Griffin knew their parents had tried to get Castor to interact with other proven psi talents, but the experiments had not worked because Castor was convinced that he and Pollux were more than simply twins; they were two parts of the same soul.

Alexander’s offering Castor back his soul, Griffin thought in despair. If this works, then they’ll be able to manipulate Castor. He’ll do anything to keep his contact with Pollux. Up until now we’ve had a slight edge because we’re the only ones who have had any luck working the spaveks. If Alexander’s plan works, we will be increasingly expendable.

Kipper listened intently as Adara reported her meeting with Leto. When she finished, he shifted uneasily. “That’s good, I guess. But Leto’s not working against us is not the same as her working for us, if you know what I mean.”

Adara nodded gently, trying to adopt the posture Bruin always took when encouraging his young charges to speak out. It seemed to work because, after a moment, Kipper continued.

“There’s just you and me, Sand Shadow and Honeychild. I don’t think we can count the horses and Sam the Mule.”

“That’s not precisely true,” Adara said. “Sam is proving a remarkably reliable guardian for our little horse herd. That means we don’t need to waste one of us standing guard. Perhaps it will help us plan if we enumerate our other advantages, just as we would if planning a hunt.”

Kipper looked dubious, so Adara started. “First, Sand Shadow and my bond means that we have communication over distance. We don’t have the same direct contact with Honeychild but, between her ability to talk to Sand Shadow and those written signs I taught you, we can do pretty well. Now, your turn.”

Clearly Kipper still had his doubts, but he also didn’t want to disappoint her. After a few moments’ thought he said, “Honeychild can communicate with Bruin. That means we can let them know when we’re coming for them.”

“We can do more than that,” Adara added. “We might be able to work out a way to coordinate so that we can take advantage of some particular event—say when Ring is wearing the blue spavek or at least when they’re all out of their cells.”

“That would be nice,” Kipper agreed. “My turn again. How about this? We know something of the layout of Leto’s complex and can plan our attack to come from a couple different directions. There’s the door into the meadow and the hidden one into that cavern. If Leto keeps her promise not to interfere, we might be able to lure them one way while our strength goes in another.”

Adara nodded approval. “Now you’re thinking like a hunter! If foxes can come up with ways to lay a false trail, surely we can do the same. I wish I could have gotten Leto to work with us. She would have been very useful that way, but that’s beyond us.”

Kipper beamed. “Foxes and false trails … What else? Wolves never go after the whole herd, they cut off their prey from the larger group. We might be able to manage something like that. There aren’t all that many of them: Griffin’s three brothers, the Old One, a boy, and that Julyan.”

“Four brothers, now,” Adara reminded him. “I think … I’m still trying to work out what Honeychild and Sand Shadow were saying. I’m certain there’s a new arrival but, after that, it’s uncertain. It’s as if Bruin can’t figure out how much of a threat this new fellow—he has red hair, so we’ll call him ‘Red’—will be.”

“Brothers don’t always get along,” Kipper said in a way that made Adara certain he was speaking from experience. “Maybe this Red won’t like that the others locked Griffin up.”

“We can hope,” Adara agreed. “There is one problem, though, one we need to deal with before we go in.”

“What?” Kipper asked. His face fell as he remembered. “That Alexander and his ability to make the others do what he wants.”

Adara nodded. “That’s right. Until we figure out a way to protect ourselves and the others we’d be as good as committing suicide.”

She bides

Craving sure protection

Viewing risk askance

I decide

To choose action

Is this arrogance?