CHAPTER 4

The man had carried off his tumbler.

Lisinthir had not moved after the therapists had taken their leave; he was comfortable, for once, with the hekkret a familiar burn down his throat and a softness in his limbs. The headache seemed distant, and his heartrate and breathing more measured. It allowed him the leisure to contemplate the unlikeliness of his visitors.

The last Eldritch he'd had congress with—true Eldritch, not his draconic lovers in their stolen guises—had been the heir to the throne, the Princess Bethsaida. He'd not met her prior to her incarceration among dragons, so perhaps she'd once been more like the typical women produced by their culture: assertive and very poor at delegation of authority. With power passing through the matrilineal line and men of their class mostly relegated to the duty of dying for honor or to protect their estates, it was an inevitability. He could even be somewhat proud of it, he supposed, that his race bred strong women, for who would want to lie with a weak one? It is what he'd loved about the Slave Queen: the purity of the strength distilled into that gentle spirit, so close and quiet and deep.

But Bethsaida had been broken by her captivity. He didn't blame her for it; the Seersa operative had been very close to broken herself, and God knew he had only survived because he'd manipulated the Emperor into an epiphany that had spared them both the inevitable outcome of their constant clashes. It did mean, however, that his last good memory of any Eldritch was one of weeping and cringing, and how frustrated and frightened he'd been that he had to find a way to protect someone who could not be counted on to help in any way.

Lisinthir, not fond of lying to himself, even about his addictions and his mounting depression, was forced to admit that experience had colored his expectation of his own kind, one he'd already been predisposed toward given his parents and the court his father had flung him to, where he'd earned his name on the dueling fields because he refused to back down from the insults thrown at him for being the scion of a failing House. The male scion of a failing House, because one assumed that a man took after his father.

But this Eldritch... Lisinthir half-lidded his eyes. This Eldritch had a proper spine and fire in his spirit. Fear in response to blood and swordwork, yes: that was inevitable amid the pacific Alliance, which saw conflict only at its troubled borders, and even among his own people where combat was relegated to the formalities of the dueling ground, or to the atavism of the hunt. But this Eldritch had actually carried off the tumbler.

And there was a sense-impression... again, Lisinthir rubbed his thumb along the side of his palm, bringing the memory of touching the other man's face back to the surface. He hadn't noted it at the time, too focused on his disappointment that this Eldritch was not his Chatcaavan lover. But now that he'd found some distance from it, he could... just... feel a hint of a deep burn, a yearning, one sublimated so completely Lisinthir almost wondered if he'd imagined it. But no, he'd lived by the evidence of his senses, and he thought this one truth. Somewhere, locked down so tightly he doubted his dear therapist knew it himself, was a hint of desire.

It made him curious. The scion of the Seni Galare was quite a prize: respectable, wealthy, couth in manner and birth... very little like Lisinthir, whose parents' squabbles made even his enormous wealth and similar lineage a matter of ridicule. They seemed to be of an age, so Jahir must have put his formal presentation decades behind him. Did his far cousin not have a wife? Was that why he was gallivanting in the Alliance? Or did he have urges their culture frowned upon, and was that why he'd fled? Probably not, for the desire to be so tightly bound. The Alliance would not have judged him for untoward urges, so why flee there and then suppress them?

And then there was the matter of the Glaseah. They were permanently yoked; that much was obvious from the way they'd handled the conversation, and from the tendency of their bodies to mimic each other when at rest. The Glaseah himself seemed steadfast enough; Lisinthir had known a handful of the species and found them likeable, and his far cousin's Glaseah appeared to be no exception. It made him think, suddenly, that Jahir had suggested that the Alliance send a Glaseah to the Empire. Was this relationship the source of that suggestion? How had they met? And what would have possessed an Eldritch to accept one so completely into his life, much less his mind? Especially this Eldritch, who would have had every advantage and privilege had he remained at home?

The mystery intrigued him, made him interested in living a little bit longer. He was pondering smoking the other half of his hekkret roll while contemplating it when the door chimed.

"Come in," he said.

And here was the Captain of their ship. Lisinthir slid his feet off the table and sat up, resting his elbows on his knees and lifting his brows.

"May I?" the human said, indicating the chair Jahir had just vacated.

"Of course."

The man sat facing him, leaning forward but relaxed: not intimidated by him, Lisinthir suspected. He wasn't sure whether that was indicative of the Captain's confidence in himself or his underestimation of Eldritch. It was hard to tell with humans, given how the Pelted treated them and how that affected their relationship with other species.

"I'm Captain Raynor," the man said. "I haven't had a chance to welcome you aboard, Ambassador."

"Thank you."

"Now," Raynor said. "You knew they would try to board us. I assume it's because they want you."

"That would be the assumption I am also working under."

"Can you tell me why, given that they just sent you away? I'd think they'd be more interested in shooting you dead than dragging you back."

"The faction that sent me away," Lisinthir said, and hoped that the Emperor's partisans were numerous enough to be called a faction, "does not want me dead or dragged back. But they have enemies who appear to have some use for me."

"So they'll be back."

"They boarded this ship specifically so they could disable it and buy themselves the time to come in search of it." Lisinthir sat back. "Healer-assist Borden told me you had fatalities. This is a courier... does she carry the full complement?"

"We were down by five before this started."

And a courier usually carried only twenty-five people. "Repairs are going to take time, then."

"Which is why I'm here," Raynor said. "Everything you can tell me about what to expect from these people, I need to know. It sounds like they're not likely to blow us away if they find us...."

"They won't destroy the ship, no," Lisinthir agreed. "But they will kill the crew, or sell you all."

"Not a palatable thought. We fled back toward the border. What's the likelihood of them realizing we ran toward them instead of away?"

Lisinthir began to answer, then paused. "That... might actually surprise them. They would not expect that much arrogance from the Alliance's navy." He tilted his head. "It won't matter if the boarders got any signal out before they were dispatched. Did they?"

"We don't think so," Raynor said. "But we've been limping away from the point where they intercepted us ever since we killed them. We have some minimal ability to correct our drift right now, so we've been using it. Do you think the ship that brought you had any luck fighting them off?"

That vessel against two carriers? Lisinthir grimaced. "Not unless it was reinforced."

"So you think the two ships that were harrying it are now looking for us."

"It would surprise me if it were otherwise."

Raynor nodded. "I won't pretend I'm glad to hear it, but I'd rather know than not. If you don't mind educating me on the capabilities of the ships we just left behind, I'd be grateful."

"Since the education will help you preserve all our lives, Captain, I would find myself very hard pressed to mind the work."

Raynor chuckled. "Hit me, then."

Lisinthir gathered his thoughts, picking data out of the sex-soaked memories that had revealed it, and began to talk.

"You want to do what?" Borden asked, frowning. The Seersa was rooting in one of the lockers in the clinic.

"Disable the genie in the Ambassador's quarters," Jahir said as Vasiht'h sat beside him and listened—as much to his partner as to the woman they were addressing. "We'd like him to come to us for nutrition."

"He'll have to anyway," Borden said. She was still favoring a leg, but it was hard to tell watching her haul a box out of the locker with a grunt. "The ship's going dark, so no one's genies will be working. No water for anything but drinking, either... we don't want to run the recyclers. Everyone can have one Pad bath a day."

Vasiht'h felt Jahir's distaste through the mindline, enough to make him lick his teeth. His partner vastly preferred using water for his ablutions, which Vasiht'h could understand: if he had been born bipedal and covered in skin instead of fur, he'd have preferred it too. Given that he was neither of those things, he found Pad bathing more effective than anything short of full-body immersion.

Borden opened the box and checked the packing list. "Rations," she said. "We should be good for a month. Are you hungry?"

"Not anymore," Vasiht'h said, eyeing the wrapped bar she held up.

The Seersa chuckled and pulled herself onto one of the biobeds, peeling the wrapper back. "How is your patient?"

"Our patient?" Vasiht'h repeated.

"I'm not kidding myself that he's mine," the Seersa answered, ears flipping back. "His problems are way above my pay grade."

"How do you figure?"

She shook her head. "All you have to do is talk to him to see it. You've seen post-traumatic reactions, I'm guessing? You wouldn't be here if Fleet didn't have you on its list of approved contractors, no matter what head of state requested your presence, not on the border with the Empire. Anyway, he's got it bad. I've seen more obvious expressions of it... he's at least functional, or appears to be. But I suspect he's functional because he hasn't really internalized that it's post-traumatic at this point. He's still operating like he's in a high-threat theater. And I don't want to be there when he realizes he's not."

/Trenchant,/ Jahir murmured, the sending edged with knives.

"Anyway, I'd be happy to help you with the purely physical stuff," Borden continued. "I'll run tests, help you drag the body here when he collapses of whatever it is that's finally going to put him down. But the mental stuff? Is all yours."

"Thanks," Vasiht'h said ruefully.

"Just keep in mind... the Captain's going to want reports."

/That wasn't in our briefing,/ Vasiht'h said, ears flattening.

"Reports?" Jahir asked.

"The Ambassador knows things about how things work over there that no one knows," Borden said. "That much is obvious. Fleet's going to want to know everything he can tell them in case something happens to him."

"Like... his withdrawal symptoms put him in acute care," Vasiht'h said slowly.

"Or we all die here," Borden said. She was swinging a leg off the side of the bed while eating. "The Captain can get a high-speed buoy off before we're captured if we can't get the Well engines back online to push a message to the nearest Fleet repeaters."

The picture she made, so nonchalantly discussing the possibility of their demise without any effect at all on her appetite, reminded Vasiht'h that for all he'd been the one to push for their involvement in Fleet affairs, he never really wanted to be this much a part of their world. The Goddess's sense of humor at work, no doubt.

Jahir said, "We understand. Alet, we are given to understand you have portable medical equipment? I assume you have a stabilizer along with diagnostic tools?"

"Of course," she said. "Standard issue for all our ships. They're packed under the beds. There should be a green tab—get your fingers under it and pull and it'll unlock the drawer they're in."

Jahir applied himself to the equipment, and some background noise in the mindline diminished to a low hiss. The crackle had started not long after the fight on the Chatcaavan vessel and hadn't gone away, and that much noise meant Jahir was working on thoughts he wasn't sharing.

Most of the things Jahir had kept hidden from Vasiht'h hadn't been personal secrets, but ones involving his race as a whole, things he revealed to no one outside the Eldritch save by permission from the Queen, or through extraordinary circumstance. The few times Jahir had kept something hidden from Vasiht'h in particular hadn't been personal either: they'd involved things his partner was denying to himself. Some of those secrets had been harmless, save where they'd detracted from the joy of a normal life... like Jahir's ability to play music as well as enjoy listening to it. But at least one of those secrets had involved the woman he loved and was barred by his people's laws from wedding: his cousin, Sediryl.

Until Vasiht'h had met Sediryl he hadn't realized that his partner had any sexual or romantic inclination at all; he'd assumed that a long life also conferred some distance from passion, the way it did with most elders of a shorter-lived race, with the hormone loads falling off with increasing age. He supposed it had been a reasonable assumption; by Pelted standards, Jahir had long since passed the age where passion should have been a driving motivation for most individuals. Except paradoxically while Eldritch children aged at close to the same rate as Pelted ones, the Eldritch adulthood was stretched almost languorously long. Vasiht'h had since seen older Eldritch, enough to realize that they did get older, just far, far more slowly than their shorter-lived Pelted companions... and all that meant that Jahir was still, by his body's standards, a young man.

Not all young people had the same needs, of course, and Jahir had always seemed more cerebral than sensual. But Vasiht'h had been present for the revelation that his partner wasn't actually asexual like most Glaseah... just... complicated. Unavailable as far as he was concerned, because he loved Sediryl. But prevented from ever actually acting on that belief. Ridiculously, because the strictly biological concerns that had prompted the Eldritch fanaticism about marrying relatives could be fixed with a simple outpatient procedure in the Alliance, and Jahir knew it. But they'd both been xenotherapists long enough to realize that rising above one's acculturation, even when living in a vibrantly multicultural setting, wasn't necessarily possible.

Vasiht'h, despite being asexual himself, was not completely clueless about other people's needs. Before he'd met Jahir, he'd been a careful observer of relationships, compelled to understand them by the curiosity that had driven him into clinical practice. His instinct for it had gotten better since he'd linked with Jahir, and it had taken him years to realize it was because Jahir's nature was informing his impressions through the mindline.

So he knew, without a doubt, that the animal magnetism Lisinthir exuded was both unheard of in an Eldritch... and extremely compelling, because Jahir was cognizant of it on a level somewhere below his conscious grasp.

And that was what he was worried about. Because if desiring your opposite-sex cousin was bad among the Eldritch, desiring your same-sex cousin was explosively so.

Jahir was running the portable equipment through its diagnostics, checking the battery and fluid levels. His concentration emptied the mindline of everything but the fluid-stream sound of data rising to the level of consciousness, being applied to physical reality, and evaluated before continuing. "Everything looks in order."

"It should be," Borden said. "Checking it before every mission is one of my duties, which means it was looked at less than a week ago." Her smile faded to a more professional detachment. "It goes without saying that it needs to be used sparingly. The clinic gets priority on power when we're low on it, but if we get too low those are our only recourse."

"Understood," Jahir said. "As much as possible I'll try to minimize their use, but I'm expecting a significant crash whenever his body finishes metabolizing whatever remains of what he was taking."

"When will that be?"

He shook his head. "Without knowing the half-life of the drug or where and how the body stores it? It could be a year from now... or an hour. If I can get him to tell us what it was, that would help."

/Or the fact that he has some of it with him?/ Vasiht'h said, remembering the smell.

/Or that, yes./

"Good luck with that," Borden said. "I get the feeling he holds everything close to his chest."

Jahir chuckled, quiet. "We have some experience with similar situations."

She grinned. "You would at that." She pushed herself off the bed. "Let me just run you through the computer, log that you took the equipment and when. Standard procedure. Then you all can get going."

Which they did, a few moments later, with Jahir pulling the equipment behind them on its wheeled base and Vasiht'h with a sack of protein bars. The silence in the mindline had become positively oppressive, particularly since Vasiht'h could sense the unspoken thoughts behind it like the clog in a drain trying to fill with water.

Patience, he thought, and followed his partner into their quarters. He set the food on the table and wrinkled his nose at it. Technically it didn't contain any objectionable ingredients, but there was something soulless about it that made him long for tea and a kitchen to make soup in, and cookies.

"I'd like that too," Jahir said, sitting on the sofa. More quietly. "I would, in fact, very much like to be a long way from here."

"That makes two of us." Vasiht'h sat, sighed. He pushed a bar over to the Eldritch and took one for himself, resigned.

"I think maybe you misunderstand." These words came more slowly, and there was a sound in the mindline accompanying them: like the wailing of distant hounds, a mournful sound that put all the fur up Vasiht'h's back. "I think we might be the wrong people for this case. And by we... I mean myself, particularly."

Surprised, Vasiht'h looked up at him, met his partner's weary smile.

"You thought I wouldn't notice it?"

"I... wasn't sure," Vasiht'h said. "When you do see problems in yourself, you admit them readily, but you have to see them first. And some things are... well... tender topics."

"Tender topics. Yes." That made a frisson of mirth travel the mindline, but it was not streaked with colors or smells Vasiht'h associated with happiness or humor. It tasted bitter under his tongue, like medicine. Jahir turned the bar on the table, eyes resting on it. "We are too close in rank and family, arii. It is hard for me to look at Lisinthir and not see the House cousin I am obliged to dress down for misbehavior. And it is unreasonable for him to look at me and see a therapist who can approach him dispassionately, without judging him against the standards of the culture and class we share. When we return to Alliance space, I think it would behoove us to remand his case to someone else."

Vasiht'h appreciated the optimistic outcome implied by the 'when.' "The Queen did suggest it would help him to connect with the person who'd been talking him through his first few weeks there."

"The Queen—" Jahir stopped and schooled himself, drew in a careful breath with head tilted as if nursing a pulled muscle in his neck. "The Queen," he continued, quieter, "made an educated guess on what was needed and deployed the resources available to her, which is her duty. Perhaps she knows Lisinthir well enough to believe it would have helped him to have me here. But she does not know me, arii. And she doesn't know how serving in this particular capacity might be impossible because of my own issues."

So he knew something was going on. Maybe not what, if the taste in the mindline was any indication... there was something there about heartbreak, about his dichotomous feelings about his homeworld and upbringing, about his divergent beliefs on what proper behavior was and had to become for their people to survive. That... was probably problem enough without the issue Vasiht'h suspected was lurking under it. He considered, chose his words carefully. "Sometimes healing others heals us."

Jahir murmured, eyes lowered, "And sometimes it breaks us."

Vasiht'h did sigh then. "Oh, arii." He padded around the table and wrapped his arms around his taller friend's midriff, pressed his head against Jahir's chest.

"I am sorry," Jahir murmured, the rueful amusement in the mindline feeling healthier. "It seems it is always about my issues, isn't it."

"Not always," Vasiht'h said. "I've had my rocky spots."

"Never quite so extreme as mine."

Vasiht'h thought, mostly to himself, that his own issue was in his arms, and it was as extreme as any issue in all the worlds. Embracing love, knowing that it would lead to loss—not his own, but that of someone he loved… he sighed against his Eldritch's chest—his Eldritch's—and felt the wash of compassion flow back through the mindline.

"You know better," he said finally. "Sometimes people's issues don't become relevant until their situations change. We might be on the cusp of discovering I have severe ones of my own!"

"Oh happy day?" Jahir offered with a lopsided smile, but now there were motes of golden amusement sparkling between them.

Vasiht'h chuckled and leaned back. "We can hand this case off when we get back. But right now, we're the ones here who can deal with it." He looked up. "Do you want me to do that alone? I can, if you're uncomfortable."

Jahir sighed. "No. I wouldn't ask that of you. Particularly not on a case so intricately bound up with drugs."

"I'm sure Hea Borden can assist if things get too technical for me."

"She could, but it would be ridiculous not to make use of my training when the situation so clearly calls for it." Jahir shook his head. "No. I will do my best until we arrive back home. We should be equal to the task of keeping him stable until then."

"If you're sure…."

"I am."

Vasiht'h squinted up at him, gauging his resolve. The mindline felt firm enough, but… he picked up one of the bars and handed it over. "Here. Eat."

Jahir made a face. A very subtle one, more a little flinch of a lower eyelid and a twitch of his nose, but to Vasiht'h those signs were as loud as any siren. "And if I am not hungry?"

"If you're serious about soldiering on," Vasiht'h said, "you will dutifully eat all of that. Then I'll know you're dedicated to the cause."

Jahir eyed the bar with more visible distaste, then began to peel the wrapper. "We have done harsher things."

Vasiht'h snorted and went back to his own half-finished meal.