A Few Good Men Read online

  I became aware that I’d stared at Nathaniel much too long and possibly too intently, and that he was staring at me in a definitely odd way, somewhere between fright and hatred, with his throat working, as though he were fighting hard not to make a sound.

  And Sam looked from one to the other of us with a puzzled expression.

  I managed enough control over my wayward body to say, stiffly, “Pleased to meet you, Nathaniel. Am I to assume you have been trained in business and are your father’s assistant?”

  “Not business primarily,” he said, but his voice came out squeaky, as if he were a too-young boy just at the age when voices change. “More law, though I am learning the business administration from my father as fast as I can.”

  “I see,” I thought. So, crazy and a lawyer, par for the course. And of course his eyes looked like Ben’s. They would. He was Ben’s nephew. Which probably explained the hatred in his eyes. He probably knew I’d killed Ben. Fine then.

  Something like a wave of mingled nausea and grief hit me full force, because I hadn’t been back in this house without Ben, and it felt like Ben had just died, all over again. “I . . . I will look forward to working with you,” I managed, then looked over Sam’s head, at Savell who stood by, hovering. What I wanted to do was run through the crowd, screaming, run away from all this, from the servants staring at me, from the much-too-full hallway, from the press of bodies, their smell, their heat far too close after my life as a recluse. From Nathaniel Remy’s all-too-explicable hatred. But I couldn’t. The Good Man might be an absolute dictator—most are—but he’s also a prisoner of his house and position.

  My throat had constricted, my body hurt with the effort of my holding in place, but my voice sounded calm and composed in my own ears. “Savell, if you would order a bath run, I need to change into”—I looked down and made a small self-deprecating shrug—“more appropriate clothing.”

  “Ah, sir, of course, only—” He looked like he was about to say something, then bowed. “Of course, sir. I shall order your room cleaned and prepared.”

  “Forget it. I just need a bath. Now.”

  There was scurrying and moving, as Savell clearly gave instructions to his underlings by gesture and look.

  And Sam was still there, still staring at me. Something in his expression was unreadable. I thought I saw surprise and a faint disgust, but most of all there seemed to be pity. Why he should feel sorry for me was unfathomable, but I was sure that he felt it nonetheless. “Sir,” he said, “you will need to speak to Nat. There are legal issues which must—”

  “You mean someone will dispute my right to be the Good Man?” I asked, and hoped my voice sounded more incredulous than I felt.

  “Oh, not that, sir,” Sam said. “But we must make sure everything is watertight all the same. And as quickly as possible. Before the council of Good Men meets.”

  I realized what he meant by that. The retainers had been living in fear, as I expected, of someone taking over and what it meant for them and the seacity.

  “Nathaniel”—I said, and spared that worthy what I hoped was a withering glance—“can come to me in half an hour.” I wanted to meet with him about as much as I wanted to saw off my head with a rusty saw. But I supposed there was no avoiding it. “I must have some privacy, first. And my mother? Has anyone told her I’m here?” I was surprised she had not come running yet. Perhaps she too could not forgive me. Perhaps even she hated me.

  Nathaniel seemed to go paler, but it was Sam who answered, steadily, “The Lady Isabella passed away, sir. Two years ago.”

  I looked at him and I know my look was disbelieving, even if I didn’t mean it. “What?”

  “An accident, sir. Her flyer caught fire. She didn’t escape in time.”

  And then I did run. I ran, most indecorously, between two flanking rows of retainers, back to the front hall. I pelted up the stairs, as I did when I hurt myself in the garden, when I was little, and ran up the stairs to my mother’s comforting lap.

  Only I ran past the rooms that had been hers, and down the side corridor, to what had been my own bedroom. I went in without even thinking, and then stopped, because this room didn’t look at all like mine.

  It looked like my father’s.

  Clothe Him in Silk,

  Cover Him in Gold

  Nathaniel charged into my room as soon as I came out of my bath, while I was still mother-naked, and completely vulnerable. My fault.

  It wasn’t just that I hadn’t locked the door—I’d spent so much time locked from the outside, it never occurred to me that someone might want to come in to my room. And besides, I’d grown up with retainers coming in and out of my room to lay out clothes or clean something, more or less at will. The Good Man or even his scapegrace son could never lock the door without interfering with the smooth running of the household.

  But that wasn’t the problem. The main problem was that I had dawdled and not just because I’d cried in the bath, where no one could see me, overcome suddenly by the loss of my mother on top of what felt, irrationally, like the recent loss of Ben.

  It was that I’d also wandered around the room in a daze for a while before bathing. I suppose I should have expected it to have changed. But I didn’t.

  Olympus tradition is different from that of most of the other houses I’ve heard about, where there is a ruler’s room and an heir’s room. Instead, the house has assigned rooms for each person and the person remains in his own room, regardless of his position.

  On the other hand, when I’d left, Max had been in the nursery. And I’d guess they’d moved him into my room when he’d reached the age to leave it, at six or so. No reason why they shouldn’t. I’d certainly not been expected to return.

  But instead of the furniture Mother had picked for me, the warm smooth pine shelves and undecorated bed, the low dressers and the comfortable chairs, I was faced with an ornate, heavy and dark wood bed, curtained in dark blue; with pastoral holos on the walls, with carved, polished trunks and dressers. It made the room look exactly like my father’s when I was little, and I can honestly say if this was Max’s taste, I didn’t think highly of it.

  There was only one piece of art that I didn’t remember as something my father would surround himself with. It was a damn good likeness—I presumed of Max, or perhaps of my father when he was very young, wearing a casual coat and pants, and with a setter dog at his heels. Done in pencil on paper, it had an archaic look and the lines of it were pure and clear in a way that was highly unfashionable in the holo-enhanced art of our day. There was a spareness to the line that didn’t in any way make the work look cartoonish, and which made me think that the artist was a professional. However, it wasn’t signed. I looked. Which was bizarre since having a piece in the Good Man’s private quarters would make any artist’s career soar.

  Whichever it represented, Max or my father, it confirmed for me how startlingly like them I looked, and how different all the same. My face was battered and scarred in a way neither of theirs had been, and over the years of my captivity it had settled into bitter lines.

  It had been a while before I tore myself away to get in the bath, and even longer to get out. And I did take a bath, in the deep-sunk marble bathtub, instead of just a shower.

  When I came out, water-wrinkled, I rubbed myself with the towel kept in the warming shelf, and wondered how I could have forgotten how soft towels are. But I had. The softness against my skin sent unexpected shocks of pleasure through my body and I smiled to myself, thinking that next I would become a serial towel abuser.

  Outside, in my room, someone had laid out a suit that made me raise my eyebrows. Really? Was that what they were wearing? It was gold and blue and more ornate than anything I would have seen in polite society before.

  And that was the moment, as I stood there frowning at the suit, thinking it would make a very funny contrast with my scarred features, that Nathaniel Remy burst into the room.

  Burst is an advised term, though he wasn’
t a large man, and I’d never think of him as a particular attention-getter. He was tall. I’d guess six two or so, probably enough to appear very tall to most people, but his build was—much as his father’s and Ben’s for that matter—lean and long-legged. With pale hair and pale skin, dressed in dark colors, he looked like he should have faded into the background—a dry little clerk going about an uninteresting dry little life.

  But as my door burst open, he came in with his fists clenched, his face taut, and his whole body giving the impression he was a powder keg all too eager for a match to set it off.

  He closed the door behind him as I turned to stare, so surprised that if he’d taken a burner to me, I’d not have reacted even in time to dive for cover. Fortunately he didn’t, though his eyes looked like he’d like to.

  Looking up at me, he brought his pale eyebrows down over his dark eyes, and said, with the type of finality that implies both that the person spent a considerable time thinking of what to say, and that he’s afraid of being challenged, “I’m here. But you needn’t think . . . You needn’t think . . .” His eyes flashed inarticulate hatred.

  I never was an angel, even before I was responsible for the deaths of anyone. Ben and I had run a broomers’ lair together, after all.

  I will grant you we were the sort other broomers called play-broomers. Unlike them, we didn’t live outside the law, we only visited there in our spare time.

  Other than riding brooms, in situations not of an emergency nature—a serious enough infraction in most territories and seacities—we had committed few crimes. We had stolen from a drug transport once, and we’d engaged in territorial fights, like any broomer lair. And never once, in those circumstances, had I ever seen anyone stare at me with so much hatred. Not even my father when he sent me to jail.

  It made me feel defenseless, unprepared. I thought that this was Ben’s nephew, that this man had Ben’s eyes, and that he hated me. And why shouldn’t he? Whether I’d killed Ben to halt his suffering or not—that had just been the last step in my involvement in Ben’s life. There wasn’t the slightest doubt in my mind that if I’d never got involved with Ben, Ben would still be alive, probably Sam’s right hand in administration and a fond uncle to this young man.

  The idea of that alternate future; the image of Ben mature, assured, respected, made my throat close and my heart shrink, which in turn made me unable to speak.

  And it allowed Nathaniel Remy to close the space between us, an inarticulate growl emerging between his clenched teeth and turning into words. “You!” he said. “You needn’t think you can fool me. I don’t care what my father says.” His voice wavered and he stopped, looking startled, not so much at the wavering, I thought, as at the idea he’d talked at all. If it were possible for a man to stare in bewilderment at his own mouth, he’d have done so.

  But slowly, he focused on me again. I’d often heard hate described as fire, but I’d never before understood. Now I felt as if, if I stared hard enough at Nathaniel’s dark eyes, I’d find a red pinpoint of smoldering hatred in them. “If you hadn’t got yourself put away, safe and cozy,” Nathaniel said. “You’d be dead and Max— And he—” a watery sound drowned his words, even though his eyes were dry.

  It wasn’t funny, but the wrenching of my feelings away from Ben and to Max was so startling, the juxtaposition of Never-Never or even the jail before that—where I’d had to fight tooth and nail to keep the slighter-built Ben from being beaten or worse—and safe and cozy wrenched a surprised laugh from me.

  Nathaniel was standing maybe two steps from me, glaring up. At the laugh, he started and jumped, as though I’d slapped him.

  His bunched fist shot forward too fast for me to react. It caught me hard on the mouth, and sent me reeling back a step, but not far enough that his left fist didn’t catch me again.

  My mind had figured it out by then. I didn’t know why Nat Remy hated me, but surely he had plenty of reason.

  And I didn’t know what he thought he was doing, but some things I did know. I knew this was a man in the grip of such a powerful emotion that it had to have totally overpowered his mind. I knew he wasn’t thinking of the penalties for striking the sole, despotic ruler on whose good will his life and the lives of his relatives depended. And I knew he’d forgotten my very existence was his and his family’s only bulwark against destitution and maybe death.

  And I knew too that he was Sam’s oldest son and that Sam loved him. That much had been obvious in the way Sam looked at him. And I knew Sam was one of the few—perhaps the only man left alive—for whose good opinion I still cared.

  As Nathaniel raised his foot to kneecap me, my mind got hold of my body and I went into my fast mode. I couldn’t allow him to injure me. I couldn’t allow it, not because I didn’t deserve it, but because all Good Men united in punishing crimes against one of them. It was maybe the only thing they all agreed on. And if Nathaniel seriously injured or killed me in a way Sam couldn’t cover up, Nathaniel would die for it. And Sam didn’t deserve that. Not over me.

  I dove away from where his foot would have hit, and behind him. Taking advantage of his being off balance, I grabbed both his wrists, secured them into one of my hands, while my arm snaked around him and pulled him tight against me, I pushed him up against the wall, pinning him.

  The man didn’t know the meaning of quitting. Or the meaning of self-preservation. He jerked his head trying to hit me, and his attempts to kick backwards made me shift my hold and make it tighter, all the while trying to ignore that he was warm and alive because this was not what I’d thought of when I’d imagined holding someone warm and alive in my arms.

  It would have been easy to kill him or incapacitate him from this position, but my purpose was not to kill him.

  Not knowing what else to do, I just held on tight, breathing as steadily as I could. I don’t know how long it took, but eventually he stopped trying to attack and began to shake like a leaf in a wind storm, his teeth knocking loudly together.

  I recognized the reaction because Ben had had it too. It was the whiplash of the berserker. Nathaniel, like Ben, was a berserker, and when a berserker fit was cut short, he got hit with a near-painful reaction. Ben had never gone berserk at me, but he’d gone into that state a few times in broomer lair fights and had to tamp it down.

  Nathaniel had also gone heavy in my grasp, and I thought the reaction probably made him weak enough he couldn’t harm me. I also knew the only way to bring Ben out of one of these, and there was a chance it would work on Nathaniel too.

  I saw the drinks table to my left, went over to it, and grabbed a bottle at random. It didn’t matter what it was, provided it was alcoholic.

  Ben thought the alcohol worked because of its effect on the nervous system. I thought it worked because it made him concentrate on the burn of alcohol. By the time I got back to Nathaniel, he was in a heap on the floor, shaking, his hands over his face.

  I treated him exactly as I’d treated Ben in the same circumstances. I uncapped the bottle, pulled his hands down and shoved the bottle at his lips, then tilted. Most people will drink rather than drown. He did, taking three startled gulps, before pulling his head back and taking a deep breath.

  His shaking lessened and he took another breath, then he reached for the bottle from my hand.

  Yes, I did think that it might be used as a weapon, but I was now forewarned and, anyway, I was faster than he was. In the event, he did nothing but take another swig of the bottle, swallow, then look at it and say, in startled shock, “Gin. I don’t drink gin.”

  I couldn’t keep the laughter in, though I tried, and he looked at me as though seeing me for the first time. The bottle fell from his grasp. It didn’t break, but it rolled sideways, spilling liquid on the carpet. His mouth fell open. His throat worked.

  “You,” he said. “I . . . Damn. I . . .” He covered his face with his hands, then lowered them and looked resigned but not scared. “I attacked you, Good Man Keeva, and I want to make it clear that I�
�m acting on my own. Neither my father, my mother, nor any of my siblings, nor any acquaintance or friend or colleague or teacher incited me to do this. It is my fault, my fault alone.” He stood, and faced me, managing to look dignified. “And I will repeat this statement as needed.”

  It was, in the circumstances, as noble a speech as I’d ever heard, and he stood with his shoulders thrown back, his head held high, ready to die alone for a moment’s fury. He was an idiot, but a gallant idiot.

  “Very likely,” I said. “But you forgot to exonerate one person. I would swear you had nothing to do with your own actions, either.” And, to his startled look. “How long have you been holding back the berserker fit? Since I came in the door?” And, because I’m not a genius, but I can think through cause and effect, and I remembered the horrible description of Max’s death through torture. “You and Max were friends, weren’t you?”

  He took a deep breath, nodded. I turned my back on him, deliberately, and walked back to the drinks table. “What do you drink?”

  “Nothing. Not at this time of morning. My father would have my skin, and besides . . .” He sounded surprised. “I don’t think I’ve eaten in . . . over a day.”

  “I imagine,” I said. “With the search for Max and then their finding him murdered.” I found the soda dispenser, filled a glass of soda water, and took it to him. “Drink,” I said, “or you’ll start hiccupping in no time.”

  “I cut your lip,” he said. His gaze arrested on my lip. “You’re bleeding.”

  “You did?” I wiped at it, leaving a red streak on the back of my hand. “So. No big deal. I’ve done worse to myself.”

  He took a sip of the water. “Any other Good Man would have had me—”

  “Not a sane Good Man,” I said. “Grief and shock hit you too closely together. You weren’t in your right mind.” Which was true enough even if he did have one, which, of course, I couldn’t know. “But for the record, I didn’t maneuver or intend to spend a year in a prison for violent criminals, and fourteen in solitary confinement in Never-Never.”