Once a Hero Read online

She fixed on the one thing she could stand to know. "I . . . didn't know he was dead."

  "Well, your father couldn't tell you that without bringing up the rest of it, could he? He hoped you'd forget the whole thing . . . or think it was just a fever dream."

  He'd said it was a fever dream; he'd said it was over now, that she'd always be safe . . . he'd said he wasn't angry at her. Yet his anger had hovered around her, a vast cloud, dangerous, blinding her mind as the smoke had blinded her eyes.

  "You're . . . sure?"

  "That the bastard died? Oh yes . . . I have no doubt at all."

  The invisible mechanisms whirled, paused, slid into place with a final inaudible crunch. "You killed him?"

  "It was that or your father's career. Officers can't just kill their men, even animals who rape children. And to wait, to charge him—that'd have brought you into it, and none of us wanted that. Better for me to do it, and take my lumps . . . not that there was anything worse than a stiff chewing out, at the end of it. Mitigating circumstances."

  Or extenuating . . . her mind dove eagerly into that momentary tangle, reminding her that extenuation and mitigation were, although similar, applied to different ends of the judicial process, as it were.

  "I'm glad to know that," Esmay said, for something to say.

  "I always said you should be told," he said. Then he looked embarrassed. "Not that I talked about it, you understand. I said it to myself, I mean. It was no use arguing with your father. And after all, you were his daughter."

  "Don't worry about it," Esmay said. She was finding it hard to pay attention; she felt the room drifting slowly away, on a slow spiral to the left.

  "And you're sure you got it all sorted out, all but him being dead, I mean? They helped you in the R.S.S.?"

  Esmay tried to drag her mind back to the topic, from which it wanted to shy away. "I'm fine," she said. "Don't worry about it."

  "No . . . I was real surprised, you know, when you wanted to go off-planet and join them. Figured you'd had enough combat for any one life . . . but I guess it's your blood coming out, eh?"

  How was she going to get rid of him, politely and discreetly? She could hardly tell him to go away, she had a headache. Suizas did not treat guests that way. But she needed—how she needed—some hours alone.

  "Esmaya?" Esmay looked up. Her half-brother Germond grinned shyly at her. "Father said would you come to the conservatory, please?" He turned to Coron. "If you can excuse her, sir?"

  "Of course. It's your family's turn now—Esmaya, thank you for your time." He bowed, very formal again at the end, and withdrew.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Esmay turned to Germond, now fifteen, all ears and nose and big feet. "What—did Father want?"

  "He's in the conservatory with Uncle Berthol . . . he said you'd be getting tired of listening to old soldiers' tales, for one thing, and for another he wanted to ask you more about Fleet."

  Her mouth was dry; she could not think. "Tell him . . . tell him Seb's gone, and I'll be out in a few minutes. I've gone upstairs to . . . to freshen up." For once, the impenetrable assumptions of Altiplano society worked in her favor. No male would question her need to be alone for a few minutes with an array of plumbing fixtures. Nor would they rush her.

  She went up the stairs by instinct; she was not seeing the brass rails holding the carpet snug to the risers, the scuffs on the steps themselves. Her body knew how to get up the stairs, around the corners, where to find the switches that gave her absolute privacy.

  She leaned against the wall, turned on the cold-water tap, and put her hands into it. She wasn't sure why. She wasn't sure of anything, including the passage of time. The water cut off automatically, just as it would aboard ship, and she nudged the controls again. Abruptly she threw up; the curdled remains of lunch slopped into the clean swirl of water and disappeared down the drain with it. Her stomach heaved again, then settled uneasily. She cupped her hand under the faucet, and drank a handful of the cold, sweet water. Her stomach lurched, but steadied. She had never been prone to nausea. Not even then, not even when the pain was so bad she'd been sure she was being torn apart. The real pain, not the imagined pain induced by fever dreams.

  In the mirror, she looked like a stranger—a gaunt old woman with flyaway dark hair, face streaked with tears and vomit. This would never do. Methodically, Esmay took a towel from the rack, wet it, and cleaned her face and hands. She rubbed her face hard with the dry end of the towel, until the blood returned and the greenish tinge of nausea disappeared under a healthy pink. She attacked her hair with damp hands, flattening the loose strands, then dried her hands. The water stopped again, and this time she didn't turn it back on. She folded the damp towel, and hung it on the used rack.

  The woman in the mirror now looked more familiar. Esmay forced a smile, and it looked more natural on that face than it felt on her own. She should put on something, she thought, looking to see if she'd spotted her shirt. A few drops showed, dark against the pale fawn. She would change. She would change into someone else . . . her mind stumbled over something in the smoke that was all she could see.

  Still navigating by habit, she unlocked the door, and returned to her own room. By the time she'd taken off the shirt, she knew she'd have to change from the skin out. She did that as quickly as she could, taking what lay on top in her drawers, and glancing at herself only long enough to be sure the wide collar lay flat and untwisted around her neck. The pallor had gone; she looked like Esmay Suiza again.

  But was she? Was Esmay Suiza a real person? Could you build a real person on a foundation of lies? She fought her way through the choking dark clouds in her mind, trying to cling to what she remembered, what Seb Coron had told her, to any logic that could connect them.

  When the smoke-cloud in her mind cleared, the first thing she recognized was smug relief: she had been right. She had known the truth; she had made no mistakes. Her adult mind intruded: except for the stupidity of leaving home in the first place, the idiocy of a child trying to travel cross-country in the midst of a civil war. She batted that critical voice down. She had been a child; children were, by definition, ignorant of some things. In the essentials—in recognizing what she had seen, in telling the truth about what happened—she had been right.

  Rage followed that moment of delight. She had been right, and they had lied to her. They had told her she was mistaken—that she was confused by the fever . . . or was there even a fever? She had started to call up the household medical records before her critical voice pointed out that of course the records would show such an illness, such a hospitalization. It could have been fabricated, all of it—how would she know? And to whom did she want to prove it?

  To everyone, at that moment. She wanted to drag the truth before her father, her uncle, even Papa Stefan. She wanted to grab them by the neck, force them to see what she had seen, feel what she had felt, admit that she had in fact endured what she had endured.

  But they already knew. Exhaustion followed exhilaration just as it followed fever; she could feel the familiar languor in her veins, dragging her down to immobility, to acquiescence. They knew, and yet they had lied to her.

  She could keep her own secret, and let them think theirs safe, run away again as she had run before. They would be comfortable still, indulged by her complicity.

  Or she could confront them.

  She looked again in the mirror. That was the person she would become, if she became an admiral like Heris Serrano's aunt. The diffidence, the uncertainty, that had mocked her so often had burned away in the last hour. She did not yet feel what she saw in that face, but she trusted the eyes that blazed out at her.

  Would he still be in the conservatory? How long had this taken? The clock surprised her; she had been upstairs only half a local hour. She headed for the conservatory, this time with all senses fully awake. It might have been the first time she came down the stairs . . . she felt the slight give in the sixth from the bottom, noticed a loose tack on the railing side o
f the carpet, spotted a nick in the railing itself. Every sight, every smell, every sound.

  Her father and Berthol were stooped over a tray of bedding plants with one of the gardeners. Her new clarity of vision noticed every detail of the plants, the notched petals of fire-orange and sun-yellow, the lace-cut leaves. The gardener's dirt-blackened fingernails where his hands were splayed out on the potting table. The red flush along the sides of her uncle's neck. White lines in the skin of her father's face, where he had squinted against the sun so long that the creases had not tanned. A loose thread on the button of Berthol's sleeve button.

  Her foot scraped on the tile floor because she let it; her father looked up.

  "Esmaya . . . come see the new hybrids. I think they'll do very well in the front urns . . . I hope old Sebastian didn't wear you out."

  "He didn't," Esmay said. "In fact, I found him quite interesting." Her voice sounded perfectly calm, perfectly reasonable, to her, but her father started.

  "Is something wrong, Esmay?"

  "I need to talk to you, Father," she said, still calm. "Perhaps in your study?"

  "Something serious?" he asked, not moving. Rage surged through her.

  "Only if you consider a matter of family honor serious," she said. The gardener's hands jerked; the plants shivered. The gardener reached for the box of planters, and he murmured something. Her father lifted his chin, and the man grabbed the box and scuttled away, out the back door of the conservatory.

  "Do you want me to leave?" her uncle asked, as if he were sure she would say no.

  "Please," she said, this time testing her own power to put a sting in it. He flinched, his eyes shifting to her father, then back to her.

  "Esmay, what . . . ?"

  "You will know soon enough," Esmay said. "But I would prefer to speak to Father alone, just now."

  Berthol flushed, but turned away; he did not quite slam the door going out.

  "Well, Esmaya? There was no need to be rude." But her father's voice had no power in it, and she heard an undertone of fear. The little muscles around his eyes and nose were tense; the contrast between his tanned skin and the untanned creases had almost disappeared. If he'd been a horse, his ears would have been flat and his tail switching nervously. He should be able to put the sum together: she wondered if he would.

  She came toward him, running her hand through the fronds of one of the sweetheart palms; it still tickled. "I talked to Seb Coron—or rather, he talked . . . and I found it most interesting."

  "Oh?" He was going to brazen it out.

  "You lied to me . . . you said it was all a dream, that it didn't happen . . ."

  For a moment, she thought he would try to pretend he didn't understand, but then a quick wash of color rose to his cheeks and drained again.

  "We did it for you, Esmaya." That was what she'd expected to hear.

  "No. Not for me. For the family, maybe, but not for me." Her voice did not waver, which surprised her a little. She had decided to keep going even if her voice broke, even if she cried in front of him, which she had not done in years. Why should he be protected from her tears?

  "For more than you, I admit." He looked at her from under those bushy brows, gray now. "For the others—it was better that one child suffer that confusion—"

  "Confusion? You call that confusion?" Her body ached with remembered pain, the specific pains that had specific causes. She had tried to scream; she had tried to fight him off; she had even tried to bite. The strong adult hands, hardened by war, had held her down easily; bruising her.

  "No, not the injuries, but not being sure what had happened—you couldn't tell us who, Esmaya; you didn't really see him. And they said you would forget . . ."

  She felt her lips pulling back from her teeth; she saw in her father's expression what hers had become. "I saw him," she said. "I don't know his name, but I saw him."

  He shook his head. "You couldn't give us any details at the time," he said. "You were exhausted, terrified—you probably didn't even see his face. You've been in combat now as an adult; you know how confusing it is—"

  He doubted. He dared to doubt, even now, her knowledge. A bright ribbon of images from Despite rippled through her mind. Confusing? Perhaps, in terms of organizing information to relate in court, but she could see the faces of those she had killed, and those who had tried to kill her. She always would.

  "Show me the regimental roster," she said, her voice choked with rage. "Show me, and I'll point him out."

  "You can't possibly—after all these years—"

  "Sebastian says he killed him—that means you know who it is. If I can point him out, that should prove to you that I do remember." That you were wrong, and I was right. Why it mattered so much to prove this was not a question Esmay wanted to examine. Proving a general wrong was professional suicide and military stupidity. But . . .

  "You can't possibly," her father said again, but this time with no strength. He led the way to his study without another word; Esmay followed, forcing herself not to strike him down from behind. He moved to the console, and stabbed at the controls. Esmay noticed that his fingers were shaking; she felt a calm satisfaction. Then he stepped back, and she came forward to look.

  The faces came up, six to a screen. She stared at them, one part of her mind sure that she would know, and another sure that she wouldn't. Had her father even called up the right year? He wanted her to fail, that was clear enough. He might have cheated—but she could not believe that of him, even now.

  Suizas did not lie . . . and he was her father.

  He had lied before, because he was her father. She tore her mind away from that dilemma and stared at the screen.

  She did not recognize most of the faces at all. She had no reason to; she had not been to Buhollow Barracks after her father was posted there. She found a few faces vaguely familiar, but unthreatening. They would have been men who had served with her father before, even among the household guard at the estancia. Among them, a much younger Sebastian Coron, whom she recognized instantly . . . so her memory was clear in some details that far back.

  She could hear her father's breathing, as she scrolled through the list. She did not look at him. It was hard enough to focus on the screen, to breathe through the tightness in her throat. Screen after screen . . . she heard her father shift in his chair, but he did not interrupt. Someone came to the door; she heard the rustle of clothing, but did not look up. Her father must have gestured, for without a word she heard the rustle of clothing retreat, and the gentle thud of the door as it shut.

  Through the entire enlisted ranks, and she had not found that face her mind refused to show her. Doubts chilled her. The face she remembered had been contorted with whatever emotion makes men rape children . . . she might never find it among these solemn, almost expressionless faces in the catalog. It must be here . . . surely Coron would have told her if it had been someone in another unit, or an officer.

  Or would he? She made herself keep going, to the officer ranks. There at the head was her father, no gray in his hair, his mouth one long firm line. Beneath, in descending order, the . . . her breath caught. Yes. Her heart fluttered then raced thunderously in her chest, spurred by the old fear. He stared out of the page, sleek and handsome, the honey-colored hair swept back . . . she remembered it darker, matted with sweat and dirt. But no doubt at all, not one.

  She searched his face for clues to his choices . . . for some mark of depravity. Nothing. Regular features, clear gray eyes—coloring not that common on Altiplano, but much prized. The little button of an honor graduate, the braid on his epaulet that declared him an eldest son, of whom more was expected. His mouth was set in a straight line, a conscious copy of her father's . . . it looked no crueler. His name . . . she knew his name. She knew his family. She had danced with his younger brothers, at the Harvest Games, the year before she left Altiplano for the stars.

  Her mouth was too dry to speak. She struggled to swallow, to clear her tongue. She had struggled the
n, too. Finally she got out a word: "This." She laid her finger on the image, surprised at the steadiness of her hand; her finger didn't tremble at all.

  Her father got up; she could hear him coming up behind her and fought not to flinch away. He grunted first, as if someone had slugged him in the belly. "Gods! You did—how did you—?"

  Anger released her tongue. "I told you. I remember."

  "Esmaya . . ." It was a groan, a plea, and his hand on her hair was another. She slid aside from it, pushing herself away from the console, scrambling out of the chair.

  "I didn't know his name," she said. Amazingly, it was easy to keep her tone even, her words crisp. "I was too young to have been introduced, even if he'd been at our house before. I couldn't tell you his name, or give the kind of description that an adult might have been able to give. But I knew. You did not show me the rolls then, did you?"

  Her father's face, when she looked, might have been carven in bleached wood; it looked dry and stiff, unnatural. Was that her vision, or his reality? Her gaze wandered away, around the room, just noticing the familiar things before moving on to something else. In her mind, more and more of the certainties shifted, as if stone walls had been only scenery painted on movable screens. What did she really know about herself, about her past? What could she rely on?

  Against this chaos the past years in Fleet stood firm: she knew what had happened there. From her first day in the prep school to the last day of the court-martial, she knew exactly what she had done, and who had done what to her. She had created that world for herself; she could trust it. Admiral Vida Serrano, an easy match for her father, had never lied to her . . . had never screened anyone else, at her expense.

  Whatever she had had to suppress, to limit, in herself in order to make this haven was expendable. She didn't need to find the part of herself that had loved to ride, or paint, or play antique instruments . . . she needed to keep herself safe, and she had managed that quite well. She could give up Altiplano; she had already done it.

  "Esmaya . . . I'm sorry." He probably was, she let herself think, but it didn't matter. He was sorry too late and too little. "If—since you remember, you probably need therapy."