Once a Hero Read online

  Luci's face relaxed; she almost grinned. "So?"

  "So I need someone to manage my herd. Someone who will make sure that the mares go to the right stallions . . . that the foals get the right training, and are actually put on the market—" Family horses almost never went to market. "—And so forth," Esmay said. "I would expect to compensate the manager, of course. The eye of the master fattens the herd . . . and I will be far away, for a very long time."

  "You're thinking of me?" Luci breathed. "It's too much—the mare, and—"

  "I like the way you handle her," Esmay said. "It's how I'd want my horses handled, if I wanted horses at all . . . and since I have them, that's what I'd like. You could save up the money for school—I know from experience that it impresses them if you fund your own escape. And you'd get the experience."

  "I'll do it," Luci said, grinning. Despite herself, Esmay thought back to the previous night's conversation. Here was someone for whom prudence could never swamp enthusiasm.

  "You didn't ask what I'm paying," Esmay said. "You should always find that out first . . . what it's going to cost, and what you're going to get."

  "It doesn't matter," Luci said. "It's the chance—"

  "It matters," Esmay said, and surprised herself with the harshness of her voice; the horse under her shifted uneasily. "Chances aren't what they seem." Then, at the look on Luci's face, she stopped herself. Why was she being negative, when she had just been admiring Luci's impetuosity? "Sorry. Here's what I want from you—a fair accounting of costs and income. Midsummer—that should give you time to write it up after the foal crop arrives."

  "But how much—" Now Luci looked worried.

  "You didn't ask before. I'll decide later. Maybe tomorrow." Esmay nudged her mount, and started off toward the distant line of trees beyond the canter track; her cousin followed.

  She had forgotten about the old man at the reception until a servant announced him after lunch, when she had lingered in the kitchen over a second piece of rednut pie smothered in real cream.

  "Retired soldier Sebastian Coron, dama, requests a few moments of your time."

  Seb Coron . . . of course she would see him. She wiped the last of the pie from her mouth, and went out to the hall, where he stood at ease, watching one of the younger cousins practice the piano with Sanni standing by, counting the time.

  "Reminds me of you, Esmay," he said when she came forward to shake his hand.

  "It reminds me of hours of misery," Esmay said, smiling. "The untalented and unrhythmic should never be forced to go beyond learning a few scales . . . once we've admitted how hard it is, we should be let off."

  "Well, you know, it's in the old law." It was, though Esmay had never understood why every child, with or without ability or interest, should be forced through ten years of musical training on a minimum of four instruments. They didn't make all children learn soldiering.

  "Come on in the sitting room," Esmay said, leading him to the front room where women of the family usually received guests. Her stepmother had redone it again, but the bright floral-patterned covers on the chairs and long padded benches were in a traditional print. This one had more orange and yellow, and less red and pink, than Esmay remembered. "Would you like tea? Or something to drink?" Without waiting for an answer, she rang; she knew that with his arrival the kitchen staff would have started preparing the tray with his favorites, whatever they were.

  She settled him in one of the wide low chairs, with the tray at his side, and herself chose a seat to his left, the heart-side, to show her awareness of the family bond.

  Old Sebastian twinkled at her. "You have done us proud," he said. "And it's all over for you, the bad times, eh?"

  Esmay blinked. How could he think that, when she was still in Fleet? She had to expect other combat in the future; surely he realized that. Perhaps he meant the recent trouble.

  "I certainly hope I never have to go through a court-martial again," she said. "Or the mutiny that led to it."

  "You did well, though. That's not exactly what I meant, though I'm sure it was unpleasant enough. But no more old nightmares?"

  Esmay stiffened. How did he know about her nightmares? Had her father confided to this man? She certainly wasn't about to tell him about them. "I'm doing all right," she said.

  "Good," he said. He picked up his glass, and sipped. "Ah, this is good. You know, even when I was still active, your father never stinted the good stuff when I came here. Of course, we both understood it was special, not something to be talked about."

  "What?" Esmay said, without much curiosity.

  "Your father, he didn't want me to talk about it, and I could see his point. You'd had that fever, and nearly died. He wasn't sure what you remembered, and what was the fever dreams."

  Esmay fought her body to stillness. She wanted to shiver; she wanted to gag; she wanted to run away. She had done all those, in past times, without success. "It was the dreams," she said. "Just the fever, they said, something I'd caught when I ran away." She managed a dry laugh. "I can't even remember where I thought I was going, let alone where I got to." She did remember a nightmare train ride, fragments of something else she tried not to think about.

  She did not know what tiny movement—a flicker of eyelid, a tension in the muscles along his jaw—but she knew at once that he knew something. Knew something that she did not, which he longed to convey and felt he must conceal. Her scalp prickled. Did she want to know, and if she did, could she get him to tell her?

  "Well, you went to find your father . . . that was simple. Your mother had died, and you wanted him, and he was right there in the midst of a nasty little territorial dispute. That was when the Borlist branch of the Old Believers had decided to pull out of the regional planning web, and take over the upper rift valley."

  Esmay knew about that miscalled dispute: the Califer Uprising had been a civil war, small but intense.

  "No one realized you could read that well, let alone that you could read a map . . . you hopped on your pony, with a week's food, and set off—"

  "On a pony?" She could hardly imagine that; she had never liked riding that much. She'd have expected her young self to sneak a ride on a truck bound for town.

  Seb looked embarrassed—she couldn't imagine why—and scratched at his neck. "Back then you rode like a tick on a cowdog, and just as happy. You were hardly ever off your pony, until your mother died, and they were happy enough to see you back on it. Until you disappeared."

  She couldn't remember that—couldn't remember a time when she would have chosen to spend all those hours on a horse. What she remembered was how much she hated it, the lessons and the sore muscles and all the work of picking out hoofs and grooming and mucking out a stall. Could this be true, that an illness had wiped out not only her pleasure in horses, but all memory of a time when she had enjoyed them?

  "I guess you'd planned pretty well," he went on, "because they couldn't pick up your traces anywhere. No one thought of what you'd really done; they thought you'd gotten lost, or gone up in the mountains and had an accident. And no one ever knew the whole story, because you didn't make a lot of sense when we found you."

  "The fever," said Esmay. She was sweating now; she could feel it, like a sick slime all over.

  "That's what your father said." Sebastian had said it before; now his voice echoed with her memory, and her new adult ability to interpret nuances of expression compared the two versions and found hidden disbelief.

  "My father said . . . ?" Esmay said, carefully neutral, not looking at his face. Not directly, anyway; she could see the pulse in his throat.

  "You'd forgotten it all, with the fever, and all for the better, he said. Don't bring it up, he said. Well, I guess you know by now it wasn't all a dream . . . I suppose those Fleet psychnannies dug it out and helped you deal with it, eh?"

  She was frozen; she was simmering in her own terror. Cold and hot at once, closer than she wanted to some terrible truth, and yet not able to move away. She could f
eel his gaze on her head, and knew if she looked up she would not be able to hide her terror and confusion. Instead, she busied her hands among the little dishes of breads and condiments, pouring the tea, handing over a delicate cup and saucer with the spray-pattern touched with silver . . . she could hardly believe her hands were so steady.

  "Not that I could have argued with your father, of course. Under the circumstances."

  Under the circumstances Esmay could cheerfully have wrung his neck, but she knew that wouldn't work.

  "It was not only my duty to him as my commander, but . . . he was your father. He knew best. Only I did wonder sometimes if you remembered something from before the fever. If perhaps that was what changed you . . . ."

  "Well, my mother had died." Esmay got that out past her tight throat. Her voice, too, was steady as her hands. How could that be, with terror shaking the roots of her mind? "And I was sick so long—"

  "If you'd been my daughter, I think I'd have told you. It helps the trainees to talk things through after a bad engagement."

  "My father thought differently," Esmay said. Dust was no dryer than her mouth; she felt drought-cracks opening in her mind, bottomless mouths to trap her . . .

  "Yes. Well, anyway, I'm glad you had the chance to deal with it in the end. But it must've been hard when you had that traitor captain to deal with, that second betrayal—" The almost musing tone of his voice sharpened. "Esmaya! Is something wrong? I'm sorry, I didn't mean—"

  "It would be most helpful if you could simply tell me the story from your point of view," Esmay managed to say; her voice was thickening now, the dust compressing into angular blocks of rock-hard clay. "Remember, I had only my own somewhat fragmentary memories to go on, and the psychnannies found them somewhat inadequate." The psychnannies would have found them inadequate, if they'd found them at all, but they hadn't. They had assumed that anyone with her background would have had any such problems dealt with earlier. And she, convinced by her family's insistence that everything in the nightmares was just fever dreams, had been afraid to let them know she had problems. She'd been afraid of being labeled crazy or unstable, unfit for duty . . . rejected, to come home a failure. Was this why her family had assumed she'd fail, even to the point of keeping her trail horse unassigned?

  "Perhaps you should ask your father," Coron said doubtfully.

  "I suspect he would be displeased at having his judgment questioned," Esmay said with all sincerity. "Even by the Fleet's psychiatric specialists." Coron nodded. "It would be a help, if you wouldn't mind."

  "If you're sure," Coron said. She had to meet his eyes a moment; she had to endure the worry in them, the tightness of the lines around his eyes, the furrowed brow. "It's not a pleasant matter—but of course you know that already."

  Nausea bucked in her gut, sending sour signals to her mouth. Not yet, she begged it. Not until I know. "I'm sure," she said.

  It had been a time of riot and civil disorder, when a single small child, if determined and sure of herself, could travel by pony and then by rail some thousand kilometers. "You'd always been good at explaining yourself," Coron said. "You could come up with a story the moment you were caught out. I suppose that's why no one really noticed you—you spun some yarn about being sent to an auntie or grandmother, and since you didn't act scared or confused, and you had enough money, they let you on the trains."

  All this was supposition; they had not been able to trace her path between the time she left the pony—they never found it, but in those days it might well have ended up in someone's stew pot—and the last part of her journey, the train she'd taken right into disaster.

  "The last despatches home had given your father's station as Buhollow Barracks, and that's where the train would have gone. But in the meantime the rebels had overrun the eastern end of the county, putting everything they had into an assault aimed at the big arms depot at Bute Bagin. The force at Buhollow Barracks was too small to hold them, so your father had rolled aside to hook around and cut them off from the rear, while the Tenth Cav moved up from Cavender to hit them in the flank."

  "I remember that," Esmay said. She remembered it from the records, not from real memory. The rebels had counted on her father's reputation which had never included leaving a plum like Buhollow unprotected . . . they had planned to immobilize his forces there with part of their army, while the rest went on to Bute Bagin and the supplies there. Later, his decision to abandon Buhollow and trap the rebel army would be taught as an example of tactical brilliance. He had done what he could for the town. The civilian population of Buhollow fled ahead of the rebels; they had been told which way to go. Most of them survived.

  But Esmay, crammed in amongst refugees from earlier fighting, had ridden the train two stops too far. Both sides had mined the railroad; although the official reports said a rebel mine had blown the low bridge over the Sinets Canal just as the locomotive passed, Esmay had never been sure. Would any government admit its own mines had blown up its own train?

  She did remember the enormous jolt that slammed the carriage crooked. They had been going slowly; she had been stuffed between a fat woman with a crying baby and a skinny older boy who kept poking her ribs. The jolt rocked the carriage, but didn't knock it over. Others weren't so lucky. She could just recall jumping down from the step—a big jump for her at that age—and following the woman and her baby for no reason than that the woman was a mother. The skinny boy had poked her once more then turned away to follow someone else. Streams of frightened people scurried away from the train, away from the blowing smoke and screams at the front end of the train.

  She had lost track of direction; she had forgotten, for the moment, which way she was supposed to go. She had followed the woman and baby . . . and they had been following others . . . and then her legs were too tired, and she stopped.

  "There was a little village the locals called Greer's Crossing," Coron went on. "Not even one klick from the train track, where the shipping canal turned. You must've gone there with others from the train wreck."

  "And that's when the rebels came through," Esmay said.

  "That's when the war came through." Coron paused; she heard the faint slurp as he sipped his tea. She glanced up to meet a gaze that no longer twinkled. "It wasn't just the rebels, as you know only too well."

  I do? she thought.

  "It was right about there the rebels realized that they were being herded into a trap. Say what you like about Chia Valantos, he had a tactical brain between his ears."

  Esmay made a noise intended to indicate agreement.

  "And maybe he had good scouts—I don't know. Anyway, the rebels had been on the old road, because they had some heavy vehicles, and so they had to go through the village, to get across on the bridge. They were making a mess of the village, because the people around there had never been supporters. I suppose they thought the people from the train had something to do with the loyalists . . ."

  The old memories forced themselves up, lumping under her calm surface; she could feel her face changing and struggled to keep the muscles still. Her legs had begun to hurt, after the hours on the train, the crash, the fall . . . the woman, even with a baby, had longer legs and took longer steps. She had fallen behind, and by the time she got to the village it was gone. Already the roofs had collapsed; what walls remained were broken and cantways. Smoke blew across streets littered with stones and trash and tree limbs and piles of old clothes. It was noisy; she could not classify the noises except that they scared her. They were too loud; they sounded angry, and tangled in her mind with her father's voice scolding her. She wasn't supposed to be so close to whatever made those noises.

  Blinded by stinging smoke, she had stumbled over one of the heaps of old clothes, and only then recognized it as a person. A corpse, her adult mind corrected. The child she had been had thought it a silly place for someone to go to sleep, a grown woman, and she had shaken the slack heavy arm, trying to wake an adult to help her find her way. She had not seen death bef
ore, not human death—she had not been allowed to see her mother, because of the fever—and it took her a long time to realize that the woman with no face would never pick her up and soothe her and promise that everything would be all right soon.

  She had looked around, blinking against the stinging in her eyes that was not all smoke, and saw the other piles of clothes, the other people, the dead . . . and the dying, whose cries she could now recognize. Even across the years, she remembered that the first thought she could recognize was an apology: I'm sorry—I didn't mean to . . . Even now, she knew this was both necessary and futile. It had not been her fault—she had not caused the war—but she was there, and so far untouched, and for that, if nothing else, she must apologize.

  That day, she had stumbled along the broken lane, falling again and again, crying without realizing it, until her legs gave out and she huddled into the corner of a wall, where someone's garden had once held bright flowers. The noise rose and fell, shadowy figures moving through the smoke, some wearing one color and some another. Most, she knew later, must have been the terrified passengers on the train; some were rebels. Later—later they all wore the same uniform, the uniform she knew, the one her father and uncles wore.

  But she didn't remember. She couldn't remember, not all of it. She had remembered, and they'd said it was dreams.

  "It'd have been better, I always thought, if they'd told you," Sebastian said. "At least when you got old enough. Bein' as the man was dead, and couldn't hurt anyone again, least of all you."

  She did not want to hear this. She did not want to remember this . . . no, she could not. Fever dreams, she thought. Only fever dreams.

  "Bad enough for it to happen at all, no matter who did it. The rape of a child—sickening. But to have it one of ours—"