Hero's Welcome (A Fantasy & Futuristic Romance Short Story) Page 2

  It wasn’t quite so bad.

  He started down the hall, then, on second thought, stopped and went back. Standing in front of the mirror, he ran his hand over the dark stubble that covered his cheeks. He had intended to leave it. Instead he slathered hair-dissolving foam on the nascent beard and washed it away. The foam left his cheeks smooth and undisguised, forcing him to acknowledge the weight he’d lost. He looked lean and hungry and, in his own eyes, angry.

  He tried to lighten his expression, to erase the frown, to make his lips curve upward in a smile. When he realized his attempts to rearrange his features only made things worse, he grimaced and turned away.

  Kasimanda wasn’t in the galley. But there was a plate of grain cakes on a warming square. And real coffee. Maybe the residents of the house had left it in long-term storage, he thought as he breathed in the wonderful aroma, then poured some into the delicate ceramic mug she’d set on the table for him.

  Her grain cakes melted in his mouth, like the ones his mother had made, and he realized that she must have used a Dorre recipe. He wanted to tell her how good they were, but she didn’t appear when he called her name.

  “You don’t have to leave,” he said more loudly, hoping his voice conveyed a note of apology for his insensitivity of the night before. “You can stay here as long as you want.”

  No answer.

  Half disappointed, half relieved, he went back to the power center and spent the morning on repairs. When the sun had reached its zenith and begun its slow fall toward the horizon, he headed outside to inspect the farm machinery. He wasn’t going to look for her, he told himself as he limped his way to the large barn, where the equipment was kept.

  After satisfying himself that the riding scour and harvester were in working order, he returned to the galley, where he found she’d put away most of the supplies he’d brought and prepared another Dorre-style meal. Like the fairy people in a children’s story, he thought with a low laugh. An unseen helper.

  Stomping down the hall, he began opening doors. In a wing off to the left, he found the small chamber where it appeared she had been sleeping. The bed was narrow, the storage bay small. Servant’s quarters.

  Why in the name of Far— He stopped himself, realizing suddenly how insulting the curse would be if he slipped and said it aloud in front of Kasi: his people defiling the name of hers.

  He started over.

  Why in the name of hell was she sleeping in here? She could have the master bed chamber for all he cared. He opened the storage bay. There were only a few tunics, all of them clean but made of cheap cloth. Wasn’t there anything better in the house, he wondered as he fingered the coarse fabric, imagining it next to her soft skin. With a curse, he turned and stamped away.

  He worked outside for the rest of the day. By evening, his leg was throbbing. Back in his room, as he pulled off his clothes and removed the prosthesis, he decided he could use some more of that orange stuff.

  Would she come to him again? Or was one good look at his mangled leg enough, he wondered as he lay with his eyes half closed, too keyed up to sleep. An enormous sense of relief swept over him when the door finally glided open.

  “Was your leg better today?” she asked softly as she tiptoed toward the bed.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m so glad.” In her voice was a hint of the music he’d always loved.

  “I think more of that salve would help,” he admitted in low, rough tones.

  In one quick motion, she perched lightly beside him. He wanted to feel her touch. Still, he flinched when her fingers made contact with the leg. Teeth gritted, he ordered himself to relax as she began to soothe the magic salve over his poisoned flesh. Again there was warmth and sweet relief.

  In the darkness, he began to talk, his tone flat and devoid of emotion. “I was on a mission to secure a farm house. There was a Farlian hiding inside. He burned my leg. I put a hole in his chest.”

  Her hand stilled, then started again.

  “I killed a lot of your people.”

  “Are you bragging or asking for my forgiveness?” she asked, a little hitch in her voice.

  He might have tossed out a cynical answer. Instead he gave her honesty. “Neither. I just . . . I just needed to say it. I’m not sure I’m fit company for anyone. I feel . . . uncivilized.”

  “The men you killed were uncivilized, too,” she answered. “They would have killed you if you hadn’t killed them first.”

  He made a low sound in his throat. “I started out as an idealistic boy fighting for my people’s freedom. I didn’t know what war was going to be like. I didn’t know how it felt to look into a man’s eyes and kill him.”

  “You did what you had to do. And your people are free.”

  “And yours?”

  “We’ve paid the price for years of conceit and presumption.”

  Her answer shocked him. “That’s what you believe?”

  She sighed, a sad sound in the darkness. “When I think about it, I understand that when we raised the price of rokam oil too high, our buyers on Kodon Prime made a business decision to ally themselves with the Dorre and back them in a war against us.” She sighed again. “But mostly I try not to think about it. I try just to survive, one day at a time.”

  She said it with such heart-wrenching simplicity that he struggled to draw a full breath. Her next words only added to the crushing feeling in his chest.

  “Link, you’re a man whose body and soul were injured by circumstances beyond your control. A man with the strength to heal the parts that can be healed.”

  “How do you know?” he asked in a hoarse whisper.

  “Because you had the courage to tell me your doubts. Because you let me put my hands here.” In the darkness, she lightly touched the stump of his leg. “There are things inside all of us that we find frightening. It’s how we deal with the fear that counts.”

  When had she grown up, he wondered. Where had she gained this kind of wisdom?

  “Doesn’t it change the way you feel about me when I tell you I killed Farlian men?” he demanded.

  “I never saw things in terms of Farlians verses Dorre. Our races evolved differently, because my ancestors came from Earth much longer ago than yours and adapted to a new environment that changed us. So my skin is very pale, and my eyes see better at night than yours. But those physical differences are superficial. Our hopes and needs and feelings are alike. We’re all still people, and in all ways that matter, we’re the same.”

  “Then why did you stop me that night, when you knew I was going to kiss you?” He blurted out the question, then immediately regretted it.

  He thought she wasn’t going to answer when she rose and took a step away from the bed. Then she began to speak in a low, rapid voice. “Because I knew my father was standing in the doorway, waiting for me to come in from the garden. And despite his liberal leanings, he would have killed you if you’d put your hand on his high-born daughter.”

  Before Link could respond, she turned and fled the room.

  He lay for long hours in the darkness, remembering each word of the midnight encounter, each touch of her hands on his flesh. He especially remembered that she’d been motivated by a desire to protect him from her father, not revulsion for him, when she’d refused his kiss all those years ago.

  Sometime in the early hours of the morning, slumber finally took him.

  Despite the short sleep, he woke feeling better than he had in months, as if a giant weight had been lifted off his body. He knew it was Kasimanda’s doing. She was the first person he’d told how he felt— about the war, about his leg, about anything at all. Maybe it was because he’d known her longer than anyone still living. Maybe it was the gentle way she had about her. Whatever the reason, he felt he could talk to her, share himself with her. And with the talking and sharing had come a kind of freedom.

  He wanted to tell her, but she had disappeared again. Anguish grabbed him when he considered that she might have fled the estate. T
hen he reminded himself that she’d said she had nowhere else to go.

  He ate the food she had left for him, then headed outside. With the riding scour, he began to clear away rocks that had washed down from the nearby mountain with the season’s rains. No one had tended the field since the war had started, and there was a lot of debris.

  While he worked, he thought about Kasimanda. Kasi, he had called her when they were young. Things had changed abruptly when they’d grown into awkward adolescents. And more recently, changed again— in ways he was afraid to imagine. They both had been ground up and spit out by the war.

  He sighed. On Laster of Renfarel’s estate, where he and Kasi had grown up, Farlian and Dorre children had played together as near-equals— until they began to mature and were suddenly cautioned to remember their places in society.

  Those places had changed, though. The Dorre, in waging war against their oppressors, had stood the world on its head, creating chaos in the process: cities renamed, rulers reduced to humiliation, civilians murdered. Families, like Kasi’s, torn apart. Men, like him, maimed.

  With a grimace, Link centered his mind on the task of clearing rocks. When the sun dipped low over the hills, he returned to the house and revived himself in a long cool shower. After eating the dinner Kasi had left him, he flopped into bed. But rather than lying down, he propped his back against a mound of pillows and left a small lamp burning in the corner of the room—as if he were expecting company. Then, as the silent minutes dragged by, his tension mounted along with the throbbing in his leg.

  He had almost given up hope when the door slid open, and she stepped into the room. Stopping, she shielded her light-sensitive eyes, took a step back.

  “Don’t go.”

  “The light—”

  “I need to see you.”

  He held his breath as she hesitated in the doorway, then felt the air trickle from his lungs as she crossed the space between them.

  She was dressed in a short gown, not unlike her daytime tunics. As he watched, she opened a small medical kit and took out the salve. Easing gingerly onto the bed, she kept her eyes down as she began to work on his leg, the medicine and her touch bringing that same deep, healing comfort. This time, though, the sensation soon became more than mere comfort. With the absence of the pain, he was helpless to stop the response of his body to hers.

  He sat there, feeling the heat gather in his loins as her hands worked their way down his leg and up again toward his thigh. And he knew the precise moment that she realized how her touch was affecting him.

  Uttering a strangled cry, she scrambled off the bed.

  “Kasi.”

  The name from their childhood stopped her. Still, she stood warily, poised to flee.

  He gestured downward. “I’m not going to run after you. By the time I attached that pitiful excuse for a leg, you’d be gone—to wherever it is you hide during the day.” He made a sound that was almost a laugh. “Or I could hop after you. I haven’t tried that yet—don’t know how fast I’d be at it.” Nor had he joked about the leg, he thought with a kind of detached amazement.

  Her features contorted.

  “Kasi,” he said again, very gently.

  She held herself stiffly, as if she might break in two, and the question that had been gnawing at him for days worked its way to his lips and came out in a half-strangled growl. “The Dorre soldiers who came to Renfaral—did they find you?”

  Her whole body jerked as if he’d slapped her, and he felt a sudden pain in his gut, like the twisting of a knife.

  “Did they catch you?” he managed, praying he was wrong.

  Her head gave the smallest of nods. When she spoke, her voice cracked. “In the woods. They didn’t know I was Laster’s daughter, so they didn’t kill me.”

  The look on her face told him more than the words. He clenched his jaw to keep from roaring his outrage. He had heard soldiers bragging of catching Farlian women and teaching them a lesson in obedience to their new masters.

  “I would never do anything to hurt you,” he said, struggling to speak around the fist-sized obstruction in his throat.

  “When I touched you, you got . . .” She stopped, gulped.

  “Hard,” he finished for her, then went on to admit, “I was aroused. Do you know what that means?”

  “That you want to have sex with me.”

  The stark look on her face pierced though his chest to his heart. “That’s only a small part of what I feel. When you touched me and talked to me, you made me feel things I didn’t think I’d ever feel again. Good things. Things I thought had died inside me.”

  She stayed where she was, her gaze searching his face.

  “Kasi, I would never hurt you,” he repeated. “I swear that. On the altar of Atherdan.”

  Her head came up. “On Atherdan? The sacred place of your people.”

  “Yes.”

  Her small white teeth worried her lip.

  “I can’t get up. You have to come back here, so we can talk.”

  The breath froze in his lungs as he watched her stand unmoving. Then, in a rush she came to the bed and perched on the side, just out of reach, her face turned away from him.

  “Can you tell me about it?” he asked.

  “I haven’t told anyone,” she said in a ragged voice.

  “Last night you made me face things I didn’t want to face. And this morning I felt better.”

  “What happened to me was . . . bad.”

  “I know.” He wanted to reach for her, take her in his arms. He kept his hands flat against the mattress.

  “Four of them caught me,” she choked out. “And they dragged me into the old tool shed.”

  She told him things, then, that he didn’t want to hear, things that made bile rise in his throat, though he listened until she was finished, until she began to weep, until he wept with her. Finally, when he couldn’t stand it any longer and reached for her, she slid away. When he called her name, she slipped out of the room.

  And he was left alone on the bed with only his troubled thoughts for company. He had come to this place feeling sorry for himself, for what he had endured. But his wounds were of the flesh. Hers were of the soul.

  Still, she had summoned the courage to tell him her secrets. He would do the same. If she was still there in the morning.

  As tired as he was from his work in the fields, Link remained awake for a long while before sleep finally claimed him.

  To his surprise and vast relief, he found Kasi the next morning, sitting at the table in the galley. Her eyes were red, as if she’d spent the whole night crying, and her hands were clenched tightly in front of her. But she was there.

  He propped his hips against the counter, meeting her gaze with a steadiness that belied the pounding of his heart.

  “So what do you think of me now?” she asked. “Kasimanda of Renfaral. The woman who served four Dorre soldiers against her will.”

  The calmness of her voice frightened him. He sensed he could lose her with a single wrong word. “I think you’re as brave as any war hero, Dorre or Farlian,” he answered from the depths of his heart. “Brave enough to keep going after you lost your whole family. Brave enough to go through what must have been hell to get yourself here. Brave enough to face me and my anger, and to take care of my leg, when I know what you wanted to do was run away.”

  She stared at him as if she couldn’t believe the appraisal.

  He ran a shaky hand through his hair, and fear made his words come out stiffly. “Kasi, when I first saw you here, I couldn’t face what I felt. That’s why I acted angry. I was terrified that you were going to hurt me.”

  Her lips parted, and her huge, gorgeous eyes opened wide in astonishment. “Me? Hurt you?”

  “Oh, yes. The way you did that night seven years ago when you ran away from me in the garden.” He swallowed, tried to gather some courage of his own to match hers. “Kasi, I have loved you since I was ten. A crazy, hopeless love. But now—” He gave a little
laugh. “Now I guess I’m willing to wait for you until I’m a hundred, if that’s what it takes.”

  Wildly conflicting emotions chased across her features.

  “No pressure,” he said, relieved that he had finally confessed the truth. “No demands or requests. No real expectations.” He was lying, of course. Through his teeth. He had expectations, all right, enough to last several lifetimes.

  Turning so that she couldn’t see his face, he poured himself a mug of coffee. Then, without another word or even a glance in her direction, he grabbed a grain cake and headed for the fields.

  She was waiting for him when he came in for dinner. While they ate the food she had prepared, they talked quietly about growing rokam and about the supplies she needed for the house.

  He made his first wordless request when they were reclining on wide loungers beside the empty swimming pool. Moving his leg, he gave a small groan.

  Her head swung quickly toward him. “Is it bad?”

  He shrugged elaborately.

  “You need more of the salve.”

  “I think you’re right.” He considered his options—his bedroom where she would be nervous, or out here where he would feel defenseless without his prosthesis. He chose her comfort. “We could use the lounger.”

  “Yes,” she answered on a rush of breath that told him he’d made the right choice. Still, his gaze slid away from her as he pictured himself taking off the leg. He wasn’t ready to do that in front of her. Standing, he steadied himself against the wall. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

  The sun had set by the time he returned. Overhead, stars winked in the black velvet of the sky, and the smallest of the four moons cast a blue radiance on the fields beyond the house.

  He looked around anxiously for Kasi, afraid that she might have changed her mind. Then she moved, a shadow detaching itself from the wall of the house, and he watched her silhouette glide toward him. She was tall like most Farlian women, almost his height. But the blue light gave her a fragile, indistinct look. Long ago she had told him how things appeared to her in the moonlight. To her radiation-sensitive eyes, the light was soft and pink, giving objects a warmth he couldn’t see.