"I know. I'm sorry. Hitting servants isn't the kind of thing I do."
And now Dal's surprise turned to fury. "Servants?" he asked. "For a moment I forgot that I'm a servant. I saw us try our hands at the same task and I was better at it than you. I forgot I was a servant."
Bergen was frightened at this turn of events. He hadn't meant anything by his statement-- he just prided himself on not being an uncontrolled master.
"But Dal," he said innocently. "You are a servant."
"That I am. I must remember that in the future. Not to win at any games. To laugh at your jokes even when they're stupid. To let your horse always be a little faster. To always agree that you're right even when you're being a fool."
"I've never wanted anyone to treat me like that!" Bergen said, angry at the unfairness of it.
"That's the way servants treat their masters."
"I don't want you to be a servant. I want you to be my friend!"
"And I thought I was."
"You're a servant and a friend."
Dal laughed. "Bergen, sir, a man is either a servant or a friend. They're opposite directions on the same road. Either you're paid for service, or you do it for love."
"But you're paid for service, and I thought you did it for love!"
Dal shook his head. "I served for love, and I thought you fed and clothed me for love. I felt free with you."
"You are free."
"I have a contract."
"If you ever ask me to break it, I will!"
"Is that a promise?"
"On my life. You aren't a servant, Dal!"
And then the door opened, and Bergen's mother and uncle came in. "We heard shouting," his mother said. "We thought there was a quarrel."
"We were having a pillow fight," Bergen said.
"Then why is the pillow neatly on the bed?"
"We finished and put it back."
The uncle laughed. "What a regular little housemaid you're raising, Selly."
"My Lord, Nooel, he wasn't joking. He still paints." They walked up to the painting and looked at it carefully.
Finally Nooel turned to Bergen and smiled, and put out his hand. "I thought it was just bluster and blow. Just a teenager spouting off. But you've got talent, boy. The sky's a bit rough, and you need some work on detail. But whoever can paint whiptrees like that has a future."
Bergen could not take credit unfairly.
"Dal painted the whiptrees."
Selly Bishop looked furious, but smiled sweetly at Dal nonetheless. "How nice, Dal, that Bergen lets you play with his paintings." Dal said nothing. But Nooel stared at him.
"Contract?" Nooel asked.
Dal nodded.
"I'll buy it," Nooel offered.
"Not for sale," Bergen said quickly.
"Actually," Selly said sweetly, "it's not a bad idea. Think you might want to develop the talent?"
"It's worth developing."
"The contract," Bergen said firmly, "is not for sale."
Selly looked coldly at her son. "Everything that was bought can be sold."
"But what a man loves enough, mother, he'll keep regardless of the price he's offered."
"Loves?"
"Your mind is disgusting, Selly," Nooel said. "Obviously they're friends. Sometimes you can be the worst bitch on the planet."
"You're too kind, Nooel. On this planet it's an achievement. After all, there's the empress."
They both laughed and left the room.
"I'm sorry, Dal," Bergen said.
"I'm used to it," Dal answered. "Your mother and I haven't ever gotten along too well. And I don't care-- there's only one person here I care about."
They looked at each other closely for a short time. Smiled. Then dropped the subject, because at fourteen there are few gentle emotions that can be openly borne for very long.
When Bergen turned twenty, somec came to their level of society.
"A brilliant stroke," Locken Bishop said. "Do you know what it means? If we qualify, we can sleep for five years at a time and wake up for five years at a time. We'll live for another century beyond what we would have otherwise."
"But will we qualify?" Bergen asked.
His parents laughed uproariously. "It's pure merit, and the boy asks if his family will qualify! Of course we'll qualify, Bergen!"
Bergen was quietly angry, as he usually was with his parents these days. "Why?" he asked.
Locken caught the edge in his son's tone. He turned authoritarian, and pointed at Bergen's chest. "Because your father provides jobs for fifty thousand men and women. Because if I went out of business half this planet would reel under the impact. And because I pay more taxes than all but fifty other men in the Empire."
"Because you're rich, in other words," Bergen said.
"Because I'm rich!" Locken answered angrily.
"Then, it, you don't mind, I'll wait to go on somec until I qualify by my merit, and not by my father's."
Selly laughed. "If I waited until I qualified on my own, I'd never get on somec!"
Bergen looked at her with loathing. "And if there were any justice in the world, you never would."
It surprised Bergen, but neither his mother nor his father said anything at all. It was Dal who spoke to him, later that night, as the two of them sat together putting finishing touches on art pieces-- Dal, a miniature, in oils; Bergen, a massive, almost mural-sized portrait of the houseson the estate as he thought they ought to be, with the house much smaller and the barns large enough to be of some use. And his whiptrees were beautiful.
Weeks later, Bergen slipped off and paid the examination fee and tested high enough in basic intelligence, creativity, and ambition that he was given the right to go on somec for three years and off for five years. He would be a sleeper. And he did it without money.
"Congratulations, son," his father said, more than a little proud at his son's independence.
"I notice you've scheduled it so you wake up two years before us. Time to play around, I imagine," Selly said, looking and sounding more bitter than ever.
Dal said only one thing when he heard Bergen was going on somec. "Free me first."
Bergen looked startled.
"You promised," Dal reminded him.
"But I'm not of age. I can't for a year."
"And do you think your father will? Or that your mother would let him? My contract lets them forbid me to paint, or lets them own anything I produce. They could make me clean the stables. They could make me cut trees with my bare hands. And you won't be back for three years."
Bergen was genuinely distressed. "What can I do?"
"Persuade your father to give me my freedom. Or stay awake until you come of age and can give me my freedom yourself."
"I can't forfeit the somec. You have to use it when you get it. They only have so many openings a year."
"Then persuade your father."
It took a month of constant badgering before Locken Bishop finally agreed to release Dal from his contract. And the contract had a stipulation. "Seventy-five percent of your income above room and board comes to us for five years or until you have paid us eighty thousand."
"Father," Bergen protested, "that's gouging. I would have freed him eleven months from now anyway. And eighty thousand is ten times what you paid for his contract in the first place-- and you didn't pay it to him."
"I've also fed him for twenty years."
"And he worked for it."
"Worked?" Selly interrupted. "He just played. With you."
Dal spoke, softly enough that they quieted down to hear him. "If I give you that, I won't be able to get enough money to take the somec merit examination."