“What about George?” she heard Ronnie ask. Then she heard nothing.
Chapter Twenty
Cecelia awoke only moments later, thoroughly ashamed of herself, to find Ronnie kneeling beside her. He looked, she thought, far worse than she possibly could, with that colorful pattern of bruises on his head and face, his muddy, still-wet clothes, and the pallor of exhaustion and hunger. She glanced around for Heris. Her captain was talking to the militia captain, who nodded as he keyed information into a wristcomp. Other militia had appeared; Lepescu’s body had already been put into a black bag and lifted onto a stretcher. . . . She saw it being carried out.
“Are you all right, Aunt Cecelia?” He sounded genuinely concerned, not annoyed by an aunt who had fainted.
“I’m fine,” she said, and pushed herself up on her elbows. She was too old to faint; at her age people took it seriously and talked about medical causes. “Just hungry,” she said, which was now true. She was ravenous, and remembered that she had not had breakfast or lunch. Ronnie looked around frantically, as if he thought she expected him to pull a good meal from the rock. “Don’t worry,” she said, more tartly than she intended. “I forgot to eat, that’s all.” When she glanced around again, she saw that the two young women were sitting together, doing something to each other’s faces, and the other young man stood awkwardly alone. “What’s the—”
“Mr. Smith,” Ronnie said softly but firmly. “He’s Mr. Smith—I don’t know if you’ve met.”
“Oh, we’ve met.” She eyed him, then glanced at the prince. “Mr. Smith, is it? Did you two arrange to meet here and continue your disagreement?”
“No!” Ronnie hushed himself with a shrug. “He was here on . . . other business. Finished business, now.”
Cecelia looked at the prince, who seemed to feel her gaze and returned it. In the cave’s uncertain light, she could not be sure of his expression, but he approached them.
“Excuse me,” he said. “Ronnie, I really do need to talk to you. About the duel—”
“Mr. Smith,” said Cecelia, in the voice that had not failed her in fifty years or more. “You do not need to talk to anyone. Under the circumstances, Mr. Smith”—she emphasized the name slightly—“the less you talk to anyone the better. I very much doubt your father knows where you are.”
“Well, no, he doesn’t, but still—”
“You would be wise, Mr. Smith, to wait until your father explains your situation more fully. There is no question of a duel. Is that quite clear?” Cecelia put her eye upon him, the eye that had quelled many a brash young man even when she herself was young. He subsided; even the stubborn knot along his jaw went away, and the jaunty curl at the tips of his moustache seemed to droop. His voice lowered to a hesitant growl.
“What I was going to say, ma’am, was that your nephew’s courage in landing on the gas grenade cancelled out any previous disagreement we might have had.”
“You did, too,” Ronnie said quickly.
“Wise of both of you,” Cecelia said, allowing them to see her smile. “Now if someone can find me something to eat—”
Cecelia had never thought about how long it could take to move a few people across a short stretch of ocean. She had always been, she realized, the one who didn’t have to wait. This time, she waited, and heard from both militia and the young people what had happened. Even with her wits restored by hot broth and half a survival bar from Bubbles’s pack, it didn’t make sense to her.
“Lepescu killed the other hunters? Why?”
Heris rubbed her nose. “My guess would be that he thought he could get away alone. No witnesses on his side, convicted criminals—if any survived—on the other. . . . If he’d killed the young people, gotten into that flitter, and made it away—”
“But he couldn’t possibly—”
“I’m not sure. Suppose we had still been on the mainland when George’s transmission went out. He’d have had hours, not minutes, to complete his plans. Kill the witnesses, gas the remaining victims from the flitter. Fly back to Bandon, take the shuttle up. A wild gamble, but he liked wild gambles. Better than surrendering tamely to be tried himself.”
“But why not get the others to help him?”
“Likely they wouldn’t. That Mr. Smith—and by the way, are you and the others going to tell me who Mr. Smith is?”
“Someone who shouldn’t be here,” Cecelia said. “Later, perhaps—” She glanced around at the militia who might be within earshot.
“Ah. Like someone’s son, perhaps? Yes.” Heris’s eyes twinkled. “Anyway, Mr. Smith explained that there had been a lot of confusion after the flitter crashed here, and the admiral had insisted on continuing the hunt. He might well fear that his allies would turn on him. If he had gotten away—well away—we would have found an island full of dead people and no witnesses to convict him. He would not necessarily know that I was here at all, or that I knew he was onplanet.” Heris cocked her head. “A bold plan, typical of him, but as usual wasteful of resources.”
“And Raffa told me about what happened after they crashed—although she doesn’t know all of Ronnie’s story, or George’s, or the others’. Were they all your crew?”
“Apparently not. This wasn’t the first such hunt, and Petris said some who survived a few weeks of a hunt were kept to seed the next, to keep it ‘interesting.’” Her voice flattened on the word. “Too many were, though. I never thought—I swear I never imagined any such thing—”
“Of course not.” Cecelia leaned against the rock, and smiled at the younger woman. So much older than the younglings, Ronnie and his friends, but still so vulnerable. . . . She clearly needed someone to reassure her. Yet, in Cecelia’s experience, no reassurance made up for bad results . . . and this had to be a bad result, no matter how selfless the original decision. She looked away from Heris, and thought about what she could do. Did she know anyone in the admiralty?
By the time Heris and Cecelia landed on Bandon again, the young people—except for Buttons, who remained the family’s representative on Bandon—had been taken to the mainland along with two wounded militia and three wounded victims. Ronnie needed medical observation; the girls had wanted to check on George themselves, and Bubbles had an appointment with her father. Cecelia relaxed in the luxury of Bandon Lodge—a full set of servants had been flown out as soon as the island was secured—and left Heris to her own devices. Heris, after a bath and change of clothes, gathered her courage and went to see if her former crew would even speak to her. They were scattered through the guest rooms, according to the information in the deskcomp. She found door after door with its privacy locks engaged, and didn’t try to intrude. Finally she found one door ajar, and tapped lightly.
Petris looked out at her. “Ah. Captain Serrano.” The formality went to her heart. “I was just about to bathe.”
“I’m sorry. I’ll—” Wait, she would have said, but she had no right to force him to speak to her if he didn’t want to.
“I’m sorry I yelled at you, back there,” he said. “It was just hard to believe—”
“I’m sorry I thought you could have been with . . . with Lepescu.”
“Look—I’m still stinking filthy—I was checking on Oblo, and he’s fine. Let me get clean, and why don’t we go walk somewhere?”
At least he was willing to talk to her. Heris nodded, silently, and turned away. Back in her room she tried to relax, but her eyes kept moving to the window, with its striking view of the beach and the other island across the water. The sun slid lower; the colors of sea and sky changed minute by minute. Flitters came and went; they were, she supposed, picking up the bodies and taking them away, bringing more investigators to look for more clues. . . . Her head ached. She had fallen into a restless doze in her chair when the tap on her door woke her.