The flitter delivered them to the wide courtyard before the Main House rather than the flitter hangars. Here it was cold, with low clouds racing across the sky before a sharp wind. Heris sealed the jacket she had not needed on the island and shivered. She was glad she wouldn’t have to walk up the hill from the other end of the village. Inside, Petris looked up the great staircase that first time with an odd expression that mingled delight and apprehension.
“This is exactly how I thought a great lord’s house would look, and I don’t trust it,” he said finally. “It’s too perfectly what it is, like an entertainment-cube version of a fleet cruiser.”
“It’s intimidating,” said Heris. Now she could admit that. “I couldn’t believe anyone actually lived in it. But they do.” She wondered where the servants were; usually two or three at least were in the hall at this hour. But the one who had opened the door had vanished, leaving it to Cecelia to lead the way upstairs.
Petris, she found, had the room next to hers, where she remembered someone else having been, but she did not raise her brows to Cecelia, who already looked entirely too smug. How had Cecelia known that?
“Don’t forget,” Cecelia said, “that Petris will need to check in with Neil. I’ll let him know you’re coming, shall I?”
Heris looked at Petris. He had not had the benefit of Cecelia’s riding simulator. But he grinned. “I can hardly wait to see Heris on horseback, chasing a fox,” he said. “Although I’m not looking forward to those early starts.”
“Nonetheless. And of course I needn’t warn either of you about discussing all this—”
“Not at all.” Petris raised and lowered his brows at her, a clear dismissal.
“Dinner at eight,” Cecelia said. She strode off down the corridor.
“Your employer—” Petris began.
“Our employer,” Heris said. “Unless you change your mind.”
“I never change my mind,” Petris said. “Come in here—” He led her into his room, a twin of her own. “I don’t believe this, either!” He was staring at the furniture, the gleaming expanse of the bathroom and its glittering toys. He walked around the room, opening and closing the doors of wardrobes, looking into drawers in tall polished chests. Heris could see the racks of clothes, and wondered. “I’m sure these all fit—Lady Cecelia would have seen to it. I always knew there was a good reason to leave the onion farm.” Then he looked into the bathroom again. “Plenty of room, and warm towels. Shall I scrub your back, my love, or will you scrub mine?”
Ronnie was sure they were all making too much fuss about his condition. George had been shot; George might die. He still had that nagging headache, and a collection of bruises and scrapes, but after a night in the hospital he was ready to go back to hunting. Or at least, back to living in the far more comfortable quarters he had enjoyed before.
“Time enough,” the nurse said. “You’re not leaving until the doctor agrees, and your scans aren’t normal yet.” It wasn’t the same nurse as before, he thought, and wondered how often their shifts changed.
“Nothing’s broken,” Ronnie said. “You let that fellow in the other bed leave just twenty-four hours after a broken leg—”
“Bones aren’t brains,” the nurse said. Ronnie closed his eyes, feigning sleep, and was surprised to find dark outside his windows when he opened them again. The next morning (which morning?) he woke without a trace of the headache, and the awareness that he had not been clearheaded before.
“And you’re not yet,” the doctor said, when she arrived to talk to him before he left. “You think you are, but it’s like climbing out of a hole: it’s lighter where you are, but you’re still in shadow. I know this will disappoint you, but I’ve already notified Lord Thornbuckle’s head groom: you are not to ride for at least ten days, and you’ll have to be reevaluated then.”
“But I didn’t—” Ronnie began, but the doctor smiled and patted his knee as if he were a child. Considering her white hair and wrinkles, she probably thought of him that way. I didn’t want to ride, he said silently. And now I don’t have to. “What about George?” he asked. They had told him nothing so far except soothing murmurs. He braced himself to hear that George had died.
“That young man,” the doctor said. “Do I understand that everyone calls him the odious George?”
“Yes,” Ronnie said.
“I can see why,” she said. “He can have visitors—in fact, he has visitors all day, now. So if you want to know, just take the lift up one, and it’s the third door on the left. He’s still on the surgical floor, though really—” She shook her head without finishing that and left. Ronnie pulled on his clothes, hardly wondering where they’d come from, and went to see George.
George lay propped up in bed, looking like an advertisement for a hospital company: dark hair perfectly in place, fading bruises on his face suggesting courage without diminishing his good looks. Ronnie knew that on anyone else the yellow and green and dull purple would have looked hideous, but George’s luck seemed to hold.
“Ronnie!” His voice sounded the same, if not quite as loud as usual. “I wondered when you’d make it up here. You missed all the excitement.”
Ronnie stared at him. Missed all the excitement? Had no one told George about the admiral and the gas grenade, or the prince, or—
“My father’s on the way,” George said. He looked exactly as he had always looked, smug. Odious. Ronnie wanted to hit him, but you couldn’t hit someone in bed with a gunshot wound. He went in, nonetheless, holding a vague grudge but not sure how to let it go. Should he tell George about the prince? He thought he remembered it was supposed to be a secret.
George’s face changed, and his voice softened. “I—was really scared. You passed out on me, then they caught me, and those two—”
“Who?”
“The guards back on Bandon. I never saw the hunters at all, just these two men.”
“They’re the ones who shot you?”
“Oh, no. One of Bunny’s militia shot me, and it wasn’t an accident, either. I tried to tell Captain Serrano, but couldn’t get it across. . . . He was standing there, eyeing your aunt as if he’d like to kill her right then.”
“Did you tell Bunny? When you got back here?” Ronnie had an urge to leap up himself, right then, and go find his aunt.
“It’s all right. That’s part of what you missed. That’s the same man who tried to kill your aunt and Captain Serrano when they went to find you in the cave.”
“Oh.” Ronnie tried to remember if he’d heard about that man before. He remembered some things vividly: finding George unconscious, trying to build a litter, the storm, Raffa’s warmth against him in the cold, dark cave, that moment of sheer terror when he jumped for the gas grenade. But he had no clear mental map of the time . . . how long they’d been on the island, or whether they’d stayed on Bandon overnight or flown straight back.
“Your aunt plugged him,” George said, with relish. “He had the captain covered.”
“She would,” Ronnie said vaguely. He hated not remembering; it was like being very old, he thought. He had probably said things, and done things, without really knowing it. What if he had said something stupid? What if he had said something stupid to Raffa? Was that why he couldn’t remember seeing her in the hospital?
George sobered again. “It’s not that easy, being a hero. At least, it wasn’t for me. You—”
“Not for me, either. There’s a lot I can’t remember.”
“There’s a lot I wish I couldn’t remember.” George scowled. “I have never been so scared, so humiliated, in my life—not even that first term at school.” He sounded far more human than usual. “At least you didn’t have to scrub any toilets.”