“Rib?” she said.
He nodded. “Two. And a deep laceration. What possessed you to grab the tongue like that?”
“I thought only to knock it aside. I did not expect a saw blade.” She raised the two gloves. “My hands?”
“The left one was badly sliced up. You must have grabbed at it with your right after you dropped the teaser.”
“I promised Gidula I would deliver you in one piece to Henrietta. Could not let Froggie punch holes through you.” She took another experimental breath. “I must praise your medical skills, sweet.”
“The meshinospidal did all the work. I just zipped you in the basket and followed the instructions. The automatics took cell samples, regressed them, and applied them in the proper course.”
“Ooh, but you had noo oobligation to deliver me whole. Or to deliver me at all. Foortunate, then…”
Donovan shrugged. “Look,” he said, “can we drop the Alabaster accent? We’re past that, I think.”
“Fortunate, then,” she said more quietly, “you spy Frog Prince in time; or both dead.”
“Inner Child is paranoid. Makes a good sentry.”
Olafsdottr sighed. “Must be very wonderful divide attentions so. I was told it had incapacitated you.”
“It does have its drawbacks sometimes.”
“How do you plan to explain the corpse to the Megranomese authorities?” she asked. “Or how you came by this ship?”
“It was his ship. He was giving us a ride. This thing broke out of its box. Missy, if between the two of us we can’t concoct a story to fool a Megranomic copper we should both of us quit the Long Game.”
Olafsdottr cocked her head sideways. “I thought you had quit.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Almost, you tempt me, sweet. But I am unaccustomed to asking for help.”
Donovan grinned. “I’ll teach you.”
The answering smile was almost sad. “Sweet, between the two of us, we defeated a Foreganger killing machine. Tell me you are not the man we need for the struggle.”
Donovan sat back so that his head rested upon the wall of the little infirmary. He closed his eyes and his breath slowly gusted from him. “I’m not the man you need.”
“Ah, well, it would have been entertaining to watch developments. How long before we reach the Megranome way station?”
The scarred man shrugged. “The ’ospidal had you in suspension for five days. We’re out of Megranome space.”
“Ah. You take me direct to Dangchao, then. Perhaps Bridget ban keep me in clean cage.”
Donovan rose, wiped his palms on his trousers. “You sleep now, ‘sweet.’ Your hands are too badly cut up to pilot the ship. I don’t have a certificate myself, except as a chartsman; but every chartsman is a pilot in training, and certificates are only for officials. We’ll be on the Tightrope in another two days.”
Olafsdottr struggled to sit up, winced at the pain, and slid back prone. “On the Tightrope?”
The scarred man, at the infirmary door, shrugged. “And don’t ask us why, because there’s not a single one of us knows the answer.”
Cengjam Gaafe: The Second Interrogatory
“So,” says Bridget ban, low and drawn out, so that the sibilant slides like a hiss from between her lips, “it was no kidnapping, at all. He went with you of his own free will.”
The Confederal shrugs and grins. “Not free. Cost great deal.” Then, in Gaelactic, “And what is will, anyway? We are bounced about by the impacts of Fate and where we finally ricochet, that is where we fare. Whether we will to go that way or whether we simply will go that way is a question for metaphysicians, not for one so humble as I.” She sips again at her coffee, which has grown tempered as she unwound her tale.
“Paint it as you like,” the Hound replies. “He had control of the ship. He had the choice. To bring you here to me, or to proceed into the Confederacy.”
“A false dichotomy,” says Olafsdottr. “He did both; for here I am. The Fates weave cloth fine as silk.”
Graceful Bintsaif stirs. “It seems clear to me,” she announces. “Donovan’s old loyalties to the Confederacy reasserted themselves, and he went to answer his masters’ call.”
The Shadow turns in her seat and smiles at the junior Hound. “It seems clear to you because you are young, if not…” Her eyes flick to the blazon she wears above her left breast. “… if not without some experience. As you grow older, matters become much less clear.”
“Because eyes age and lose their focus.”
“And that may be a good thing. Some things best not seen clearly. But what are these ‘loyalties’ you speak of that ‘reasserted themselves’ and drove him to the Confederacy? Are they incorporeal creatures that lurk inside Donovan’s head—as his sundry selves do—awaiting opportunity to pounce and seize control of him? No, I think loyalties are things that a man expresses, not mysterious entities that express a man.”
Méarana strikes a chord. “There was a tenth Donovan once,” she remembers, “one he confronted and defeated, one that sought oblivion and death.”
“Ooh, we all seek that, harper, though soome less willingly than oothers. Or perhaps I should say, we all find it in the end, whether we seek it or noot. For whether or noo we seek it, it surely does seek us.”
The harper’s fingers take the chords into a goltraí, a lament. “So, maybe the Tenth Donovan survived after all and, resurrected, compelled him to his doom.”
Bridget ban snorts derision. “There was no compulsion, Lucy. You heard her. He chose to join them.”
“Aye, Mother, I heard her. I dinna ken an I’ve heard the sooth. And in any case, he went to o’erthrow the Names, not to succor them. So whate’er loyalties impelled him, ’tis nae clear that they were loyalties to Those.”
The Hound pours herself a fresh cup of coffee and replenishes that of Ravn Olafsdottr. “No, it is clear to me to whom his loyalty lay.” She hands the courier the cup, and their eyes lock for a moment before the latter leans back and raises the fresh brew to her lips.
“But tell me,” Bridget ban continues when Olafsdottr is once more set, “we of the League care mickle for Donovan buigh but muckle for the stirrings of the Confederation. Tell us more about this civil war you say roils the Shadows of the Names.”
The Shadow flashes her mocking smile. “What should it matter to you whether a great edifice is fallen, save that when whole it once blustered and frightened your sleep? Is it not enough to know that, turned upon itself, it can spare no attentions for you?”
“When a building close by crumbles, the rubble may strike my own. Bad enough that your masters once sent raiders across the Rift to devil our borderlands. At least there then were Those from whom we could demand redress. But if you are coming apart, a thousand filibusters, a thousand mercenaries may now descend upon us. Bad enough, our own pirates. We’d rather not host yours.”
The Shadow’s face loses its smile. “Do not hope too fulsomely, Hound. Hope is the cruelest of virtues, for her betrayal strikes more deeply. What is underway is not bongkoy, but chóng jíán, not disintegration but reconstruction.”
“Are you sure,” asks Bridget ban with a thin smile, “that it is not lam lam?”
The courier throws back her head and laughs, and even Graceful Bintsaif’s stern façade wavers. Méarana plays an interrogatory note on her harp and asks her question with a glance.
“Ooh, your moother plays a foony jooke, yngling. We say ‘lam’ it means ‘collapse.’ But also with a change of tone ‘sweet-talk’ or ‘coax.’ She means to say that it was my sweet-talking of Doonoovan buigh that caused his resistance to collapse.”