The Llun’s ears had gone flat. “Is that a threat? Is that what I take it for?”
“Don’t worry about me. I’m not Ehrran. Or Naur. I don’t keep notebooks. And I’m going to be a lousy houseguest. You understand that? I can’t drag that kind of politics into the han. I can’t sit in the han and handle the kif. Or the mahendo’sat. Or the stsho. That isn’t what the kif and the mahendo’sat created. I don’t have any kin anymore. I can’t have. I can’t pay those kinds of debts. Come on, Tully.”
She walked past the Llun, away from her and down the corridor without a backward look. She hurt inside. There were only foreigners waiting for her. And the crew she had to face. And explain to.
“Wrong?” Tully asked.
“No.” She felt better, having said that. Having decided it. She laid a hand on his shoulder as they walked. “Friend,” she said, and discovered that felt better too.
“Pyanfar.” He stopped, faced her, pulling something from
his hand and, taking hers palm up, pressed that something into it. She opened her fingers. It was the little gold ring. The one from lost Ijir. From some other friend of his. “You take.” He reached out and touched the side of her ear. “So.”
It was the most precious thing he owned, the only thing he really owned, the only link he had with his dead. “My gods, Tully-”
“Take.”
She clenched her hand on it. He seemed pleased at that, even relieved, as if he had let something go that had been too heavy to carry.
“You want to stay or go? Tully?”
“Stay. With The Pride. With you. With crew.”
“It’s not the same! It won’t be the same! Gods rot it, Tully, I can’t make you understand what you’re walking into. The crew may leave. Hilfy will have to. I don’t know where we’ll be. I don’t know how long this will last before it gets worse.”
“Need me.”
She opened her mouth and shut it. Of all the crew she reckoned might be steadiest, she had never even reckoned him. Like the ring, it was too profound a gift.
“Come on,” she said.
“We’re doing all right,” she said, on a full stomach, in the crowded galley-the Tauran had gone, with Vrossaru, aboard Mahijiru, trailing the humans out. There was a matter of getting back to Meetpoint and picking up their ships and cargoes. Ayhar’s Prosperity had a guaranteed run in that direction too, with a full hold, which Meetpoint might direly need. And, good or bad news, one never knew, the knnn had disappeared with the tc’a, off on a vector which ought to get it lost in limbo, if it were not a knnn, and capable of making jumps that other ships could not. Toward stsho space, it looked like. At best guess.
“We got word from Tahar,” Haral said. “They got the message.”
“What’d they say about it?”
“Said thanks. They said they’ll believe in a han amnesty when they get it engraved, but they say they plan to shadow us awhile. Till the word gets around.”
“Huh.” It was prudent. Dur Tahar was that. She let go a small sigh. “We got some business at Meetpoint too, soon as they get our tail put back together.” She took a sip of gfi. There was a vacancy at table. Hilfy was off doing Chanur business. Which was the way it had to be. Married, within the year: that was what Hilfy had to do, find herself some young man strong enough to take her cousin Kara and pitch him clear back to Mahn territory.
In that choice she had burned to give advice; but what was between her and Hilfy had gotten too remote for that, too businesslike. It was her own hardheaded, closemouthed pride. She saw it like a mirror. Hilfy knew everything; more than Hilfy might ever know when she was a hundred.
Then: “Hey,” Hilfy had said to her when she left, not captain-crew formal, but a level, adult look eye to eye. “I’m not going hunting round in Hermitage. I’m just putting the word out I’m looking. Me. Heir to Chanur. And the winner gets a shuttle ticket up to Gaohn. I don’t care if he’s handsome. But he’s by the gods going to have to have the nerve to come up here and meet my father.”