FOREIGNER: a novel of first contact by Caroline J. Cherryh

He couldn’t get more than that. The chill was back, a sudden attack of cold and weakness that told him Giri was giving him good advice. He’d gone to see Cenedi last night before supper. His stomach was hollow to the backbone.

And if they’d kept breakfast waiting and water hot since his meeting with Ilisidi, it wasn’t that they meant to take the usual gracious forever about bringing it.

“All right,” he said. “Breakfast. But tell the dowager!”

Giri disappeared. The other guard stood where he’d been standing, and Bren strayed back to the fireside, with his hair inching loose again, falling about his shoulders. His clothes were smudged with dust from the cellars. His shirt was torn about the front, somewhere in the exchange—most likely in his escape attempt, he thought. It wasn’t humanity’s finest hour. Atevi around him, no matter the sleep they’d missed, too, looked impervious to dirt and exhaustion, impeccably braided, absolutely ramrod straight in their bearing. He lifted sore arms, both of them, this time, wincing with the effort, and separating his tangled hair, braided three or four turns to keep it out of his face—God knew what had happened to the clip. He’d probably lost it on the stairs outside. If they went out that way he might find it.

A servant carried in a heavy tray with a breakfast of fish, cheese, and stone-ground bread, along with a demi-pot of strong black tea, and set it on a small side table for him. He sat down to it with better appetite than he’d thought he could possibly find, in the savory smell and the recollection of Giri’s warning that meals might not be on schedule again… which, with the business about getting his coat, meant they were going to take action to get him out, maybe through the opposition down in Maidingi… on Ilisidi’s authority, it might be.

But breaking through a determined mob was a scary prospect. Trust an atevi lord to know how far he or she could push… atevi had that down to an art form.

Still, a mob under agitation might not respect the aiji-dowager. He gathered that Ilisidi had been with them and changed her mind last night; and if she tried to lie or threaten her way through a mob who might be perfectly content with assassinating the paidhi, there could well be shooting. A large enough mob could stop the van.

In which case the last night could turn out to be only a taste of what humanity’s radical opposition might do to him if it got its hands on him. If things got out of hand, and they couldn’t get to a plane—he could end up shot dead before today ended, himself, Ilisidi, God knew who else… and that could be a lot better than the alternative.

He ate his breakfast, drank his tea, and argued with himself that Cenedi knew what he was doing, at least. A man in Cenedi’s business didn’t get that many gray hairs or command the security of someone of Ilisidi’s rank without a certain finesse, and without a good sense of what he could get away with—legally and otherwise.

But he wanted Banichi and Jago, dammit, and if some political decision or Cenedi’s position with Ilisidi had meant Banichi and Jago had drawn the nasty end of the plan—

If he lost them…

“Nand’ paidhi.”

He turned about in the chair, surprised and heartened by a familiar voice, Djinana had come with his coat and what looked like a change of clothes, his personal kit and, thank God, his computer—whether Djinana had thought of it, whether Banichi or Jago had told him, or whoever had thought of it, it wasn’t going to lie there with everything it held for atevi to find and interpret out of context, and he wasn’t going to have to ask for it and plead for it back from Cenedi’s possession.

“Djinana-ji,” he said, with the appalled realization that if he was leaving and getting to safety this morning, Malguri’s staff wouldn’t have that option, not the servants whose man’chi belonged to Malguri itself. “They’re saying people down in Maidingi are coming up here looking for me. That two aijiin are supporting an attack on Malguri. You surely won’t try to deal with this yourselves, nadi. Capable as you may be—”

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