“Oh?”
She could see interest sparking the glint in his eyes. He leaned back against the plasglas, propping his arms on the wide sills, apparently not affected by contact with the cold surface, whereas she could feel the frost of it oozing into the semi warm link.
She gave a laugh. “Don’t get me started on that phase of my life. It’s over.” She made a cutting gesture with her hands.
“Then it’s time to sing about it. You came through.”
“Sing? Me?” She ducked her head in denial. “Not me-couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket.”
Sean smiled-almost challengingly, she thought. “Inuit chants can’t be called tunes, not without a stretch of the definition, but they do grab the mind and make audiences listen. I think they’d like to hear your songs.”
Yana was not affecting modesty: she just didn’t think any of her experiences were worth hearing about, and certainly some of them she wouldn’t talk, much less sing, about.
“I’m serious, Yana.” He spoke her name with an odd lilt. She shot him a quick look and saw that he was, indeed, serious. Then his expression turned sly. “The spring latchkay’s coming up soon.
You’ll be coming, and there are some folks hereabout would like to hear a song about Bremport.”
“Bremport?” She went rigid.
He laid a light finger on her arm. “You were at Bremport. Charlie picked up on that when he got a copy of your orders and the briefing on your medical history.”
“That should have been confidential,” she said, feeling less guilty about Charlie than she had the day before.
“Charlie’s older brother Donal was at Bremport, too, so it was of more than casual interest to him. So were three other sons of Petaybee and two daughters, and us here knowing nothing about their deaths but that they are dead.”
Damn Charlie anyway. Giancarlo had been right to transfer him-the boy’s loyalties had been too mixed for him to be an effective company representative here. Still, she couldn’t blame him, but-damn. She remembered to exhale then, and swallowed hard on all the things she didn’t wish to remember about Bremport.
The swallow was a mistake. Somehow it went down wrong and she started to cough. Hard as she tried to limit it to the one cough, another burst past her lips, and the next thing she knew she was racked by a paroxysm. She fumbled in her coat for her syrup and dragged the bottle out. But she moved too swiftly: it flew from her groping fingers and smashed on the stone floor of the link. As if the loss of the syrup were a signal, the coughing fit intensified. Scan’s very strong fingers gripped her arms, supporting her convulsing body and he began to hurry back the way they had come, though she had trouble keeping on her feet. She had to bring her knees almost to her chin to keep the spasms from tearing her abdominal muscles.
“What’s the cause, Yana? The gas at Bremport?”
She managed to nod a yes. Then he was assisting her into a laboratory, flicking up lights, and settling her onto a nearby stool before he sprang across the room to the large array of cabinets there. Without fumbling, he poured out a dose of a clear yellow liquid and returned to her side.
“Something of Clodagh’s that makes cowardly coughs evaporate on its fumes,” he said. “We all take it now and then.”
Yana was in no condition to object to anything anyone might consider remedial. Between one spasm and the onset of another, she knocked back the liquid-and rolled her eyes, inhaled, and then exhaled gustily, for the medicine had a kick in it that could only reduce any cough to tatters. And the next spasm didn’t materialize.
Surprised, Yana took several short breaths, fully expecting each one to deteriorate into a cough. Scan regarded her with a growing smile curling his lips.
“See? Guaranteed effective.”
“What was in it?” she gasped respectfully, still aware of the taste of it in the back of her mouth.
The mischief returned to Scan Shongili’s eyes. “Well, now, that I don’t know. Clodagh won’t pass on the secret of her elixir. She just makes it.”