"Maybe," he said. His voice was infuriatingly calm, refusing to argue.
"You'll understand it one day." I didn't plan the words. They came up out of the old anger, and the longer they hung in the air the truer they felt. "You'll be standing in this hall in your nice coat, running everyone's lives, and the office will send you a human you never asked for. Some small thing'll come off a transport, no taller than my chest, and knock you clean off your hooves, and we'll see how much you love doing things correctly then."
Something moved behind Remmen's face; quick, there and gone. Then it smoothed right back down.
"Noted," he said dryly.
He went back around the table and pulled a fresh folio off the stack. "I'll draw it up. Marriage contract, citizenship papers. There's a way to get her bound and made a citizen of New Knossos before the Agency can send her back. If it comes to it, I can put her past the Agency's reach with a stamp." He squared the pages and grimaced. "But I'd rather not."
If the solution was in hand, what was the problem? "Why not?"
"Because the contract is the whole of it, Lorkin." He looked up, and the politician was gone for a breath, and what was under it was a male who'd built a town out of nothing and lay awake nights over it. "The paper is the only reason a woman crosses the dark to a place like this and lives. It's why Earth keeps sending them. A human bride signs, and the contract swears she'll be housed, kept, never coerced, and shipped home whole if it goes wrong. That promise is what keeps her safe in a house with the likes of us. And we are not the only stop on that line. The Agency runs matches on a dozen worlds. The first time New Knossos ducks a contract, slips a bride out the back to keep her, every one of those worlds learns the promise is worth nothing. Every match after hers pays for it." He set the pen down again. "Chloe wants to stay. I believe you. It still has to be done right, or it isn't worth doing, and it won't hold."
I'd come in ready for him to refuse me. I hadn't been ready for him to be right.
"So what do you want?" I said. I could feel my future slipping away, and I needed to fix it. Somehow.
"Get it right with the Agency. Properly, on the record. When Nezara's back, we go to her together and we make the case for the transfer before the placement ends." He slid a folio toward the edge of the table, toward me. "But none of it moves while Chloe's still matched to another male. Before I write a word, before Nezara hears any of it, you get Zarcal to release her. Inhis hand, on paper, freely given. He took the placement. He's the one who has to let it go."
I'd handed her to him in the first place, too much a coward to take what was mine and too sure I'd break her. Then he'd lost himself in his own kitchen and come for her. He was back in that house now, healing or not, and I'd have to walk in and ask him to sign his wife over to me.
"He'll do it," I said, and didn't know if it was true.
"Then go ask him." Remmen had already picked his pen back up. "And Lorkin. When you stand in front of him." He didn't look at me. "Ask him like a male asking a favor of his brother. Not like a male collecting a debt."
I nodded. It was the only thing I could do.
The street had dried out under the noon sun; the ruts gone hard, the cider house already loud at one end of town. Zarcal's place sat east and a little south, the wall still unfixed, the conversation I owed him waiting behind his door.
I didn't go. Not yet, and not alone. I'd spent all of this deciding for her. Handing her off, taking her back, walking into rooms to fix her life while she slept. I was done doing it in the dark.
Whatever I had to say to Zarcal, Chloe would be beside me when I said it. I turned back to go and find her.
11
CHLOE
The Agency doorwas propped open with a rock.
I stood in the churned-mud main street and looked at it a beat too long, my heart knocking around like it had somewhere better to be.
In every way that mattered, my trial with Zarcal had ended the night he charged through the wall to get at me and Lorkin put him on the floor to stop him. You don't stay a man's wife after that. It had been easy enough to leave the whole question alone. Live in Lorkin's bed. Call it temporary. Refuse to look too hard at the future.
An open door meant I didn't get to do that anymore. I made myself walk through it.
Theeodus was behind the counter.
The entire walk over I'd been promising myself Nezara would be back — Nezara with her soft eyes, who gentled spooked things for a living and had looked at me at intake and saidlet one of them see you, the real one.
Nezara, I could work.
Nezara knew how to bend.
Theeodus didn't. He was a pale, narrow human in an Agency jumpsuit, the same junior clerk who'd pointed toward the forge my first week and told me kindly not to bother the scary man who lived there. He had a stack of forms squared off in front of him and the look of someone who had to read all of them and wasn't looking forward to it.
"Chloe." He didn't quite meet my eyes. "We aren't really open. There's a backlog. I'm only in to start on it."
"The door's open." I gave him the smile, the warm one, the one that's gotten me a free drink on three planets. "Theeodus, I am so glad you're here."
