I raised my fist. I had entered fortified compounds under hostile conditions. I had approached armed targets who very much wanted me dead. I had operated in circumstances where hesitation cost lives. None of that had felt as harrowing as standing outside a woman’s door in the dark, in new clothes, trying to remember how to make a fist connect with wood.
I knocked.
A pause. Then footsteps from above.
She opened the door looking awake and unhurried, as though visitors after dark were unremarkable. She wore simple clothes—pale, loose—and her hair was down. I hadn’t seen it completely undone before. It was longer than I’d realized.
“Good evening, Gilrox,” she said, and waited.
“Clear night,” I said. “I thought…” My words choked off. Maybe I should have arrived earlier. Should have asked her more formally. Should have brought another gift.
She raised her brows. “You thought…what?”
“That you might want to come up in the shuttle. With me. See the planet from above.” I paused, wishing I had been able to string those words together with more elegance. I surely sounded like the brute I looked like. “If you have nothing else to do.”
She looked at me for a moment. Then, “Let me get my wrap.”
She went inside and came back with a soft gray cloak and a shy smile. I’d prepared myself for a likely rejection and was a little thrown off in the absence of it. I led her to the clearing where the shuttle sat and she walked up the ramp beside me. Inside, she took the copilot seat the way Aila had—as though ithad been waiting for her specifically. I sat, ran through preflight, and lifted us off into the dark.
She said nothing as the ground fell away beneath us. I watched the altimeter and kept my eyes on the instruments for as long as I could manage. I didn’t manage long.
Maive gazed through the forward screen, hands resting in her lap. The planet curved below us in a spectacular show of late evening colors and the bronze slice of one of the planet’s moons. The ocean caught the light of both in long vivid sheets. The narrow, habitable strip of land grew smaller between the water to the east and the mountains to the west. The flash crystal mines up in the cold zone caught nothing. The stars above were winking on one by one.
Her breath caught and her lips parted on a small gasp as she took in the beauty around us. She recovered almost immediately, hands tightening once in her lap before releasing. But I’d witnessed it. Her face had opened briefly in a show of pure wonder, and then she was composed again.
“It’s extraordinary,” she said in a voice that was nearly steady.
“That’s why I thought I’d bring you now,” I said. “It’s unreasonably beautiful.”
She laughed at that and I held our altitude as we moved at a slow clip. She leaned forward slightly and tracked the coastline below. I could see Valrim Village from here, before it passed out of view. She’d found it without my pointing to it, and when she did, she was quiet for a while.
“I forget how far away everything else is,” she said finally. “It’s easy to forget there’s so much out there besides our little village.”
“Not everything out there is good,” I grunted. “Planets you feel far away from tend to have a reason for it.”
She made a soft sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “Is that experience talking?”
“Extensive experience,” I said with a nod.
She looked at the stars and sighed. “Ulrid would have loved this.”
I waited.
“My life partner.” She glanced at me briefly, maybe checking my expression for a reaction, then turned back to the view. “He passed six winters ago. An illness. By the time we knew what it was, there was nothing to do.” She said it plainly, in the way of words said so many times they no longer cut. “He was a scholar. He knew more about Runam history than anyone alive. He spent his life trying to preserve it, record it, keep it from being lost.” A pause. “He would have wanted to see everything from up here. He would have asked you a thousand questions and remembered every answer.”
I tried to picture that. A quiet man with a scholar’s mind, reading and recording. A man who sat with ideas rather than weapons, who measured his life in pages and knowledge. He sounded nothing like me. “I’m sorry you lost him,” I got out. And I meant it. The thought of Maive suffering made my chest hurt, even if it was for grieving another man.
“Thank you,” she said. “He was the one I leaned on when the weight of everyone else got heavy. I didn’t understand how much I relied on that until he wasn’t here anymore.”
The planet turned slowly below us.
“You’re carrying it yourself now,” I murmured. “That must be hard.”
“I’ve had six winters to learn how.” She sat back. “I’m better at it than I was.”
There was nothing useful I could say, so I didn’t try. We held the orbit for a while longer and the silence between us had no discomfort in it, which was its own thing to notice.
“You said you’d forgotten what it felt like to want to stay somewhere,” she said after a while. “That night at the festival.”
