“We’ll be gone a few years. Maybe more. What do you say? You’ve always wanted to be a Jara.”
“No, I haven’t.” My denial is meaningless, a reflex. I’m still stunned.
“You’d be good at it,” he continues calmly, like he hasn’t upended my life. “I’ve done my duty here, but now it’s your turn. Everyone agrees you are the best candidate.”
He must be joking.
“You’d trust me with this?” I shake my head. “I don’t believe it.”
He draws something out from beneath the table and hands it to me. At first, I don’t recognize the dirty lump of fur. But then I turn it over and see the scars. The greenling-quality repairs where he sewed up the slashes after he used my stuffed braxa for target practice.
He kept my childhood toy. I don’t understand.
“Why are you giving this to me?”
“I thought maybe Lele would like to play with it one day.”
“But why do youhaveit?” The fur is so soft in my fingers, I have to resist the urge to stroke it.
“Because you loved it,” he says frankly. “You might not believe me, but I stole it from you because Father told me you were too old for it, and I didn’t wanthimto take it away. If Ihadn’t used it to train, he would have done who-knows-what. Used it for some punishment, probably.”
That rings true enough, as much as it contradicts the story I’ve always told myself, that Nik injured and repaired my braxa to torture me over and over. It was a greenling’s guilt that made me imagine the poor creature’s pain and suffering was my fault.
“I knew you borrowed it back every night to sleep with and then replaced it before I got up in the morning, so I did my best to repair it and leave it where you could find it.”
I clutch the old toy, its familiar fur still a comfort. It means more to me now that I understand Nik was trying to protect me. He seemed so much older at the time, but he was a greenling, too. Doing his best to shield me from our father. “I put it back every morning because I thought you’d destroy it if you knew I cared.”
He nods. “That’s the love of a king. One who gives up what he loves to protect it. Please, Lyro. Consider it. Usuri needs a leader like you. You’re already doing a lot of the job.”
So I consider it.
How is it that I set out to free myself from bonds and ended up with a hundred more? It’s been only a few weeks since Lena and I landed on this planet, and we’ve both shouldered dozens of responsibilities on top of caring for Lele and hosting our friends and relatives who insist on visiting us even when I tell them to stay away.
To tell the truth, I don’t hate it here. Usuri’s passageways are filled with priests and warriors, some I knew from the Eye as decent males. The close quarters, discipline, and austerity are what I’m used to.
In the deeper levels, the miners keep to themselves. Outcasts and orphans, the destitute and the desperate...I relate to them, too.
And my Alara is with me, so it feels like home. She likes it here, I think.
“She’s like a rabli bug,” Thren had marveled during his visit, watching Lena flit around the pits, passing out tili wafers to the fighters and showing off our greenling to his mate, Bree. “Glowing. Lighting up everything she touches. Ironic that she’s so bright when you bring shadows wherever you go.”
The scholars always said he was a thick-skull, but I think they were wrong. His observation is perceptive. Lena doesn’t mind the cold weather and dark tunnels, because she shines. She’s made to be a queen. She’s made to bemyqueen, because she can’t be dimmed. She can’t be crushed.
I set down my nomo cup on the firstmeal tray. “I’ll do it,” I tell Nik. “We’ll do it together.”
Epilogue
Lena
Three Years Later
“Home is a word and a place and a feeling,” I read, repeating the line in both Frathik and English as well as Irran. “Home can be anywhere. Home is where you are.”
Lele tugs my arm to get a better look at the page, and I tilt the book so she and Lennon can both see. He’s barely toddling, but he loves to see the pictures. His pigment turns deep brown as he looks at the image of a Frathik mother embracing her eight-eyed children.
He smacks the screen with his chubby hand. “Mama,” he says in Irran, beaming up at me with his father’s stormy gray eyes and a shock of my white-blonde hair.
“That’s a mama,” I agree, squeezing both of them. “Okay, time for bed.”
