built this place. After we took it over all that time ago . . . well, the stockpiles alone are worth defending. If we can hold off this attack, we can buy time to move them out, to start again.’ He laid his hand on her arm. ‘People came here because we drew them here, even the ones who aren’t a part of the organisation. I’m responsible.’
‘You’re responsible for me too,’ Lucia said. Yugi looked at her in surprise. He had never heard Lucia use such an accusatory mode with her father.
Zaelis was plainly hurt. He drew his hand back from her. ‘That’s why I’m sending you out of harm’s way,’ he said. ‘It will only be for a short time. I will come and find you afterward.’
‘No,’ said Lucia, quite firmly. ‘I will stay.’
‘You can’t stay,’ Zaelis told her.
‘Why not? Because I might be killed?’ She leaned forward, and her voice was a furious hiss that shocked him. ‘You’ll abandon me, but you won’t abandon them! Well, neither will I! All these people, all my friends and my friend’s families, all of them are going to die here! Because the Weavers want me! Most of them will never even know why. And you want me to leave them, to go and hide again until the Weavers hunt me down and more people die?’ She was shouting now. ‘I’m responsible for these people as much as you are. You made me responsible when you promised them a saviour from the Weavers. You tied all their lives to me and you never once asked me if I wanted that!’
Her last words rang into silence. In all her life, they had never heard her raise her voice in anger. The force of it, coming after fourteen years of placid calm, stunned them.
‘I will not go,’ she said, her voice dropping again but losing none of its steel. ‘I will stay here and live or die with you, and with the people to whom you bound me.’
Yugi looked from Lucia to Zaelis and back again. Suddenly, she no longer looked like a child, and he caught a glimpse of her mother’s fire in her glare. Zaelis was dumbstruck. Finally, he swallowed, and he dropped his eyes from the fierce and unfamiliar girl who had taken the place of his daughter.
‘So be it,’ he said, his mode formal and distant. ‘Do as you will.’
Yugi felt the moment become excruciating, even softened as it was by the pleasant fuzz of the amaxa root.
‘Remember that army of Aberrants coming our way?’ he said with forced flippancy. ‘If anybody’s interested, I have a plan.’
Asara sat with her arms around one knee and the other leg tucked beneath her, and watched the starfall drifting down over Lake Sazazu. The grass was sodden, and the moisture soaked through her clothes to dampen her skin. The water still rocked with the memory of the storm, flashing fitful arcs of moonlight from shore to distant shore. Night-birds swooped back and forth, plucking at fish that were attracted to the surface to nibble at the tiny ice-flakes, thinking them to be food of some kind. The sensation of unreality was fading now, returning the world to normal.
Alone, she gazed out over the lake, deep in thought.
Reki slumbered back in the shelter they had made. He was so exhausted he had slept through the chaos. The thought brought a twitch of a smile. Poor boy. His grief and misery had destroyed him, but she still found herself with a strange affection for the bookish young Heir-Barak. Where she would have been disgusted at the weakness of someone else for wallowing so in their agony, for him she made an exception. It was, after all, her fault.
The last few days had been curious. She had expected pursuit, but Mos’s men were either criminally inept or were not searching for them at all, and she found that very odd. It worried her more than if they had been hot on Reki’s trail. Surely they knew what he carried, and what it meant for the Empire? And yet Asara had stayed effortlessly ahead of the game. Such good fortune was frankly suspicious.
Reki had not taken the news of his sister’s death at all well, and they had been forced to rest a while here, for he was in no state to go on. His lamentations would draw attention to them. Even when he was silent, he bore such a shattering sorrow in his eyes that people