Matriarch Read Free Page B

himself, anyway. For his planet, he chose well.”
    Her incongruously adult tone always unsettled him. “That’s true. But what if you know someone is doing something stupid, and you don’t stop them?”
    Giyadas cocked her head this way and that but didn’t look up at him. “He only harmed himself in the end. He has the right to choose to do that.”
    â€œOutcomes, eh? Always outcomes.” Wess’har didn’t care about motive. What was done mattered; what was thought was irrelevant. “You’re probably right.”
    Giyadas lapsed into silence. She spoke when she had something to say or ask, and beyond that she was content to observe. She spoke English with Eddie’s accent. And she would be the next leader of F’nar if and when she grew more dominant than her mother Nevyan.
    It was inevitable. They didn’t vote. It just happened, and there were never any wars about it. Eddie had a moment of wondering whether invasion by a species like that was such a bad idea after all.
    He reached the center of the city—one of a number of little self-governing states scattered discreetly across the planet—and began the punishing walk up the network of terraces that lined the caldera. Giyadas kept pace as if she was keeping an eye on an idiot.
    â€œLindsay Neville is dead,” she said suddenly.
    Eddie’s calf muscles were coping better with the climb these days. But he almost missed his footing.
    â€œOkay,” he said.
    â€œAnd Mohan Rayat. I saw Aras and Ade return.”
    So they’d handed them over to the bezeri, or at least the few that were left. Eddie wondered how smart squid executed prisoners; he also wondered whether to change the subject, but wess’har didn’t deal in euphemism even to spare their children. Giyadas could take it. “I expect it was quick.”
    â€œDid you say goodbye to her?”
    That kid never misses the jugular. “No, I’m afraid I didn’t.”
    â€œDo you wish you had?”
    Yes. She was a friend. “What would I have said to her anyway? Serves you right? Trust in God? What do you say to someone who’s killed thousands of innocents?”
    â€œI thought you might know,” said Giyadas forlornly. “Iknow how the isenj treated Aras when they captured him after he had killed so many. Perhaps you might have told her to be brave.”
    She was suddenly both a child again and a wess’har, genuinely wanting to know things. It wasn’t rhetoric. Eddie was never certain if it was naïve candor or insight so profound that he didn’t quite grasp it. He suspected it was a blend of both. At the top of the steep steps that ran up the terrace, Giyadas slipped ahead of him and they walked in silence on pearl flagstones. Males followed, females led. The kid was falling into adult wess’har habits. So was he.
    Eddie’s view of wess’har went in cycles, unfathomable miracles one month and then almost family the next. Right then he felt like Uncle Eddie, and the thought crossed his mind that a trip to Umeh Station would mean human companionship again, humans in numbers, and human women. There were two female Royal Marines based on Wess’ej: incongruously pretty, slight Ismat Qureshi, who could probably take his head off without breaking a sweat, and Susan Webster, built more on the armored vehicle scale of things but pleasant enough company for a trained killer.
    And then there were the colonists, biding their time on Mar’an’cas Island, a long way north of pretty, temperate F’nar. Eddie didn’t fancy his chances of romance with the devout Christians there, not even with Sabine Mesevy.
    If he went back to Earth with them, it might not be home any longer. It probably wasn’t; nearly eighty years had elapsed.
    Giyadas pushed open the door of her family’s home and a wave of cooking smells and warbling voices spilled out. At the table in the big