By the Sea of Sand Read online

  She hadn’t known then, of course, that it was more than that. Kason’s father was the Rav Aluf, the man in charge of the entire Sheirran Defense Force, which made him more than simply rich. It meant he was powerful, too.

  They’d become a team as effortlessly as they’d become lovers. For nearly a full cycle, Kason had infiltrated her life, learning the ways of the lighthouse and also of her. She’d learned him too. How he liked his caffah, how he looked when he was sleeping, the sound of his laughter. The smell of him. The flavor. And yet still, though she might visit him in his narrow guest bed and they’d done their share of lovemaking in almost every part of the lighthouse that offered space for it, he did not share her bed. They didn’t speak of love.

  Not until the day his father found him.

  Teila had been outside, bringing in her scudder with a good-sized milka pellet dragging behind, when the cruiser appeared in the sky. It had been a long time since she’d seen one, and the noise of it startled her into nearly running the scudder ashore. At first, she’d thought it was the authorities coming to arrest her for illegal milka harvesting—the rules had become so much stricter over the past few cycles, she wouldn’t have been surprised to learn she’d inadvertently been breaking a handful of them. It wasn’t until she went around the back of the lighthouse and found Kason there with a man who looked so much like him it could only be his father that she noticed the crest on the side of the cruiser.

  The Rav Aluf had sneered at the first sight of her. She’d never forget that he’d given her no chance to prove herself to him, that he’d immediately presumed she’d set out to seduce his son. She’d never forgiven him for that, and probably never would.

  “Come home, Kason,” his father had said. “It’s time. You’ve spent long enough shirking your duties.”

  Kason hadn’t seen her come around the base of the lighthouse, so his answer hadn’t been for her benefit. “I’m not coming home. I don’t want to join the SDF. I’ve found something here that I want to keep.”

  “What’s that? A warm bed? Please,” his father had said. “You can find a hundred women more suited to you than her.”

  “You don’t even know her.”

  Another sneer. “I don’t have to know her.”

  “I’m not coming home.”

  “If you don’t come home,” his father had said with a long, hard look at Teila, “you will forfeit everything. Do you understand?”

  Kason had turned then to look at her. “Yes. I do.”

  “Will you stay?” she’d asked as though she’d just come around the base of the lighthouse and hadn’t heard anything else they’d said. “I’ll make something to eat.”

  “I’ll stay only long enough to convince my son to leave with me,” the Rav Aluf had told her.

  He’d been true to his word, and a terrible houseguest, too. Teila had bitten back every retort that rose to her tongue, determined not to give him the satisfaction of being right about her, but it had been a bitterly won battle. Kason hadn’t seemed as bothered by his father’s constant sniping. If anything, he’d seemed to enjoy baiting him.

  “You let him speak to you like you’re a child,” Teila had said one night when Kason had tried to make love to her and she’d turned her back on him, too aware of the Rav Aluf’s presence.

  “It doesn’t bother me.”

  “It bothers me,” she’d said. “And you allow him to speak to me like . . . like I’m worthless.”

  That had made him sit up. “No.”

  “Yes,” Teila had said. “And you say nothing.”

  “It’s just talk. He’ll leave soon, when he sees that I’m not going with him.”

  She’d turned on him fiercely. “And why aren’t you? Why would you stay here, so far from anything, working so hard, when you could go home and live a life of luxury?”

  His hand on her wrist had kept her from going far. Little by little, he’d pulled her closer, then onto his lap. He’d brushed her hair from her face. “Why do you think, Teila? Tell me why you think I’d rather stay here.”

  She couldn’t bring herself to say it, in case she’d overassumed. The thought of looking like a fool in his eyes was too much to bear, so she shook her head and stayed silent. Kason had kissed her, soft at first. Then harder. His hands roamed, making her sigh. Making her squirm.

  “Don’t you want me to stay?” he asked her after, when both of them, spent and naked, lounged in his bed. “Teila?”

  Pride and fear had bound her tongue. His hand on her bare back had gone still. He sat up to look at her.

  “Answer me.”

  “I need to check the lamp and get some sleep.”

  He caught her wrist again, this time harder than before. “Check the lamp, but come back to me. I want you to sleep here.”

  “No. Your father—”

  “It’s not his business.” Kason’s voice had gone hard as lightning-seared sand and just as brittle. “Say you’ll come back here.”

  She hadn’t been able to make herself form the words. Silence had filled the darkness between them, colder than the air outside. When she left him, he didn’t try to stop her.

  The next morning, the roar of the cruiser’s thrusters had woken her from restless dreams. She’d leaped from her lonely and too-empty bed before her eyes were even open to run to her window. He was leaving her; she knew it without even seeing him board.

  Teila had never taken the stairs so fast in her life. She’d tripped at the bottom and broken her ankle; the pain had been distant and faint until much later, overshadowed at first by her desperation to reach him before he went away forever. Limping, she hurtled herself through the back door and toward the cruiser, which was just closing its doors. Vikus and Billis had been pressing their goggle-eyed faces to the glass.

  She’d said nothing, made no cry. It was too late. He was going to leave her because she’d been stupid.

  And then, the door had opened. Kason came down the ramp. She’d run on her broken ankle and launched herself into his arms. She’d covered his face with kisses and vowed to never let him go. And, until his father had returned a few cycles later and convinced Kason that his duty to protect her meant serving in the SDF, she hadn’t.

  Chapter 26

  He smoothed a hand over the curved wood, testing it for splinters or imperfections. The pads of his fingertips caught briefly on a tiny rough spot, so he went over it with the smoothing paper again and again until the wood was as slick as glass. Only when the entire hull had been smoothed to his satisfaction did he get out the jar of whale oil.

  He held it to the light, swirling the golden contents. This oil was what lubricated the whale’s jointed segments; over time and with the right amount of grinding, it would become milka. It was far more precious and expensive in this state, because it was so much harder to gather. It was also poison if you tried to eat it, unlike its nutritious and delicious other state.

  He knew these things the way he knew the color of his hair and eyes, that he liked milka pudding, that his favorite color was blue. None of that came from the data stream, which, though still prominent, had begun to bother him less. He knew about whale oil and boats, he thought, because he’d known about them before. And Teila had known he would know.

  Carefully, he poured some of the oil on the wood and began rubbing it in. He used his fingers because it was easier that way to make sure he got the oil into every crevice and pore. Something happened while he worked.

  He relaxed.

  The aches and pains he’d come to count as commonplace began to ease, despite the way he’d been stretching and using his muscles while working on the boat. The tension in his neck disappeared, which in turn erased the throbbing pain in his skull he’d thought would never go away. This was what he was meant to do, he thought as he got lost in the rhythmic motions of his hands working the oil into the wood. Fix. Not break. He was a builder, not a soldier . . .

  “Hey! You!”

  Startled, he turned and nearly knocked th