Protector

And this morning he was not so sure he really wanted his bath until he absolutely had to. He wanted to let his headache go away. He wanted no one to say anything unpleasant to him, and most of all he wanted no one to ask him why he was walking around with his face was all squinched up as if he had a headache, which he certainly did. And the condition of his head and his stomach was not something he wanted gossiped about on staff. It was bad enough Eisi and Lieidi had to know he had misbehaved and drunk something from leftover glasses. He was really quite ashamed of himself. Or it was the effect of the headache and upset stomach.

Geigi and nand’ Bren must be on the train at this hour, well on their way to the spaceport. He so wished he could have gone with them, to say good-bye to Lord Geigi, and just to be outside the Bujavid and out of the city entirely for a few hours. The spaceport, too, would be something to see—he had been there once in his life, but he only just remembered it as big white buildings and a long strip of concrete. When he and Great-grandmother and nand’ Bren had landed back on the planet, they had landed at an airport over on the island of Mospheira, where only humans lived— thathad been something to see.

And from Mospheira, at Port Jackson, they had crossed the straits on Bren’s brother Toby’s boat, and then stowed away in a rail car, and ridden mecheiti—so many ways they had traveled to get back to Shejidan. He had done all these things most people never had and before that he had had the run of the starship, and known secret passages and places nobody in the Bujavid could imagine. He had floated in air. He had seen water hang in globes you could chase.

Now he was limited to a suite of rooms in a nest of potted plants, with poor Boji in a cage.

It was because of his grandfather that he had no idea when he was going to be allowed out. And if these were the conditions he had while his guests were here, it was going to be embarrassing.

Let us see the ocean, they would say. And he would have to say no.

Let us see mecheiti, they would say. And he would have to say they could not.

He would be embarrassed to have them know how strictly he was locked in, now. He could tell them about the adventures he had had, but he could not show them any. They might think he was lying, and he could not prove anything.

And being locked in was likely the way things would be, and he would have to make the best of it and just hope his mother was polite and did not call any of themabnormal.

They had been through a lot. But they had settled matters on the west coast. They had had a big signing where Lord Machigi of the Taisigin Marid made an alliance with Great-grandmother. Everything had been going so well.

And then his grandfather, from just embarrassing and annoying, had gone crazy, for all he could understand, and thrown a fit because he was excluded from Great-grandmother’s party, and he had come upstairs and scared the staff. His parents’ marriage had almost collapsed that same night, because of Grandfather. Beyond that, he had a strong notion there were things going on with Grandfather that, being a boy, he was not supposed to know.

If Grandfather had gotten in—what would he have done?

The scene his grandfather had made had not made his father approve of his grandfather, which he now did not, at all.

It certainly had not made himapprove of his grandfather, either.

And it probably had made his mother mad, too, though she would not admit it.

Would his own grandfather have tried to kill him, to force his father to take his unborn sister for his heir?

That was a smarter move in some ways, but stupid, too, because there was no guarantee his father would not teach his sister just who was responsible for shooting her brother, and he could not think that shooting him would persuade his sister to trust Grandfather much, either . . . granted his sister was no fool.

And while he and his mother were at odds, he did not believe that his mother would ever forgive anybody who shot him.

So doing away with him could not have been the reason Grandfather had made the scene at the door, either. And he had thrown a very indecorous tantrum in Great-grandmother’s reception and gotten himself thrown out in full view of everybody.

He kept thinking about it and thinking about it. He had nightmares about his grandfather turning up by his bed. He could only imagine what his mother felt about the situation.

He had met people with perfectly understandable reasons for shooting him, like meeting him in a basement hallway when they were searching the house, trying to kill anybody they found—that was sensible. He had had nightmares about that. But to have Grandfather replace that man in his nightmares—

That was scarier, somehow.