Goddess of the Moon (Young Ancients: Tiera) (3 page)

There
was a pause, as the man considered it all, and then his mind went blank. Even
as he spoke.

"Good.
Well, not a problem for you now, as long as you aren't going to blame him for
being himself, as you said. You're nearly as tall as he is, so I doubt you'll
trigger that part of him anymore, personally. So, you're willing to work with
him? I'd like to have one of the children shadow you for a few days, if we
aren't out on a mission. Possibly if we are. He's
very
proud of the ones
he's bringing with him. It's part of the real plan. Testing them for positions
in various places. They're all young though. Not adults."

She
thought she understood that at least. When the waves had been sent at the other
lands, huge killer ones, the Space Fleet had gone to Austra, to save who they
could. It hadn't been everyone, since there was limited time, and space. The
Austrans had surprised her, even in the reports that came out later. They
didn't hold to tight family bonds there, and considered their neighbors to be
an obstacle, rather than their close friends, most of the time. Still, when
their world was ending, people helped each other, and tens of thousands of
adults sacrificed their
lives
to save what children they could. Ones
they didn't even know.

Tiera
wouldn't have ever thought they would have done that. Not those people. If she
ever met them, or their ghosts, she'd have to prostrate herself on the ground
and apologize for her unworthy thoughts about them. It wasn't a thing she liked
doing, apologizing, but those people had earned it, and more.

That
meant there were a lot of orphans left over. Most were still in their homeland,
but about a thousand of them had volunteered to leave everything they knew
behind, for a chance to help fight the ones that had nearly destroyed half
their land. She knew for a fact that at least a few of them were no older than
four. Timon had told her about it, so that she'd recommend fostering for them.
Their honor was as important as anyone's, but they were really too young to
even
learn
what to do yet. She'd responded by paying for a school for
them, in her own county. They were being trained to fight, but also read, write
and do mathematics. Speak all the languages too. They didn't have the top
instructors in the world, maybe, but everything they might need to know was
being taught to them. It was all she could think of for them.

The
strange part had been that
Havar
had been working with some of them. He
really did tend to think of children as not being people at all. Even the noble
ones. He...

She
nearly thought that he wasn't a cruel man, but that wasn't the case, was it? He
controlled himself in general, and didn't hurt people casually, but he wasn't
soft on small people in practice either. It probably meant that, whoever these
kids were, they were hard and good fighters, if they hadn't run away from the
man after the first lesson or two. She'd seen grown adult warriors avoid
working with the man. Almost daily in fact.

"Fine.
I can do that." She didn't
love
the idea, but she was willing to be
put out. After all, she was a Countess now, and even before that, a
person
.
If some orphan would benefit from being around her at all, then that was what
she'd do. It was what
any
adult would do. At least the ones that
deserved to hold their heads high in the morning.

"We'll
probably meet them when we get in. It's about six now."

How
the man could tell, she didn't really know. She didn't have a watch on her,
since that was asking for it to be broken, what with the fighting and all. Kolb
didn't either, but she could tell he looked out the side window. So it had to
do with the position of the sun. She tried to memorize that. It was different,
since they were still far to the south of the places she was used to. Almost at
the very bottom of Noram. In County Rodriguez. Their
old
Count was
sitting in a prison cell, in the King's Palace, having been shown to be working
against the man. That, the rebellion, had been put on hold for the most part,
she'd heard.

That
didn't get the man free at all however.

Which
was good, since he deserved to die. The man had tortured his
own
fiancé,
Petra Ward. Nearly to death too. Tiera would have ended the man just for that,
if she'd caught him. Timon did it instead, which meant the fellow had been
tortured in retaliation, and turned over to King Richard for the duration.

Uncle
Richard. After
a fashion. She still wasn't totally certain that everyone hadn't been lying to
her about that, claiming the Queen was Tor's daughter like they had. Oh, she
got the idea, that Tor was basically Count Lairdgren that way, and that Doris,
her meditation teacher, had done the work, using his pattern to create Aunt
Connie, but Tiera had no real way to know if it was true or just a clever ruse
to keep her from slaughtering the King. The man had helped Sandra Morris kill
her girlfriend. Oh, not on purpose, but he'd still allowed her to do it, in the
end.

People
kept acting like Tiera had forgotten her already, but she hadn't. Her orange
eyed friend lived behind her eyes, almost all the time. In all but the deepest
trance states, she was there with her. It was only that, the meditation, that
kept her from running off and killing the man herself.

That
and, if she could trust Count Lairdgren, Doris and Tor, that the man was her
uncle, after a fashion. Family. That meant she had to hold her hand.

If
she could at any rate. She still hated him, and really wanted him to suffer for
what he'd done. It probably couldn't happen, she knew, but deep inside, on
occasion, she had to struggle for control to stop it from taking place.

Luckily
she liked the rest of the royal family well enough. Aunt Connie was nice, and
Cousin Alphonse... That one was a bit embarrassing, since they'd done some
things together a few times. She shrugged that thought away. It was Two Bends,
backwoods
,
embarrassing, since he was a
technical
cousin. Her mother was a clone of
her grandmother, and not her father's child at all, biologically, however. That
meant that she could sleep with Alphonse, or even his sisters and it was only
awkward in her head, thanks to the titles involved. It wasn't
really
wrong.

For
her. Tor on the other hand had been sleeping with his own daughter and worse,
or possibly better, depending on the logic used, Varley, the Princess that was
also his granddaughter
and
daughter, more or less.

They
were so close that way it was practically like having sex with himself.

The
backwoods part of her wanted to scream, go and find him, and hand him a cutter,
so he could end his shame. The logical part just shrugged it off, since it
hadn't been his fault, if it was real at all. That part was even handling it
all fairly nobly. From what she'd heard, Aunt Connie didn't really care that
much at all about it, and had wanted to keep Tor as her lover anyway.

That
had come from Tiera's personal spy in the palace. Princess Karina.

Well,
it would be more fair to say that she and the Princess had gossiped a bit. It
was still information however, which counted. They actually had a lot in
common, the redheaded Princess and Tiera. They both liked to fight and were
decent at it, though Karina was still better than she was. They also both liked
to listen to music and had similar taste in boys. And girls.

Tiera
sighed and then wondered if she should sleep with
her
. Cousin, yes, but
not really, and one that wouldn't even blink at that being a problem at all,
she didn't think. Varley would be a problem, being basically her brother Tor in
a dress, but Karina and Alphonse were fine that way. She needed to send them a
message and invite them over for a meal or something soon, she decided. One at
a time, of course.

She
spent most of the flight back focused on her task of flying, not even bothering
to make a restroom or cause the craft to become larger. It left her feeling
blank and glassy as they went over Two Bends and then, about fifteen minutes
later, landed in the central courtyard of Lairdgren School. It was a good thing
that she'd left the craft small she realized, since in the center of the space,
clearly putting down right before she did, was a much larger version of the
same type of Fast Craft she was in. It was glowing, which helped a lot, since
most of the lights had been put out around the school.

That
was habit now. At night you went dark and hid lights if you needed to use them.
The word had gone out that lights were easy targets from space. It was true, too.
Cities lit up visibly from there and it didn't take a lot of skill to use that
to drop things on the people below. The only good part of that being that they,
the good guys, had nearly total domination of up there. The Others could get
there, of course, but their ships were slow and took a lot of fuel. They didn't
have a space station or anything either. There was an old one, but that was
being held by the Space Fleet, and had been for months. So was the Moon base.
The other one that was. The new one was still being put together by their
people.

Tiera
glanced at the craft and worked out that it wasn't Timon, since that would have
been glowing silver, if anything. It wasn't Tor either, since he wasn't due
back for a few months, so that Tim could try to take Cordes out of his head.
She didn't think that was possible, really, but didn't let herself think about
it too much. After all, she knew enough about building to understand that the
effort would most likely kill both her brothers. It was...

She
hated to think about it at all, since Tor was good and kind, if a bit strange,
but it would be a lot more efficient to simply kill him, than to let Tim die
too.

The
last time they'd fought he'd taken her out so fast and hard that she hadn't
even been aware of what had happened until later, when Timon described it. Tor
had taken both her
and
Kolb out of action using direct effect magic.
That was really hard to do, and he hadn't even been in a combat rage, meaning
it was nearly impossible. Except of course, he was
Tor
, so it wasn't.

No,
if it came to it, she'd simply have to ask Tor to kill himself. That might not
work though, if the Ancient entity in his head decided to fight them, or
worse
,
convinced her brother to do it. The whole thing was a giant mess.

She
shook her head and then climbed out of her own vehicle, which was a dull black
color still. She normally liked using brighter colors, actually enjoying things
like that, and appreciated the glowing green of the other craft, but combat
missions weren't a good time for trying to gain style points.

Just
as Kolb hit the ground, and she turned her own ship off, grabbing the amulet it
was on and tucking it around her neck, using the leather strap she had for that
purpose, the other vessel stopped glowing and she could hear, but not really
see, the people seeming to be out of it already.

"Move
silently. We need to practice that all the time now." The order, and it
was
one of those, came from a familiar voice. Baron Havar. Then things got a lot
quieter. She could still hear people walking, coming down the ramp and moving
out with their gear onto the smoothed paving stones. It really wasn't loud
however. She had better hearing than most people and nearly lost them, with
only the occasional rubbing sound or misplaced footfall letting her know it was
more than one person. Havar was the noisy one too. He was, no doubt, simply too
big to really vanish that way.

Someone
took the craft down, and she could hear it being put away the same way her own
was. That indicated something to her, in that whoever had done it was little.
Not just small, but under five feet tall. Or at least hunched over. That could
be Gerent, she thought, but the scent was wrong. Everyone here smelled of
apples to her, since a lot of people had been eating those as their primary
source of fruit for a while. Gerent had a more varied diet though, being a
gardener. Even in early spring he'd kept plants going all the time.

She
didn't know the plan, but everyone just stood there, waiting for something.
Nothing happened for a few minutes, and she risked casting her mind out, to see
if she could figure out the plan. Havar was just going to wait there, until
someone came. Kolb was just going to let them wait, to build up patience, and
the kids were wondering what the heck was going on.

Rolling
her eyes she grinned, not dropping her trance that much really. She had to a
bit, in order to be able to speak however.

"Come
this way. Don't make any noise. We'll go inside for a moment, then move out
into the woods for the night." Because it was pretty clear that no one
else had a real plan yet. Not even as to where the kids would stay. True, they
could
have separate comfy beds in the Timon Craft, but that was hardly an adventure,
was it? She didn't know what these kids had been trained for, but she'd always
liked camping out as a child, well enough at least.

No
one called her on it anyway, or told her to stop interfering, so she walked
toward her own room. It wasn't a big space, and her roommate might be in there,
or not, but that didn't matter too much, did it? They just needed a place to
discuss things and she needed a few moments to make certain she had an actual
idea ready for them all.