She closed her eyes and lifted her face to the sun. The first time she'd felt it on her bare skin in years, perhaps. Frey found himself worrying that she might burn.
You're worrying? About her? You should worry about yourself!
The voice of reason. He reminded himself not to be beguiled. Just because she'd changed her appearance, it didn't make her any more trustworthy.
The waitress arrived with their drinks and a plate of pastries. Trinica took one and bit into it. Frey realised that he'd never seen her eat while she was aboard the Ketty Jay. She'd taken her meals in her room, perhaps aware that her presence was poisoning the atmosphere in the mess. She had a fussy, precise way of eating that Frey had always found sort of adorable.
He ate a pastry himself. For a short while, they didn't speak. Absurdly, Frey began to feel comfortable. Like they'd known each other for ever. Like it was no big thing that they were sitting together in the grounds of an ancient university eating pastries on a sunny day. The whole situation was bizarre in its normality.
'Trinica, do you ever question what you're doing?' he said.
She peered suspiciously at the pastry in her hand. 'Should I?'
'No, I mean, do you ever wonder if you're on the right road?'
'My road chose me, rather than the other way around.'
'But, I mean . . . You're rich, right? Even without your family. You could sell your craft, retire. Do anything you wanted.'
She laughed a little laugh. 'Like what? Keep bees? Potter about my manse looking at the flowers?'
'You could read. You always liked to read.'
Trinica gave him a look that was midway between indulgent and patronising. 'I rather think it's you we're talking about here, not me.'
She was right. It had begun as an idle thought, but it had always been heading somewhere. He knitted his fingers behind his head, trying to think of a way to explain the empty, directionless feeling he'd had ever since this whole affair began.
'Let me guess,' said Trinica. 'You're looking for something, but you don't know what it is.'
He was amazed that she'd summed it up so neatly. 'How'd you know?'
'Because you've been saying the same thing since you were seventeen.'
Frey looked blank. 'Have I?'
'Yes!' she said. 'When I met you, you were flying for my father. You'd mortgaged yourself to the eyeballs to afford a second-hand rust bucket called the Ketty Jay, but you were regretting it already, because you'd decided you wanted to join the Navy and fly a frigate.'
Frey did dimly recall wanting to join the Navy at some point, but it seemed unimaginable now.
'Then you decided you were in love with me, and you wanted to be with me for ever, and we all know how that turned out.'
Again, there was no hurt or accusation in the tone. Simple fact. He was a little offended that she could talk about it so lightly.
'I did join the Navy!' he said, suddenly remembering. 'Second Aerium War, flying cargo to the front.'
'You didn't join the Navy,' she said. 'You flew a lot of insanely dangerous freelance missions with the intention of getting yourself killed. And when you almost did, you blamed the Navy and you've hated them ever since.'
She had him there. He tried to think of a rejoinder and couldn't.
'Sorry, Darian. I don't mean to rake over old coals. I'm just making a point. You don't know what you want. You never have.'
Frey thought of Amalicia Thade, how he'd run away from a life of luxury with a beautiful woman. 'Things just seem so much better in theory than in practice. I even wanted to be a pirate for a while, like a real pirate. But it turns out I'm just not that cold-blooded. No offence.'
'None taken,' she said, sipping at her coffee.
'I suppose, at some point, you just have to make a choice and stick to it.' he said, unconvincingly. 'Make the best of things.'
'So they say.'
'Hardly seems fair, does it? All that compromise. Never quite getting what you dreamed of.'
'No one gets what they dream of, Darian. That's why they call them dreams.'
'You think so?'
'Even if you get everything you ever wanted, it's rarely all it's cracked up to be. The rich are as unhappy and screwed-up as the poor. Just in a different way.' She looked down into the black surface of her coffee. 'You can't get away from yourself.'
'What does that mean?'
'Well, wherever you go, whatever you do, you're still you. You can change your surroundings, start a new life, but you'll always fall into the same old patterns, make the same kind of friends, commit the same mistakes. The thing you need to change is yourself.'
'What's wrong with we?' Frey protested indignantly.
'I'm speaking generally. The thing a person has to change is themselves.'
'Like you did?'
'Like I did.'
'And you're happier?'
'No,' she said. 'But I'm alive.'
She gave him a sad sort of smile. Frey was overwhelmed by a surge of affection. That smile made him want to sweep her up in his arms, to protect her from all harm, to erase the damage of the past somehow.
'I forgot what it was like, talking to you,' he said. 'I mean, really talking, without all the threats and recriminations and stuff.'
'We have a lot to recriminate about,' she said.
He opened his mouth to speak, to say something complimentary, something to express his feelings, even in a small way. But she'd already detected the change in him. She'd seen the tenderness in his eyes and heard the softening of his voice.
'Darian, don't,' she said quietly.
So he didn't. The feeling curled up and died in the heat of bitterness and embarrassment. He got to his feet and threw some money on the table.
'Let's go see this professor, then,' he said.
Trinica nodded wordlessly, left her coffee, and followed him.
Professor Kraylock was a small, thin, elderly man, with a tidy white moustache and a bald head speckled with liver spots. Little round glasses perched on a nose purpled with broken veins: the sign of a man who enjoyed his hard liquor. He was dwarfed by his chair and a colossal desk of walnut and leather. Sunlight beamed through two tall, arched windows behind him, edging him in dazzling light and casting his face into shadow. Blazing dust motes hung in the air around him.
Frey and Trinica sat on the other side of the desk. Trinica and the professor were talking and laughing. Preamble stuff: greetings, inquiries about each other's health, that kind of thing. Frey had stayed largely silent. He wasn't good making small talk with educated folk.
Trinica was, though. She chatted pleasantly with Kraylock, asking him about his studies and the affairs of the university, commenting on some rare sculpture he had in an alcove. This was the Trinica he remembered. The Trinica who would charm the socks off her father's guests at some swanky dinner function. The Trinica who you could talk to for hours, because she made you feel that everything you said was fascinating and important.
Frey's eyes roamed the study, idly wondering if there was anything worth stealing. There was a lot of potentially valuable junk here. A brass orrery, an ornamental spyglass. Furniture that looked older than the planet. And books. Lots of books.
Frey distrusted books. He had a sneaking suspicion that most people only bought them to make themselves seem impressive. He couldn't possibly imagine anyone reading so many massive, boring tomes. Had Kraylock really ploughed through every one of the forty volumes of the Encyclopaedia Vardia? Or the whole of Abric's Discourses on
