“You must not blame yourself,” she said. “Sinit—promise me that you will not. All has ended very well. Daav has said your assistance was invaluable and he does not, you know, simply say such things, unprovoked. I think you did just as you ought, and wisely. I thank you, and—and honor you.”
Sinit sniffled again, and lifted her chin, feeling a . . . warmth in the center of her chest, where the knot of frightened misery had lodged.
“That will do!” Aelliana said approvingly. “Now—”
“Sinit, who was at the door?”
Aelliana's eyes widened. Sinit felt her own heart stutter.
The door went crookedly back on its track and Birin Caylon stepped into the room.
Mother had been weeping, Aelliana thought; which surely she would, having only recently lost a favored child. Perhaps it was her air of weary disarray only, but she seemed . . . smaller, in some way: a woman edging beyond her middle years with trepidation.
She froze for a moment in the doorway, arrested between one step and another, staring. It seemed that she, too, had failed of recognizing the House's third and least regarded child—then the moment was passed. Mizel completed her step, and inclined her head.
“Aelliana!” she said, perhaps a little too loudly; perhaps with an unintended edge. “It is well that you are home, daughter. Sinit, why did you not bring your sister to me at once?”
“Sinit and I had an urgent matter to discuss,” Aelliana said, drawing their mother's attention to herself. “I insisted that we speak immediately.”
She felt a subtle shifting in the air to the rear and right, and put her hand behind her back. Warm fingers met hers, squeezing gently. She was aware of a sense of heightened determination, absent only a heartbeat before, and a thrill of space-cold anger, gone before she could shiver.
Mother frowned slightly, then looked up and over Aelliana's shoulder, directly, so she judged, into Daav's face. Her mouth thinned, but she bowed with courtesy, delm-to-delm.
“Korval. Mizel is in your debt; do not doubt that we shall see ourselves Balanced, and that soon. At this moment, however, our House is in mourning, and I ask that you honor our grief. Sinit, pray show Delm Korval to the door.”
“No!” Aelliana said sharply, which was not how one spoke to one's delm.
Mizel's stare was equal parts disbelief and anger.
“I beg your pardon, daughter?”
“Daav is my copilot,” she said, arguing Guild rule as if it had meaning here, in the heart of her own clanhouse. “He has a right to be here.”
“Having delivered you to your kin, his protection—which Mizel honors—bows to mine. Korval is aware of these things, daughter, if you are not.” She looked to Daav once more.
“Korval, I do not ask by-your-leave within my own walls, but I will plead your indulgence. There has been a death in this House. Further, it would seem that the child you return to us is . . . beyond herself, and perhaps yet burdened with the effects of her misadventure. Pray, withdraw.”
“Ma'am,” Daav said gravely, “I cannot. My pilot requires that I stand with her, and here is where she stands.” He paused, and Aelliana had a sense of weighing, as of two courses of action, and then—
“If my pilot has fulfilled her commission here, then certainly, I shall leave with her.”
“Leave with her?” Mizel's voice expressed disbelief. “She is only just arrived, and in a state quite unlike her usual self. Where would she go?”
Aelliana cleared her throat. “In fact,” she said, her voice sounding much steadier than she felt, “I had only intended to stop for a moment, ma'am, to speak to Sinit. I have . . . ” She took a breath, squeezing Daav's hand so hard her fingers ached, felt a rush of certainty, and met her delm's eyes.
“I have placed myself under Korval's protection.”
For three heartbeats, Mizel stared into Aelliana's face, her own devoid of expression.
“I see,” she said at last, and again addressed herself to Daav.
“With Korval's permission,” she said, in the mode of delm-to-delm, “Mizel will speak with the clan's daughter Aelliana in private.”
Once again, that thrill of frigidly intense, short-lived anger.
“That decision of course rests with Pilot Caylon,” Daav said, also in delm-to-delm.
Mizel sniffed. “Indeed.” She gave Aelliana a hard look.
“Step into my office, if you please, Aelliana.”
For a moment, she thought she would not; that she would declare that anything Mizel had for her could be heard by her copilot as well.
The weight of culture, however, is not always so easy to shrug aside.
Aelliana inclined her head, licking lips gone suddenly dry.
“Daav,” she said, and her voice quavered, now. “Pray wait for me. I will be—I will be no longer than a quarter- glass.”
There was a sense of weighing, and of worry. Then he slipped his fingers away from hers and there remained only—worry.
“Pilot's choice,” he said, in the mode between comrades. “I will wait for you, Aelliana; never doubt it.”
