“WATER,” I SAID, SPEAKING into the stiff silence. Valka had not spoken, had not stirred from the pilot’s chair in minutes. Perhaps in hours, for I felt that surely I had passed in and out of consciousness strapped in the navigator’s chair. The ultramarine lights of warp coruscated beyond the forward windows, smeared and spiraling across the ship’s warp envelope. I watched them a long time, sure I must have passed out again. My vision swam, and when at last I focused my eyes I saw Valka peering down at me. Gloved hands pressed a cup to my lips.

The water might have been ambrosia, and I drank greedily, the clean taste of it seeming to swell in my chest. My wounded temples throbbed. “Where?” I spluttered, coughed, spilled water all down my front. Valka pulled the cup away. “Where are we going?”

Those familiar golden eyes slid away from my face. “Nowhere,” she said. “Anywhere. I set a randomized course, ten light-years out. I’m fairly confident they didn’t put any kind of tracer on board, but I’m not certain yet. I want be sure.”

“You won’t find one,” I said, leaning my head back against the seat. “Dorayaica wasn’t expecting . . .” I raised my hand. “You.”

“I want to be sure,” she said again, standing back.

I did not like the way she looked at me, brows contracted with pity and horror both, nose wrinkled against the stink of me—which I felt sure must be hideous, but I had long since ceased to smell it. “How?” I asked at length, head still swimming. “How are you here? How did you . . . ?”

“Escape?” Valka took a step back, neither wanting to flee nor to get too close. “Survive?” She looked left, studying the instrument panels along the starboard control bank. Satisfied that all was well, she looked up. “ ’Twas not easy. The Lothrians had destroyed our shuttle. We hijacked a . . . an in-system freighter, managed to get to orbit, but the Tamerlane was already lost. I guess Durand was taken by surprise.”

Stupidly, I said, “Durand’s dead.” I could still see him standing defiant before the altar where Elu had burned its lover’s corpse, still see the way his head tumbled from his shoulders—just as my head once had done. Only Durand had not come back.

Valka looked at me as though I were headless myself. “I know,” she said, and resumed her narration. “We tracked the Tamerlane’s telegraph. Managed to join a Lothrian convoy supplying the Cielcin fleet. Stowed away in a crater on one of those worldships. Slept in shifts for four years before we got to Dharan-Tun.”

“Four years . . .” That must have been Vati’s ship, the same that had carried me from Padmurak to Dharan-Tun. So it had been more than a decade since my last stand upon the bridge. “Why did you wait?”

“There were four of us, Hadrian,” Valka said, incredulous, “against a planet full of them!” She turned her back. “And we were trapped. We couldn’t leave our ship, not at warp.”

A tiny ah of understanding escaped me, and I felt a fool, felt like the stupid boy I’d been when we first met in Borosevo. Highly charged particles and cosmic radiation had a tendency to catch inside the warp envelope. That was why ships relied on ray shielding and on dense hull materials—like adamant or the huge cauls of ice that coated Cielcin vessels—to protect their delicate passengers. Anyone caught on the surface in little more than an environment suit was sure to risk damage and maybe even death.

“We did everything we could,” she said. “We knew we couldn’t save everyone, not with the Tamerlane as it was. You should have seen the state of it.”

“I saw some of it,” I said.

Valka shrugged. “Otavia came up with the plan. She volunteered to . . . to stay behind. I’d pilot the Ascalon, Crim and Pallino would find you and everyone they could.” She shook her head, still standing with her back to me, hands twisting about the empty water cup as though she hoped to strangle it. “We couldn’t save everyone. We never could. But you? Elara? Ilex? Lorian?”

Seeing a ray of hope, I leaped at it. “Lorian’s alive.” Valka’s shoulders drew up and together, and she flinched as though struck, but she said nothing. “At least . . . I think he might be. Dorayaica sent him away as an emissary.”

“Why would it do that?” Valka asked. “Why not wait until you were dead?”

“I don’t know,” I wiped at my eyes. “I don’t know, Valka.” A dry sob shook me, and I doubled over, shaking like a peasant struck by palsy. “Maybe it just wanted Lorian out of the way. Maybe it was going to send him later. You didn’t see what it was like down there. It was a charnel house, Valka. They tore our people apart.” I tried not to think of the piles of limbs, or of poor Adric White carved upon his platter—tried not to think what fate awaited Lorian now we had escaped. Would Dorayaica send him on to the Emperor anyway and claim that I was dead? Lorian would know no different. Or would Dorayaica instead exact its vengeance on the only man of my company still alive?

Seeing me as I was, she drew nearer. She knelt and took my right hand in hers, pausing only so long as it took to set the cup aside. “ ’Tis all right,” she said, sharp voice gone soft.

“It’s not all right!” I said. “Everyone is dead! They’re all dead! Pallino! Elara! Crim! Ilex and Durand! Halford, Pherrine, Koskinen . . . they carved White into pieces and served him to me at table.” The shaking was getting worse, and Valka’s fingers tightened over mine.

I felt her stiffen, draw back a moment later. “What did they do to your hand?” She worked at the seals that held the gauntlet in place. I did not answer her. She would discover the truth soon enough. The seals clicked and hissed faintly as she removed the vambrace and the gauntlet beneath. My flesh stank of sweat, adding a new, fresher element to the horrific odor rising from me. Valka moved slowly, as if peeling the funeral mask from the face of a corpse. She gasped when she saw my hand: the cryoburn scars, the missing fingers. “Forfehdri . . .” she swore, and drew the hand to her lips. “What happened?”

“I . . .” I wanted to tell her everything. About the pit, about the wall and the chains, about the peeling, the lash, the hundred depredations. But tears were shimmering in Valka’s eyes already, and I shook my head. “Please help me get this armor off.” I wanted to be clean, wanted nothing more in all the universe.

Nodding, Valka stood and pulled my arm over her shoulders. I winced as my bad shoulder pulled painfully, but stood all the same. “We need to clean your wounds,” she said, and I could feel her gaze on my wounded scalp. “You’ve lost a lot of blood.”

The crew showers were one deck below, beside the Ascalon’s dead hydroponics section. The air stank of algae and rotting fish, but the lights sprang on at our presence, and I permitted Valka to undress me. I could not stop shaking, nor still the inconstant sobs that racked me. In time, she’d removed the bloodstained armor and stinking cape. “We’ll have to clean all this,” she said, looking at the stains. “What did you get into?”

“Blood and shit,” I said. “They threw shit at me, and bits of . . .” I could not bring myself to say people, but remembered the way the crowd of Cielcin had tossed scraps of the dead slaves at me like rotten produce. Nor did I tell her how my guards had forced me to drink piss and beat me. I shut my eyes, flinched as Valka relaxed the seals that held the skin-suit tight, and when she put her hands on the collar of the suit to tug it down I yelled and tumbled to the floor, a tangle of limbs and hair. How long I lay there, quaking like a leaf in storm, curled up and coughing, shoveling air and panic into my shredded lungs, I cannot say.

“Do you want me to go?” she asked at length. Dimly, I was aware that she’d been sitting with her back against the bulkhead for a long time, knees drawn to her chin.

Something in her voice uncoiled the serpent that had tightened its noose about me, and fiber by fiber I unclenched. Gingerly, I reached out with my maimed hand and touched the only part of her I could reach. Her toe. We stayed that way a long time, neither speaking. That simple contact between us spoke for me, and for us both. I was acutely aware of the foul snarl of hair that draped over my face, and in time peeled my face from the floor, leaving brownish spots where the dried blood sloughed off. Fresh blood dribbled down my face, and I struggled to tug my left arm free of the clinging, rubbery garment. It came loose, turning the suit sleeve inside out in the process, exposing the sweat-wicking surfaces beneath.

The right arm gave me more trouble. I panted, teeth clenched as the shoulder ached bright and red behind my eyes. Seeing my struggle, Valka came off the wall and helped to free me. I heard her indrawn breath. “Your back.” I felt her hands on the thick scars there and shuddered.

“Seven years,” I said, as though this were an answer. “Seven years.”

“What did they do?” Valka asked, more rhetorically than not.

More than you can imagine, I wanted to say, but said nothing.

“Come on,” she said, urging me to stand. I tripped over the raised threshold into the shower stall, landed on hands and knees with a curse.

Valka made to step in after me, but I raised a hand to stop her. “I can do it,” I said, and reached up to key the controls. A shower was a monstrous luxury aboard a starship, and so in the name of conservation the jets blasted me with a fine mist while the sonic scrubbers squealed higher than human hearing. Valka sealed the door behind me, and—still on the ground—I stretched my legs out so far as they would go. Sweat and blood and filth began to run like ink from my face and hair, and the mist flattened my hair to my body.

Beneath the silence, I felt and heard the humming of the engines, and reality began to sink in, its weight and substance a smothering blanket.

I was alive. Alive . . . and free.

Was it another vision? A waking dream? Would I awake in the next instant, upside down in the pit, blood running from a gash behind my ear? “No,” I whispered. A denial? A prayer? Raising my eyes, I saw my reflection in the glass of the shower door. Our eyes met, just as I had met the gaze of the other Hadrian in the cell beneath the People’s Palace, just as I had met the gaze of every Hadrian in the fullness of my vision; violet and violet.

From the glass, a corpse contemplated me.

My hair: black, white-streaked like night split by lightning. My eyes: hooded, shadowed, deep-sunken, twin sparks shining as from the depth of a well. My ribs shone through skin like parchment paper, my flesh a tapestry of scars and burns ill-healed.

I had not seen myself—not truly—since Vedatharad.

I did not know me.

Movement beyond the glass drew my eye, and I refocused, found Valka looking at me, tears running silent down her face. A faint spasm tugged at the left corner of her mouth, pulled me back from the depths of myself. There were Urbaine’s fingerprints. There stood Valka, and not a dream.

“I told them everything,” I said at last. “Dorayaica tortured me, and I told it everything.” I raised my scarred and ruinous hands to hide my face. “Perfugium. Vanaheim. Balanrot. Thielbad. Ostrannas.” It was important she understand, but I knew I wasn’t making sense. “Aulos. Carteia. Ibarnis. Siraganon.”

“Hush, now,” she said.

“Kebren,” I said, and screwed my eyes shut. “Nessus.”

The door cycled, and I sensed a warm, dark presence looming over me. Smoke and sandalwood, though there could not have been either. She could not have had her soaps crouched aboard a Lothrian freighter for eleven years. Was I going mad? Or were memory and affection stronger than truth?

The shower beeped, and an instant later a torrent of warm water fell on both of us as Valka knelt and embraced me. She did not speak. Did not stir. But held me fast and close and did not let me go.

I was alive. We were alive.

“They tore them apart, Valka,” I said. “Every one of them. I couldn’t save them. I couldn’t . . . it’s all my fault. All my fault. None of them would have been here if it hadn’t been for me.”

“You know ’tis not true,” she said. “We were betrayed.”

“But I shouldn’t be alive,” I said. “They should be alive. Pallino. Elara. Everyone. Not me. Not me.” I opened my eyes then, held her at arm’s length, heedless of the water thudding down over us both. She was still fully clad, had paused only to unseal the gloves on her skin-suit, red-black hair plastered to her face. “I’m not worth all their lives.”

If Valka yet wept, her tears were lost in the flow. She put a hand on my cheek and smiled lopsidedly. Her smile had never been quite the same after Urbaine’s virus, after our visit to Edda to crush the serpent in her mind. It looked almost like mine. “You mustn’t think like that,” she said.

Yet I could not help but think such things, and so said nothing.

When at last the filth was washed from me and Valka bathed herself, she emerged dripping on the rubber mat, strangely shrunken without her suit. She studied me a long time, where I sat naked upon the bench. After a great while, she said, “We should do something about your hair.”

I looked up at her, then past her to my reflection in one of the washroom’s many mirrors. The effect was worse than the shower door had been. Starker, harder to deny. Thin but ragged red lines marred the left side of my face, fresher cousins to the white stripes on back and legs. The hair in question was a heavy curtain, its own white stripes a sober reminder of the toll my torment had taken from me. I could not remember when last it had been properly clean, though it must have been when I accompanied the Lothrians and toured Everfrost Station.

So I submitted myself to Valka’s scissors and her shears, and the quiet noise of them filled the deeper quiet between us. An ordinary thing, an ordinary moment against all that we had each endured. Locks of hair longer than my arm fell about me like heavy smoke, and when she was done I looked half myself again, though I fancied there was nearly so much white as black in my shortened mane.

Look how old you are, I told my reflection. I was nearly three and half centuries from the birthing vat by then, and it had been a hard road. All the same, I allowed myself to be lulled by Valka’s sober presence, by her altered smile and the careful touch of her dry, smooth fingers as she applied beta gels and corrective tapes.

I cannot remember sleeping, nor indeed remember much of those first days. I think I slept the greater part of them. Weeks, I think. Perhaps a month. Dim memories are all that remain. Meals. Sleep. Valka’s arms about me in the night. The steady drone of the engines. I can remember Valka cursing in her native Panthai as she mucked about the ruined hydroponics section, packing cartons of rotten plant matter and fish bones to follow my hair out the vacuum disposal. I remember fussing over my armor, dismantling it and scrubbing the individual components.

But all of it, I remember as through a haze.

Days later, or weeks, Valka found me in the utility room beside hydroponics, contemplating the disposal tube. The lights above shone stark and white, almost loud in the quiet of the lonely ship.

“What are you doing?”

The irinyr cloak lay cleaned and folded on the counter beside the vacuum tube’s aperture. I had been thinking of throwing the inhuman thing into the tube and blasting it into space, but I could not quite make myself do it. All my life I had amassed such relics, trappings of my life. I could not decide if the cloak should join them, or if it should be cast into the darkness.

“Just thinking,” I said. “It’s quiet in here. You can’t really hear the drives.” I looked round, uncrossed my arms. A few of the crates we’d packed from Maddalo House had remained aboard the Ascalon, by some miracle, and so I wore my own tunic and trousers.

Valka pursed her lips in thought. “I hadn’t noticed.”

“I spent a lot of time in a cave,” I said—I had told her everything. “You don’t realize how loud everything is until it’s gone.” I had known true silence—and true darkness—for so long that the gray solitude of the Ascalon was almost too much. “Are you all right?”

She was holding a rag, I realized, was polishing her hands absently. “Fine. I’ve got clean water in hydroponics at last. New algae cultures should be in full bloom in a day or two.”

“That’s good,” I said, hugging myself. New algae meant clean air.

“I think some of the seeds are still good. I’ll need your help getting them going.”

“Of course.”

Valka stopped rubbing her hands. “I wish I could help you,” she said.

“I know.”

“I miss them, too,” she said. I shut my eyes, blotting out the cloak and the disposal tube and the choice—for the moment—with them. “We’re coming up on reversion in a couple of days.”

It was the third randomized jump she’d taken us on in the weeks since we’d escaped Eue. We’d swept the ship for beacons, and after the second jump, we’d even suited up to check the exterior. Found nothing.

“We need a destination.”

I did not even hesitate. “Colchis,” I said, and turned fully to face Valka, opening my eyes. “Siran’s on Colchis. She’s the only one still . . . still . . .” I could not get the word out. The weight of too many ghosts sat on my chest. “She’s the only one left.”

The pity—the terrible pity—sharpened once more in Valka’s eyes. I realized my mistake the instant before she spoke it into being. “Hadrian, we’ve been gone from Colchis for centuries. For more than four hundred years. Siran is . . . long dead. You know that, yes?”

I was nodding then, as if the movement of my head might dull her words, might stop me hearing them. Some part of me had known the truth, even as the words escaped my lips. Siran is long dead. Still, my tongue felt thick and useless in my mouth. At length, I croaked, “I know. I should have known.” Then something in Valka’s voice clicked into place for me, and I said, “I’m not mad, Valka.”

Silence fell so deeply then that I could hear the faint thrum of the drives, not silenced after all. Valka did not speak. The both of us just stood there together, alone in the silence.

“I wasn’t thinking,” I said, trying to explain. I had been so long without time, so long in the cave and the pits, that I had forgotten how swift was its flight.

May Time, Ever-Fleeting, forgive us . . .

“We’re not the only ones left,” Valka said, and tried to smile in her way. I could hear it in her voice, risked a glance her way. “You said they sent Lorian to Nessus.” Those golden eyes slid across my face. How old she looked then! As old as I felt, her braid frayed by the day’s labor, eyes sunken with care and strain.

“I only think they sent Lorian to Nessus,” I said, and held my maimed hand to my face, mouth hanging open between thoughts. “After the battle? I don’t know. He could be dead, too.”

“I wouldn’t bet against him,” Valka said.

“I still want to go to Colchis,” I said, speaking over Lorian’s ghost. “If only to find Siran’s . . . grave. And Gibson’s.” I did not say that Gibson would not have a grave. The scholiasts burned their dead and scattered the ashes on the wind. But he was surely dead himself, who had been ancient when I was young—and I was ancient then. That we had met at all on Colchis was a fluke of cosmic justice, a chance thin and sharp as highmatter. But I could not stand the thought of grieving alone. Colchis was the closest place to home in all the human universe, for Gibson, and Siran, and the Red Company were home, and that home was lost forever.

Alone.

But I was not alone, not truly. Valka was with me. But Valka was as much a part of me—and I of her. A man needs more. A man must have a people, must belong somewhere. To someone. A man must have a family, born, chosen, or made.

I needed mine.

But they were gone.

“Colchis, then,” Valka agreed.

It was as good a place as any. We would have to return to the Imperium, have to sound the alarm. Doryaica had sent Lorian to herald its coming, to proclaim its dominion over all the armies of the Pale. If Lorian reached Nessus, it would be with those tidings, and more: he would proclaim that Valka and I were dead. And what of the Commonwealth? Did Lorian know of their betrayal? He must guess, surely. But he had been aboard the Tamerlane. Had he even been conscious when Vati and its troops attacked?

We had to return.

“Do you know how long the journey will be?”