Lost Era 06_ Catalyst of Sorrows - Margaret Wander Bonanno [95]
Military, her instinct told her as soon as they had appeared in the anteroom of the shop, the younger of the two announcing that he had an appointment with the jeweler to look at some naming day gifts. Neither man identified himself, but there was no doubt they were military, though both were in mufti. It was in the way they carried themselves. All Romulans walked guarded in public, but these two were even more so; their very ears had ears. Erect spines, square shoulders even without the overpadded uniforms, voices correct even in whispers, that upper-caste accent they could never escape.
“But what else?” she could hear the Lord’s voice in her mind. He had arranged for her to apprentice to this particular jeweler expressly because his shop was frequented by officers. For all she knew, the jeweler himself was Tal Shiar. He certainly had the nastiness. “Observe, report. What else?”
Student and mentor? Father and son? Superior officer and subordinate? She did the exercise for her own purposes; she would tell the lord as little as possible. Even as she pretended not to look at them, concentrating on untangling a mess of fine neck chains the jeweler had dropped, she swore, on purpose just to give her something to do, and they made themselves comfortable on the couches in the anteroom while the jeweler went to fetch his trays of rings and pendants for their consideration, her peripheral vision took them in, her senses registering every nuance.
Report: They were a generation apart in age, and the younger man-not young, but younger than the other, middle-aged, the kind of man who might easily have children her age, who might even…Stop it, fool! Stop seeing every Romulan of a certain age as a potential father-all right then, the one in his prime, square-faced, ridge-browed, graying at the temples, deferred to the elder who was the handsomer of the two-silver-haired, smooth-browed, fox-faced, patrician.
Yes, military by caste and birth, when either might have chosen differently had there been a choice permitted. Aemetha’s speech about a people always at war rang in her head, and she found herself wondering if the elites as a caste would be quite as arrogant if they didn’t live under the knowledge that they would forever have to send their best and brightest out to the stars and to death.
The squarish one might have been an architect, she thought, the silver-haired one a poet. Stop it! she told herself. Shut off the voices in your head and listen to what they’re saying! The Lord is testing you, and you’ll have to tell him something…
“… always intemperate, Alidar,” she heard the elder say before the jeweler had emerged from the back of the shop. Did she only imagine he was looking her way when he said it? “Intemperate in war, and now you reverse course and speak too vociferously for peace. It’s going to cost you.”
His eyes were so blue she could determine their color from where she stood, and she’d always had a thing for cheekbones. There were bloodlines here, Zetha thought, that were far more easily traced than hers, and something else, anger and a deep and unremitting sadness, as if in his long life he’d seen enough and more than enough of death and most of it unnecessary. Stop it!
“But it’s too much, Tal!” the younger one said too abruptly. “Forgive me, I don’t mean to be rude, but even you have to admit that these days it’s war for the sake of war, because if the Romulan in the street turns his eyes away from the stars and starship battles, he’ll see that the economy is in shambles, his livelihood threatened, his children poorly educated, his future mortgaged for yet another warbird. The entire system is corrupt.”
“And so it always has been!” the one called Tal agreed, then stopped himself as the jeweler came prancing toward them, balancing velvet-lined trays of precious baubles in both hands. “You see, now you have me doing it!”
“Perhaps I thought to have an ally,” the one called Alidar mused after a long