His gentleness disappeared. "Then get out of my bed."

"But I"

"Get out."

Stunned, Kamoj slid off the bed and ran across the room, her bare feet slapping the stone. Inside her chamber, she dropped onto her own bed.

Moonlight shone through the window, creating a swath of pale colors across the floor.

A grunt came from the master bedroom, followed by the rustle of blankets.

Kamoj froze, listening.

A gasp, labored but brief.

Silence.

Was he having trouble breathing? It was hard to believe he had suffered a collapsed lung only this afternoon. She started to get up, then hesitated. Get out, he had said. If she walked in and he was fine, she would look like a fool.

The crash of shattering gla.s.s broke the silence. She jumped up and ran into his bedroom.

Vyrl was kneeling by his desk, wearing only his sleep pants, his chest bare, except for the bandages, his arms wrapped around his body. Shards of broken gla.s.s covered the floor, glinting in the moonlight. A pool of rum was spreading under the desk.

Kamoj went over and knelt in front of him. Up this close she saw tears on his cheeks, just as she had seen them last night after his nightmare. She wondered if his waking helped at all or if his night terrors recognized no boundaries between sleep and reality.

Stretching out his arm, he pulled a strand of her hair away from her lips.

"Touch me, Kamoj. Let me feel you. See you. Smell you."

She reached for him. "Always. Whenever you want."

Instead of responding, he grabbed the desk and pulled himself to his feet. The window above the desk looked south, over the Lower Sky Hills that fell away to the plains. Staring out at the mountains, he spoke in a distant voice. "I've a younger brother. Kelric."

She stood up, trying to understand his mood. "A little brother?"

"Little?" He gave a short laugh. "He's huge. Joined ISC."

"Is he here now?"

"No. The war took him away."

Kamoj lifted her hand, meaning to touch him, to offer comfort. Then she hesitated, unsure what he needed or wanted. Uncertain, she dropped her hand again.

"I have a lot of brothers," he continued. "Althor. I always admired him.

Looked up to him. He joined ISC too. Jagernaut."

"Jagernaut?"

"Cybernetically enhanced star fighter pilot. Like Kelric. Like those new bodyguards Colonel Pacal gave me."

"Althor is a soldier too?"

"Was." In a wooden voice, he said, "ISC gave him a beautiful funeral."

"Hai, Vyrl. I'm sorry."

He kept on, as if unable to stop. "There's my sister. Soz. We were closest in age, out of ten children." He finally turned to Kamoj. "You look a little like her."

"She is also a soldier? Like Dazza?"

"Dazza served under her."

"Where is she now?"

"Blown to dust."

"Vyrl, II'm sorry."

"Sorry?" His words came like leaded rain. "My brother Eldrin is still alive.

The Traders captured him. You know what they do when they catch one of us?

No, never mind. You don't want to know. My aunt and her son, they're gone.

Prisoners, maybe. Dead, probably. Then there is Kurj, my uncle. War leader before Soz. She took over after the Traders killed him."

"I'm so sorry." It sounded useless, saying that over and over. She had lost only her parents and that had torn apart her world. She couldn't imagine what it would be like to lose most of a large family.

He walked away, across the room. Bathed in pale light from the Far Moon and the aurora borealis, he climbed the dais. Then he turned to face her. "I'm a good farmer. You want crops with better yields? Bi-hoxen that can better survive your winters? I can work it out. That's what I wrote my doctorate on, the application of genetic engineering to crop and livestock development. I've had Morlin running DNA simulations here."

"I don't understand what you're trying to tell me," she said.

"Farming." He stood in the moonlight like a statue, the planes of his chest stark in the colorless radiance that filled the room. "I've always loved it. You know where I got that? From my father. He loved the land. And he loved us.

His children." His voice broke. "At least I was there when he died."

She went to him then, joining him on the dais. Gently she said, "How did it happen?"

He rubbed his palm over his cheek, seeming surprised to find tears there.

"Old age. Old wounds." Dropping his hand, he said, "My father spent his last days with his family, in our family house, on our home world. The Allied military let us have that much."

"Allied?"

"The Allied Worlds of Earth." Bitter now, he said, "They were 'kind' enough to let us live in our own homes. Of course, Earth now controls the entire planet where we live."

"Earth? I don't understand."

"I told you this afternoon. Our 'allies' betrayed us. They won't let my family go." In a quieter voice he said, "They believe that without my family to power the Ruby machines, ISC won't risk another war. Earth fears that otherwise my people and the Traders will destroy civilization, the way the Ruby Empire was destroyed, five thousand years ago."

"But if you were their prisoner, how are you here now?"

"None of my family could get offworld."

"But you're here."

He looked away from her, out the window across the room. "Do you know what my father's dying wish was? His gruesome dying wish? That his coffin be launched into orbit around the planet."

"Orbit?"

"Above the sky."

"Like the moons?"

"Like the moons. He wanted to be a moon."

"But why? If he valued the land"

"He loved it. The land. The harvest. The seasons." Vyrl turned back to her.

"Going into orbit terrified him."

"But you said he asked to go there."

"That's what he told our jailors." A muscle in his cheek jerked. "We held his true funeral in secret, to do what he told my mother he really wanted. We cremated his body and spread the ashes over his land." He swallowed. "Then my family took his coffin to the starport."

"Why, if he wasn't in it?"

"The Allieds didn't know that. There was a body, one their sensors registered as his."

She stiffened. "No."

He went on, inexorable. "Our family physician on Lyshriol was an ISC agent.

He installed an intravenous system inside the coffin to feed me. Made the coffin vacuum tight. So I could breathe. Put in a web system to deceive probes. I weigh more than my father, so he streamlined everything. Same for the web, not because of weight, but to minimize the risk of detection. It didn't even have a voice mod for conversation. He didn't want to use drugs in an unmonitored environment, but finally he agreed to sedate me, so I wouldn't get claustrophobic." His voice cracked. "It would only be for one day, after all."

"They buried you alive?"

Flatly he said, "My mother made a heartbroken plea to our jailors. Said she couldn't bear to think of her husband in that cold wasteland. In compa.s.sion for the beautiful bereaved widow, they agreed to let an ISC ship recover his casket from s.p.a.ce. In honor of his wishes, it would spend one day in orbit, and then ISC would make the pickup." He paused. "By the time I awoke from sedation, I would be safe on the Ascendant."

Relief poured over Kamoj. "It was a trick! To get you away from your enemies.

And it worked."

"Yes. It worked." His cheek twitched. "With just one little glitch."

"Glitch?"

"An Allied bureaucrat stalled the pickup." In a quiet voice, he added, "No one told my family. The Allieds didn't want to upset them. But minutes after the launch, someone somewhere along the line changed his mind and said they wouldn't give up the body."

Kamoj felt as if her stomach dropped. "No."

"Don't look so grim." He flexed his fist, jerkily opening and closing his hand.

"Negotiations to recover the body began even before I woke up."

"You woke up inside the coffin?"

"Yes."

Kamoj tried to imagine it, buried alive, with only a box separating you from the sky and stars, knowing something had gone terribly wrong, that you were here when you should have been there, safe and free.

Vyrl swallowed. "Do you know what 'sensory deprivation' means? No sound.

No sight. No taste. No smell. No weight. After a while I couldn't even feel the inside of the coffin. And my mindI couldn'tas a telepath, I need to be close to people to pick up anything. My mind opened up, searching for anyone.

Anything. Anything. I was wide open and there was nothing."

"How long?" she whispered.

The brittle edge of his voice broke. "Thirty-one days. When the team on the Ascendant finally got me out, I was screaming, raving insane."

Kamoj had no idea what to say. No words would take away this horror, no touch heal it.

"Don't look so dismayed," he said. "They took care of me. Treated me. h.e.l.l, it even helped. To a point." His head jerked. "But the psiber centers in my brain went dead. ISC got their precious Ruby psion, but they broke him in the process. Turned me into a crippled telepath." He swallowed. "Except when I sleep. Then my mind opens up like in the coffin. But this isn't s.p.a.ce. People are all around. So I go into telepathic overload. If they isolate me and I can't pick up anything, I start to scream again." Dully he added, "And every time Dazza sedates me, all I can think is that I'll wake up in that coffin."

"There must be some curesomething"

"The rum deadens my brain. It lets me sleep."

She took his hands. "Surely some other solution exists. Can't Dazza and her people help you?"

"They can all go to h.e.l.l."

"But"

His voice hardened. "Two people on the Ascendant knew my father's body wasn't in that coffin: the special operations officer a.s.signed to the mission and General Ashman, the ship's commander. They could have ended it any time by revealing that a living man was out there. ISC would have lost me back to the Allieds, but I would have been free from that nightmare." His fists clenched. "They wanted me any way they could get me, and to the h.e.l.l with my sanity."

"Hai, Vyrl." She thought she understood now, both his pain and the desperation that drove his military to such an extreme. Gently she said, "When did you start to feel thoughts again?"

"With you." With an obvious effort, he relaxed his hands. "You're wide open to me, water sprite. I felt it that day I saw you in the river."

Kamoj remembered Dazza's face when the doctor had realized Vyrl was picking up his bride's thoughts. Joy. Hope. Elation. All signs of a healer whose patient had begun a recovery she feared would never happen.

Vyrl took her hand and climbed onto the bed, drawing her with him. As they lay down together, the quilts enveloped them in billowy cloth, soft from many washings and fragrant with the scent of spice-soap.

She touched his damp cheek. "We have a saying in Argali: 'Tears wash clean the debris of the heart.'"