08-Aug-2002

Title: A Horse and His Boy
Author: TB
Archive: at GW Addiction (it don't get no better than this); anyone interested can ask, and I have a selection of my own writing on my webpage, http://www.geocities.com/brother_maxwell/TB_home_page.html
Category: POV (Quatre's, to be exact), pre-series
Warnings: spoilers for Quatre's Episode Zero, mention of child abuse, a little smooching, and general pre-teen angst
Disclaimers: We all know that Gundam Wing belongs only to the original creators, who must surely be flattered at the years of drooling attention by fan girls and boys. I am a non-profit organisation. Notes: Readers who remember me (there must be a few of you out there) know that my boy is Duo, not Quatre. But when an idea comes knocking, you pay attention. The title of my fic comes from C.S. Lewis's series "The Chronicles of Narnia"; and all of Quatre's diary entries were taken from a book by Susan Fletcher. All references to Islam come out of research done on the web and any mistakes come from my ignorance, not my wish to piss anyone off. Finally, any problems with formatting or missing letters, I blame entirely on Corel Word Perfect and txt files.

A Horse And His Boy by Erin Cayce

A Quatre Winner Story

I used to like stories that had justice in them. Stories where the right people got punished. In my favorite stories, if something bad happened to you in the end, it was because you clearly deserved it.

My auntie Chava used to tell me that it's not like that in real life, and I shouldn't expect it to be.

But I knew already. Because I didn't ask not to be loved... and I didn't do anything to deserve it.

- from the diary of Quatre Winner

I knelt on my prayer mat, and made ablutions from the small tiled pool of clean water before me. My back ached with the strain of holding proper position, and though I honestly tried, I couldn't force my mind to follow my glib tongue as I made the morning ritual. I thought about the itch where my belt pinched, about the rumble in my stomach that would be so satisfied by the apple I knew was on the desk. I even thought aimlessly about the servants. I wondered if they prayed. I knew some weren't Muslim. At twelve, I didn't think much of being a Muslim, myself. Father didn't even make my sisters wear their veils anymore, and I remembered the speeches he'd used to give at dinner on the utmost importance of maidenly modesty.

If a woman bares herself to the lustful gazes of a man, she can have no respect for herself, for her father, or for the system.

How well I knew that gravelly voice. I remember the grip he kept on his wine glass, too, I thought, and smiled bitterly. Father only harped on his daughters when he was drunk. We all knew why. Mother had hated her hijab and called Father a hypocritical conservative. When Father was especially far into his cups, he liked to tell us how her lack of respect had gotten her killed.

My knees carried the imprint of the weave of the prayer mat when I finally stood. My schoolwork awaited, and Mister Wycliffe was calmly lighting a pipe as I slid into my chair.

"Good morning," I said to him.

He blew out a perfect ring of sweet-smelling smoke. I loved the smell of his pipes, and I loved the tricks he did with it to make me smile. Mister Wycliffe was my morning tutor, and he was the only part of the day I liked. He said outrageous things that Father probably would have frowned at- which was the best part, after all- like the time when I was eight and asked him why he didn't pray three times a day like I had to.

I'm too fat to bother, Quatre, he'd said, and winked when I snickered.

He slid a book across the desk to me, and I groaned to see my mathematics. "Fight it all you like," Mister Wycliffe said, speaking around his pipe. "Algebra isn't going anywhere."

It was a Tuesday, and that meant music lessons. I loved the music, but I hated the stupid practices Miss Veronica put me through. What use were endless scales? I hated Chopin, I hated Mozart, I had no use for Lawherd. Classics were weighted down with the pomposity of people like Miss Veronica who adored form and couldn't find the brains for spirit.

I wrote music, but only late at night, under my covers with a flashlight, and I kept the scores hidden. I had learned my lesson from the diary.

After an hour at the piano it was Deportment, and today I recited the agonizing dullness of Ovid. Old Fadi circled me and slapped me across the backside with his cane whenever I slipped. The more he hit me the more I slipped, and I left Deportment with an ache I knew would yield bruises. I knew better than to protest, though. Father didn't give a damn, as long as I learned to stand straight at parties and speak only when spoken to and prat out Latin poetry on demand.

Prayers before lunch, this time out in the Rose Arbor.  I had fifteen minutes to eat, and then Sulaiman arrived with the foils and fencing gear. Two hours. He must have been in a bad mood- I'd heard from Cook that his son was talking of leaving L4 to study art on Earth- for he was meaner than usual, and the third time he broke past my parries and contacted my chest, it was more forceful than necessary and left me clutching the spot and gasping. He turned a dark color and turned away to take off his mesh face mask. He did not apologize.

I hoped his son never came back. I wished I could run away, too.

Normally I was allowed to study after fencing, up til dinner, but not today. Father seemed to feel that I had passed some kind of landmark in my growth, and that meant new responsibilities. I washed quickly behind my ears and down my neck, and had to run to be in his office at exactly three. Father's partners and employees all knew better than to pay attention to me. I stood- at attention, or I'd catch it- in the middle of the foyer like a fool, staring straight ahead of me and hating every one of them.

Do you laugh at me? I wondered. Or do you go home and yell at your unruly children and tell them to be more like Quatre Winner? He knows how to show respect. You don't see *him* backtalking his father.

At three seventeen, my father deigned to notice me, and had his assistant show me into his office.

He was standing when I entered, and I knelt, curling stiffly into a bow to honor him. No one else had to bow. But a son honored tradition when he honored his father.

Mustn't ignore a tradition.

Father put on his reading glasses, and opened a manilla folder. "Fadi reports that you failed to properly memorize Caesar," he said.

Hello, Father.

I stood, and my back protested noisily. It was worth a slap if I squirmed, though. "I'll do better tomorrow, Father."

"See that you do."

He lowered the folder to look at me. I often wondered what he saw; all I knew for sure was that he didn't like it. He'd never once smiled at me, or seemed kindly, like Mister Wycliffe sometimes was, offering me lemonade or a biscuit; or forgiving. Other children could make mistakes or daydream or laugh and play. Not my father's son.

"Tonight at dinner you will report what you have learned about the conflict between the miners and the Committee. Ten minutes should do." He took off his glasses and slipped them into his shirt pocket. "I expect a thorough examination of both sides of the argument."

I inclined my head. "Yes, Father."

He leaned across the desk, beckoned me to him. He took one of my hands, and turned it over, studying it.

"Soft hands," he said finally, and dropped my hand as if it had burned him. "An aristocrat's hands."

This was new. I was staring, and lowered my eyes to hide it. "Sir?"

He stroked his moustache, then gave a sharp nod and folded his hands over his belly. "No longer. Today you will go to Mu'sad abu Amad. He will find a job for you." He looked down his nose at me. "We are men of privilege, Quatre. As such, we can ask no man to do a job that we would not do, for that would be an abuse of our power. What is power?"

I spoke the words that I'd repeated on command since childhood, so many times they'd all but lost their meaning. "The trust and respect of those beneath you."

He nodded, and dismissed me from his thoughts and his office.

Hisham was Father's personal manservant, taller even than Father and grey as dirt. He always seemed to appear out of the woodwork whenever he was needed, and it was he who took me to the shuttle and from the shuttle to the new site everyone was calling Mudbowl. This departure from normal routine had me worried. It wasn't so much the prospect of a new job; nothing could be any worse than the rest of the day. But at the same time, Mudbowl was an unknown. Mister Wycliffe sometimes had gossip about it, and said that three men had died there in accidents. He said it wasn't safe and that only an idiot believed that anything they made there would be worth the cost in manpower.

Mister Wycliffe was the smartest man I knew, and I believed him. I didn't like what his analysis could mean for me.

Mudbowl was a factory on L4 Prime, where the space ore that the miners farmed was processed and made into useful things that were mostly exported to other colonies. I knew the miner conflict inside and out- Father had made me sit through five meetings of the Committee negotiations with the representatives- and I knew about the population boom that had brought ore demand to the highest point ever since the first colonies were built. I knew that the rush to build new colonies from our ore had been the cause of the three deaths, that the safety precautions that protected both the miners and the builders had been allowed to grow lax.

The heat that radiated from the Mudbowl site was intense, worse than anywhere else on L4 Prime, which had been modeled after a desert. I was sweating even before Hashim returned from the front offices with a short, stocky man who gave me an orange suit of synthetic fiber to put on over my uniform.

The sleeves were too long by three inches, and the trouser legs by at least that much. I rolled them up, once more humiliated by my size. Would I never grow?

"I'll take him to Mu'sad," the man said. "Come back in a few hours. Wear that hood, Mister Winner. It only takes one spark to set your hair on fire."

Startled- and scared, if I wanted to admit it- I obeyed.

There are some stories that you don't tell out loud, that you make up and tell silently to yourself. Private stories. You spin them over and over until you don't need them anymore.

I had one about my father. In this story, he had been brought before the Gazi for judgement. Gazi was asking him questions- hard questions.

I liked to watch him sweat.

- from the diary of Quatre Winner

When Father entered the dining room, my sisters stood.  I had already been standing, waiting beside Father's chair. I bowed. My sisters chorused a greeting.

Father had dressed for dinner. He was impressive when he dressed. During the day in his work clothes he was nothing special, just a big man in a nice office. At dinner you could see how he was a prince, but a prince who had made himself and his family out of his own labor. He looked dashing and strong and mythical, like the warriors from Ovid. Sometimes I wondered if Ovid had known anything about Muslim patriarchs.

He halted before me, and took both my hands, turning them palm-up to the light to look at them.

I stared at his chest and tried to look impassive. I had turned a winch for two and a half hours. A winch that was completely unnecessary, for machinery was automated now and had been for centuries. My palms were red and blistered and they stung with the disinfectant Hashim had rubbed into them. It wasn't enough for me to learn to do what every Mudbowl employee did. I had to do ten times more, because I was Quatre Winner, Kadar Winner's son.

Father dropped my hands and said nothing. He sat, and I walked to the opposite end of the table and took my chair.

"Begin your report," he told me, as the servants came in carrying the first course.

I stood again, and straightened my shoulders. One of the girls smiled at me, but the rest busied themselves with their napkins and their quiet conversation. They had stopped noticing me years ago.

"The miners have the stronger position," I said, and launched into the careful speech I had planned while I was winching. I was a very good speaker. Father had hired a voice teacher for me when I was six, and he gave me frequent excuses to practice the art. I knew how to vary pitch and cadence, to organize my information to be most appealing to my audience, to judge by the tiniest flicker of expression across a watching face when I had gone too far or when I hadn't gone far enough. I knew Father as I knew my own face. I could almost- almost- think about sneaking back to the music room and the old violin, the one with wood so thin and polished by loving hands that it gave out the sweetest sound I'd ever heard. I could almost let myself hear the song I would play on it, just for myself and the instruments.  A song I'd never have to perform for anyone or rewrite to please someone else.

My soup was cold by the time Father nodded permission for me to eat- eleven minutes, which had made me stretch. I knew his tricks and I'd prepared, but I hadn't been concentrating, and for a moment, I feared he would make me start again. It wouldn't come as a surprise. But something must have been on his mind, for he actually let me sit, and he left the table after dessert without giving me any other tasks.

Mirvat switched seats with Susan after Father left, so she could be nearer to me. "I heard you were in Mudbowl today," she said.

A few of the girls near us turned their heads.

I nodded. I liked Mirvat, even if she was silly. She had drawn the picture on the front of my diary, before Hisham had made it disappear. She was a great artist and she loved cats, though she'd never seen a real one. Cats didn't survive well on L4.

"I heard that Father's moving him." Dunyazad was much older than me, and she hadn't bothered with me since her first baby. Now she spoke from the far end of the table. She had large brown eyes, and they speared me the same way Father's did. "To the desert crews."

The desert crews? My hands ached so badly suddenly it was as if they had heard. I had ridden with Father through tours of the desert camps. L4 was the largest of all the colonies in space, and the desert the biobuilders had designed was in constant danger of falling to pieces. Natural desert life failed in space. Lizards and birds died in labs by the dozens, and scientists had been unable to engineer plants that thrived on the artificial sunlight as well as the delicate Earth originals. We were fourth generation, and all I had ever known in our desert was dead sand.

I schooled my expression carefully. It wouldn't do to seem upset. Servants were watching and I knew they reported to my father.

Mirvat turned in her chair to face Dunyazad. "The desert crews? That bunch of- they're only charterers! They don't even have a council representative!"

I hadn't known that. I wondered how Mirvat did.

I had free evenings, and I spent this one in my bed, copying out the math problems I'd failed the night before and struggling with the new ones. Father said that I wouldn't be allowed a calculator until I'd proved I could do it in my head. More often than not I threw my books away in frustration, but sometimes Mister Wycliffe found ways to explain the procedures so that I could make up little songs or limericks to remember them by. There would be no music room, tonight. My schoolwork took up all the time til evening prayer, and after the dusk bell a servant came to fill the bathtub and make sure I actually used soap. It hadn't been a girl servant since I turned eleven and had started growing hair in weird places. My sisters had done it for a while after that, but now it was usually another boy. It didn't seem to occur to anyone that I could turn a spigot by myself.

Most of the servants didn't like me. When I was younger I had done my best to be awful to them. I was awful to everyone. When I prayed, I tried to pray about that, to ask Allah for forgiveness for being a brat. It was the one thing I was most ashamed of. I knew they were all surprised by the way I had changed since last year. They had hated me before, but now I puzzled them and that was worse in some ways. They acted like it was some kind of trick, that I would turn back into a monster at any time. There was nothing I could do about it but try to earn their respect. I hadn't gotten a servant in trouble in months. I hadn't thrown a fit or spilled things on the carpet just to make a stain or put tacks on my teacher's chairs or tried to make a servant clean up after me. But they didn't trust me, and it burned me to admit that I deserved it.

Aamir was my age, and we had sometimes played together when we were younger. His father was Hisham, and that made me want to ask him questions like did he hate his father too. But I didn't. It wasn't my business and I knew he wouldn't tell me, anyway.

Aamir sat on the stool next to the bathtub and passed me shampoo and soap when I asked for it. He looked like a real Arab. His skin was nut brown, like a walnut dug out of its shell. He had brown eyes as big as Dunyazab's, and curly brown hair.  Sometimes he wore a winding cloth headdress, sometimes not. He told me once that he only prayed when he felt like it. He said he was modern.

I was blonde. I had blue eyes. Aamir said that his father said I looked exactly like my mother. I didn't know if that was true or not, because I'd never seen a picture of her. She was dead, and if Father had his way I'd be dead, too. I knew exactly why Father didn't love me.

Aamir wrapped a towel around me when I stood up out of the water. "What was it like at Mudbowl?" he asked.

I didn't have to question how he knew where I'd gone. I knew you couldn't keep secrets from servants. "Clean."

He chewed the inside of his cheek. "I was thinking about working there."

That startled me. I dried my hair and thought how to phrase the right words. "Why? I mean, I didn't know you wanted to leave here."

"Why not?" He shrugged. "I don't want to be at someone's beck and call all day long. I don't plan to earn my dinars by bowing to you every minute and helping you take baths every night." He grinned. "No offence."

I ignored that. "When were you planning to leave?"

"I turn fourteen in August. I could get part time, then." I stepped into house slippers, and he helped me put on a terry cloth robe. "If I earn enough money, I could leave L4."

"Where would you go?"

Earth. Where else did anyone go when they left the colonies? We wanted Earth. We wanted a real sun and new, unrecycled air. We wanted to feel living dirt and see the endless oceans of salty water.

Aamir must have decided he'd said enough, because he didn't say anything else. He bowed to me and left, turning out the hall light as he shut the door to my room.

I went to sleep worrying about the desert crews, but I dreamed of Earth.

My auntie Chava used to tell me to chew my words before letting them out. "Seven times, Quatre," she would say. "Chew them seven times." If you let your words go buzzing out of your mouth like bees, she always told me, they will come back and sting you.

The trouble was, I couldn't resist letting them out. And sometimes, they seemed to slip between my lips before I even knew they were coming. Sometimes what I said was cruel, and I appalled even myself. Now, I know from Shahrazad and her stories that words can hold great power.

Still, Auntie Chava was right. Silence holds great power, too.

- from the diary of Quatre Winner

Dunyazad was right about the desert crews, but it took Father a week to send me there. I came back from fencing on Monday to find Aamir packing my suitcase.

"What are you doing?" I demanded, closing my door and leaning on it.

"You're leaving for a while." Aamir rolled two socks into a ball. "Who put that dent in your face?"

I said nothing. Everyone knew and it wasn't worth talking about.

Aamir chewed the inside of his cheek, then shrugged and closed the lid. "Heading out to the desert. If there's anyone you need to talk to, you better do it fast."

I had no one.

Hashim took me to the shuttle once again, and for a moment I wondered if there hadn't simply been a misunderstanding and I was going back to Mudbowl and my winch like normal. But we didn't get on the shuttle- Hashim took me outside the port to the back, to an old road that was lined with jeeps. A tall man was waiting for us.

"Quatre?" He squinted down at me, then shrugged and offered a hand. "I thought you'd take after your father more. Good man, Kadar."

"Thank you, sir," I said. I burned with the comment, but I kept my face blank.

He took my suitcase from Hashim and threw it into the back of the nearest jeep. "Hop in. It's a long ride."

Hashim didn't even say good-bye. He didn't even stay long enough to tell me who this man was. He turned and left without a damn word.

The jeep jumped and bounced on the road as though a tyre were flat, but the man didn't get out to check. He drove in silence for fifteen minutes, thirty, a full hour by my wrist watch, and then suddenly we turned off the road and the ride became smooth as the wheels dug into the sand securely. We headed straight out into the desert.

"Your new home," he said, and pointed.

At first I saw nothing but the same dun hills that surrounded us on all sides. But then I realized the tops of the dunes were flat, and that they weren't sand dunes at all but buildings.

My new home. That meant I wasn't going back to Winner anytime soon. How could he just whisk me away from my life like that?

My eyes stung, and I told myself it was the sand getting to them.

He left me by the jeep holding my bag, and I stood with the earth scorching the bottom of my feet through my loafers and my suitcase digging into the broken blisters on my palms. I waited for someone to come for me, and I felt small and extremely lonely.

How could he do this to me. What was I supposed to learn from this?

My watch beeped for noon, and there was no one around, though I watched every door I could see desperately for signs of human life. Did anyone pray here? Did anyone know I was supposed to? I crouched, and opened my suitcase. Aamir hadn't included a prayer mat or beads or a bottle of water for ablutions. I was standing in the middle of a cluster of buildings I was probably locked out of, and I wasn't sure, but I didn't think Allah would take that as an excuse.

I felt eyes on me suddenly, as I laid one of my shirts on the sand and knelt on it. The skin between my shoulder blades tingled and I knew someone was watching. It took all my will power not to turn to look. I used sand to make ablutions, and as I bowed I prayed louder than I normally would, for the benefit of my watcher.

At the end of my chants, I asked Allah to grant me composure. I would need it.

"That's a nice show you put on," said my watcher at my back. I rose, and faced him.

Faced her. It was a woman. She was tall, and she dressed like a man. Not even Dunyazab dared to wear trousers in the house. Morever, this woman was clearly not Arabic. She looked more like Mister Wycliffe- English. White skin and hazel eyes. Her hair was yellow. Like mine.

"It's not a show," I replied.

Her hair was short like a man's. She didn't wear lipstick like Mirvat liked to, but she did have polish on her fingernails. Pink polish. She raised one of her hands and put a hat on her head, then stuck the hand out to me.

"Hi," she said. "You must be Quatre Winner."

I shook her hand. "I don't mean to be impolite, but who are you?"

"Annie Davis. I'm B-group manager." She squinted, then threw back her shoulders. "You're with me, for now. Them who like to pray do, same as you did, but they gather in Forer, over there." She pointed to the building farthest to the left of me. "In the future, you can go there too."

I nodded. Suddenly my throat was tight. "What am I here for?" I asked, trying to sound forthright and probably only sounding scared.

Her lips pursed. "Here to learn, I suppose. You'll follow me, run errands when I tell you to, work when I tell you to, and the rest of the time you'll listen." She started walking, and I scrambled to grab my shirt and close my suitcase and follow her. "You'll eat breakfast at oh-six- hundred, tea at fourteen hundred, and dinner at eighteen hundred, in the same place you pray. You sleep there." She pointed to a squat barracks, where we were apparently headed. "We'll drop off your things there." She glanced at me over her shoulder. "You're probably used to your own room."

I shrugged as nonchalantly as I could.

"Well, we cleaned out one of the storage closets for you. It ain't big, but it's the only privacy you'll get, likely." She stopped at the door, and turned to show me the palm-printer beside it. "We'll worry about your clearance later. For now, do the manual code, 48968."

I repeated it to myself, and she made me punch it in. The door opened, and we went inside.

Inside was one long hallway and a few men leaving their rooms into it. They greeted Annie with smiles, which made me feel a little better. If she was liked, then she couldn't be as tough as she was acting.

"Yours," she announced, and stopped halfway down the hall. "No keys. We don't lock doors inside."

At her gesture, I opened the door. Small was an understatement. There was a cot, and a foot of floor space on two sides of it. I laid the suitcase on the cot and tried very hard not to be dismayed.

Did Father really think he had to play these games with me? What was he trying to prove? I wouldn't have protested being sent here. I would have taken it like a man, like the man he wanted me to be, and I would have packed my own bag and done whatever was required. He didn't have to spring it all on me like a trap. Like a punishment.

Look at the bright side, I whispered silently in my mind. No more algebra. No more Sulaiman stabbing you in a bad mood. No more endless Ovid.

When I turned back to Annie, my shoulders were straight and my expression was calm. "What next, ma'am?" I asked.

She nodded thoughtfully. "Come on. Let's get some grub, and then I'll show you around."

The thing about Shahrazad was, she didn't give up. When the Sultan was killing a new wife every night, and there were hardly any unmarried girls left in the city, and people were getting madder and madder about what was happening to all their daughters, and it looked as if there might be a revolt, Shahrazad didn't just throw up her hands and quit. She *did* something about it.

I think that's why I admired her so much. Of course, she was clever and learned and beautiful, and she knew how to tell stories in the night. I admired her for those things, too. But the important thing was, she didn't give up.

Unlike my father.

- from the diary of Quatre Winner

I was nine when I first heard the story of Shahrazad.

The story was ancient. It took place in a country called Persia, which I had never heard of and couldn't find on any maps. Mister Wycliffe said it had collapsed a long time ago. There was a sultan. His first wife betrayed him with another man, and he killed them brutally with his own hands when he found them together. After that, he could never trust his wives, and so every night when he married a new queen, he killed her by morning to prevent her betraying him.

It went on for years and no virgin girl was safe from him. Fathers smuggled their daughters out of Persia in any way they could. Mothers maimed their little infants so they would be unsuitable for the sultan. Still, every night, another girl died.

Then Shahrazad stepped forward. She married the Sultan of her own will, and after they had laid together on their wedding night, when he was going to kill her, she begged him to hold off long enough for her to tell one last story to her sister. The Sultan agreed, and Shahrazad told her story so well that by dawn, she still hadn't finished. The Sultan wanted to hear the end so badly that he let her live; and the same thing happened the next night, and the next, and the next, for a thousand and one nights until finally the Sultan admitted that he loved her. He never killed agin.

When my nanny first told me that story, I sneered and said, so what.

She asked me, don't you love your sisters? Wouldn't you be sad if some man could kill them all just because he was the sultan?

I said, My father is a sultan and he can make new daughters whenever he likes, just by calling the lab.

She whapped my bottom and after that she never told me any more stories.

There's more than one way to be crippled. I don't mean that you can have a crippled foot or a crippled knee or a crippled hand. I mean you can be crippled in your heart. You can store up all your rage at someone, which can weigh down on your heart and twist it into a weird shape until you're always aching underneath. You forget what it's like *not* to ache. You forget that you're aching at all.

- from the diary of Quatre Winner

Probably I wasn't supposed to, but I got an obscure satisfaction from working in the desert crews. The men were all much older than me and almost never paid attention to me, and the women like Annie Davis tried to be friendly but were usually busy. I wondered, some, what they'd heard about me- probably the same tales that everyone had. They would have been true a year ago, but now I was determined to prove that I could work hard and without complaining. And I did work hard, probably harder than I'd ever worked at anything.

Even though I had been born on L4 in the desert, I had lived in a big house with ventilated air and controlled environments. Out in the camps, the buildings maintained cool conditions, but you were only ever inside to pray or to sleep. I did less and less of either the longer I was there, and the satisfaction came from watching muscles appear where there hadn't been any before, and tolerance to the heat grow where I had been weak in it before, and respect for my silent endurance appear in the eyes of the grown ups I worked beside.

One week became two, and two became four. At first I had played page to Annie Davis, but after a while she sent me to A-group- the desert combers. We ventured out into the uninhabitable regions of the colony to research, experiment, and record. The manager, Gauhari, was the opposite of Annie Davis. No one seemed to like him, but he was the best in the field of desert environ biobuilding. He put me with Chakbast, the morning shift supervisor. Chakbast was young, only twenty five, and he showed me pictures of his first-born son.

"He is five now," he told me, grinning proudly. "My Yakootah bore him so strongly. Now she carries a daughter."

I smiled for him, and handed back the picture. "Congratulations, Chakbast."

He clapped me on the shoulder, and handed me a shovel and a canvas burnoose. "Ready to take a drive?"

Nowadays my duties consisted mostly of carrying heavy equipment or digging holes or putting up the tents for the comber crew. I was always allowed to watch as the crews took soil samples or "core" samples- of course the colony didn't have a core, as we were built on the inside of a metal sphere and not the outside, but the Earth term had stuck. I learned things I'd never known about colonies before, like how surprisingly shallow the soil layer was- only three quarters of a mile deep. I learned the secret that the desert crews knew but had been forbidden from releasing to the public- that the failing of the biodesert to produce life was symptomatic of a colony that would eventually fail to support anything but hydroponics. That all the research they did wasn't just to maintain accurate figures for farmers, but to hopefully stumble across a solution. I learned that they weren't all environmental scientists- some were spacial scientists, and they took the figures that the biobuilders came up with and applied them to the forces that rotated the colonies or kept them supported in the weightlessness of space and extrapolated what adjustments would have what effect on the life inside the metal spheres.  Some of the things I learned were frightening, and some were fascinating. I learned a new appreciation for my life, and the people who worked constantly to be sure I was unaware of the great efforts that fostered it.

That night, the night that marked three months for my life in the camps, I stayed out by the fire longer than usual to listen to the crew talk. The women had left- they often went off together at night- and the twelve men who remained were passing around cans of beer and sharbat. Alcohol was forbidden to a true Muslim, but... tonight, I took beer when it was handed to me. It didn't taste very good, but I drank it anyway, not wanting to look like a little boy. My nose began to tingle halfway through the bottle, and then my ears got hot. I had to open my eyes wide to see as well as normal, or at least it felt that way, and things seemed to be moving faster than I was accustomed to all around me. I wasn't sure I liked the feeling.

"I think you're done in," someone said to me.

I looked up quickly from the sand I'd been drawing doodles in with my toes. Where had I put my shoes? I didn't know the man who was speaking to me; I only recognized him as one of the analyzers.

"They'll be up all night," he told me. "Don't try to keep up, not on your first drink."

"I drink all the time," I retorted recklessly. I drank the last swallow of beer to prove it.

He had thick eyebrows, and they contracted briefly. Then he laughed. "Sure, little tiger." He stood, and found my shoes for me. "Come back to your tent and sleep it off."

I glanced around the fire. I had been closed out without even realizing it. The men were gambling now- I saw light flashing off the white dice- and had grown very loud. No one was watching me.

I looked back to the man who waited patiently for me. "Okay," I said, and stood. I tried very hard not to wobble as I walked back to the circle of tents, and to the small one that I shared with Rabbani, one of the engineers.

The man followed me in, and settled on the far end of my bedroll. He placed my shoes between us, and idly rubbed his thumb through the spare clothes I had laid beside my sleeping space. "I thought you were rich," he said.

I burned at that snub. "My father is rich," I snapped. "I'm here to work."

He grinned, showing an even row of very white teeth. "Roar on, little lion."

I flushed. "I didn't mean to sound that way. I just want to be valued for who I am, not what my name is."

"Sounds fair to me." He crossed his legs, and took off his burnoose. He had sun-streaked, reddish hair that swept back from a high forehead. He ran a hand through it where the burnoose had matted it. "You know what everyone says about you."

I could guess. I touched my nose. "People always talk about someone they think is better than them. Or acts like he thinks he is. I'm neither."

I got the impression that he was considering me, weighing what I said. Did he find it wanting? "You don't like yourself very much," he said, at length.

I looked for a reply, but I couldn't find one that didn't sound snotty inside my own head. In the end, I took the route that had served me since last year. I stayed silent.

He nodded, though, as if I'd confirmed his assumption.  "I'll see that no one talks badly of you from now on," he told me.

He said like he was doing me a favor, and maybe he was. But I refused. "No. Let them talk. I don't need anyone to fight my battles for me, and it would be hollow if they accepted me just because you asked them to."

He frowned.

"That's the way it has to be," I added, making my voice hard the way my father did when he could tell I was thinking of disobeying him.

It seemed he didn't like that, and it occurred to me that maybe he'd wanted to find some way to get in good with me. I saw it at Father's parties all the time- men and women alike who tried to find some gift they could give my father or some obligation they could make disappear for him. I had always detested those people for being so obvious.  They didn't offer out of friendship, but because they thought Father could do something for them.

I wondered what this man thought I could do for him.

He grinned again, and it looked so natural that I doubted my assessment of him. "Very well." He bowed his head and touched his forehead in a gesture of respect. "You are very determined, Quatre Winner."

I smiled uncertainly. "Thanks. I think."

He laughed, and laid on his side on the canvas floor of the tent. "And so what do you think of the desert, Quatre? Of our work here? Do you miss your easy life?"

The tension I'd started to feel disappeared. I pulled my shirt off over my head, and tossed it behind me. "There was nothing easy about it," I told him, and mimicked his pose. "It was just a different kind of hard from this." I waved my hand.

From the new angle, I reassessed my judgement of his age. He couldn't be more than thirty- the lines in his face weren't as deep as they'd looked in the firelight, and his hair was still thick and shiny. He was still very handsome.

"Tell me about it," he said. His teeth flashed. "I've never been rich and so I can't imagine it."

I searched for the words. My head felt a little better now- cooler and not so dizzy. "I go to school all morning," I said at last. "I have tutors. I have to learn history and math and composition. At least I can understand the importance of that, but there's other stuff like Latin and Greek and manners- you know, how to bow to a diplomat and how that's different from the bow to a senator. Which fork to use when you're in Sanq, or America. I even had to learn how to walk."

He laughed. "Seems to me there's only one way to walk."

"You'd be surprised." I rubbed my calf, remembering. "Then in the afternoon it's usually physical stuff. When I was little, I learned how to pilot shuttles and stuff. I even learned how to pilot a mobile suit, but my father didn't think that was appropriate and he fired the man who was teaching me. Now I do fencing." I thought of Sulaiman, about how hard he tried to make me fail. It hadn't happened yet, and I was almost as good as him. "Someday I'll beat him," I said. "I haven't been able to practice here, and whenever I go back he'll use it to humiliate me."

"You don't like him," he said.

I measured my response. "He's just doing what Father wants him to. And to be fair, I wouldn't be as good as I am if he hadn't pushed me so hard. I can beat anyone my age, and most older kids."

"I'd like to watch you sometime," he replied.

Something about the way he said it paused me, but the moment passed and I shrugged it away. "Before I came here Father had me working in Mudbowl- I mean, Rogers Factory. Now I'm here."

"How old are you," he asked.

I looked at him. I heard Aamir in my head suddenly, thought of how old he sounded, how confidant and nonchalant. I lied through my teeth. "Fourteen."

He nodded, and sat up. "You're a man, Quatre of fourteen years. It is not proper for a man to hate his father."

"I don't hate him," I protested. "I just-"

"You just what?"

I looked up at him, and my mind was racing. My heart hurt. "What do you care if I hate him," I whispered.

"I don't doubt your life has been hard," he said, softly. "I don't doubt he gives you reason. But if you spend your life trying to beat him, you'll grow up empty. The day he dies, you'll lose your only purpose for living."

"Who are you to say that to me?" I demanded, sitting up. "I don't even know your name and you presume to lecture me! What do you know about it anyway? He hits me, did you know that? All my life he let me believe I was born out of a culture and I only found out different because I snuck into his office and found my birth certification. He hates me because I killed my mother! He--"

"I've seen it happen," he retorted. "To better men than you."

My mouth snapped shut.

There was a silence, and then he lowered himself again, taking one of my shirts to cushion his arm. "Calm down, tiger," he murmured, and grinned slowly. He held out his hand to me, palm up. "It was a bit of friendly advice, and it went a little farther than it ought."

I crossed his palm with mine. "I'm sorry for my reaction. It's just- " I shrugged, embarrassed of myself. I knew he was right, and inside my stomach was churning. It felt like the day I had been captured by the Manguanacs, and the giant Rashid had slapped me for telling off my father. I had thought nothing would ever be more humiliating, and the mirror he had held up to my appalling behavior had made me so ashamed. Who was I in the scope of the universe? So what if I quarreled with my father and he rode me too hard and he had never stopped blaming me for being a real son when I really ought to have been born in a laboratory. There were worse things in life.

My eyes stung, and I looked away from the man to hide it. I held my breath until it eased.

When I looked back, he was watching. "My name is Kadar," he said.

I swallowed to loosen my throat. "My father's name is Kadar."

"I know." He sighed, and held his hand out to me again. When I took it, he pulled me to him, and touched my face and kissed me on the mouth.

I had never been kissed before. It caught me by surprise, and at the same time it didn't. My body tingled, and it was exciting and scary both. He held my head with one hand and rubbed my chest with the other. He mouth tasted strongly of the sharbat, and his tongue was wet and strange. I let him do it, but resisted when he tried to pull me down on top of him.

"I don't want to," I said. My voice sounded loud in dead air of the tent. I sat back on my heels, and unconsciously wiped my mouth.

Kadar's heavy eyebrows were drawn together as he looked at me. "Maybe it's not about what you want."

Suddenly I wished I hadn't taken my shirt off. I felt hot and knew I was flushing a dark red. "You won't touch me again," I whispered, but it had no voice behind it.

He caught hold of my hand again. "Christ, don't act like I'm raping you. I saw how you looked at me."

It was him swearing by Christ more than anything that startled me back into my wits. I knew very well what the Qur'an said about- about what I'd just done. That fear overrode the others, and I stood too quickly, wrenching away from him.

"Please don't tell anyone," I whispered, and left the tent.

I had sinned. I ran out into the desert, and when I couldn't see the fire anymore I fell to my knees and I prayed for the first time in weeks.

If Father ever found out, I was dead. I cried then for the first time in years.

Stories are thick with meaning. You can fall in love with a story for what *you* think it says, but you can't know for certain where it will lead your listeners. If you're telling a tale to teach children to be generous, they may fix instead on the part where your hero hides in an olive jar, then spend the whole next day fighting about who gets to try it first.

People take what they need from the stories they hear.  "The tale is often wiser than the teller."

- from the diary of Quatre Winner

I left the camps after six months. I never saw Kadar again.

Home had never felt so strange. I felt closed in by the walls. The marble floors didn't absorb my footfalls the way sand did. There was an absence of sound, of breezes and people laughing and joking. The air conditioning made me feel frozen, and the lamps made me blink and squint.

"You look different," Aamir told me, bending to turn the hot water spigot. I laid my clothes on the toilet with a weird kind of sadness; they were patched and worn now, having lived on me constantly for half a year. I knew that by morning they'd be gone. Probably the servants would burn them.

I took off my socks. "What do you mean?"

Aamir straightened and turned to face me. "Just different," he said. "Older."

I hesitated, then nodded. "Thanks."

He moved, and I climbed into the bathtub. The water felt foreign. I hadn't taken a real bath in months- everyone knew better than to waste the water. I drew my knees up to my chest, and held them there.

Aamir did something he had never done before. He poured shampoo into his own palm, and washed my hair for me. "Tilt your head back," he murmured.

"It's August," I said. "Aren't you going to work at Mudbowl?"

"Father won't let me." He said it without inflection.  "Guess I'm going to look after you a little longer."

I wiped suds out of my eyes, and looked up at him. "Do you mind?"

He laughed. "Not so much."

He brought me a shirt and a pair of trousers I had used to like. The shirt cuffs left an inch of wrist showing, and the waistband of the trousers fell loose around my hips. I held them up with one hand.

Aamir silently handed me a belt. I grinned.

He sat with me on my bed, and curled his arms around a pillow. I knew I wouldn't be able to sleep tonight, on a surface so soft. When I said so, Aamir replied, "Drag the blankets on the floor, then. I'll come in the morning and put them back on the bed so no one knows."

"Okay."

"What was it like, Quatre?"

I thought about that for a long time. "It was worth it."

"My father says that yours feels bad about sending you away so long. The servants were calling it 'the exile.' Your sister, Dunyazad, told him to call you back."

"If he listened, it's a first," I smiled.

Aamir was serious. "He listened. They argued about it for a whole week. She refused to come to dinner, and she forbade your other sisters from going too."

I was shocked. "She didn't! He must have cursed her."

"He wasn't happy." He leaned back against the wall, and stretched out his legs. "She's a very bold woman," he added. "It's too bad she's so much older."

"You like her?" I had never thought of any of my sisters as *likeable,* exactly. I supposed they were pretty- some were beautiful- but they were my sisters.

"Not in that way." His large eyes met mine. "I'm not into girls."

Six months ago I might have blinked. Now I didn't, and he was the one to blush. "You knew?"

"No," I replied truthfully.

"Does it bother you?"

I thought of the night I had cried in the desert. "I don't know."

He was chewing the inside of his cheek. "Is there a girl that you like, Quatre?"

"No."

He hugged the pillow tightly to his chest. "Have you ever kissed anyone?"

I took up my own pillow. "Yes."

"Someone in the desert?"

I had spent the night in the desert crying myself to sleep. Kadar had ignored me the next day, and after that he only spoke to me on the rare occasions we ran into each other. "Yeah. Someone... older."

"Did you like it?"

The real reason for my tears that night, that I had only admitted to myself afterwards. "Yes."

Aamir stood, and went to the tall bureau opposite the bed. "Your father had them install a televid. It's supposed to be an apology." He turned to look at me, and there was a shyness there that I had never seen in him before. "Want to watch for a while?"

Suddenly I felt shy myself. "Sure." I smiled.

He came back to the bed with the remote clicker, and this time he sat next to me. He turned on the vid, and flipped through the available channels. He paused on a news station, and lowered the remote.

A man was speaking. He looked young. He wore a Federation uniform, and his expression was serious. His eyes looked very blue.

"Who's he?" I asked.

"Treize Khushrenada." Aamir pointed toward the screen. "He's started a group called the Specials. He's supposed to be the best new mind in the military. They call him a genius."

He had red hair and blue eyes. When he looked at the camera, it felt like he was staring straight through the screen at you.

"Where's he from?" I took the control and turned it up. "His voice is funny."

"It's a dub. He's from New Germany, I think."

The deep voice of the dubber was describing a plan for alliance. "We cannot allow the colonies to be our distant cousins," Khushrenada said. "The day will come when disaster results from our negligence in maintaining our close kinship. If we head it off now, we can prevent the day when brother must inevitably fight brother for dominance, for resources, for space in which to live. For survival."

"It sounds like he doesn't support the Federation," I said.

Aamir shrugged. "Maybe he doesn't. Who does, anymore?"

"I beg the colonial resistance to put down their arms," he continued. "The Federation will recognize peaceful intent and respond in kind. The colonies will then be able to rejoin Earth in alliance and brotherhood, and both sides will benefit from a peaceful and harmonious exchange of economy and ideology."

I frowned. I wasn't sure what he meant- did he want the colonies to surrender? I knew that most of L2 was occupied now, and sometimes at dinner Father talked about how the Fed was squeezing trade agreements out of the L4 miners at every turn. Or did he mean the Federation would stay on Earth and stop trying to force the colonies into compliance?

Aamir changed the channel, and settled on a music show. We watched that for a while, and he seemed to forget Treize Khushrenada entirely. I tried, but I couldn't. Something in his look held me.

"Hey," I said suddenly. "Who is that man, exactly?"

"Who?" He looked at me.

"Treize whatever his name was."

Aamir shrugged. "Some colonel or something. Why? What are you thinking?"

I didn't know. It was just an odd feeling of... premonition, maybe. Uneasiness.

"You're tired." He stood, and turned off the vid. "Take off the trous and hand them over. You want anything to drink before I turn off the light?"

"No." Suddenly I was tired. Exhausted. I dragged as I crawled under the sheets, and closed my eyes to listen to Aamir move around my room, closing drawers and running water in the bathroom. He put a glass on the small table beside my bed, and said in a whisper, "It was good to see you again, Quatre."

I opened my eyes, but the light was already out. "You too, Aamir."

Sometimes when you wish a thing and then it comes true, you discover that maybe you didn't think through your wish all the way to the end. Like in old tales when a jinn grants a wish that somebody made lightly. Then, once they have it- the thing that they had wished for- they realize they didn't really want it after all.

My auntie Chava used to say that wishing has power. That when you wish for something you are concentrating on it. And when you concentrate on a thing, you help to bring it about.

You have to be very, very careful what you wish for.

- from the diary of Quatre Winner

Things between my father and I eased, after I returned to Winner Estate. It wasn't so much that a truce was declared as that the fight had gone out of him. I had my sister Dunyazad to thank for it, though I never did. She and her husband and children left L4 for one of the satellites. Her husband became a manager there, and we saw very little of them. That had happened with some of the other oldest girls, and I though I had used to think that Father let them go because he didn't care what they did, I could see now that he let them leave because he knew they were unhappy.

Life became very different for me. The trial- or The Exile, as the servants still called it- of the desert months had changed me a great deal. Everyone saw it and had some remark about it, even Sulaiman. In the first bout he disarmed me in seconds. But in the second go, our hilts locked. In the past, he had always used his weight and height to bear down on me and force me to the floor, and it was always over once I was on the floor. It was the worst possible position for someone small, like me. But that day, when our hilts locked, I ground my teeth together and I resisted his push with every ounce of power in me. And I didn't go down.

When Sulaiman broke away, I could see his surprise. Though my arms ached and my knees trembled, and he disarmed me again in minutes, I knew I had won.

Mister Wycliffe said my algebra had improved with the break, and moved onto calculus. He gave me a calculator.

I was rusty at my instruments, but Miss Veronica seemed more interested in hearing stories about the desert crews. She gave me a gift- blank sheets of score paper. She even played a recording for me that someone had sent her, of a new composer from L1 who was very experimental and interesting.

Best of all, I didn't have to go to Fadi anymore. Mister Wycliffe would oversee my learning of French.

With the weight of my studies improved, I had more time in the afternoons. I had been back for a week my father summoned me to his office. As I took up stance in the foyer of his building, I realized that it didn't bother me like it normally did to be kept waiting. For the first time I really looked around, and wondered what they did in here. I had never actually thought about what my father did before.

When he called me in, I bowed, and he gestured to a chair. I took it, but I was a little stunned. He had never let me sit in his presence before, except at dinner.

With even more shock, I saw his face for the first time in a long time. He looked much older than I remembered, and I wondered how long it had been since I'd really seen him. There was grey in his thick hair, and lines carved around his eyes and mouth that made him look... sad.

I stood, and went to the small kitchenette on the far wall of his office. I took ice from the refrigeration unit, and opened a bottled water into a glass. I took it back his desk, and handed it to him.

He stared at the glass, then at me. I met his eyes, another thing I hadn't done in longer than I could recall. He squared his shoulders, nodded gruff thanks, and drank half of the water. "Please sit, Quatre," he said.

When I had, my father sighed, and rubbed the condensation on the outside of the glass against his palm. "Your birthday is in two weeks," he said. His dark eyes moved restlessly around the room. "I wanted to ask- I wanted to ask you- if there was anything you... wanted."

My throat went dry. "No, sir," I replied, with as much voice as I could muster.

He put down the glass, and rubbed his moustache. "Nothing?" He waved his hand. "Don't hold back for fear of me, boy." There was an awkwardness in him suddenly. "I won't refuse."

Did I want anything? This opportunity was unprecedented, and a year ago I'd have killed for the chance just to deny him, to reject his overtures as I'd always felt he rejected mine. I would have said something awful like "it's too late to try and be a real father." I would have relished it.

Now it made me want to cry. I struggled to control myself, to be a man.

When I thought I could speak, the effort of maintaining a thin note of humor cost me all my strength. "I never did get that pony you promised, Father."

He looked up quickly. His moustache twitched, and then he smiled.

My father smiled at me.

"You're big enough for a horse, now," he murmured. "Well. We'll see."

My breath caught.

He lifted a manilla folder- he was so fond of them- and held it out to me. "Tomorrow I'm going into the City. You're coming, as well. Have Aamir attend you. Read that over, as you'll be sitting in on some meetings with me. If you do well, I'll give you a free hour to explore."

I took the folder with a hand that felt numb. "Yes, sir."

He nodded, and his eyes slid away from mine. "Dismissed."

I thought my legs would fold before I could close his door, but somehow I set one foot before the other until I was back in the false sunlight of the outdoors, on the path back to the family side of the estate. I paused beside a tree, and walked around its trunk to the backside hidden from the path. I slid down between two huge roots, hugged the folder to my chest. And then I wept.

Just as Father had dictated, Aamir and I were waiting the next morning. He had some of his junior partners with him, a tall Earth-born man called Chip who headed finances, and Zahida, his personal assistant. Father seemed preoccupied; if I had been hoping for a moment of dazzling connection or a secret, pleased glance, I was disappointed. Aamir and I fell into step behind him, and climbed in first to take the back bench in the dark-windowed van that waited outside the business entrance. The adults talked in low voices to each other all during the long drive to the City.

I had only been to the City twice before. Winner was stationed far along the curve from it, but even as a child I knew about it. Some of the servants came from there, and some of Father's business was run there. It was the largest inhabited area of L4 Prime, and I'd heard you could get anything in the universe that you wanted there. I was very nervous. The most people I'd ever seen had been three years ago when four delegations from the other colonies had met with a diplomatic corps from Earth on the Winner property. That had been nearly four hundred people- at least eight hundred, once you added in the staff of Winner, the families of the staff, and the employees of the business and their families. I had felt stifled then, and the City housed almost a million.

When we could see the first buildings appear on the horizon, I found myself longing for the emptiness of the desert. Not that the desert had been empty... but my chest felt tight as I remembered the nights in the open when you felt like there was nothing between you and all of space.

The drive to get to the City had been long, but driving through it to our destination took even longer. Traffic was heavy- I had never even seen traffic before- and soon we passed through residential areas into the business sector. There were skyscrapers on every side, and it took a lot of control not to press up against my window with my mouth hanging open like a yokel. It helped that Aamir looked entirely calm and bored.

And then suddenly we were pulling into a parking garage. Father, Chip and Zahida exited the van with their briefcases and hats, and Aamir and I climbed out after. Chip put his hand on my shoulder, and said, "Well, boys, here we are. You two eat breakfast yet?"

"Yes, sir," Aamir replied politely.

"Good, good. Now, when we get inside, you two are going to have to entertain yourselves for a while- about an hour and a half. They'll find a room to put you in. Then there's a tour, which you'll join us on. Lunch, a little meet and greet, and then more afternoon meetings. Think you can handle it?"

We nodded obediently.

Chip slapped me lightly on the back, then went off after Father.

Aamir grinned at me. "If this is what you have to look forward to, maybe I don't envy you so much."

I shoved him, and we both laughed. We ran to catch up with the adults.

The meetings were boring, but I didn't allow myself to drift. The men that my father was meeting with represented not just business interests on the colony, but on Earth, too, and I'd come to think that I couldn't discount Earth. The speech I'd heard a week ago by that Treize Khushrenada was still in my mind. I had heard snippets replayed sometimes at night, and there was something about it that just- I couldn't say even to myself. Made me feel like there was something under my nose that I was missing.

Chip gathered his papers around four and leaned back in his chair with a sigh. "Look, here's how I see it. It would be extremely beneficial to us to take on the Federal commission. I don't think that moral protestations will do us any good. The Federation isn't just reaching into the colonies- it's arrived. It's better to be a partner than to miss the boat."

My father was scowling. I knew Aamir was bored, but suddenly I wasn't. Something about that speech by the Specials leader was clicking in my head with what I was hearing from my father's men. I wasn't sure what conclusion was forming in my head, but I knew it was there, and I unconsciously leaned forward and tightened my grip on the arms of my chair.

Suddenly Zahida turned to me. "What do you think, Quatre?"

Aamir glanced at me, surprised, and suddenly a roomful of adults were looking at me, waiting for my reply. I turned red.

"Me?" She only nodded. I searched for words. "I... I think..."

My father was already looking away. He reached for his watch, laid out on the table where he could see it, and fiddled with the gold band.

I gripped the arms of my chair so tightly my bones ached. "I think Chip is wrong. L2 probably thought they were just taking the easy road, and now they're overrun and not even in control of their own government. And the Federation may say that the commission is only for purposes of exploration or relief on Earth, but no one is gullible enough to believe it."

My father nodded slowly.

"They want weapons," I said. "And no one is gullible enough to believe that they don't have the resources to modify a machine of peace that we build for them with our ore. They're militant and they want to make us expend our principals to build them an army to subdue ourselves."

Zahida let out a snort. "There you have it, Chip. He's got it in one."

Chip wasn't pretending to be friendly now. The glare he cast at me was sullen and rude. "The Federal representatives have provided any file we ever asked for," he told me. "They have nothing to hide. And I would hardly call L2 'overrun.' If anything, it's the rebels causing all the problems there. The Federation only provided a trained police force to aid the colonial government."

"They are a military organization." My father answered. "I agree with my son. We will withhold our support of the project."

"Kadar, we can't afford that!" Chip stood, alarmed, and reached for the pile of charts and folders in the middle of the table. "If we let this commission go to someone else, we stand to lose not just the profits from that, but possibly all related commissions. We could make it through a few dry years, sure, but what happens when the Council decides to exercise their right to accept the commissions on behalf of the colony? Are you going to boycott? It would be suicide!"

"I will not contribute to a war effort," my father replied.

Chip controlled himself with an effort. "Kadar," he said, his voice low and solemn. "It's wonderful that you include your son on these deliberations. He needs to learn the ropes and no one denies that. But he *is not* equipped to make decisions without all the information, and no one expects a *child* to be able to put together the very complex layers that we have been trained to understand. Certainly his suggestions are entertaining." His eyes settled on me for a moment. "But not to be taken seriously."

"Enough." My father stood. "If you think I base my own decision purely on my son's advice, you are mistaken." He gathered papers into his briefcase, and snapped it closed. "Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your time. We will not be accepting the Federation's request for the new mining season."

On that signal, the representatives packed up their schedules and progress reports and followed my father out, all talking in low murmurs to each other. Aamir turned to me, smiling. "You did well, I think," he whispered.

I smiled back, but I felt limp. I had never been allowed to speak at these meetings, and surely never asked for my opinion. Had my father's father ever done the same to him?

Chip stopped beside my chair. "Stand up," he said.

I looked around. The room was empty except for Aamir and I. Slowly, I stood.

"You listen to me," he said, and put a hand on my arm.  His fingers dug into my flesh. "I know you've fooled your father into thinking you're the mature and wonderful little son he's always wanted. Kadar is a good man and he's willing to forget the monster you've been all your life. I'm not your father, though, and I don't feel any obligation to believe your little performance."

"I'm getting Master Winner," Aamir interrupted, and shoved back his chair.

"Sit down, kid," Chip snapped. "This isn't any of your concern." His eyes never left me. "You may think it's fun to play around with your father's company. I'm not laughing. I refuse to be set back by some game-playing brat like you, and after I fix this mess, the first thing I'm going to do is see to it that Kadar does the sensible thing and have you sent to a boarding school on the other side of the universe from this business."

I tried to stare him down, but he was hurting my arm and he was hitting on my fears. All the triumph I'd felt when Father agreed with my reasoning evaporated, and the words "boarding school" echoed in my ears. Would he really send me away? I had no Dunyazad to stick up for me now. Chip might really convince him. Maybe Father's good mood would change and he'd listen to Chip...

Chip let me go and walked to the door. "Go find something less important to screw with, Quatre." He shut the door behind him.

I sank back into my chair, and realized I was shaking.  I hugged my arms around my chest and made myself breathe normally.

Aamir made a rude gesture. "That was completely unfair."

I made myself stand and settle into calm. "No. He's right. I was awful and I'm just reaping what I sowed." My head hurt suddenly, and the moment I let myself think about it my eyes filled. I pinched myself viciously until they cleared. "He just told it how he sees it."

"He's wrong." Aamir sounded so blessed sure, and it made me feel a little better. "Kids are supposed to be awful, anyway. If adults held that against us for the rest of our lives no one would ever be able to grow up."

I nodded, but I didn't trust myself to reply.

"Your father said we could have an hour to wander around the City," he said. "Come on. We're going to make the best of it. I'll show you where to get the best roasted peanuts and you can pick out a birthday gift for your sister Clara."

I nodded again, and let him lead the way.

Once Aamir got going, he was as efficient as his father. He collected one of the building's doorguards to chaperone us, and set off down the street at a march. I followed, but my feet were dragging. I kept imagining that Chip was talking to my father and telling him about Swedish boot camps for snotty children.

I tried to hold on to my preoccupation, but as we left the business district and hit the street markets, it was like stepping into another world. There was so much to stare at- people of every color and shape and size were out in the middle of streets or manning wooden carts and kiosks. They sold everything from fruit and meats to beads and dolls and handguns and clothing. Aamir had obviously been here often, and he wove through the crowd much more quickly than I would have if I'd been left to myself. Once, when he had to double back to fetch me away from a stall hawking video equipment, he reminded me that we only had an hour.

We took a sharp detour down a side alley, and Aamir came to a stop in front of a vendor. The smell of roasted chestnuts was so strong that my mouth watered.

"My treat," Aamir murmured, and paid for two paper packets bursting with hot nuts. Now we took our time, walking and eating. I knew I would have to eat dinner when I got back to the house, so I gave half of my packet to our chaperone.

"Most of the market isn't worth anything," Aamir told me. "This is a better area." He pointed around us. "What does Clara like?"

Clara was older than me by a year. We hadn't always gotten along, but now I helped her with her homework and I had covered for her a few times when she had started kissing one of Father's interns and nearly been caught.

"She likes blue," I replied. "And those butterfly hair clips. She's always wearing them."

"Let's try here." He led me to a stall set back against a tall building, where a young woman was piercing a girl's ears. It looked painful to me, and I concentrated on the racks of hair things.

I purchased four different kinds of clips, and on consideration, a pair of earrings that had little chips of blue glass in them. I could have afforded a better gift- the crew had given me a leaving gift of a hundred dinars even though I hadn't been earning wages- but the earrings were pretty and I knew Father would probably buy her real jewelry.  At another stall I bought her a soft blue silk scarf with lilies embroidered on the edges, and had the vendor wrap it in purple tissue.

"We only have a few minutes before we should head back," Aamir said. He stood at the other side of the scarf stall, fingering a shirt of dark green silk. I had seen the style- Father had an Indian friend from the other side of the colony who wore loose and flowing clothes like that, and wooden sandals with laces made of hemp. I left the cashier to stand beside Aamir, and brushed my fingers over the winding pattern of light brown on the sleeves.

"Do you like it?" I asked.

Aamir shrugged, but I could see he did. "Get it," I said.

"No." He dropped his hand. "We should probably get moving. There's no sense in pissing off your father by being late." He left to get our door guard from where he was loitering outside a shop selling pictures of famous movie stars.

I took the shirt down from the rack, and brought it back to the cashier. "This too, please. Can you wrap it?"

"Quatre Winner?"

I looked to where my name had been called, and saw a short, rotund man wrapped head to toe in a thawb and kibrs like a Bedouin- except no Bedouin had come into space because the herds had never been able to survive in the colonial environment.

"How do you know me, sir?" I asked, accepting my bag from the cashier.

"I remember you." He rubbed a hand through his thick, dirty beard. "Told you once I'd need a place to hide, said I'd look you up. You promised."

I knew him then. My hand went to my shoulder, to the tiny, puckered scar that would always remain from the bullet that I had taken for Rashid Manguanac. I remembered him, all right-- he'd called himself a mad scientist, and he hadn't gone back to Earth with the prisoners. I stared, and would have said something- I didn't know what, but something- but Aamir called.

"I have to go," I said slowly. "I... "

"Go, go." He waved a hand with long yellow nails. "Found you now. I'll find you again."

I joined Aamir and the older man, and forced myself not to look back at the strange man in the stall. Together we headed back to my father's building and from there to home.

At dinner that night, I searched my father's face for some sign that he was thinking of sending me away again. He had brought the newspaper with him, though, and remained absorbed in that. I couldn't read him. I went to bed with much to think about, and didn't sleep til dawn.

There are many schools of thought on how to pick a ripe melon. The thumpers give a sharp rap and listen for a hollow sound. The sniffers claim they can nose out a ripe melon by smell. The gazers judge by color- a yellow hue beneath the fine, pale netting on the skin of the fruit.

My auntie Chava taught me to inspect the scar at the stem end. If it is well callused and sunken just enough, the melon will be good and sweet.

- from the diary of Quatre Winner

The next day I was tired and out of sorts. I dragged through morning classes, and used lunch to visit my sister and deliver her gift. She put it with the others and told me she would open them all after dinner, if I wanted to come.

I was soundly beaten in fencing, but the drive to do the extra practice that would correct my sluggishness was just missing. I couldn't bring myself to care. I washed up, and wandered around the house and the garden. An hour later I was staring up at my father's second floor office window, and I gave into reality. I needed to talk to him.

I let his assistant know I was waiting, and stood looking out the window bay. The line of the desert was just visible on the tiny curve; a slash of tan-color. My chest felt a little hollow as I gazed at it. The desert would always be a special place to me now. I wondered if Earth's deserts would feel the same.

"Quatre?" It was the assistant, looking apologetic. I knew before she even opened her mouth.

"He's too busy, isn't he."

She hesitated, then nodded. "Can it wait? If it's really urgent I can ask him again-"

"No, please don't go to the trouble." I tugged at my vest, then put my hands in my pocket. "Good day, ma'am." I turned to leave.

Chip was just coming in the door, carrying a lunch bag. He stopped when he saw me, and any hopes that I'd allowed to live that he hadn't said anything to Father died when he smirked at me.

I was going to be sent away again.

I held Chip's eyes in a pathetic display of dignity until he closed his own office door. What good was my defiance? He'd won. Father's overtures had just been a gesture of apology, like the televid. He was over it and now he was over me. Hadn't I known he'd've left me in the desert for the rest of my life if Dunyazad hadn't fought him?

I left the office and went straight back to my room. I threw the door shut, and hunted through my closet for my suitcase. I left half my clothes on the floor and threw whatever looked comfortable into the carry bag. I wouldn't stay to be sent away again.

When I emerged from the closet, I stopped short. Hashim was in my room, and Aamir behind him.

Hashim said, "I heard the door slam."

I straightened my spine so quickly that even Fadi would have been proud. "Tell him what you like," I said, softly and evenly. "Tell him you did your best to keep me here. But I'm not staying."

Aamir started to say something, but his father cut him off. "I will lock you in this room if I have to."

"Then I'll climb out the window." I put the suitcase on the bed and started stripping off my uniform. I kicked my loafers away and laced up the boots I'd found in the closet, half a size too small and pinching my toes. I threw the tie onto my pillow and the ugly grey vest after it.

Hashim came and laid a hand on my suitcase to hold it down as I reached for it again. "Then I will have bars put on the window."

"What investment do you have in my being here or far away?" I demanded. "You *hate* me. Your life would be easier without me!"

He said nothing, but he took his hand off my bag and stepped back.

"What about me?" Aamir threw a frustrated look at his father and waved his hands in the air. "What do you think will happen to me if you're not here for me to serve?"

I hesitated, then went to the bathroom and opened the top drawer beneath the sink. Normally it held spare hand towels, but sometimes I had hidden things in there under the top layer. Now I took out the package I'd bought at the market, and I left the bathroom and held it out toward Aamir.

"Take it. Please," I said.

He did, and ripped a hole in the tissue and looked inside. The skin of his neck flushed. "I didn't ask you to buy me gifts."

"I know. Sometimes I do things without being asked." I grabbed my suitcase. "I'm going to the City. I don't know what I'll do when I get there, but I don't plan on sticking around here just to be dragged back and sent to some- some school somewhere." I hadn't meant to say that, but it was out before I could take it back. My face burned. I grabbed for the door handle and missed, and slammed it with a fist. Pain lanced up my arm.

Hashim spoke quietly behind me. "Is that what you think will happen?"

"I've been given that impression, yes." I wrapped my smarting hand in my shirt. Allah, this was humiliating. I couldn't even run away properly.

"Do you think your father would do such a thing?"

I stared at the door. "He did it once."

Aamir grabbed my arm, the same place Chip had yesterday. He spoke in a whisper directly in my ear, so softly that his father, mere feet away, wouldn't hear.

"You want him to love you?" he hissed. "Don't destroy any chances you might have left by doing something childish and regrettable. You may be right and he may feel moved to send you away twice- but he only had one calling back in him."

A hot salty liquid burned on my lips. It was as if all the crying I hadn't done in my life was surfacing now and demanding release. I wiped tears from my face with my sleeve, and refused to look at him.

"Give me the suitcase," Aamir murmured. "I'll unpack it and we'll clean up in here. No one will ever know."

"And what if he sends me away? What if he does, Aamir?" I turned to face him. "What will I do?"

His eyes were so deeply brown they looked almost black, and to my surprise I saw they were red- rimmed as mine probably were. "Then you go," he said.  "You go and you endure it like a man."

"Master Winner, your father, was sent away once."

I looked beyond Aamir to Hashim. I wiped my face again. "What?"

The tall grey man who had served my father at least the length of my life crossed his arms over his chest. "Your father was a wild thing when he was your age. His father, your grandfather, was at his wit's end trying to rein him in. He sent Kadar away when he was seventeen." He sighed. "Your father doesn't know any better than to do what was done to him."

There was an ache in my chest that felt so permanent it made me want to die. "That doesn't make it right," I tried to say, but my voice failed.

"No one says it does." Aamir took the bag from me, and I let him have it. "Look. Nothing says for certain he'll do it. Let's go to the City, you and I. We'll just have an evening out and enjoy ourselves." He glanced away. "That's all right, Father?"

Hashim nodded.

"See?" He took my elbow and guided me back to the bed. "Now take off those silly boots and put on a sensible shoe. We'll go right away and we'll even clean up later. Okay?"

I bent slowly to untie my laces. When I looked up, Hashim had gone, and Aamir was slipping the green Indian shirt over his head. He grinned, and smoothed it over his chest.

"Well?" he asked, holding out his arms.

I suddenly felt absurd. I started to laugh, and if it was watery at first, it eased into genuine giggles. "Thank you," I said.

He came to the bed and took my hands. And then he kissed me softly on the mouth. He pulled back, searching my eyes; then he cupped my face with his fingers and kissed me again. This time I wasn't scared.

In old tales, there is a power in words. Words are what you use to summon a jinn, or to open an enchanted door, or to cast a spell. You can do everything else perfectly, but if you don't say the words right, it won't work.

If you know how to use words, you don't have to be strong enough to wield a scimitar or have armies at your command.

Words are how the powerless can have power.

- from the diary of Quatre Winner

I went to the City frequently after that. No one ever stopped me, and Sulaiman quietly began to move into advanced studies with one of my sisters. I don't believe he ever told Father I had started skipping, he was that glad to have an interested student.

One late afternoon, I slipped away on my own to the market. I had purposefully dressed down- some of the vendors had started to recognize who I was and treated me differently. My hair was the worst give away. I knew better than to cut it, but I did buy a hat to cover it. Without the blonde to give me away, I could have been anyone, browsing along the stalls.

But it didn't fool the Bedouin. Instead, he fooled me.

On my third solo trip to the market, I had been wandering aimlessly for some time. I was startled out of contemplation of a painting of the Sahara Desert on Earth by a tug on my sleeve. I glanced down, and focused on a girl who couldn't have been more than six years old.

I knelt, and fished a taffy out of the bag I had bought earlier. "Hello," I said solemnly, letting her snatch it from my hand. "Are you lost?"

The paper wrapping frustrated her, and she handed it back long enough for me to remove it. "What's your name?," she commanded, grabbing back the candy and sticking into her pink little mouth.

"I'm Quatre," I said. "What's-"

"Help me find my daddy?"

"Sure." I stood, and offered her my hand. She took it and began to tug me along. "Are you taking me to where you saw him last?"

She nodded, industriously sucking on her taffy. "Right this way."

"What's your daddy look like?" I asked her, but she didn't answer. She was pulling me around a corner, and up a side street. "What's your name?"

She stopped in front of a butcher's shop, and knocked on the door. A man came to the window, glanced at her, and quickly opened the door.

"This him?" he asked her, his eyes coldly raking me over.

"Yes. Can I go play now?"

He nodded, and the little girl ran past us to a staircase to the left.

"*You're* Quatre Winner?" the man demanded. "You don't look old enough."

I was edging back to the door. "I wish," I lied quickly. Surreptitiously I glanced around me- no one between me and the door. "My name is Aamir..."

He looked disappointed. "Trust a kid," he muttered. "All right. Scat."

I needed no further encouragement. I turned and reached for the door handle.

Chip, my father's accounts manager, was standing in the open doorway.

"You," he said.

I stepped back out of his reach, just in time to avoid the grab he made for me. "What are you doing here?" I gasped, ducking away from his hands.

"I'll ask you the same question," he retorted grimly. I hadn't forgotten the man behind me, but I couldn't dodge both of them in such limited space. The first man caught me by the scruff of the neck, and Chip ripped off my baseball cap.

"Get him in the back," Chip ordered. "Before anyone else sees him."

I knew better than to fight. Chip would like nothing more, I was sure, than to have an excuse to hit me. My nerves were singing, though, with every apparently-calm step that I took. We walked through the shop, and I caught more of a look than I wanted of sharp knives making short work of animal carcasses. It seemed like a preview of what Chip was going to do with me now that I had seen him at whatever foul business he kept on the side.

Whatever it was. Maybe he just likes red meat, I thought, and couldn't hide a self-mocking smile.

They led me to a storage room in the back, past the refrigeration units. Chip scowled at the other man until he left us, and then he locked the door behind the man.

"Now I want to know," Chip started, "exactly how you found this place. Were you sneaking around or did you just stumble on it?"

"He did neither."

Chip's eyes went past me, and I turned. Dimly, I knew that I ought to have been surprised; but I wasn't.

"Hello again," I said, and bowed to the Bedouin-who-wasn't-a-Bedouin.

His eyes gleamed amidst the pale folds of his face. He had been cleaned up since the last time. His beard had been trimmed to a goatee and slender moustache, and his hair was slicked back and hidden under a headdress. "Well met, young master."

Chip laid a heavy hand on my shoulder. "You know Quatre? How is that possible?"

"We're old friends." The fat man chortled into his chin and sat, groaning, behind a low table covered with blue sheets. Blueprints. Chip's hold on me prevented me from looking closer. "Let him go. No way to treat a guest."

"A *guest*?" Chip propelled me forward furiously. "Sit down," he growled at me. "Don't touch anything."

The table was surrounded by large cushions on legless couches, the kind some of the more traditional businesses my father worked with favored. I sat, tucking my feet beneath my thighs, and I reached for the top paper. The Bedouin let me take it, over Chip's protests.

"It's an mobile suit," I said, slowly. I took in the carefully pencilled details, and reached for another paper, and another.

"Not just any MS." Scowling ferociously, Chip crouched at the end of the table. "It would have been bigger and stronger than anything anyone's ever seen."

"Would have been?"

His eyes accused me. "The Federation commission for refined metals would have been the perfect cover," he bit out. "I already had the numbers ready to fix. By the time your father noticed we were mining far more than we needed, it would already have been built."

"A weapon of war." I tossed the papers down. "He would have had you-"

"What?" He sneered. "Fired? Kadar is a pacifist, but he's not a blind man. You said yourself that the Federation is on the verge of overrunning the colonies. You can't stop aggressive military action by lying down and waiting for the sword."

"You wouldn't have been able to hide something like this," I retorted, waving my hand to indicate the prints. "It's not something you can just throw a sheet over! My father tours the factories weekly. And once he saw, he wouldn't harbor something that aids the Federation!"

"Not the Federation," the Bedouin said. He drew my gaze back to him. "The Resistance."

I stared. But I had known before he said it.

Slowly, I picked up the drawing of the cockpit. "Who would pilot it?"

"You."

Chip made a sound deep in his throat that might have been a yell if he'd risked the volume. "Him?" He stood. "He's barely thirteen! He doesn't know the first damn thing about fighting a man's fight, about the kind of tactics we've been discussing! He needs five servants and a cheer section to do his homework!"

"That may have been true once," I snapped. I shoved to my feet and faced him off, foot taller that he was. "I'm not like that anymore."

"He faced off the Federation once already." The fat Bedouin spoke into his chest, his head bowed deeply as if in thought. "Took a bullet for a man he didn't know. And he flew like a natural."

I could see that Chip hadn't known that. I held my chin high and added nothing.

His protests were weaker now. "That's nothing that a thousand other men haven't done in the name of the colonies."

"None of them were eleven years old," said the Bedouin. "He is my choice."

"I think you're insane." Chip scrubbed a hand through his hair, making it stand up at angles. "He'll fold. He'll fold the first time they fire on him. And what if they capture him?" His eyes speared me. "It will ruin your father."

"He'll have time to get used to the idea." The Bedouin waved a pudgy hand. "You'll tell him, won't you, Quatre?"

I looked at him. Father would be furious. Aamir had warned me not to ruin my chances with him, and I had a feeling that this would do exactly that.

Chip threw my cap at me. "We're going back to Winner.  We'll *consider* the possibility, H. But don't hold your breath. Kadar will never allow it, and I don't disagree with him."

"Why?" The words were flowing out of my mouth, hot and angry, before I even thought them. "Because I'm a spoiled rich brat? Because I'm not good enough? Because you don't think I can do it?" I touched my chest, where the small puckered scar would always tell the tale of the bullet wound. "I *can* do it. I've spent more than a year trying to prove to people that I can do anything, take anything- trying to prove to my father." I drew in a calming breath, and forced myself to settle down. "The time for proving things is past," I said, making my voice soft and even, not cracking and furious. "I can do it, and Father isn't going to stop me from it."

The Bedouin- H- burst into rusty laughter. "Good man," he muttered, wiping his face. "Good man."

Chip was silent on the drive back. Maybe I hadn't proven myself, but I'd won a minor victory.

He'd listened.

Often, in the old tales, the humblest creatures turn out to be more powerful than you would ever expect. A ewe will outwit a jackal, for instance. Or a mouse will save a lion's life.

This is not just a storyteller's trick to make things interesting. Sometimes, it really does happen.

- from the diary of Quatre Winner

Aamir fetched me early on Thursday morning, before my lessons began. "Change first," he warned me, going into my closet and returning with long trousers and a simple linen shirt. "No, don't throw your uniform on the floor. Give it to me."

"What's going on?" I asked, shucking the short grey pants that I had put on like every other day and taking the trousers from him. "Am I in trouble?"

"Not as far as I can tell." He grabbed a brush off my bureau and attacked my hair. "Master Winner just ordered it. You're to meet him in the Mother Garden."

I was puzzled. The Mother Garden was a good fifteen minutes away, even if I ran. It was on the edge of the estate and I was almost never allowed there. Father sometimes held parties there, because it was close to the desert and the breezes.

Aamir put his hand between my shoulder blades and pushed me toward the door. "Don't keep the man waiting."

I did run, most of the way. I slowed to catch my breath and to fan myself, and paused outside the Garden gate to wipe sweat from my forehead and shove myself into a kind of calm- outwardly at least. I tried not to think about it, but I was nervous. I didn't put it past Chip to still be convincing Father to send me away, whatever hold the Bedouin had on him. And Father hadn't spoken to me in nearly two weeks.

I entered the Garden, and closed the gate behind me. I couldn't see Father anywhere. Uneasiness swirled in my stomach as I slowly wandered past the fountain and into the maze. Maybe he just wasn't on time? He always kept me waiting. But a glance at my watch said nearly twenty minutes had passed, and I couldn't keep still.

Then I heard something I had never before heard in my life, except on an old televid film. My breath caught in my throat as I dashed back the way I'd come. I cleared the last hedgerow and stopped short.

Father stood beside the fountain, holding the reins to a *horse.*

I felt dizzy. I inched forward, and laid a trembling hand on the beast's mane. "Father?" I whispered.

He watched me gravely. "Happy birthday, my son."

The horse snorted, and turned his head to snuffle my hair. I laughed despite myself, and stroked the coarse hair of his powerful neck, feeling the velvety muscle beneath the surface. "He's for me?"

"A Winner tries to always keep his promises." He watched us explore each other- the horse seemed less incredulous and mostly unimpressed. Father took sugar cubes out of his pocket and handed them to me, then held my wrist gently under the horse's nose. A huge wet tongue lapped them up immediately, and I laughed again. "They like that," my father explained. He cleared his throat, and glanced away. "What will you call him?"

I hesitated, smoothing the mane with my fingertips. One ear twitched towards me.

"May I have some time to think about it?" I asked finally.

Father nodded. "All the time in the world. The naming of things is important."

I thanked him, and bowed.

"I'll leave you with him," my father said. "No lessons today. Ride him all you want, and when you're tired, Hashim will show you where the temporary stable is. We'll get a good one built soon."

"Thank you." I breathed in the thick, pungent odor of the horse. "Father... " I turned to face him. "There's something I need to tell you."

The lines on his forehead deepened as he frowned. "Yes?"

Knowing I had to do it didn't make it easier. I clenched my hands into fists, and threw my shoulders straight.

"I want to join the Resistance," I said, and told him everything as steadily as I could manage.

He listened without interrupting. Whatever he thought of my words, I couldn't tell, and soon I couldn't bear to meet his eyes any longer. I finished with my gaze securely on my feet, and swallowed to ease a throat suddenly sore.

Silence stretched for so long I couldn't take it. "Please say something."

To my shock, I felt his hand move in my hair, so tenderly that tears sprung into my eyes. He stroked my cheek with his knuckle, and I lifted my head to look at him.

"I don't agree with your decision," he told me, his voice husky and choked. "But- I can see you've thought it through. And Allah knows you've never asked me for anything else. I won't fight you, Quatre."

Relief flooded my heart, and love, so great that it ached. One of the tears escaped my hold and fell, and he brushed it away with his rough thumb.

"Go ride your horse," he said, and tried to smile. "I expect a full report at dinner."

I grinned. "Yes, sir."

He nodded, and stepped back. Then he turned and walked briskly from the garden.

I gathered the reins in my hand, and fingered the gear on the horse's back. I did my best to imitate the cowboys from the old films, and stuck one foot in the stirrup. I grasped part of the saddle firmly, and heaved myself up. It wasn't smooth, but it got me on the horse, and I thrust my other shoe into the stirrup, and tried not to look at how far away the ground was.

The horse turned its head to look at me.

I clucked like the cowboys did, and gently nudged the huge round ribs I sat upon. "Give me a try, Kadar?"

He sucked in such a great breath that the ribs beneath me expanded, tossed his head, and took out of the garden at a run.

The End

(:./erin/horse)