The Marcher Lord (Over Guard) (22 page)

Elizabeth was smiling at him, leaning back on her arms
in a way that reminded Ian of her father.

“But no,” Ian went on, turning back and idly taking a few steps
toward the opening in the trees where the plains lay, “science doesn’t usually interest me. Not this kind anyway. I enjoy practical technology, things that can be put to good use. But it is amazing how efficient they are, what they do for this planet.”

“Makes for a waste of a planet,” Kieran muttered, still cantankerous, “never be able to do anything with it if the trees can’t come down.”

Kieran was just angry that Ian wasn’t leaving him and their charge alone. Brodie had taken his hint fairly quickly after they’d arrived, but Ian was ignoring his.

No,
Ian liked it like this. He watched a fast bird darting up and down over a particular place in the grass, noted a flurry of small climbing animals clambering after each other up, down and around a single tree some ways off. There were plenty of other planets to be developed; this one could be spared that.

“And you are both from
Wilome?” Elizabeth asked. “Is most of your company from there?”

“I’m not sure,” Ian frowned.

“Corporal Hanley is,” Kieran said, “Brodie and Rory aren’t. I don’t know about Corporal Wesshire or our superiors. I think it gives us a foot up on everyone else.”

“Is that so?” Elizabeth asked.

“Everyone else in the civilized worlds is trying to make it to Wilome,” Kieran said, “but we’re smart enough to know that it’s best to be coming from Wilome, not to.”

“Not one for the bustle and excitement,” Elizabeth decided.

“Or the smog,” Ian put in, “or the regular epidemics, the congested inoculation lines.”

“Well, I happen to love
Wilome,” Elizabeth laughed at Ian’s downward tirade, “I wish I could visit there more often.”

“Yes, well,” Kieran said, “
milady, I’m sure you get to frequent the nicer parts of the city. Our borough wasn’t all that bad, but you won’t catch me missing it.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Elizabeth sounded doubtful, “a company of little boys, so far from home. I’m sure it will set in eventually.”

“Devil take it,” Kieran scoffed, “not likely.”

“Yes,” Elizabeth agreed, her eyes narrowing some as she stared dow
n into the water. “I suppose it is all perspective. If you had grown up on a place like the Marches, a place like Gower, I imagine your opinions would be quite to contrast. Coming from a place like that to Wilome, it is a relative thrill to be among so much life, so much excitement.”

Ian carefully rested his chin on
his knees as he sat. “Your pardon, milady, but I would not have guessed you for one who enjoys that sort of excitement.”

“It does tire me,” Elizabeth admitted, swirling her fingers around the tips of the water, “especially when there are social obligations to fulfill. I will be so kind as not to inflict any of those sorts of details on either of you.”

“I seem to have heard Kanters is rather found of fashionable novels,” Kieran said, grinning.

“Only the best ones,” Ian countered offhandedly, making sure to note Elizabeth’s generally favorable reaction.

“No,” Elizabeth went on, drawing herself a little tighter, “it is the lack of silence I think. A person could go out of themselves most places on Gower and no one would know for years. But in Wilome, there is never any silence, so many voices going on about whatever they care about. Although, most of it is the drudgery, and they can’t possibly care for that, can they? I am not sure how most of Wilome lives at all, it is like a perpetual miracle. I imagine the problem on Wilome is not so much the chance of going out of one’s self without notice—it is that it would be so hard to find a place where anyone else would care.”

They were quiet for a noticeably short fraction of a minute. Ian was more concerned with deducing that Kieran didn’t know how to take that than
Ian was about giving his own response.

But eventually he broke the matter for the general good.

“Would you tell us what Gower is like?” Ian asked her.

“Have I
not already told you more than you wanted to hear about it?” she answered.

“No,” Ian said, gently urging her, “please tell us.”

“There is not much to tell,” she said. “The geography is varied, but is fairly warm and wooded around the capital, where we reside. There aren’t many inhabitants, no native population any longer. The Vels lived there for some years before we drove them out. It forms one of the leeward frontiers for Baldave. There is not much else to say.”

“What do people do for amusement there?” Ian asked.

Elizabeth smiled. “Most of the people we govern spend their time trying to subsist. There is a great deal of hunting, both for necessity and sport.”

“Your father must enjoy that,” Kieran said, “he’s an excellent hunter.”

“He grows easily bored of the local game,” Elizabeth idly flipped one of her feet out and back into the water, “and of all the things of our world that are so familiar. He spends a good deal of time in Wilome and elsewhere, and our mother especially loves it there. She’s from Wilome as well.”

Ian’s eyes were no longer so much on trying to imagine a place like Gower, a place like this
planet, only with a more Bevish sort of climate. His eyes were instead employed in the far less laborious job of watching Elizabeth’s lower limbs, feet moving up and down, over the surface of the water. Her skin there was even fairer, if possible, and her ankles not quite dainty, but excessively feminine. She suddenly stopped her motions though, and Ian pretended to be looking somewhere else, not sure if she had become aware of the direction of his thoughts.

It wasn’t so much
an issue any longer for him, even a common soldier, to see her ankles. The general tone of their conversation and atmosphere may very well have been a little too informal, but some of that could be accounted by Elizabeth Wester’s fairly unique status. She was well-versed in upper class etiquette and posture, but she was also decidedly born from a wilder kind of environment. The fact that she was here at all, taking Orinoco in stride said much for that. So it wasn’t very surprising to Ian that she wouldn’t be prone to hiding her lower extremities, at least in most cases. Ian knew through his mother’s generation, and many more before that, it had been extremely forbidden. That had relaxed, especially in the younger girls of the past several years. Ian was pretty glad that it was changing in that way, as he saw it as an impracticality, and though there were far more enlivening themes to consider, he found it difficult to deny the simple allure in Elizabeth’s thinly elegant, lowest joints.

Kieran was talking about all the places he was going to see through his career. Elizabeth turned back to
Kieran, and Ian wasn’t able to discern any signs that she had caught Ian looking—or at least that she had caught him looking and found anything unpleasant in it.

“And where exactly do you wish you see, Private
Kanters?” she asked.

“I’ll be content with whatever I’m given,” Ian said, taking the excuse of her attention to rove his examinations over her features again.
“I suppose … I suppose I must admit that I do want to see many places, so I’m glad that the Guard will allow me to do that. But I don’t think I have any places in particular.”

“Yes
, you do,” Elizabeth leaned forward. “It’s only a matter of deducing where you don’t want to go.”

“Maybe,” Ian said.

“The Fallola Isles?” Elizabeth asked. “The pools of Hesmesbi, the shores along Bullus?”

“Someday,” Ian said.

“The Dervish colonies?” Elizabeth pressed. “Tier, Fulmalla, or—”

“Orinoco,” Ian interjected, smiling.

“Not anymore,” Kieran corrected, sounding eager to be part of the conversation again.

“No,” Ian said, thinking, “I suppose not so much the Dervish planets. Perhaps the
Masomalore Ridge—yes, I’d like to see that first, if I had the choice.”

“There, you see?” Elizabeth said. “Everyone has preferences. Especially when they say that they don’t.”

Ian didn’t say anything.

“But what of the other ancient empires?”
Elizabeth asked. “Sesach? Kees?”

“I would like the
Sesach places as well,” Ian shrugged. “They were an effective culture.”

“My father said the
Kees Empire was the best,” Kieran said, “that everything else was just copying them. He went and saw Thesla as a boy, said there’s no place like it. That’s the first place I’m going to when I get the chance.”

“Well, I should go and see how things are getting along,” Ian said as he stood.

“Is there a hurry?” Elizabeth asked, watching him carefully.

Looking back down at her for a moment, he wondered what it was she saw when she looked at him like that.

“Probably not,” he said, “but Lieutenant Taylor might need some help with something by now. Thank you, milady, for the wonderful conversation,” he gave a short bow to her and then started off for the other side of the encampment.

“I thought that’s what the
Chax were for,” Ian heard Kieran mutter, and then their ensuing conversation was softly swallowed up by the underbrush Ian stepped through.

Keeping near the water’s edge and securely under the tassi trees, he reflected that it was almost too cool, especially when one had to
maintain the prospects of passing in and out of the protection throughout the day. To his right, ironically above the water, where much more of the sun was able to pass unchecked by the tassi trees, it was still very hot. It bit at the upper parts of that side of him, always buffeted, but never completely routed by the gentle movement of colder air that the trees pushed out and down from themselves. The ground that he moved about was more dry mud than anything, the hanging vegetation he had to push aside was a nuisance he didn’t pay much mind to.

Though he took care to drift away at a consistent clip, his thoughts didn’t do likewise from the
two people he had left behind. He only broke and looked back once, half-afraid, half-expecting them to be watching him, but of course they weren’t. From what little of their voices carried across the water, it sounded like Kieran was doing most of the talking.

Why the margrave’s daughter was giving any time at all to
someone so ridiculous was beyond Ian. It didn’t seem to sit with the impressions that she left in Ian, and there were so many of them—varied and enticing. He ran over the images of her again and again in his mind, the warmth of the curving of her smiling, the sweet-smelling air moving at the edges of her hair. That’s even what she seemed to be sometimes, a mass of pleasant impressions, but there was more, much more to her Ian knew, even instinctively. And even if Kieran was an overly competent soldier, which remained mostly untested in Ian’s view, he could find nothing in Kieran that would seem to suit what she wanted.

And though that certainly wasn’t something he knew
a lot about, he couldn’t help but think a lady like her would only be impressed by strength, in its various manifestations. And Ian knew that he would always have far more to offer of that than Kieran ever would.

Walking through the calm wilderness near the wa
ter, a contrasting scene rose to mind. It was full of pomp and noise, regal conversation and indoors, yet brightly lit with sunlight. Crowds of people richly dressed in vibrant colors, assembled in informal formalness, stretching along a robed path that led up to the throne where Elizabeth waited in full regalia, a sprawling rich coat and dress extending all around her. Marching up to her, in similarly smart apparel, he would kneel before her, and she would lower the sword first to one shoulder, and then the other to approving applause.

This brief but vivid image generated a smile on his face as he ducked under a particularly thick overhanging between a
clump of trees. Though fantasy it would always be, he greatly wished that something of that order would happen someday, soon.

It was perfectly
possible, he would only have to win her approval, even if circumstances of their lineages would prevent anything more. At the moment, his competition wasn’t too worrisome. He just had to want it.

But he did,
didn’t he?

Yes, at least somewhat.
But not entirely? He knew he wanted to win, but surely it was more than that. Surely as he grew to know the margrave’s daughter the better it would be. He did hope she would fall in love with him, even though that rang selfish, as it would probably eventually be difficult for her. It would be a great heap on Corporal Wesshire if Ian was able to secure the noble’s daughter, without the assistance of questionable means he might have to regret.

Then of course, he thought as he came within sight of the
brisa and the rest of their party lounging on the far side of the trees, there was a chance that he might fall in love with her. To be fair, he wasn’t sure that he’d ever seen a more beautiful girl. But still, he thought, it wasn’t likely. He didn’t have time for that right now.

“What sto?”
Ian called to his companions as he passed through the last few trees, running his fingers along the glassy, smooth bark as he calculated how much more the margrave’s daughter had been looking at him than Kieran to the sum conclusion that his life couldn’t presently get any better.