Read Online Price of Ransom by Kate Elliott - Free Book Online Page A

lock me up.” It was almost as if he was begging her. He sounded very young and frightened.
    “It’s only for a little while.” She moved toward him. “I’ll be here with you as often as I can, Kyosti, but you have to understand—”
    “Don’t lock me up. Please.” Like a broken recording or the decayed loop of the Forlorn Hope ’s distress beacon, he was simply repeating some phrase from his past that her movement to the door had triggered. He was not talking to her at all, really. “Don’t lock me up.”
    She had to look away. It was too agonizing to watch him deteriorate into someone confused, reduced to this kind of abject pleading. It was as if Kyosti was not even in the room with her anymore.
    “Don’t lock me up. Please.”
    And in any case, she had no choice.
    “I’m sorry,” she said, and she pressed the panel and left the room, coding it to lock behind her.
    In the outer room, the Mule still sat, waiting. Mercifully, it said nothing. Pinto had left. Before she had even had a chance to recover, the door slipped aside to admit Yehoshua and Aliasing.
    Lia’s eyes were red, puffed from tears. She had huddled in against herself. Small to begin with, she seemed on the verge of collapsing into nothing. She did not sit until Lily motioned her to the chair, where she sat gripping her knees, shoulders hunched, head down.
    At a nod from Lily, Yehoshua and the Mule left. Lily remained standing.
    “They won’t tell me how Jenny is,” said Lia at last, her voice so faint it almost dissolved into the hush of the cabin.
    “Do you think you deserve to know?” Lily demanded.
    For a moment she regretted the harshness of her words. Lia trembled, shrank, and put a hand up to cover her eyes. But lowered it again, although she still stared at the floor.
    “No,” she murmured. “I don’t deserve to know.”
    She stopped, but there was such a palpable air of her being about to go on, given enough resolve, that Lily kept silent.
    “They said they just meant to impound the ship and take everyone back to Arcadia to appear before a court. That’s the way it worked before, in military matters. My mother often dealt with the military arm, and any soldier of whatever rank was always given an appearance before a fair court.”
    Lia paused, catching her breath after this first effusion, and looked up at Lily as if hoping that the matter was now explained.
    “I don’t understand.” Lily paced to the door and back. “If you didn’t agree with the mutiny in the first place, why didn’t you ask to go with Machiko and the others when we put them off the ship? Fair court or not, I think you know that mutiny is comparable to treason and the penalty is death.”
    Lia did not reply immediately. She seemed to shrink farther into the couch, looking so insubstantial as to be almost nonexistent. Her cloud of dark hair fairly screened her face.
    “They said—” she began, and faltered. Her voice was so faint that Lily had to approach the edge of the couch to hear her. “They said Jehane had sent them, to bring me back to them. He sent me a private message, while we were still in orbit around Arcadia. Before your accident. Before Central fell. He said he would send for me, when he controlled the planet. He wanted me to be his—” Her voice caught, but she mastered the impulse to cry. “To be his consort.” The words, or some memory of Jehane or his message, seemed to give her strength. “But I didn’t hear anything else from him. And then Pinto and Paisley brought you back, and you were hurt so badly. They said Jehane tried to kill you, but …”
    “But you didn’t believe them,” Lily said, feeling tired. She wondered if Lia’s obvious, and long-repressed, love for Jehane had blinded her as thoroughly as Robbie’s idealism had blinded him.
    “No,” Lia admitted, sounding strangely matter-of-fact. “That someone else, one of his lieutenants, might have tried—I could believe that. But not Jehane.”
    Lily