The Coalition’s most decorated battle commander Caze Paladen is running out of time—personally and professionally. A shard of shrapnel embedded close to his spine threatens his life, and the resistance of Ziem’s people to Coalition rule threatens his career. Either way, Paladen is on borrowed time, unless he can find a way to win this war.
The legendary Spirit of the Mountain, widow Iolana Davorin—long believed dead—has the power of healing along with the blessing and curse of far-seeing vision. Following her path has saved Ziem so far, but cost her nearly everything, including the love of her children. Now, when she’s almost reclaimed her life, she must risk it all again and find a way to turn an honorable man into a traitor.
Caze Paladen holds her world and the lives of her children in his hands. Yet, she sees something in him that gives her hope, for both her home and her heart. If she can find the long buried spark of humanity in him and flame it to life again. If she can stop the rebels from killing him. . . .
Chapter 1
COALITION MAJOR Caze
Paledan knew he had reached the tipping point. That point at which all the grim
warnings from the Coalition doctors back on Lustros did not outweigh this
fierce need for physical action. Any action, as long as there was a lot of it,
and it exhausted him. Not in the way lack of sleep exhausted a person; he’d
been dealing with sleep deprivation for so long he barely felt it anymore. He
wanted—no, needed—to be physically exhausted again, in the way he had not been
for far too long.
The
two were linked, he knew. He’d had no trouble sleeping when he’d been able to
work his body to that point of collapse. Several hours of his own unique brand
of training, put together from methods distilled from any opponent who had
ever bested him or impressed him, had left his body with no choice but to
sleep.
But
he’d been unable to do so since that day on Darvis over a year ago, when his
vehicle had triggered an explosive device left in a roadway by a vanquished
enemy, a sort of farewell volley from a defeated force that had put up only a
token resistance anyway.
He
supposed, were he as honest with himself as he tried to be, that was part of
his irritation at his current situation. To suffer the first serious wound of
his career at the hands of an already beaten enemy was a bit ignominious. And
another part of that honesty would also have to be that he had made an
assumption that cost him; he had trusted the local commander when he said they
had no such devices. It had been the last inaccurate information the man would
ever pass on, for he had died in the same blast.
All
of which was the reason for his more intensive, first-hand study of Ziem and
the inhabitants; he did not wish to make another mistake of that magnitude.
This one had cost him too dearly.
It is too close to the spine, even the
automatons cannot guarantee a safe procedure. But one misstep, Major, one wrong
combination of movements, or a well-placed blow, and the shrapnel will shift
and sever your spinal cord.
For
all his strength, for all the fit power of his body, one wrong move and he
would crumple like a shipjack subjected to too much weight.
When
they had told him he would live, he had been relieved.
When
they had told him how he would have to live, he had rebelled.
There
was no other option, the doctors had all agreed. Trying to remove the shard of
planium was an almost certain death sentence.
Almost.
He
had fastened on that word. "Almost” was not a certainty. And better to die
trying than to live a half-life, the kind of life they said he must to survive.
And he had taken this post only for the time to regain his strength, for he was
certain in the end he would choose the operation no matter the risk.
He
had never expected to become so fascinated with this distant, mist-shrouded
world. Or its unique, surprisingly resilient people.
He
had never thought he would regret dying without knowing what the final result
of the battle for Ziem would be. That he was even thinking of it that way, that
the final result could be at all in question, he well knew was sacrilege. That he even called it a battle for
Ziem would be thought so in some quarters.
But
in those quarters, they did not know the Raider.
The
medical staff had recommended minimal movement, meaning at most being trapped
at a desk, as his best course. But he knew he could not live wearing a desk
chain.
What
he hadn’t realized was that living this way would be nearly as bad. Constantly
reminded by the ache, and the occasional sharp jab from the shrapnel that his
body was no doubt trying to expel as the foreign object it was. Constantly
wondering if this movement or that would shift it that last critical fraction,
leaving him paralyzed or dead.
Dead. It had better be dead.
He
could think of nothing worse than being totally immobilized. What especially
haunted him was the thought that he might be left unable to end himself. For
most officers, ending up unable to function would be handled, for they would be
of no further use, and thus be discarded. But he had often been told his
knowledge of battle and tactics were valuable resources. What if the Coalition
decided his knowledge, his experience in battle, required him to be kept alive
even when he could no longer move, for his mind alone?
He
would have to make arrangements for that. There were ways, he knew, that
required nothing but the ability to swallow.
A
now-familiar need welled up in him. He fought doing what he knew he wanted to
do. But he decided after a moment to give in, because for the first time in his
life he had more than a glimmer of understanding. Not of her reasons, for that
was beyond his ken, but of the idea of reaching the point at which you truly
could no longer go on. When the future you saw was more nightmare than the end
you sought.
He
crossed the office to the storage room. He’d been thankful that the rebel
attack on the council building had not taken down his office, mainly because of
what was stored in that closet.
He
opened the door, reached in, and grasped the edge of the stretched canvas. The
simple frame that had once bordered it had been shattered in the bombing of the
taproom, but it had done its job and protected the piece itself. He’d removed
it to keep any splinters from damaging the canvas.
He pulled it out carefully. He lifted
the arm-span-wide painting and propped it
on the chair. He denied even to himself he’d placed the chair for that very
purpose.
He stared at the woman in the incredible painting. He could
barely credit the taproom keeper’s claim that it had been done by a mere art
student. And the Coalition would refuse to believe a back of beyond place could
produce such a talent at all.
But then, they had also found it impossible to believe a
lowly taproom keeper was in fact the Raider, who had brought Coalition efforts
on this world to a standstill. The bedamned world that had nothing to recommend
it but a vast reserve of planium.
And in the end it did not matter to
him whether the Coalition would reach their
goals here. What mattered was the woman in this portrait—the vivid, blazingly
alive woman with the amazing eyes and the fiery hair. That she had been reduced
to the act he had just been contemplating seemed as impossible as everything
else about this world.
What seemed the most impossible was her reason. He knew who
she was, or rather had been. He had known before he had ever arrived on this
world that its one-time leader, the man named Torstan Davorin, had been the one
to first incite the population to rebellion. First, but not for long. The
Coalition had learned from its failure on Trios to nip such insurrection in the
bud and had taken out the fiery orator before the revolt had gathered much momentum.
And this woman had been pledged to him, a local custom of binding, for life
apparently. By all accounts she had been unable to bear her grief and plunged
from Halfhead Scarp, that stark, towering half mountain to the west of Zelos.
That was the part that seemed the most
impossible to him. Not the plungeitself, not even that she left four children behind—the Ziemite devotion to such primitive bonds was something he was familiar
with from other worlds— but that she had loved the man so much she could
not go on without him was the impossible concept.
He—and the Coalition—had long ago relegated that kind of
love to the realm of folk tales and imagination.
And yet what else could possibly drive the woman in this
portrait, so achingly alive, to take that leap to her death? Not fear, not
anger... for in fear she would stand, in anger she would
fight. He was not certain how he knew this, but he did. However, that left him
back at the beginning, the tales of a love so great that the loss of it ended a
vibrant life, with nothing left but the formality of physical death. The kind
of love the Coalition scoffed at, when it wasn’t denying its very existence.
This woman had not only been the mate of this world’s most
powerful man, she was the mother of the man who had nearly brought the
Coalition to its knees on this remote planet. How did a woman with that kind of
strength give up?
It had once seemed to him the weakest way out, and
therefore not worthy of consideration.
Now
he was not so sure.
Now,
he could only think of how immense that love must have been, to drive this
woman to end her own life when she had had four children who, according to the
structure of this world, depended upon her.
He,
however, had no one who would miss him or help him leave this world if the
worst left him immobile. He’d likely be remembered for his victories, but there
would be no one weeping over his grave. The Coalition would go on, and he would
soon be nothing more than a few lines in the approved histories. Which was as
it should be by Coalition tradition. A simple passing, acknowledged but not
dwelt upon. Grief was one of the worst of emotions, ungovernable, useless, and
among the first to be forbidden by Coalition edict. And after love, that
softest of all emotions, grief was the most ridiculed when encountered on the
more primitive planets not yet taught the proper way to deal with such things.
He himself thought the two defects were entwined, for the one seemed to set the
circumstances for the other. For the Coalition, both were oddities to be
studied only to find the best way to quash them, nothing more.
Such
emotions had been extracted from him in childhood and replaced by Coalition
logic. And yet here he was, staring at a painting of a woman he’d never known,
feeling an odd sort of ache that was beyond physical. He knew there was a word
for it, even though it, too, had been excised from the Coalition lexicon long
ago.
Sadness.