Lost and Found

         Readers of Seryahdin (not currently online, sorry) will recognize that this is the same world and characters are family members of characters from that novel. In fact, it takes place fifty years in the past of the novel, and certain older characters in the novel are teenagers here. I never thought about actually writing this story, a biographical footnote on those characters, until I was 'prompted' by one of the prompts in the 'Oddly Romantic' contest on WDC. It put me in mind of the loneliness they must have felt while growing up apart. Anyway, I feel pretty confident this story can stand on its own without knowing the novel.

Lost and Found

Eric Paul Fretheim

         Like most Kelsic nobility, Mary nic Brath disliked dealing with those who couldn't just forget it. In her country homeland, the aristocracy did their job and stayed out of people's lives, mostly avoiding situations which demanded formality. On her steading she'd shocked many a visiting city-bred Lady-this-or-that when they discovered her behind the house, stoking the cooking pit or hosing mud off the boots of the fieldworkers.

         "It's a farm you be visitin'!" she'd berated more than one and let them think what they may. A pack of silly ninnies, the lot of them, anyhow. Mud didn't care if the carpet belonged to an 'Imperial Lady Consort' or a common farm wife. Why should she?

         Damn the civil war that had dragged her husband and family to this great pile of humanity called Parha. She hated living in this city where the nobility strutted about with annoying arrogance and, not surprisingly, the commoners had risen up in an attempt to create their 'Republic'. Perhaps the influx of provincial nobles such as her husband shipped into the Imperial capital to command the military garrisons now occupying rebel territory right next door would improve the situation. They could teach the overweening city-dwellers manners, not to mention how to do their jobs as they ought. Unfortunately, it left her stuck here pining for her borderlands farm and dealing with prissy young things like the Cantarene lady-in-waiting whom her foster son had carted home for tea.

         The girl shouldn't be seeing much of that courtly pretension in the Brath sitting room anyhow. The books in their cases were the jumbled wreckage of her husband's and sons' voracious reading habits, not carefully collected old volumes of unread lore like in other aristocratic households. They had one of the new dial telephones featured prominently on an oaken table, but theirs was a common wood model, not brass and gold.

         Mary sighed and shook her head at Dugan. "If you want her to meet more o' your family, Lad, you'll be askin' her to relax."

         He grinned back and shrugged. "I've tried, Mum. She's a stubborn lass."

         "I'm sitting right here!" the object of the conversation announced, a little miffed, and he turned his grin to the blonde lovely.

         "Alicia, Mum asked you to call her 'Mum' or 'Mary' in the house. You'd best mind her wishes. We Kelsies are not much for the formalities."

         Alicia shook her head briskly, centrifugal force causing bits of ribbon in her courtly 'hair-dress' to whip outward. In that move, Mary knew she'd not grown up wearing such, or she would have learned to use the peculiar head-bobbing moves the Parhalho women used. Like most of her city-bred kind, she'd affected the clothing of the ancient Parhans who still made up perhaps half the nobility. The immigrant populations that had mostly taken over the Dominion, including Mary's own Kelsies, comprised the other half, but most did not affect either their native dress or the current fashion of upper-class commoners. She'd clearly taken the Parhalho costume up only after moving here from her native world.

         "It's very difficult," the girl declared, "to just drop a lifetime of habit."

         Before Mary could bristle, the girl softened her tone and finally looked a little apologetic. "In addition, I admit I am quite nervous, Your Worship. Unless I am so honored to meet His Imperial Excellency your husband or Her Imperial Highness your sister-in-law, you are the only Imperial Royalty with whom I ever expect to converse."

         That surprised her. "I... Now, surely, you run into the other Imperial houses at balls and functions all the time!"

         Dugan cleared his throat to get her attention, and shook his head. "No, Mum. Truth, you've not seen her at any, aye? She's not from around here, you see. She's my ship-mate in the Navy. She's lived her whole life on Cantaree. She even attended the Naval School there. This is actually her first visit to the capital."

         Her entire image of the girl as spoiled Palace brat came crashing down with her son's words. "Your 'ship-mate'? You introduced her as a 'lady-in-waiting'!"

         He cleared his throat in embarrassment. "At her request. She didn't want you thinking of her as some social-climbing commoner who'd snared an Imperial scion while on duty."

         "As if I'd be thinkin' that of a Crown officer!" she protested, then almost immediately regretted it, as this would be exactly what most of her fellow Ladies Imperial would have thought. She smiled reassuringly at the suddenly very uncomfortable girl. "Sorry, Dear. That was unfair of me. So you serve with Dugan?"

         Dugan shook his head, smiling as he answered for her. "Not directly, Mum. I'm a line officer. She's a... ah, specialist."

         Mary turned her raised eyebrow toward the girl in question. "And what, pray tell, does an 'ah, specialist' do?"

         Despite herself, the girl cracked a slight smile. Might she actually be relaxing? "My Lady, I am our battle group's witch-master."

         Confused, Mary turned back to her son, who sighed. "That's not her official title, of course. She's on the books as a 'Technical Officer of the Marine Infantries', in the same fashion as an Intelligence officer. About one in a hundred sailors comes to us trained in the Elder Arts, so the Navy reckons every battle group should have an officer who's an Artist, in charge of organizing them, in case."

         "In case of what?"

         Alicia smiled. "You Parhans believe we've outgrown the Elder Arts, because you've turned all things spiritual into science, created Kethethic Engineering to replace witches and shamans and whatever else, but... when the fleet runs into something stronger than your machines, we spiritual sorts still need to help out."

         Mary had bristled a little at the You Parhans, as she'd never considered herself part of the city despite her husband being one of the ten Imperial Lords who technically owned the place. She was certainly more part of it than a girl from an entirely different world though. The slightly dismissive Your machines, though... it said something about the girl. Perhaps the odd addition of elbow-length white gloves to her costume, an accessory the locals would never affect, should be telling her the same thing. A woman who didn't bow and scrape to all things Parhan and Modern might just be good enough for Dugan at that. Mary was beginning to warm up to the offworlder.

         "So you're a Flux Artist," she summarized, and the girl nodded.

         "When I was a little girl, I tested out with high potential, and my queen ordered me to train in what is called in our world, Junsai. Spiritual Combat. I am told most Elder Artists would call me an Incharyahdin."

         Mary began to notice an odd foreign cadence in the girl's speech, and realized they must not be English speakers in her native land. She'd done a remarkable job of learning the language.

         Mary tipped her head in inquiry. "Your queen?" No aristocrat within the Dominion held such a title.

         "She grew up in the court of Queen Rill, of Orosjo, her mother's country," Dugan explained. "They're a client kingdom, not a province. She's an Imperial citizen through her father, a Parhan lord."

         Mary did not miss that the Parhan lord somehow had no name. A bastardess raised as a court fosterling... she politely steered away from the subject. She could find out later, in private. "So how can you be both a lady-in-waiting and an active naval officer, Lass?"

         The girl looked sheepish. "I'm not, really. Her Majesty insists that any of her noblewomen who can't keep up their social duties due to military service be considered her own ladies-in-waiting. Orosjoese are a bit provincial, you see. My countrymen tend to consider women living away from their families or courts scandalous."

         The house-girls finally showed with the tea and cakes, and the conversation eased into a son's accounting of his latest cruise... at least, the bits he could speak of. As she listened, she watched the girl closely, and wondered about her foster-son's agenda.

         Despite Alicia's ideas about Parhans, the Imperial houses were secretly most appreciative of 'spiritual powers' and the Elder Arts. In fact, Houses rose and fell based upon the powers of their own members, who usually ranked among the most powerful Artists in the Dominion. Like all the Braths, though, her son knew about the family's declining abilities over the last two generations, and the eventual doom it could spell to the Brath name.

         His foster-father was the only truly strong Artist left out of all those born to the Brath clan, and Niall mac Brath had married Mary Donnelly, a spiritual lightweight who turned out to also be infertile. In Dugan, the childless couple had fostered a distant cousin with only mildly more ability than Mary, but he'd been the best choice out of all the blood relations. The girl might not realize it, but her 'high-potential' genetics could well be attracting the boy more than her mind or her looks.

         Thank goodness the future of the house no longer depended on such genetic bargains. Not since her little Rogin had come into their lives. The dark-skinned little alien boy was her husband's distant relative, one of the fifty thousand children who had flooded into their world from Chald, the homeland of the Gireid race, as it faced invasion and destruction.

         The Braths were descendants of a Welshman from Earth who had married a Gireidil ex-priestess from Chald and settled in the Kelsie lands on Tirh. The Gireidin woman's clan Int'rith had been an ally of Brath House ever since, and the orphaned Int'rith noble boy had become their adoptive son. His Gireidil genetics promised an infusion of high potential that would put his adoptive father's powers to shame, and Rogin, no longer little but now at sixteen a towering figure of an Imperial Naval School student, had lived up to that potential as a rapidly developing Flux Artist.

         Dugan could have resented losing his chance to inherit the Imperial Lordship, as Rogin's adoption took precedence over his own fostering, but he'd instead been ecstatic, now freed of that responsibility without losing the privileges of being a 'Royal'. It helped that the four-year-old Rogin had joined their family less than a half-year after his twelve-year old 'elder brother'. Besides, if Rogin didn't develop an interest in young women eventually, Dugan's children would wind up inheriting, anyway... which could possibly explain Dugan's interest in a certain bonny young Flux Artist. She hoped for the girl's sake this wasn't his reason.

         "Mum? Are you still here?" Dugan queried, and she started slightly.

         "Oh, dear. My mind was on the Moon, I fear."

         "I was wondering if she'd passed inspection, yet," he commented dryly, a comment direct enough to shock her until she realized the girl was no longer present, having excused herself for the wash room.

         "I did drift off on you, didn't I?" she smiled. "I'm afraid I was worrying about things again."

         "You've been watching her pretty closely, Mum. What's bothering you?"

         "Does she ken you're not the heir, Dugan?"

         "Yes, actually." He glowered slightly. "I have her fully up to speed on our family. She's not a title-chaser, Mum."

         "Is she the love o' your life, though, Lad?"

         He looked uncomfortable. "Mum, you're getting ahead of us a little..."

         "I'm hopin' you do not see her as breedin' material, Dugan. It occurs to me that she is not the only one present who could be havin' ulterior motives, and that particular motive would unfair to any girl."

         Dugan pressed his lips together, visibly forcing himself not to argue. After the moment to check his tongue, he answered, "She and I are two people who enjoy each other's company. Not each other's genetics or titles. Truth."

         She inspected Dugan's face carefully, as she thought she saw more in his eyes than what he'd said. He pulled his mouth sideways, shaking his head. "I'd best go look after her. I'm not so sure she isn't hiding somewhere trying to collect her nerves."

         "I rather thought she was beginnin' to relax."

         He got up and straightened his uniform. "Aye. She was... until you began staring at her like a hungry eagle."

         She suspected herself guilty as charged, and stopped herself from protesting. He was clearly itching to run after the girl, anyhow.

         The telephone rang after he'd left the room, and with no house-girl in sight to answer it, she took it herself, careful not to put the base to her ear and speak into the earpiece as she'd done the last time she tried it. "Brath House."

         "Mary!" came her husband's surprised voice.

         She smirked at his disbelief. So you thought I couldn't work this gadget on my own? "Aye, Niall. I still live here."

         He chuckled for a moment, then grew serious. "It's not you I was callin', Lass. I must speak to Dugan right away. It's quite urgent. He's home, is he not?"

         It chilled her slightly to hear her normally calm husband use a word like 'urgent', or a tone that matched it. She knew better than to ask, though. Clearly, it would be military business, although she had no guess what her husband's Occupationary Guard duties had to do with the Navy.

         "Aye, he's here. Hold a tick, Dear." She set the phone down and turned to call him, only to see the lad and his companion coming back into the room. "Your father's askin' after you."

         She finally thought to wonder, Why did Niall know Dugan was here? as he collected the device. She watched the concern on her son's face with unease of her own. Her feelings grew to alarm when he answered with a curt "Aye, Sir!" instead of a son's response to his 'Da'. He dropped the earpiece on the hook and looked to Alicia. His words to her were of an unexpected tone as well.

         "They didn't catch up to her, Lieutenant," he reported sharply. "She's already in the neighborhood."

         Alicia paled slightly, then developed a very un-Courtly bearing.

         "Get your mother upstairs, Subs!" she ordered, using the common contraction for his rank of Sublieutenant, and Mary found her son grabbing her upper arm, turning toward the hall back to the stairway. Before her shaken mind could form a question against the unexpected changes around her, one of her house-girls screamed from the front hall and everyone turned toward the sound.

         The next few instants came at Mary with strange clarity, thanks to adrenaline and fear. Alicia stripped off her white gloves and jumped forward into a fighter's stance, Dugan pulled Mary around so that his body would be between her and the front hall as he drew a handgun, and a brown-skinned, nearly naked girl sprinted into the room from that direction and came to an impossibly abrupt stop, with purple fire dancing on her hands.

         Mary's training as a Keth-Ethin, a traditional user of magic tools, was at best basic, and her sense for the supernatural fires of Flux rudimentary, but even she could see the power behind the green fire snaking forth like whips, bursting from tattoos covering Alicia's hands and arms, or the shield of purple fire that the topless intruder spread with her own hands to meet the attack. The girl shrieked her rage at Alicia.

         Mary stared at the bizarre sight. The newcomer's lack of clothing wasn't her only shocking feature. Above maidenly breasts spread an enormous tattoo, the image of a hawk or eagle approaching in a talon-first dive, its wings stretching from shoulder to shoulder... and Mary's senses told her the tattoo was the primary source of her power. In her wild raven hair, feathers, beads and totems also pulsed with power... and animal spirits. The girl was a Maryahdin, an animistic shaman, and guessing from the style of what little clothing she wore, an Alyrhian tribeswoman.

         What was this creature doing invading a Royal household almost a half a world away from her tropical island homeland?

         Whatever her plan, she wouldn't succeed. Despite the girl's remarkably strong aura, she showed little experience, and Alicia rapidly proved to be a far stronger fighter. The green fire-whips shortly imprisoned her wrists, but the girl's eyes did not yet admit defeat.

         "Rogin?! Where?!" she huffed as she regained her breath. Sweat covered her from the exertion of running and combat, highlighting muscles now straining against her bonds. "Where is he?!"

         Astonished, Mary demanded, "What in Heaven do you want with my son?"

         The island girl stared at her with baffled anger, resting from her labor for a moment, then resumed her struggle against the whips, shrieking again. The savage sound and fury continued for another half minute, until she abruptly stopped, her wild expression instantly turning to a mix of hope and uncertainty. She stared at the archway to Mary's right, where Dugan had intended to go.

         Mary followed the girl's eyes to see Rogin standing there in his I.N.S. uniform. Alicia saw also, and sharply declared, "Cadet, you were told to remain in the cellar!"

         "I know that, Lieutenant," Rogin responded quietly, his usual gawky uncertainty nowhere to be seen. Mary could see that her son was forcing a lordly bearing to counter Alicia's commanding tones, but he was doing a good job of making it seem natural to him. He met her eyes and calmly requested. "Please release her."

         "What?!" Alicia answered in disbelief. "My Lord, this girl has run Protective Services ragged trying to catch her!"

         "Alicia," Dugan quietly, echoing his younger brother, "Release her."

         The woman now stared at him in surprise. "Subs, your father ordered..."

         "My father doesn't understand," he answered curtly. "We've tried to explain it to him and to Mum for years. They just wouldn't listen. I cooperated with Da on this long enough to get Rogin and her together in the same room. Release the girl."

         Alicia glared at him. "Subs, are you telling me you deliberately subverted this operation?"

         Rogin began walking across the room toward the island girl, who was now openly crying and staring at him, as if unable to believe what she saw. Mary finally recognized the distinct ethnic resemblance between the girl and her boy and understood Dugan's words, 'We've tried to explain it to him and to Mum for years...'

         "Release her," Mary echoed her sons and Alicia stared at her.

         "Your Wisdom?"

         She moistened her drying lips and nodded. "Please, Lieutenant. I believe that would be the next Imperial Lady Consort nic Brath you're holdin' prisoner."

         Alicia's eyes bugged slightly in disbelief, but once Dugan's hand touched her arm she extinguished the flux-flames, staring at him in bewilderment.

         Sobbing uncontrollably, the girl ran to Rogin's arms, choking "Sanorh'ruon!"

         At the sound of her son's birth name, Mary knew she'd understood correctly. She saw her sixteen-year-old boy cradling a girl in his arms, probably for the first time yet holding the stranger as tenderly as Niall had ever held his wife, while the Gireidil girl in Alyrhian costume loudly weeped in his embrace.

         Alicia watched at the scene in confused silence, while Dugan explained it. "My little brother is by birth a Gireidin, one of those thousands of orphans from their world that came to Tirh during the war. My foster parents adopted him around the same time as they fostered me.

         "Gireid have some things in their head wired different than you and I. They have intense loyalty to family and spouse, stronger than anything you can even imagine. They have neither a word for divorce, nor the psychological ability to hurt their spouses badly enough to want it. And they marry as children."

         She frowned, puzzled. "They what?"

         "Their families choose fiancées when they're still toddlers. They do not live in married fashion until they're about twenty, but they grow up knowing who they'll be spending the rest of their life with, whom they belong to. That's their love, no teenager's angst, no trauma, no uncertainty.

         "Rogin married when he was four years old, and that was just weeks before he evacuated from Chald. The two became separated in the evacuation, and Rogin's had neither knowledge of her whereabouts nor whether she even survived, all these years. It appears she wound up in Alyrhia."

         Mary had known all of this when Rogin first came to her... and put it aside, convincing herself that her son was no different than any other human, that the marriage was merely a heathen custom forced upon him by his alien birth parents. Tears began forming in her eyes as she remembered comforting her little boy so many times, as he cried his heart out for 'Ara'ta'loeth', whom they'd convinced themselves to think of simply as a lost friend. He'd experienced that recurring trauma throughout his childhood.

         Dugan had understood, had taken pains to learn about his little brother's people, had tried to explain to them the things his brother was too young to tell them. They'd assured him the differences were exaggerated, that they were all humans after all... but in this one scene, the girl's desperate rage, the boy's instant protective tenderness, she knew all her certainties had been foolishness. Rogin's refusal to associate with the many young noblewoman who'd smiled at him had not been disinterest, but fidelity to this strange foreigner.

         "Rogin me lad," she said quietly and her son looked over to her. She hesitated as she saw his eyes also filled with tears, then smiled encouragingly.

         "Take the lass to the house-girls. Tell them to find some proper clothin' for her in my wardrobe. We'll put her in one of the guest rooms for now."

         He nodded wordlessly and gently led the girl out of the room. Ara'ta'loeth still clung tightly to him, making the going slow, but Mary suspected Rogin was no hurry anyhow.

         Blinking her eyes clear, Mary turned to her older son. "Now, I believe you owe me an explanation."

         He glanced at Alicia, who was still visibly sorting out her confusion, then grinned at his mother apologetically. "Well, obviously we stretched the truth a bit about Alicia and me. Protective Services has been tracking the girl... Ara'ta'loeth... but couldn't corner her. She's a tough one. Da wanted some extra insurance in case she got through, so he told our captain to send us in. He hoped PS would pick her up before she got here, and you'd never learn anything to worry you."

         In summary, her husband had been keeping her wrapped in an invisible coccoon as he always did. Mary needed more details than that. "And what about Rogin? What was he doin' here in the house? He ought to be at the Naval School right now."

         "Da considered this a better spot for a showdown than the Naval School, if she made it all the way to Rogin. Fewer curious eyes and ears. Once we were sure she'd reached the city, we had him sneak into the lumber room downstairs to wait it out. We planned that he stay down there. His only role here was to attract the girl so PS could pick her up."

         During Dugan's explanation, Alicia had knelt to collect her gloves, which she was now pulling back on to cover her extravagantly decorated limbs. She glanced at him and noted dourly, "Of course, it seems a certain Sublieutenant and a certain Cadet made other plans."

         He shrugged. "Sorry, Lieutenant. Da wouldn't let me tell PS or anyone else about Rogin's marriage. He considered it 'Nonsense', and he didn't want me 'spreading rumors'. Of course Rogin wasn't really going to cooperate with Da's plans, so I couldn't either. He's my brother, Alicia."

         "And how much of the rest of this spectacle were lies, Lad?" Mary pressed.

         Dugan shook his head in confusion. "The rest of it?"

         "The lady-in-waitin' from Queen Rill's court?" She gestured toward Alicia.

         The lieutenant flushed, but it appeared to be indignation rather than embarrassment on her face. Hastily, Dugan noted, "Mum, she's exactly as I described... well, except for us seeing each other. We did not lie about who she is."

         Mary studied the girl, who returned her gaze squarely. "Answer me one question then, Lass."

         "What is it, your Wisdom?" the lieutenant responded, a bit defensive.

         "What kind of idiot is my son, anyhow?"

         Dumbfounded, the girl repeated, "Your Wisdom?" Dugan was staring at her in confusion as well.

         "Understandin' as I do that he is not in fact courtin' you? Or, should I understand that he has already courted you, and you turned him down?"

         "I... My Lady, I..."

         "Have you in fact turned my son down, Lady Alicia?" Mary pressed.

         Alicia glanced at Dugan, both of them still befuddled, and then said, "No, my Lady, I've not turned him down...."

         "Good. Dugan brought you here for my permission to dine with the family. I think I shall give it. I'll expect you and and my son to dinner tomorrow evening. I'll invite my sister-in-law so you can meet her Imperial Highness in the same go."

         Alicia still stammered as she spoke. "Your Wisdom, th... this was just a ruse to get me into the house for a while! W... we aren't actually..."

         Mary stopped listening and turned to her son. "I'm headed upstairs to compose a letter to your captain, requestin' Alicia's and your presence to dinner tomorrow. See if you can get her to stop stutterin' before your aunt meets her. First impressions are crucial, you know."

         With all the aristocratic arrogance she normally did not affect, Mary swept out of the room before Alicia could say more. She paused out of sight in the hall to listen to the results.

         "My Lord," the girl worried, "I seem to have created a problem for you. I'm truly sorry." Her contrite tone was a remarkable change from the peremptory 'Subs!' of only minutes before.

         "Lady Alicia," Dugan stated, courteously, but with a degree of warmth that confirmed to Mary that his attitude toward the girl had not actually been an act, "I should be quite pleased were you to attend dinner at my house. Kindly tell me you will?"

         Mary smiled and continued down the hall, confident that her son had the situation well in hand.

End