A/N: This chapter is relatively short, because for plot reasons it has to end in a certain place. This will become clear in the next chapter, which I think should be ready for prime time tomorrow-ish. After that there will be a brief hiatus while I cope with parents visiting from out of the country! Update: Just fixing a couple of typos I noticed, and putting in proper breaks.
Disclaimer: I cannot take credit for inventing Daine, Numair, or anyone else whose name you recognize as belonging to Tamora Pierce. I do, however, accept responsibility for kidnapping them from Tortall and making them live in the twentieth-century United Kingdom. Please nobody sue.
2: Post-Mortem
"I hate those things," Daine said, limping into the hotel room and kicking off her detested high-heeled sandals.
"My poor little vetkin," said Numair, squeezing her shoulders in sympathy. "I forget how much you dislike pomp and circumstance."
"It's so exhausting, and such a waste of the university's money, and all the food is booby-trapped, and nobody accomplishes anything at all." She flung herself onto the hotel-room sofa.
"Ah, but that's where you're wrong," said her husband. He had shed shoes and jacket and tie and was padding around the room in his stocking feet, drawing curtains and pouring glasses of iced water. "I accomplished something rather important, I think."
Daine accepted one of the glasses and pressed it to her forehead gratefully; the reception, with its glitter and noise, had given her a raging headache. "Do tell," she said, and set about draining her glass.
"Well," said Numair, sitting beside her on the sofa and stretching a long arm behind her shoulders, "For one thing, I believe I convinced a certain member of the local royal family to set his romantic sights on a different object."
"You and Alanna," Daine sighed. "Doesn't either of you ever think of anything else?"
"You forget, love, I've spent at least the last five years lusting after you myself. I'm well able to recognize the signs." His hands, delicate despite their size, gently massaged her pounding temples.
"That's lovely, thanks. And you're daft. I'm sure his highness was only making conversation." Daine yawned hugely. "Talking of royalty, what about the King? Wasn't he supposed to make an appearance?"
Numair frowned. "No," he said. "Not this time. There's another of these things tomorrow night, a banquet at the royal palace, black tie et al., for a select few guests—including Alanna, and you, and me." Daine goggled. "I did tell you about this—it's on the programme. He'll be at that one, of course. I'm not sure to what we owe the singular honour of such an invitation. Me especially," he added.
"Why you especially?" She knew he had a history among these people, but it wasn't something he talked about often, or very clearly—what she mostly knew was that his memories of this place were not happy ones.
He shrugged. "Some other time."
Daine looked at him closely; he looked tired and rather sad. "Did you find anything to eat in that madhouse?" she asked him. "I know you aren't much for posh nibbles after you've been traveling…"
He smiled at her gratefully. "It's all right," he said. "Those arrowroot biscuits you packed for me? I had some in the pocket of my jacket."
"Clever," she acknowledged. "I wish I'd thought of that."
"One thing I do rather like about travelling," Numair remarked, surveying their luxurious accommodations from the comfort of the large bed. "This is so much more elegant than our usual digs."
"You mean it's so much tidier," Daine countered. "No—well—not so many stacks of books and journal preprints scattered around the place."
"Much less cat and dog fur."
"Only two laptop flexes to trip over—"
"No dog bikkies trodden into the carpet—"
"No experiments running in the kitchen—"
"No rescued hedgehogs cowering in the downstairs loo—"
"We need a cleaner," Daine laughed. They had been having this conversation, or variations thereof, for most of their relationship, and its familiarity was comforting after the evening's stress.
"We'd never find one. Remember what happened to the last one?"
"Of course I don't, Numair. It was before I ever met you."
He frowned. "Yes, you're right. I'd quite forgotten. Well, it's a tragic story," he went on. "I'd spent nearly a fortnight culturing Drosophila melanogaster in the dining-room, trying to discover whether females with red eyes preferred brown-eyed or red-eyed or purple-eyed males—"
"Why, I can't think," Daine interjected, "when you've got a perfectly lovely lab at the uni to work in."
"Because," Numair explained patiently, "that lab is intended for the work I'm paid to do, not for experiments I conduct for my own—well, fun, I suppose." He grinned at her. "Same reason you keep your rescued beasties in our bath rather than in your lab. At any rate, just as I was beginning to get somewhere, in came the cleaner and—and—"
"She cleaned up the fruit flies," Daine guessed. "You can't blame her, Numair. You ought to've got someone from the uni cleaning staff if you wanted a cleaner who'd tolerate flies in the dining-room."
"You tolerate that sort of thing remarkably well, vetkin," he pointed out.
"Very true. But then, I'm nearly as bad a housekeeper as you are, so you might say I make things worse rather than better." Daine was grinning. In fact, they were both perfectly happy with their cluttered, haphazardly furnished, animal-fur-covered old farmhouse on the outskirts of Edinburgh, and with the assortment of dogs, cats, and rescued wildlife with which they habitually shared it. A room like this—well, let her and Numair live in it a week or two and it would end up as chaotic as their own home.
All the same, she couldn't deny that it was very nice, once in a while, to be somewhere so tidy, and posh, and—well—private.
"It's an awfully nice, big bed," she murmured speculatively, snuggling against his side. "With no dogs or cats in it."
"It is that." Numair bent his head to nuzzle her hair; his arm tightened around her shoulders, pulling her close.
"My head doesn't ache as much as it did …"
"I'm delighted to hear it, love." Long fingers slid under her chin and raised her face to his. The gentle mockery was gone from his dark eyes; they held her gaze, smouldering with desire, as he brought his mouth down to hers.
She lost herself in the kiss, clinging to him as if afraid of drowning.
He woke her in the small hours, jerking upright and shouting, in a voice ragged with fear and rage, something she couldn't decipher.
"Numair!" she tugged on his arm, trying to yank him back to reality. "Numair, wake up! It's all right—you're safe—I'm here."
He blinked in confusion—rubbed his eyes—turned his head to look down at her. He was sweating, his dark face paler than it ought to be in the ghostly light of the bedside alarm-clock.
She sat up on her knees and put her arms around him, feeling the rapid thudding of his heart against her chest.
"Tell me," she urged him gently.
Face buried against her neck, he shook his head.
"'Mair, sweetheart, be reasonable," she coaxed, stroking his damp hair. "It's eating you alive. You're having these dreams every night, now. It'll help to talk about it—you taught me that yourself, remember?"
"I know it," he said. "And you ought to know everything. You need to know, now we're here, in case … just in case. It's just—you must remember—it's so bloody hard to begin."
So hard to begin.
Yes, she remembered. Certainly she remembered.
On the summer day when Daine, a sixteen-year-old school leaver of no very great distinction apart from what she calls "a way with animals," comes home from a day out on the fells to find her grandfather and her mother, the local midwife, beaten and murdered by armed robbers, her life begins a rapid descent into misery and chaos. At once some in the village—Snowsdale, high in the Yorkshire Dales, a half-forgotten farming community bypassed by many of the trends of recent decades, including a decline in the stigma of unwed motherhood and an influx of immigrants from other lands—accuse her of complicity. Angry and desperate, she tries to track the culprits down herself; she is seen lurking in unsavoury places; the local publican throws her out more than once when her increasingly strident interrogations of travellers, and even her neighbours, threaten the peace of his house. Once the district police have identified and arrested the perpetrators, who are found to be suspects also in a string of similar crimes across the district and who deny all knowledge of Daine's existence, the whispers quiet a little; but by that time Daine has begun to lose touch with reality.
The day she begins to hear animals talking to her, she knows she has to go away before things get worse. Packing those few possessions she values in the saddlebags of her bicycle, she sets her face to the north (for no better reason than because it feels right at that moment) and pedals resolutely away from Snowsdale and all its works.
She meets Onua first—Onua Chamtong, who runs the Dick School's stables, on a walking holiday in the Dales National Park. Onua needs a new assistant, someone who knows horses and can ride a bit. Daine doesn't dare tell Onua about the voices in her head, but she does sense a certain kinship in this gruff, stocky, foreign woman and eventually feels safe enough to tell her other things she'd never planned to admit. The fate of her family. The fact that she has grown up lonely and shunned, daughter of an unmarried local farmer's daughter and an unknown, much-maligned father.
They run across Onua's friend Numair by happenstance, too, but it is a good thing for him that they do; he has got himself into a scrape surely only he could have managed, bike mangled, one wrist broken, feverish and out of provisions. Daine handles the first aid, while Onua goes for help on Daine's bike and comes back with the local doctor in his Land Rover. Two days later Numair, plaster cast and all, insists on joining them for the rest of the journey. He sees the desolation behind Daine's gruffly practical shell, and clowns extravagantly to make her laugh; when she is consumed with guilt for enjoying herself with her family not yet cold in their graves, he gently reminds her that she need not bury herself with them. It is the most beautiful, and also the most appalling, period of Daine's life thus far.
By the time term starts in Edinburgh, Daine is happily ensconced in her position as Onua's assistant and the two of them are her fast friends. She finds the big city both terrible and wonderful, enlightening and dislocating, liberating and strange. Through Onua and Numair she meets most of the people whom, though they are so intimidating at first, she will soon consider her closest friends.
But it takes her much longer to tell them about the voices.
She will later wonder whether this—the moment when, finally, seated in front of the fireplace in Onua's flat, staring into the flames because she is too afraid to meet their eyes, she tells them everything, and Onua hugs her and Numair, on her other side, assures her that she is not mad, only unusually perceptive—was the beginning of her falling in love with him. After much thought, she will decide that it was earlier still.
So hard to begin.
"Maybe," Daine suggested, ever practical, "you could begin with the reason your thesis advisor kept calling you by someone else's name."
