Free With Stars Underfoot (Adventures in the Liaden Universe®) by Sharon Lee, Steve Miller Page B

looking aside so the other would not read it in his eyes.
      "No," he said.
      There was a small silence, followed by a sigh.
      "Just as well, then," Fen Ris murmured. "For it was not I." He paused, and Mil Ton looked back to him, drawn despite his will.
      "Who, then?" he asked, shortly.
      The gray eyes were infinitely sorrowful, eternally determined.
      "My lifemate."
      Fury, pure as flame, seared him. "You dare!"
      Fen Ris lifted his chin, defiant. "You, who taught me what it is to truly love—you ask if I dare ?"
      To truly love. Yes, he had taught that lesson—learned that lesson. And then he had learned the next lesson—that even love can betray.
      He closed his eyes, groping for the rags of his dignity...
      "Her name is Endele," Fen Ris said softly. "By profession, she is a gardener." A pause, a light laugh. "A rare blossom in our house of risk-takers and daredevils."
      Eyes closed, Mil Ton said nothing.
      "Well." Fen Ris said after a moment. "You live so secluded here that you may not have heard of the accident at the skimmer fields last relumma. Three drivers were killed upon the instant. One walked away unscathed. Two were sealed into crisis units. Of those, one died."
      Mil Ton had once followed the skimmer races—how not?—he had seen how easily a miscalculated corner approach could become tragedy.
      "You were ever Luck's darling," he whispered, his inner ear filled with the shrieks of torn metal and dying drivers; his inner eye watching carefully as Fen Ris climbed from his battered machine and—
      "Aye," Fen Ris said. "That I was allowed to emerge whole and hale from the catastrophe unit—that was luck, indeed."
      Abruptly it was cold, his mind's eye providing a different scene, as the emergency crew worked feverishly to cut through the twisted remains of a racing skimmer and extricate the shattered driver, the still face sheathed in blood—two alive, of six. Gods, he had almost lost Fen Ris—
      No.
      He had already lost Fen Ris.
      "I might say," Fen Ris murmured, "that I was the most blessed of men, save for this one thing—that when I emerged from the unit, Endele—my lady, my heart..." His voice faded.
      "She does not remember you."
      Silence. Mil Ton opened his eyes and met the bleak gray stare.
      "So," said Fen Ris, "you did read the file."
      "I read the summary Tereza sent, to entice me back to the Hall," he corrected. "The case intrigued her—no physical impediment to the patient's memory, nor even a complete loss of memory. Only one person has been excised entirely from her past."
      "Excised," Fen Ris repeated. "We have not so long a shared past, after all. A year—only that."
      Mil Ton moved his shoulders. "Court her anew, then," he said, bitterly.
      "When I did not court her before?" the other retorted. He sighed. "I have tried. She withdraws. She does not know me; she does not trust me." He paused, then said, so low Mil Ton could scarcely hear—
      "She does not want me."
      It should have given him pleasure, Mil Ton thought distantly, to see the one who had dealt him such anguish, in agony. And, yet, it was not pleasure he felt, beholding Fen Ris thus, but rather a sort of bleak inevitability.
      "Why me?" he asked, which is not what he had meant to say.
      Fen Ris lifted his face, allowing Mil Ton to plumb the depths of his eyes, sample the veracity of his face.
      "Because you will know how to value my greatest treasure," he murmured. "Who would know better?"
      Mil Ton closed his eyes, listening to his own heartbeat, to the breeze playing in the leaves over his head, and, eventually, to his own voice, low and uninflected.
      "Bring her here, if she will come. If