A Few Good Men by Sarah A. Hoyt Page A

that they didn’t have anything real to guard anymore. After all, the Good Man was dead. Both of them. But I wasn’t going to think about that, because this truly was not the time to cry over Max.
    Instead, I gritted my teeth and walked straight up to the door, and thumbed the comlink lever next to it. Looking through the slightly green-tinted sheen obscuring the doorway was like looking through a heavy sheet of falling water. It took a moment for anyone to respond, and I thought when they did that I’d ask to speak to Patrician Isabella Keeva. Best to be admitted to Mama’s presence, and explain everything to her, then let her make the announcement to the family and get the lawyers to deal with the legal issues.
    I wasn’t sure how Mother would feel about me, but grieved and horrified though she might be, I couldn’t imagine a time or place where she wouldn’t love me or be on my side, even if I’d turned into a monster.
    But when a voice said, “What do you wish?” creakingly, from the other side, my body apparently had different plans from my carefully thought out ones. I heard the words that came out of my lips in utter disbelief, “This is Good Man Lucius Keeva. Open the door.”
    There was a long silence, then an almost scared squeak, all the stranger since it sounded like it came from a grown man. “What?”
    “I am Good Man Lucius Dante Maximilian Keeva. Open the door.”
    From the scuffles and sounds and the shifting shadows and movements on the other side, the squeaky-voiced man called a hysterical woman, who called a booming-voiced man, who in turn called another man, who called a woman, who called another woman.
    As the discussion on the other side reminded me of nothing so much as three catfights going on all at once, another voice came in. At first I couldn’t hear it at all, just the sort of vibration that indicated someone was speaking in normal tones and at a reasonable volume in the middle of the cacophony.
    Strangely, this caused the other voices to stop, and I heard what seemed the last words of his sentence. “No, he’s not dead. Yes, of course it could be him.”
    The squeaky-voiced man said in the tone of someone accusing someone else in a crime, “He looks just like Patrician Maximilian Keeva. Older.”
    “Yes,” the controlled, patient voice said. “He would. About eighteen years older.”
    And even through the door, attenuated, I’d recognized the voice. It was Samuel Remy, Ben’s much older brother, my father’s steward and man of affairs, and the only person who’d ever treated me like a son.
    I heard locks slide and bolts pulled, and wondered why they were barricaded in the house. Then I remembered the seacity was up for grabs, and it wouldn’t be the first time nor probably the last that a Good Man solved that kind of issue by force, ahead of official meetings and declarations.
    Finally, a pale face looked up at me. It was endowed with two dark eyes, and the hair above it was mostly white, but I remembered it mousy brown, and the face found a place in my mind as Savell, my father’s butler.
    “Hello, Savell,” I said, smiling. “It’s certainly been a long time.”
    His eyes widened at me. Whatever instrument he’d seen me on before—I seemed to remember a holo viewer just inside the door, to screen visitors, though the door was never closed and anyway I didn’t open the door myself, ever—must have failed to get the full effect of my scarred face, my bulk, and my attire. Now he gave me a quick up and down look, and seemed just a little scared.
    But my manner, cordial but distant, had been perfect to etiquette, and that probably helped him steady himself, because he swallowed once or twice, then flung the door open, and stood straighter, saying in perfect butler-mode, “So it has, sir. Welcome home.”
    I stepped into the front hall of my ancestral home. Like the outside, it was of classical design and might have been more at home in the eighteenth century than