Northlight by Deborah Wheeler Page B

the next, past, present and future blurring together. Again she stood on a dais, again bare-headed, but now in sunshine so clear and bright it turned her hair to silver-white. She wore green, with the Guardian’s medallion around her neck. The people cheered as she raised her hands.
    It was all nonsense, all childish yearnings, these pictures he painted in his mind.
    Then he saw himself, standing at her side, still raw with the realization that he would be Guardian after her. He felt no sense of triumph or pleasure. Instead, the distant flowering trees pressed in on him like perfumed walls, closer and closer until he could no longer breathe.
o0o
    Orelia’s office would have been put to better use as a conference room. It was too big for any sense of intimacy, with its empty bookshelves and massive table of cheap grayish wood, polished to a high gloss. There were no outside windows, only a double panel of solar-battery lights along the ceiling. When Esmelda and Terricel arrived, the City Guards chief sat in an armchair at the far end, facing Montborne and Cherida. Standing along the wall behind Montborne was the grim-faced officer who went everywhere with him. Terricel had never heard the man’s name; the story was that Montborne had saved his life at Brassaford.
    â€œEsme. Come in, sit down,” Orelia said. Her eyes slid past Terricel. “Can I offer you anything? Tisane, juice?”
    â€œThank you, no.” Esmelda shook her head, a movement that sent the muscles in her neck jumping like plucked strings. Montborne nodded to her as she pulled up a chair and sat down.
    Terricel slid into the next seat, wondering what Montborne was doing here. He’d always thought Orelia was jealous of the general’s popularity. And Cherida...he’d known her since he was a child. She was one of Esmelda’s few personal friends; they’d been students together at the University. She’d known his father. Terricel had never seen her as shaken as she was now. She looked as if she’d gone a week without sleep, wearing the same pale green medician’s smock. Tendrils of her hair had pulled free from her usually tight braids, encircling her head with a fuzzy red halo. The skin around her mouth was waxy pale.
    Terricel forced the air smoothly and slowly through his lungs, keeping his belly muscles unknotted as he’d learned to do in years at the Starhall. Calmness pulsed through him. His eyes flickered to his mother’s face and he saw himself mirrored there for an instant. He’d never told her what he felt in the Starhall, never asked if she’d felt the same.
    Blinking, Terricel realized he’d missed a beat of the conversation.
    â€œ...does have a bearing on the autopsy,” Orelia was saying.
    â€œHe didn’t die of the stab wound.” Cherida’s mouth hardly moved as she spoke, her lips as wooden as a ventriloquist’s. “I’m still looking for the cause of death. But nobody outside my lab knows that.”
    Terricel’s jaw dropped a fraction before he controlled his reaction. Esmelda sat very still.
    â€œI don’t understand,” Montborne said. His fingertips traced the pattern of the wood, curving and looping in a hypnotic spiral. “I was there — I caught him as he fell. My hands were covered with his blood. I saw it happen — the dagger went right in.”
    â€œBut it missed all the vital organs. No major arteries were severed. The liver capsule wasn’t perforated, so there was no internal hemorrhage, just some local bleeding that any intern could have controlled. Infection would have been our chief concern, and we could easily have prevented that. He shouldn’t have died from that wound.”
    â€œWhat then?” Montborne demanded, his voice gone sharp. “Are you saying he died of an incredibly coincidental heart attack? At his age?”
    Cherida held up her hands, fingers rigid. She’d bitten several