Search: A Novel of Forbidden History by Judith Reeves-Stevens, Garfield Reeves-Stevens Page A

The way she stared at Brighid’s belly when the concubine’s purple-trimmed white shift pulled across her. A child grew there. His.
    Then Rutheme, noticing that her host had registered her distaste and disapproval, spoke as if Brighid were not capable of understanding.
    “Are there others?”
    Hamilkir knew she meant children born of oak and shadow. “Twenty-two.”
    Whatever Rutheme and Torhiram thought of that answer, they shared their reactions only in a glance between them.
    “Are there not similar children in Ehschay?” Hamilkir asked.
    “There were,” Torhiram answered.
    Hamilkir could see his concubine’s concern at Torhiram’s use of the past tense.
    “Where did they go?” Brighid asked. She slipped her hand into his and squeezed it. As mysterious as the gesture was, Hamilkir had learned the
ahkwila
took comfort from it.
    “They were not
khai,”
Rutheme said. “They were not
ahkwila.
Where could they go? Accepted by no one.”
    Hamilkir squeezed his concubine’s hand as she had taught him. “We accept them.”
    “So did we,” Rutheme replied, “until the attacks began.”
    “I told you,” Hamilkir said, “there’s no fighting here.”
    “There’s always fighting.”
    Hamilkir refused to accept that pronouncement.
    “Two wolves in a cage,” Torhiram said. “There can be only one. So, in time, there is only one.”
    “We’re not animals.”
    “No,” Rutheme agreed. She stared at Brighid. “But they are.”
    Tears trickled down Brighid’s cheeks, pale no longer but splotched with red. Hamilkir had been with her long enough to know the tears did not mean his concubine was in physical pain—instead, some thought had caused her an internal, unseen discomfort.
    He spoke more sharply than he meant to. “That’s not a known fact.”
    Neither of his guests responded to his unintended insult.
    “Sometimes,” Rutheme said, “I believe that the
ahkwila
are what the Navigators warned us against.”
    “They warned us of the ocean.”
    Rutheme gestured at the pregnant
ahkwila
. “Which one? The ocean of water? Or the ocean of flesh? Both can swallow us.”
    “Unless,” Torhiram added, “we take action against them.”
    Hamilkir stood. He found the conversation unpleasant. “I’ll take no action against the people of the oak.”
    “Someone must,” Rutheme said. “Or else the Navigators will be proved true twice over. Once for the fate of our home, and once for our own.”

SIX
    “Tell me you’re going to arrest David Weir.”
    Jack Lyle’s response was a snort of amusement. Twelve years in the air force, another sixteen as an agent in the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, and he knew Colonel Miriam Kowinski’s type. One detail out of place, one comma missing, and she’d bring down the wrath of heaven on the hapless fool responsible. A quality he could admire, if not emulate.
    “Eventually,” he said.
    As if preventing herself from saying anything she’d regret, the colonel shifted her attention to Lyle’s specialist working on David Weir’s computer. It was midnight on a Monday, and the rest of the office area in the lab was deserted.
    “He was stealing DoD data,” the colonel said.
    “I understand.”
    “We’ve known about it since the first day he tried to cover his tracks.”
    “Colonel, your lab’s security is outstanding.”
    “So why isn’t Army CID in charge of this investigation?”
    “Because the Air Force OSI is in charge, per General Capuzzi’s direct order.”
    Lyle saw Kowinski’s spine straighten at his not too subtle reminder that in this affair, he, a civilian agent of the air force, had authority over her, an army colonel.
    Before she could protest again, his specialist said, “Gotcha.”
    She was Roz Marano, delectably freckled with short brown hair and, like most of the agents in Lyle’s detachment, all of fourteen. Sometime around age fifty, Lyle had begun to notice how everyone else he worked with was growing younger.
    Roz, who was