“Lift him.” The noble nodded to the two breathless boys who had led the charge.

The two teenage boys roughly pulled the soldier from the ground and held him upright. Everson’s brown face was bloodied, and he could barely stand of his own accord. He viewed the strange woman through a haze of pain as she stepped exceedingly close to him, as if observing him from a normal distance was not assessment enough. He very nearly expected her to sniff him.

“An Indiran soldier…” she murmured lightly. A small smile played about her lips. The peculiar stone embedded in her forehead seemed to pulse with a faint light. “Perhaps this is an historic day for Mano after all.”

SEVEN

Everson was as wary and nervous as a small creature huddled in the wild, ready to bolt at the first sign of attention. He had been deposited in a relatively comfortable chair at an immaculately hand-carved table sitting in the middle of an austere but elegant dining hall. He had seen better.

The two Manolith guards who’d seated him now stood rigidly at the entrance, only recently having grown bored with staring at him as if he were a pile of excrement. One guard appeared to be as young as Everson, so the prince expected a certain amount of posturing. The other was older, well-worn and haggard with the hatred that had been festering for years.

Everson tried to ignore them. Instead, he eyed yet another large laborer, this time female, as she methodically fulfilled her tasks. She was slightly smaller than the males Everson had encountered, but her features could hardly be called feminine. She was setting the table, her ungainly hands carefully placing napkins, utensils and plates, her black marble eyes never straying from the space directly in front of her. Nothing about her was threatening except for her size and the fact that a shriek from her would probably outclass all the others that Everson had heard so far. Still, he had encountered nothing but conflict and a fair amount of physical abuse since arriving on this planet, so he remained understandably on edge.

Everson also noted an oppressed nature about the laborer. There was care and meticulousness in her glacial movements, to be sure, but there also seemed to be a distinct fear of making a mistake, as if the consequences could be dire. But when she started placing food in the center of the table, all Everson’s concerns fell away. Before he could fully assess the menu, the regal woman, his presumptive savior, breezed into the room lightly, as if Everson had been formally invited to dine and she was merely a tardy hostess.

“Sorry to keep you waiting,” she said warmly as she settled into a seat at the head of the table. “Are you comfortable?”

The woman possessed an ethereal air that seemed to affect the very ambiance of the room. Everson knew that he was in the settlement nearest the Grand Schism, so he quickly concluded he must be in Front Tier. That would make the noblewoman sitting so pleasantly with him The Which. The stone embedded in her forehead only punctuated that fact.