‘It looks likely,’ he said. He shifted so he could sit. ‘I don’t want to. If they won’t come with me, I’ll have to make them. It’s what I was sent to do.’

‘Are you going to die?’ Her face was pinched, pale, tight-lipped.

‘It depends on how willing they are to kill me.’

‘That’s not an answer.’ Alessandra stood up and began to pace the few steps between the walls.

‘It’s a sort of answer,’ he said hopefully.

Her face twitched with a not-quite smile. ‘And you expect me to stand by and watch?’

‘I had to stand by and watch you save Elenya. Do you think that was easy for me?’ Benzamir tightened the sheet in front of him.

Her breath caught in her throat for a moment. Then she said: ‘I could have done nothing. It would have been easy for me to do nothing.’

‘I think I know you better.’

She didn’t reply, just paced and paced until she threatened to wear the floor down. Benzamir watched her, going through a series of gestures that betrayed his nervousness: palm wiping, nose scratching, toe wriggling.

Eventually she stopped and sat down again. ‘Even if you live, you’re going to go away.’

‘Alessandra, of course I’m going away. The whole point of me coming was to make sure you’d all be left alone.’

‘Left alone?’ she snorted. ‘You’ve interfered with everything you touched.’

‘As has been pointed out to me by our Orthodox friend.’

‘You’ll go away and leave us with our memories, and our dreams of something greater than ourselves. It seems cruel.’

She was quiet for a while, and Benzamir checked the time on his internal clock. He watched the seconds tick by in the corner of his vision.

‘So where will you leave me, Benzamir Mahmood?’

When he didn’t answer, she left him. The door slid shut behind her, but he continued to stare at the place where she’d been. He thought about lying down again, but knew it would be pointless.

He put on his pilot’s coverall and went to find some peace.

It was a part of the ship he rarely visited, and he assumed that his passengers wouldn’t have found it yet. But when he reached the door, it was open, and there was a pale, flickering light inside.

She had taken two candles from their place in an alcove and placed them on the stand in front of her. One was already lit, and she was reaching out with a taper to light the other when she stopped in mid-stretch. Benzamir was certain he hadn’t made a noise.

‘Sorry, my lady.’

Elenya completed her task, holding the wavering flame to the candle wick and waiting for it to catch.

‘You appear in the most surprising places, Benzamir.’ She blew the taper out and turned to face him. ‘You see it as your duty to save the weak and raise up the fallen. We only have to say your name, and you come to our aid. Are you a saint or an angel?’

‘Neither, Princess. Not with the thoughts that I’ve had.’

‘But you’re no mere man. I saw you fight.’

Benzamir took a candle of his own, held it to a flame and sat it in the holder. The three lights gave only the barest illumination.

‘I don’t do religion very well, any of them. I don’t know if that makes me deficient in some way. I sometimes believe in a god. Sometimes I think he believes in me. Today? It had mixed results.’ As he stared at the candle, he remembered Ibn Alam, he remembered Persephone.

‘I haven’t thanked you yet,’ said Elenya. ‘Even in my moment of madness, you wouldn’t let me go.’

‘You don’t have to—’ he started, but she laid her finger over his lips.

‘I do. I am not cured. Not yet, not perhaps for years. But my fever was broken in that frozen sea. He wouldn’t rescue me, even when I was prepared to kill myself. But you were.’

She replaced her finger with her lips. The taste was warm and sweet, brief like a wave that washes up the beach then sinks through the sand.

‘What is more important is that you were all there. Said and Wahir, whom I hardly know. Alessandra, who of all people has reason to get rid of me. Her decency, her humanity, overcame her jealousy. She is much better than me.’

‘What am I going to do with you, Princess Elenya?’

She knelt in front of the candles, not to pray but to stare into their fire until it blotted out everything else. ‘I understand Va better having met you. When he looks at me, he sees me as I was. When you look at me, you see what I could become. Neither of you see me as I am, but until today, neither did I. It’s time I went home and faced myself. Will you take me back to Novy Rostov?’

‘Is that what you want?’ Benzamir looked down at her bowed head. Part of him wanted to reach out and touch her, and it warred with the knowledge that if he did, neither of them would ever be happy.

‘Being a princess doesn’t give you much freedom,’ she said. ‘You’re always expected to behave in a certain way even if you feel like kicking and screaming; marry who you’re told without any thought of love, to breed little princes to keep the blood line going. I’ve done none of those things for the past six years. Instead, I’ve sat and waited at the gates of a monastery for a man who will not have me.’ She crossed herself twice, and almost a third time before she stopped herself. ‘Old habits die hard,’ she said, and rose from the cold floor.

They were face to face.

‘I’ve seen many things as I’ve travelled, many people. I met a man, a boat builder, called Rory macShiel; I saw him with his wife, how they behaved with each other, and for the first time in a very long time I thought of someone else but Va. I thought of my parents, and my brothers and sisters. They must think I’m dead. So I think I have to go back, even if I don’t stay.’

Benzamir nodded. ‘As you wish, Elenya Christyakova. I have something I must do tomorrow, but then I will take you home.’

‘You know where your rebels are?’

‘Once we found Persephone, it all fell into place. There will be, well, a reckoning, one way or another. We shall see.’

‘Have I disappointed you?’ she asked quietly.

He took his time to answer, daring to stare into her eyes. Eventually he said: ‘No. For all will be well.’

‘You say that. Do you know that?’

‘I hope that, because that’s all I can do.’ He bent low and blew out the candles one by one.

It was dark again, the only light leaking from far down the corridor.

‘We need to go,’ he said.

‘I can’t see.’

‘Then take my hand.’

CHAPTER 42

THEY WERE ALL subdued. The others looked on, pensive, waiting, while Benzamir looked at the rebels’ encampment on the display, marking out features with his finger and letting Ariadne label them in luminous white. Biodome. Living hab. Primary power plant. Beached skimmers resting on a dark shelf of rock. Tubes leading down into the sea, sucking up minerals and carbon to use in the replicator.

The domes were camouflaged, blending seamlessly in with their surroundings by means of chameleonware. They had only found them because Benzamir’s bugs had been tracked to the precise location.

Hunting the desert inland, he found pop-up gun emplacements and mobile mines. He weighed up in his mind whether he had enough armaments to win a head-on assault. The name on his map said Skeleton Coast. It wasn’t a promising start.

Benzamir stared deep into the heart of the image. ‘They must know we’re coming. Why won’t they talk to me?’

‘Because they want you down there. All prudence dictates that you destroy them from here and collect their charred corpses for burial later, but they know it’s you now. They know how you’ll behave. You won’t fire first.’

They spoke in Nu, and Ariadne would not translate.

‘I still have to inform them of the Council’s charges.’

‘Then write it down, put it in a drop-pod and ram it through their ceiling.’ Her voice was sharp, brittle with almost human anger. ‘They killed a ship. They don’t deserve consideration.’