Soldier at the Door(184)

She pursed her lips. “You may have a point,” she had to admit. “But you didn’t keep that secret for long, and I also suspected something more was going on than simply a dare gone wrong. Shem’s smart, but not that clever. We would’ve caught him by now.”

He sat back and studied her. “You’ve already made up your mind about him, haven’t you? Just listen to you. You’ve already decided he’s innocent.”

“No, I haven’t,” she defended, her tone not nearly as convincing as her words. “And just listen to yourself! So have you!”

“I didn’t say he was innocent, only that he’s . . . not . . . ” he fumbled for the right words, “only he’s not against us.” He shrugged hopelessly. “Oh, I don’t know. All I do know is that I want to follow my heart and believe Hogal and trust Shem, but my head keeps getting in the way with too many questions about his involvement. Or lack of.”

He closed his tired eyes and rubbed them. “Just when I thought I was on top of everything again . . . Just yesterday, when I showed my father all our improvements, and watched him grin—I’ve never seen him so happy. So when I think I’ve got a handle on everything . . . suddenly I can’t seem to grip anything.”

Mahrree reached across the table and squeezed his arm. “You’ve done remarkably well, Perrin,” she said earnestly. “You do have a handle on things. This was all completely unexpected. But think about this—if they were Guarders, just how desperate have you made them to try something so daring? You’ve got them on the run, Major Shin!”

“Wonderful,” he said drearily. “My extreme measures have pushed them to insane measures, which means at some point they’re going to succeed insanely as well.”

“No it doesn’t!” she insisted. “Because they’ve failed! And this failure’s going to hurt them—”

“Or make them even angrier,” he countered. He massaged his eyes again. “And we don’t even know if they were Guarders. Likely never will. But if they were, how does a certain young soldier fit into all of this?”

Mahrree exhaled and shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“Math,” Perrin said dully.

She blinked. “What?”

“It’s like a complicated math problem,” he intoned. “When you have symbols instead of numbers and you have to figure out what numbers are supposed to be there.”

“Oh, I hate those,” Mahrree mumbled.

“I love them,” Perrin smiled feebly at her. “Still do. It’s a challenge, defying you to solve it while it keeps its secrets to itself. But you poke it and test it and experiment until it begins to fall apart, and you get one number, and then another, and suddenly it all becomes yours. You know its secrets, and you’ve conquered it!”

She looked at him appreciatively. “That’s how you see the world, isn’t it? As one big equation that you have to solve?”

“Frequently. It used to even be fun,” he admitted, but then his smile faded. “Until recently. Until the equation eliminated Tabbit and Hogal, and tried to smudge out my parents. And now there’s a variable it’s tossing around named Shem Zenos, and I’m afraid to stick a number there, in case I hate the way it all turns out. Ah, Mahrree,” he sighed as he stared at his untouched meal, “there are too many unknowns, too many variables, and this time . . . I’m afraid it’s beating me,” he confessed in a whisper.

Mahrree was struck dumb. She hadn’t seen him so despondent since the Densals died. And he’d come so far, accomplished so much, struck a blow to the Guarders in so many ways, and now he feared—feared?—they were striking back. The world really was out to get them.

She realized then, as he now held his head in his hands again, that she’d never before heard him use the word “afraid” to refer to himself, and it unsettled her. How was it that he could accomplish so much, yet then despair so easily?

For a moment she glimpsed a solution to it all, but it was a solution High General Shin had already dismissed. Yet there was no other alternative—Perrin had to go into the forest and find out, once and for all, just what all of this was about. There was simply no other way to end it.

But, as she watched the man she adored, that nasty word starting with a c—and that word wasn’t cautious—popped into her head again. She clenched her fist in frustration, angry that the world, the Guarders, the events of the previous night, and even her favorite soldier were somehow conspiring to turn her husband into something less than he was.