The Gathering Flame by Debra Doyle, James D. MacDonald Page A

knowledgeable myself—enology wasn’t a formal part of the school curriculum any more than sharpshooting was—but I’d say you made a good investment. Where did you pick it up?”
    Jos and Errec glanced at each other. “Off a Mage cargo carrier,” the captain said finally. “Somewhere beyond Ninglin. I don’t know where they got it—none of us could read their manifests.”
    “Oh,” Perada said. She gazed at the claret a while longer, then tilted back her glass and drank it all. She set the tumbler down on the mess table with a thud. “Better us than them.”
    Ferrda rumbled something approving, and the others laughed. Tillijen refilled the empty tumblers, then tilted her. chair back and started singing a rousing ballad in a language that Perada didn’t recognize, though Metadi apparently knew it well enough to join in with Nannla on the chorus. Errec Ransome didn’t sing this time, only smiled and poured Khesatan spring wine into the empty tumblers.
    The spring wine had bubbles in it, and a taste like an explosion of flowers. At formal receptions on Galcen, during her last year at school, Perada had sipped it out of thimble-sized crystal glasses after the Khesatan fashion. The experience hadn’t prepared her for dealing with Warhammer’s more generous portions. She decided that she didn’t care.
    She drained her glass and let the bubbles float upward and go off in her head like fireworks, while the music went on and on. Errec Ransome was singing now, and the drink in the tumblers was Galcenian Uplands brandy, harsh and powerful like the northern hills it came from. Errec’s song was one that Perada recognized from her schooldays; it came from those same hills, and she wondered where and when he had learned it.

    “Oh three they drew and two he slew
And one he wounded deep.
The youngest one threw down his blade
And bitterly did weep.
     
    “He’s taken out his little knife,
He’s gripped it fast and high.
‘And though you were my own blood kin
This night you’d surely die.’”
     

    It was an old song, one of the dark and bloody ones, and he sang it alone, with no accompaniment except for a wandering countermelody on Ferrda’s pipes. He finished, and drank off the tumbler of brandy that had waited on the mess table in front of him while he sang.
    The glasses were empty again. Nannla unstoppered the square bottle of purple liquor and poured out six equal portions. Perada noticed the others looking at her expectantly.
    My turn, she realized. They want to see if I can fit in, or if I’m nothing but a passenger who happens to own a couple of star systems.
    She picked up the tumbler and sipped at the purple liquid—it had a strong, almost medicinal flavor, and it stung going down—while she tried to think of some tune that wouldn’t be more suited to a garden party than to a shipboard singalong. In the end she gave up trying— Can I help it if everybody I used to know was respectable? —and sang “Bindweed and Blossom” as she’d learned it from Gentlelady Wherret in music class at school. Nobody laughed, and she wasn’t surprised to hear Tillijen singing the chorus along with her.
    Most of the purple liquor had vanished from her tumbler while she did her thinking earlier. She swallowed the drop or two remaining, and looked over at Jos Metadi.
    “It’s your turn,” she said.
    He shook his head. “Not me. I’m the only one on board with no voice.”
    “You can’t get away without doing something.” She turned to Nannla and Tillijen. “Isn’t that right?”
    Tillijen nodded solemnly. “That’s right.”
    The number-two gunner was definitely tipsy, Perada decided—well, so were they all by now, even the captain.
    Even me .
    She looked at Metadi. “You said that everything in your cabin was at my disposal.”
    “That’s right.”
    “Then come and prove it to me,” she said. “Now.”
    For a long moment he said nothing, and she feared that she’d lost her gamble at the very