Matriarch Read Online Free PDF

glistening with her twin-tined glass fork, an oily, dark disc with vanes on one side. “Is this a mushroom?”
    â€œCorrect.”
    The novelty distracted her briefly from the unspoken question. How did Lin die in the end? “Want to tell me how you managed to get hold of mushrooms?”
    â€œShapakti,” said Ade.
    â€œYou didn’t beat it out of him, did you?”
    â€œNo, Boss.” The Eqbas biologist was wary of Ade’s aggressively protective streak. “I just said that if he was going to start reviving species from the gene bank, he might find edible fungi really interesting. He did. It was a surprise for you.”
    Shan broke off a chunk of mushroom with her fork. It smelled wonderful, and the taste surpassed the aroma. It was amazing how uplifting familiar food could be a long, long way from home.
    â€œFantastic. I mean it, that’s fantastic. ” The praise didn’t prompt Ade’s usual reaction of an embarrassed grin. He just shrugged, still agitated. She sawed another chunk from the mushroom with the edge of the fork and placed it in Aras’s bowl. “You tried this yet? Nothing like fried mushrooms to start the day.”
    Aras jerked back his head as if scalded. “Fungi.”
    â€œYou’ll like it.”
    â€œIt’s fungi. Isenj smell of it.”
    She’d forgotten that, but Aras hadn’t forgotten being a prisoner of the isenj, and she’d absorbed the memories of what they’d done to him. Smells were very evocative. It was enough to make him freeze in that wess’har alarm reaction.
    â€œOkay, sweetheart.” She retrieved the chunk of mushroom and gave it to Ade, wondering why the smell hadn’t triggered her memory too. Shit. “I’m sorry.”
    Breakfast fell silent except for the occasional scrape of glass on glass. How long she could she not ask what had happened? She didn’t have a good track record on tact. Ade stared into his bowl of beans, wearing his don’t-hit-me expression. Aras—long dark braid draped over one shoulder, still that elegant blend of heraldic beast and man—simply looked her straight in the eye, unblinking as only a wess’har could be. But he said nothing.
    â€œI thought I’d germinate these tomato seeds,” said Shan, and rattled the container in her pocket in the hope of getting some conversation going. “See how they do out here.”
    Ade and Aras sat eating in grim awkward silence, wafting a citrus tang of agitation. She suppressed her own scent—a habit now—and pushed the small box across the table towards them.
    She’d expected them to be subdued. They weren’t like her: they didn’t get triumphant satisfaction out of seeing the guilty punished. But they were upset. There was no other word for it.
    I should have done it myself.
    She’d never let anyone do her dirty work before and this reminded her why. They made her feel guilty.
    Aras picked up the container and turned it over in his hands. The unpatented, illegal seeds that Shan had carried with her for years and light-years—more out of defiance and hope than certainty of settling long enough to plant them—tumbled inside.
    â€œIt’s winter,” said Ade, voice strained by tight throat muscles. “Funny time of year to sow them.”
    Shan tried to find a focus in the patterns of sauce that nestled in the bottom of her bowl. “I know people back home who keep theirs growing all year.”
    Home just slipped out, but she was sure she felt no pain in saying it now. It was just a location, nothing more. There was no way of removing c’naatat from Aras’s cells, so he had to stay here, and so she’d stay too, and so would Ade. It was the way things were. They were a team, a family.
    Sod it.
    Maybe the prisoner handover was too distressing even for Aras to discuss, and wess’har weren’t squeamish. Neither was she.