The Sea Without a Shore Read Online Free PDF

hands. Miranda was as concerned as he’d ever seen her—afraid that she had interfered in his business. Throughout their relationship, she pointedly had tried at all costs to avoid that.
    “Thank you, dear,” he said. “You did right. You had to make a decision, and you chose the better of two options. Either was acceptable—and anyway, I wouldn’t be upset if you’d guessed wrong.”
    “So it’s three for dinner, Mirandy?” Mistress Greene said, calling across the front room. Daniel and Miranda were still in the entrance hall with old paddles, fishing poles, and yard tools—some of them broken.
    “Two, Chloris,” Miranda said, looking over her shoulder with a bright smile. “I’m going to check with Gwen Higgenson”—wife of the head of the fish-processing plant—“to see if they’ve got room at table for me while the men talk business here.”
    Mistress Greene snorted. “If she didn’t, she’d put her husband out in the shed to make room,” she said, correctly enough.
    “Chloris?” Daniel said. “Hogg and I caught some sprats. Tom Sand and I will have those. But I’ve got to shower! That car of his will make it from Xenos in two hours if he pushes it.”
    “I’ve laid clean clothes on the bed,” Miranda said. She caught concern in the slight tenseness at the corners of Daniel’s mouth.
    “No, nothing fancy!” she protested. “Just like what you’re wearing”—RCN utilities—“only clean. And a newish pair, one that you haven’t split up the seat.”
    Laughing as though he hadn’t momentarily feared that he would find his Dress Whites waiting for him in the bedroom, Daniel walked through the front room on his way to the showers at the back.
    Miranda stayed beside him. “I tried to think what Adele would do.”
    She grinned, but the expression had a wry tinge. “That didn’t help much,” she said, “because I realized Adele wouldn’t be out of contact.”
    Daniel laughed in real humor as he bent to take off his soft boots. A pair of shower shoes waited just inside the door of the large tile room. He was very lucky to have met Miranda Dorst; sorry though he was that the occasion of meeting had been the death of her brother under Daniel’s command.
    “Adele isn’t a magician, love,” he said as he stripped off the utilities he’d worn fishing. The fabric dried quickly, but the many pockets were damp—and probably held weed and mud. “I grant that she seems to be one, sometimes.”
    Daniel turned on one of the three showerheads. Instead of a drain, the runoff slanted down the floor and through the gap under the outer wall.
    One good thing about this Tom Sand business was that Daniel was no longer thinking about the wolf eel and what hadn’t—quite—happened. He grinned.
    Instead I can worry about what Mistress Sand’s husband needs to tell me in secret, and what that means for me and Adele.

    Xenos on Cinnabar
    The Shippers’ and Merchants’ Treasury had become Adele’s bank shortly after she had returned—returned from exile—to Xenos. It was the first time in her life that she’d had money of her own—a share of the prize money won by Lieutenant Daniel Leary for himself and his crews. Adele, much to her surprise, had been included in the share-out.
    As she and Tovera came up the sidewalk, the doorman smiled and opened the bronze-grilled door with a flourish. “Very glad to see you again, Lady Mundy,” he said.
    Adele hadn’t entered the bank in several years; she had no call to. Had the doorman been warned to expect her, or was his visual memory really that good?
    She smiled, or at least almost smiled, as she gave the doorman a nod of response. Deirdre Leary was in her different way just as able as her brother, so both were probably true.
    Adele stepped into the lobby of dark wood, polished stone, and more bronze. She was sure that the Shippers’ and Merchants’ handled its affairs with state-of-the-art technology, but it made a point of looking quaintly