Shield's Lady

of my being a man.”
    He didn’t bother to glance back as he went about building a fire and heating water for her morning bath. He couldn’t tell what she was thinking. Nothing at all was seeping into his mind from her this morning.
    Half an hour later, cloaked against the early morning chill, Sariana sat on the other side of the fire and sipped her laceleaf tea. She waited in silence for Gryph’s explanations.
    He lounged on a rock, warming his hands around his mug and considered his intelligent, passionate, unpredictable wife. He searched for the words he needed.
    “You said you learned something about Shields yesterday,” he finally began.
    “A few things,” she admitted evasively.
    “It was something that made you think I might not be as human as you are.” He could feel his own grimness and wished he could control it better.
    “I saw a portion of a play with Keri. It was a First Generation legend about the Shields saving the colonists on board The Serendipity.”
    “And you found yourself a chatty medic who implied a few things that also made you wonder who or what you had married.” Gryph took a long swallow of tea. “Must have been a female medic,” he muttered.
    “It was, as a matter of fact.”
    Gryph gave her a level glance. “I told you last night that I’m as human as you are.”
    She returned his gaze. “Is it true the Shields weren’t on board The Serendipity or is that just legend?”
    “It’s true.”
    “Then where did your people come from, Gryph?” she asked quietly.
    “What your people don’t know, Sariana, or else they’ve forgotten, is that their ancestors weren’t part of the first wave of human colonists that left the home planets and scattered into the galaxy. There was another wave of colonization that took place a hundred years earlier. My people are descended from that first wave.”
    Sariana sat tensely, her tea unfinished in her hand. “I’ve never heard of a previous attempt at colonization.”
    “I know. Your people were lucky just to hang on to a distorted version of their own history. It’s no wonder they’ve lost all record of a previous history of other colonists. Even if the records did exist, no one would pay them much attention. As far as my people are aware, no one on the home planets ever heard from that first wave again after the ships left the solar system. Most of the ships were headed into this sector of the galaxy because the scientists had determined there was a cluster of star systems here that would be able to support human life. The odds of finding new homes seemed reasonably good in this sector. Since The Serendipity and The Rendezvous were both sent in this direction, too, we can assume that at the time of the second wave the home system scientists were still of the same opinion about the usefulness of planets in this area.”
    “They were right,” Sariana observed. “Windarra has been a very hospitable planet.”
    “That may have been true of the eastern continent, but the west was a deathtrap. Almost every other inhabitable planet in this sector was also a trap,” Gryph informed her bluntly.
    “What do you mean?”
    “The main reason no one ever heard from the first wave of colonists was because most of them died in storms of light that consumed whole ships attempting to land on planets in the local star systems.”
    “There was a scene in the play yesterday,” Sariana said softly, “a scene in which The Serendipity was nearly swallowed by such a storm.”
    Gryph nodded, wondering how to explain the rest of the tale. “The people on board my ancestors’ colony ship were lucky. They escaped the storm that almost caught them when they attempted to land on the planet of their choice.”
    “Windarra?”
    Gryph gave her a small smile. “No, not Windarra. A planet called Talis. It was located in a neighboring system.” He saw the wonder in her eyes. He also saw the doubt. “It’s true, Sariana. I swear it. My people have kept their own history all these years. We have not forgotten our origins.”
    “How did you come to Windarra?”
    “We followed the trail of the crystal ships,” he explained simply, then realized he had skipped over far too much. “I’ll have to go back to the beginning. By pure luck my ancestors’ ship escaped a lightstorm that awaited it on Talis. It backed off and went into a wide orbit around Talis’ moon while the scientists and technologists on board tried to analyze what the storm was