Inheritor by C. J. Cherryh

trip?"
    "Fine," he said, persisting in Ragi and in cheerfulness. Jase
wasn't
supposed to speak the human language. Jase had agreed to follow the regimen by which
he'd
learned: no Mosphei' at all. "How have you been, nadi-ji?"
    "Fine." Jase switched to Ragi. "I hear there was trouble in the peninsula."
    "Saigimi. Yes. Correct noun choice, by the way. — So you did hear."
    "Not that much," Jase said. "But the staff was worried."
    "Security was in a little hurry to bring me home. But nothing serious. — And you, nadi-ji? Nothing wrong, I hope."
    A hesitation. And in the human language: "Welcome home."
    Welcome
home
.
    A
little edge to that, perhaps. A little irony. Or friendliness. He wasn't sure. It was a term they'd had to discuss in Mosphei'. Jase hadn't understood what
home
was in relation to
this
planet, one of the myriad of little human concepts that had somehow not made it back from the stars unchanged.
Home
to Jase's original thinking was a world.
Home
was Earth.
Home
was, equally, an atevi star neither Jase nor his parents had ever seen, to which they'd returned from wherever they'd gone for nearly two hundred years.
    And whatever
home
meant, Jase had never in his life been out of the steel world he'd been born to, until he'd entered a tiny pod and plunged into this world's atmosphere.
    "Home, yes, nadi." Bren gave the ends of his hair, which reached the middle of his back when it was loose from its braid, a final squeeze of the towel. Tano was still standing there, along with two of the female servants. Jase had been practicing disconnecting the face and the tones of voice from the content, but it wasn't appropriate here. Or there were other interpretations. Jase had a temper. He'd seen that proved. But he wasn't going to light into Jase with lectures. "Relax. It's staff. Is there a problem?"
    "No."
    Which meant Yes, in that leaden tone of voice.
    Fine. Disasters. He saw it coming. There'd been a crisis in the household.
    But it didn't need to preface supper. Dammit, he refused to have it before supper. Not unless there'd been bloodshed.
    "Can it wait until after dinner, nadi?"
    Jase didn't answer him. It was a sulk. It was aimed at him.
    He was in the witness of atevi, both servants and security. He was under a noble roof. He was getting angry — as Jase could make him angry, with a human precision no ateva quite managed. And, dammit, he wasn't going to argue. He made his tone smooth and his expression bland. "All right, if it can't wait, let's go to the library."
    "All right," Jase said in that same dead tone.
    He led the way. Jase walked with him quietly down the short curving hall from the baths to the main hallway and back to the isolation of the lady Damiri's private library, mostly of antique, fragile books.
    Tano followed. Tano, having it unshakably in his atevi mind that Jase
was
of a different leader's man'chi, would
not
allow him alone in Jase's presence, or at least not far alone in Jase's presence when Jase was acting like this. It was well possible that, species aside, Tano picked up some of the same signals he did, of
his
anger, and that he wasn't damned patient at the moment for one of Jase's tempests in an atevi teapot.
    Tano took up a post outside the door when he followed Jase inside and shut the door.
    "So what is it?" Bren said.
    "Just —" Jase lapsed into his own dialect. "Dammit, you could have phoned, that's all."
    "For what?"
    "It doesn't matter! I waited. I waited every evening. I couldn't even get the damn security to say what city you were in!"
    Tano and Algini outranked the security he'd left guarding Jase, that was why. But it was petty business.
Not
the real issue. Jase began arguments by diversion — he'd learned that, and all right, Bren thought, he could chase diversion, if that was where Jase wanted to take this conversation at the moment; and they'd pretend to talk, and pretend to reach a conclusion and have the real issue for dessert.
    In the meanwhile, and
in
Ragi:
    "Security