Trade Secret (eARC) Read Online Free Page B

the comparisons were. Being born to a family was enough to guarantee all kinds of things on some worlds--Terran worlds, especially--and aboard some ships, but in Liaden space, it was the delm who ultimately determined what a person owned or could own, down to being denied any part in a clan.
    Well, there--he needed to know, as a trader, how often such things might be encountered. He . . . well, as a Terran spacer he'd inherited some stuff from his father and he'd owned some stuff on his own as a kid, things given him by his father.
    That must have been birthright, because not even the ship's captain--his mother--would deny it to him now. A couple pieces of jewelry, some fractins all collected now by the Scout, a book--his "logbook" where as a child he'd sat beside his father, Arin Gobelyn, whole shifts at a time, creating routes and manifests for trips he'd make when he was a pilot or Combine trader on the Market.
    He sighed, for he was still no pilot, and his mother had stolen the book away when his father died, and hid it, and so pre-told the true tale that he was never to be welcome as full-fledged crew there on Gobelyn's Market , name or no, birthright or not.
    The family stuff, personal family stuff, he tried to shove that back into the receding mental cubby that was Jethri Gobelyn, since here on Elthoria he was Jethri the trader, son of the trader, ven'Deelin the family name, Ixin the clan.
    Study and thought, that was the day, and that was fine.
    In fact, the day was going well, which was what he'd come to expect when it came to dealing with tradeship Elthoria . Very few things caused a stir, very rare was a raised voice or a ruffled demeanor, very unusual indeed was there anything deemed urgent.
    Jethri admired this stability in a ship, having come from a ship which aspired to ordinary but whose days had been punctuated by angry outbursts and whimsical orders, and an overdose of what his cousin Dyk had labeled "Jethri do."
    There was, of course, quite a difference between the driving forces behind the ship Elthoria and the ship Gobelyn's Market . On the Market the driving force was the captain, who'd also been his mother until bare months before when he'd discovered the awkward truth. On Elthoria. the driving force was Norn ven'Deelin, who had been his rescue as a Master Trader and had become his new mother, and behind her was a clan at least as old and as proud as the Gobelyns.
    Even granting different base cultures, which Jethri was more than willing to do, the ships were more different than many of his current crew mates would imagine, for they--everyone besides him, that is--had someplace to call home that was not Elthoria . Not just a posting or a position or a job or a berth, but a home , a planetside building, mostly with roof and windows and a view at least of the underside of a sky.
    As for Jethri, he'd grown up on Gobelyn's Market --it had been his home until the strange series of events that had brought him to Trader ven'Deelin's office in what was to him, just another port. By then Iza had already given notice that his home ship couldn't house him any longer. He'd become too much an extra hand, too much a reminder of agreements and perhaps even of passion that had passed years before with the death of his father, Arin.
    Technically, of course, he had a home now--which would be the distant Clan Ixin clanhouse he'd yet to enter, but inside, in his thoughts, he couldn't call it home anymore than he could call himself Liaden, though his demeanor, his clothes, his title, and his tradering all screamed Liaden to unknowing dirtsiders who met him in the rounds of business.
    But there, his mother was not his mother, his ship was not his home, his clan was not his family . . . and only some of his family was family by blood and genes.
    What had he got from being born? Birthright?
    What was that exactly? The blood and genes of his father, and a few odd ends that had belonged to his father, and that in the aftermath of