B00CH3ARG0 EBOK (4 page)

“I’m not alone,” she responded, nodding toward the nearest
guard. The Sural raised an eyebrow. “Don’t they count?”

“They focus their senses too keenly on watching for
intruders to be useful in this matter,” he said. “You may not recall that most
were of little help in catching you yesterday. It is too dangerous for you to
be out here unaccompanied, with cliffs on every side.”

“Oh.” Then, “How close did I get to the edge?”

“A few strides.” His arms tightened around her, and she sensed
a pang run through him. “A few more moments, and I would have lost you.”

She winced.
Good lord
. No wonder he was smothering
her.

He took her hand and walked toward a cora tree blooming with
small white flowers. She seated herself beside him on a low branch at the base
of the tree. The faint scent of the petite blooms, undetectable to her before
her recent change, had a citrus-like tang.

“You will enjoy cora fruit,” he said, putting an arm around
her as she nestled against him. “It ripens in mid-autumn.”

“You always seem to know what I’m thinking,” she said. “Don’t
you have any cora fruit stored away that I can try?”

“Cora must be eaten fresh,” he said. “Directly from the
tree, if possible. It loses its flavor very quickly after picking and becomes
bitter.”

“So that’s why you have so many cora trees in the gardens.”

He nodded and ran long fingers through her hair. Light brown
wisps, almost the color of his skin, came free of their knots.

“Earth has a few foods like that,” she added, wistfully
thinking about fresh-picked snap peas from her grandmother’s vegetable garden
in Iowa. He smiled. “Cena has that smile.”

His forehead wrinkled.

“You know,” she went on, “Cena. Your daughter. The head
apothecary.”

“Ah.”

“Is that all you’re going to say? ‘Ah’? Didn’t you know your
own daughter’s name?”

“Of course – but she is not my daughter.” His eyes flicked
over her face. “What troubles you about this?”

She pulled away from him, arms crossed, irritation consuming
her. What was the
matter
with this man? “I don’t understand you people,”
she said, narrowing her eyes as a spark of alarm shot through the Sural. It only
increased the irritation.

He made a gesture and reached out to put a hand on her arm.
She looked around. They were near the apothecaries’ quarters. Was the gesture
meant to summon Cena? She glared at him, but didn’t pull away.

“I never shared a parental bond with Cena,” he said. “I
cannot think of her as my daughter. Only Kyza holds that place in my heart.”

She squeezed her eyes shut as the Sural wrapped his arms and
his senses around her, probing at her roiling emotions with nudges of sanity.

“Beloved, perhaps you will understand this once you have
experienced parental bonding for yourself, with your own child.”

The storm of emotion dissipated. She relaxed into his arms, exhausted
from the brief but intense effort to control her mood. As she calmed, she began
to sense barely-contained passion in the Sural.
Of course
.
He used
his abilities yesterday. That always stirs up his desires.
As suddenly as
her anger dissipated, desire rose. Then she sensed Cena approaching. She
straightened and looked around.

“I must return to my duties,” the Sural said, his eyes full
of banked heat. “I have meetings. There are authorizations that can come only
from the Sural.”

She heaved a sigh and nodded, pulling her mouth to one side in
disappointment.

“My apothecary—Cena is here.” She popped into sight, bowing.
“Will you allow her to stay with you?”

“Yes, beloved.”

“Excellent,” he said. Then he camouflaged and was gone.

Another sigh escaped her. It was hardly surprising that he
was so concerned, not after she came so close to running off a cliff. A shudder
went through her. She remembered screaming, and now she could remember running
– or was that from a dream? – but her memory was blank of anything else until
the Sural was there in the apothecaries’ quarters, holding her while she cried.

Come to think of it, she’d never cried so much in her life
as she had in the past week. At least now she knew why.

Cena took a seat on another of the tree’s low branches,
pulling a scanner out of a pocket to turn it on Marianne. After studying the
readout on her tablet, she gave Marianne a penetrating glance, probing. “All is
well,” she announced with a smile.

“I still can’t believe I’m increasing,” Marianne said. Then
she shook her head. “It could be worse, I guess. Could be ...” She couldn’t
find the Tolari word. “
Twins
,” she said in English. She hiccupped a
laugh, wondering why Tolari didn’t seem to have a word for
twin
. “More
hormones than you can shake a stick at.”

Cena’s eyebrows lifted. “We do not have multiple births.”

Marianne’s jaw dropped a little. “Never? How do you manage
that?”

“It simply does not happen.”

“Well, I guess that would solve that problem.”

Cena cocked her head. “What problem?”

“Of what would happen if someone had too many children.”

“We are very careful about our population balance,” Cena said.
“We want to give all individuals sufficient work to keep them busy.”

“Philosophies like that haven’t worked well on Earth.”

Cena tilted her head to one side. “Our ancestors were human,
but we are not, high one. The ones who brought us here engineered our minds as
well as our bodies. We do not want to lose sight of what it means to be truly
creative, or forget that the greatest of us can create true beauty.”

Marianne thought about it, leaning her elbows back on
another branch, listening to the flutters chattering in the trees. She glanced
at Cena, who was staring at her with a thoughtful expression.

“High one,” Cena said, “would you like to learn our
ancestral languages?”

Surprise brought her up straight. “Could I?”

“I will suggest it. Storaas loves teaching, and you would
benefit from occupying your mind.”

She stifled a snort, thinking what the old man loved was an
audience. Cena raised an eyebrow. “Never mind,” Marianne muttered, repentant.
Tolari
don’t gossip.
She changed the subject. “Where did you grow up?”

* * *

When the Sural returned to the garden after several more
meetings, he found Marianne and his head apothecary chatting amiably, ‘thick as
thieves,’ as the humans put it. She was in a better mood than she had been for
many days. He smiled to himself, waiting for a pause in the conversation before
venturing into range and dropping his camouflage.

“Beloved!” exclaimed Marianne, holding out a hand. “Do you
have time to join us?”

He bowed. “I do,” he said, as he slid onto the branch beside
her.

She gave him a radiant smile and leaned her forehead against
his. The sensitive empathic nerves there shot fire down through his body. He
pulled her against him, gazing at her upturned face, lost in her startling blue
eyes. She was brilliant with desire.

His apothecary cleared her throat. Marianne pulled away and
straightened her robe, a delightful blush coloring her face.

“Who is initiating this?” the healer asked in a dry voice.
“I will not have the Marann’s emotional stability compromised.”

He glanced at her with a mutinous smile. “With a bonded
pair, it can be difficult to determine,” he said. “Even the pair in question
can find it a challenge.”

She was silent for a moment, tapping her lips with a finger
as she thought.

“Very well,” she said, finally. “I will leave you to sort it
between you. But you must limit your coupling. Can you abide by that, high
ones? You must cease behaving like digger squid in spring. If you cannot, I
will have you separated. The Marann would be arguably safer in the city, where
she cannot propel herself from a cliff.”

Marianne, who had been squirming and radiating embarrassment,
froze. “Can she do that?”

He nodded. “She can, although it is impossible to keep
bond-partners apart long,” he answered, giving his apothecary an appraising
look. She met his eyes without fear, and he nodded again. “We will abide,
apothecary.”

“My gratitude, high one,” she said, and winked out of sight.

“Why?” Marianne asked, after the camouflaged apothecary had
moved away.

“She seeks to further your emotional health.”

“No, why is it impossible to keep bond-partners apart?”

“Ah. Because bonding creates a need to be together, and not
just for coupling. An addiction, the humans might call it. If a pair is
separated, the need for contact will after a time become consuming, and the
pair will stop at nothing to find each other. When it comes to the Sural ... no
one alive could control me in such a circumstance, not even the Jorann.”

A spark of worry flashed through her, wrinkling her forehead
and creating lines between her brows. “How long does it take for that to
happen?”

“A season or so.” As the worry drained out of her, he stood
and took her hand. “Come.” He raised her fingers to his lips. “My time is my
own until after the evening meal.”

Marianne opened her eyes. The light of dawn was a relief. Ten
days in a row she had awakened late in the night, crying out, sometimes
attacking the Sural, always weeping herself back to sleep.

“Maybe I should just stop sleeping,” she muttered, barely
awake.

An aide quietly watched her from a chair, and the Sural was absent
from his usual place beside her. He should have been in her sitting room,
reading his morning reports. He’d joined her late in the evening, after finally
finishing up for the day.
Does the man never sleep?
She sighed. Summer was
his busiest season of the year. Farmers harvested, laborers built, and rulers
schemed what they were going to do to one another in the autumn to undermine their
enemies and strengthen their alliances. That was in addition to overseeing
their strongholds, their cities, and their provinces.

She didn’t sense his presence anywhere in her quarters. She
closed her eyes and concentrated. He was off in the south end of the stronghold
somewhere.

The south end? She pressed her lips together. That was the staff
wing ... and the guest wing, where a woman seeking an heir from him might be
quartered. A stab of jealousy went through her.

A light flashed on the comms unit that had come with her
from Earth. She blinked.
That’s not right
. She threw on a robe and
brushed her hair, walking into her sitting room to sit at the desk and query
the unit. It identified the signal as a long-range communication. The Sural had
warned her not to trust it – Earth Fleet could make their signals appear
long-range to their own equipment. It wouldn’t fool Tolari technology, but
Central Command didn’t know that. She dug her tablet out of her pocket.
According to it, the source of the signal was in-system, on the other side of
Tolar’s sun. She heaved a sigh and accepted the connection.

Admiral Howard’s face appeared on the monitor.

“You have a lot of nerve,” she said, gesturing to a servant
to notify the Sural. “You know very well that it’s dawn over the Sural’s
stronghold – you’re too smart to overlook that. Trying to soften me up by
interrupting my sleep? What do you want?”

The Admiral adopted a conciliatory expression. “The last
time we ... talked ... you said the Tolari are being protected by technology
more advanced than ours. Central Command has reviewed the recordings, and they
think you believed what you said.”

Her senses prickled as the Sural entered the room,
camouflaged.

“Admiral, you didn’t call me at this hour just to tell me Central
Command has come to the shattering conclusion that I believe what I say.”

The Admiral gave her a grim smile. “You’re right. I didn’t. I
called to make an appeal. You’re human, a citizen of Earth. Leave Tolar. Come
home to us. We only want to debrief you.”

“That’ll be a frosty day on the sun, after what you tried a
few months ago,” she said.

“You won’t be harmed, you have my word on it. We haven’t
forgotten that you gave up eight years of your life for us here, but your work
on Tolar is done. You’ll have a comfortable stipend, enough to travel, even
enough to live off-world. You can go back to teaching, if you want – teaching
on a station will give you a chance to teach many more languages than just the
few you taught on Earth. You won’t be harassed. We just need you to tell us
what you know about whoever is protecting the Tolari. For your sake, as much as
ours. For Earth’s sake.”

Marianne gave him her best Tolari stare and slowly began to
clap. “Oh very good, Admiral, very good,” she said with mock admiration. Then she
grew serious again. “Meanwhile, the government sues me for breach of contract
by leaving Tolar before my twenty-six years are up, and I end up begging my
friends in Casey – if I have any left after Central Command gets done
threatening them – for a crust of bread to eat and a corner to sleep in.”

“Marianne—”

“Citizen Woolsey to you.”

He heaved a sigh. “Have it your way. Citizen Woolsey. We
still have ways to pull you out, but we’d rather you came willingly.”

“I sincerely doubt that.”

“You won’t like it if you force us to act.”

“Are you threatening me?” she asked. “Because you won’t like
it if you make an enemy of the Sural. I’ve
seen
what happens to his
enemies.”

“That’s the sort of information we need,” he pressed,
leaning forward. “Help us, Mari— Citizen Woolsey. You’re human. You can’t
seriously be siding with aliens.”

“You know as well as I do they’re not really aliens. Why did
you try to abduct me? I’m not important. I’m just a teacher.”

“You’re in danger there. You told us yourself that as soon
as you vowed your life to the Sural, his enemies would want to kill you. They
tried to assassinate you within hours. We can’t leave one of our own alone in
such danger on a primitive world.”