“We must take the child. She cannot survive the birth.”
“Get a litter!”
“
The Paran has collapsed!
”
The smell of tryllen stung Azana’s nose. Hands guided her into a chair.
“Scientist.” An urgent voice near her ear. “Take the child’s bond if you can.”
She gasped. “Laura…”
“She is too close to the dark.”
“The Paran—”
“He lies bond-shocked and unconscious. Force the child to bond to you. It is the only way to save him.”
A thin cry. She nodded. Moments later, a woman in yellow laid a small, wailing, kicking bundle in Azana’s arms. Gathering her strength, she cradled the Paran’s tiny son and began to pry at the bond linking him to Laura.
Awareness returned in shades of white. Cream, ivory, bone. Laura analyzed the variations. Seashell. Eggshell. Pearl.
It was the ceiling.
She was awake. The glowing presences surrounded her. Again, or still, she didn’t know.
“Artist?” The woman in yellow stood over her. “Do you understand me?”
“Yes.” Laura searched her mind for the woman’s name. Syvra. That was it. She repeated it to herself several times. Names were important, Mama had always said.
Relief blossomed from a source on the other side of the bed. The man in green, the Paran, sat there. His gaze flicked toward the woman. “Will she remember me?” he asked.
“I cannot yet say,” Syvra replied. “Much depends on the effect of her continuing genetic change. Some connections may reestablish themselves as the cells in her brain transform.”
The man studied the… apothecary, as if trying to decide what to say. A certain amount of grim calculation passed through him. “Summon the Marann,” he said.
“Yes, high one.” She pulled a tile from a pocket.
“What is a high one?” Laura asked, but the images leaped into her mind—men and women, laughing, dancing, fighting, in a broad, stone hall hung with banners. “Where am I?”
“Humans call our star Beta Hydri,” he said. “We call our planet Tolar.”
“Beta Hydri?” She frowned. “But we have not explored there yet.”
The man opened his mouth to answer, and a young woman carrying a baby in a sling walked into the room. “Laura!” she said, and the rest of her words dissolved into incomprehensible babble.
“What?” She studied this new intruder. In contrast to Syvra, who seemed to be some sort of doctor, and to the Paran—she didn’t know
what
he was supposed to be—this woman was fair-skinned, with eyes like splinters of blue glass and long, golden brown hair tied back with a strip of cloth. Her pale blue robe also sported embroidery, similar to that on the man’s, but confined to the collar and cuffs. The baby in the sling, about the size of a one year old, didn’t stir. A shock of unruly black hair stuck out of the blanket.
The young woman stopped and uttered something else unintelligible. Laura looked over at the Paran.
“Can you understand her?” she asked. “What did she say?”
The man regarded Laura for a moment. His eyes flicked to the newcomer, whose eyebrows had climbed up her forehead. “Speak Paranian,” he said.
“Laura,” the woman said, “I came as soon as I could. The Sural sends his affection.”
Confusion turned into words. They bubbled through her lips, almost of their own volition. “The Sural? Who is that? What is going on around here? Where am I? Is this a Central Command experiment?”
Central Command
didn’t come out right.
The young woman recoiled, her remarkable eyes darting to the man.
“She does not remember us,” he said, his voice tight.
The woman’s face softened. “I grieve for you, dear one.”
Laura’s stomach tightened, and a perverse twinge shot through her. Was the blue-eyed woman his wife?
“Is she your… your…” Where did the words
go
?
The man turned a fond smile on her, as if he knew what she had tried to say. “No, beloved, she is not my—” He spoke a nonsense syllable. “You are.”
She relaxed a little, but… her thoughts froze. “I am what?”
The apothecary pulled her attention away from her tablet. “Can you tell me your name?”
“Laura—” She frowned, searching her mind until the rest of it surfaced. “Laura Connelly Johnson. I—no. Laura Johnson Howard. My name is Laura Johnson Howard. My father has the largest… the largest…”
Once more the words wouldn’t come. She rolled her eyes. If she could move her head, she would have pounded it into the pillow.
“Where am I?” she exploded in frustration, but her voice barely rose above normal volume. “Why can I not remember how I got here? Who are all of you?”
“You really cannot remember me?” the young woman asked. “My name is Marianne. Marianne Woolsey. You have known me for years. And this,” she gave a nod and a tender glance to the bundle in the sling, “is my daughter, Rose. You were visiting me when she was born.”
“I am your apothecary,” the other woman said. “My name is Syvra.”
“I am the Paran,” the man said. “Your bond-partner.”
Laura pressed her lips together.
That
word had come out when she wanted to talk about her husband. This... Paran... was too young to be her husband. And—she frowned. She was married to John Walter Howard of Boston, not this man. None of this made sense.
“I am—I am a…”
Married woman
. No word for
married
would come to mind. She gritted her teeth. “Tell me what a bond-partner is.”
The woman called Marianne gave a start. “A bond-partner is—difficult to explain. Your heart is bonded to the Paran.”
“What? What does my heart have to do with a man I have never seen before?”
The young woman’s eyes went wide.
“Do you not feel our bond?” the Paran asked.
“What bond? What do you mean?”
Syvra laid a hand on her shoulder again, and something pushed into Laura’s awareness.
“No!” Laura exclaimed, and pushed back.
With a strangled cry, Syvra staggered back several steps, clutching her head with both hands. The Paran swarmed to his feet. “Beloved, no!” he cried.
Marianne rushed to Syvra’s side.
“I am… unharmed,” Syvra murmured, rubbing her temples.
A wave of exhaustion pressed Laura into the bed, as if—whatever she had done—had sucked the energy from her body. Her lids drooped. “I just woke,” she muttered.
“It is enough, for now,” Syvra said. She slipped one hand into a pocket, but continued to rub her temple with the other. “You will grow stronger each time you wake.”
“This makes no sense at all.”
The hand re-emerged with a thin metal instrument. She pressed it against Laura’s neck. “You will learn the answers you seek. Sleep now.”
* * *
Marianne took a seat in the apothecary’s study. The Paran already sat, arms crossed and face shuttered, in a chair facing Syvra’s desk. A vague sense of a storm brewing surrounded him.
“Laura does not seem to be aware she is speaking Paranian,” she said.
“She sustained damage in the part of her brain responsible for speech,” Syvra replied. “If her language implant did not function as a speech center, she would be unable to speak to or understand us. She may never recover her ability to speak English.”
“
Egad
.” Marianne glanced toward the Paran and lowered her voice. “Does she remember you at all?”
He shook his head, lips tightening.
“At least the baby survived.”
Some of the tension left his frame. “He is small, but healthy. Azana saved him.”
“Azana? The messenger you sent to Suralia?”
“She and Laura began a friendship during the return journey,” Syvra said. “She was present when the accident occurred.”
The Paran rose from his chair. “I must speak with her.” Turning on his heel, he left Syvra’s study.
“I could sense that Laura wanted nothing to do with him.” Marianne winced. “Can a pair-bond… break?”
Syvra shook her head. “No. The Jorann can remove a bond without killing the partners, but we know of no other way. Rejection such as that from his beloved—he is in anguish.”
A shudder ran through her. “How did he react when she fell?”
“He managed to stagger to her side before the bond-shock overwhelmed him. When he collapsed, we thought at first he had walked into the dark—not an unreasonable assumption.”
Marianne shook her head. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
“Spend time with Laura. You have known her longer than anyone on Tolar, and she may remember you more easily.”
“I would be happy to do that.”
Syvra nodded. “I will notify you when she wakes.”
* * *
The Monral raised his mug to his lips and watched Sharana over its rim. His beloved refused to sit in her proper place at his left, choosing instead to take a chair farther down the high table. Still, she came to the refectory for meals, an improvement over the previous situation. She spent enough time in his proximity, in fact, to satisfy their mutual need for the other’s presence—but no more than that. The one night she had given him constituted the last time she allowed him to touch her.
“Sharana,” he said.
She glanced at him sidelong.
“I have news of your
odalli
friend.”
She swallowed a mouthful of food and turned to face him. “Laura?”
“She has taken serious injury.”
Anger boiled out of her. “What did you do?” she demanded.
“I had no part in her misfortune, beloved.”
He braced himself for a rude probing, and she did not disappoint. Her eyebrows lifted as she withdrew, mollified but unrepentant.
“What happened?” she asked.
“Facts are difficult to find. Confirmed reports say the Paran sustained a severe empathic shock from an injury to his bond-partner. His heir came before time but survives, parented by another.”
Sharana grunted. “Thus ruining your hope that human mothering would weaken Parania’s line.”
“No plan walks a straight path.” He shrugged a shoulder. “As it stands, the Paran is disabled for a time by his own injury.”
“The more you humiliate him, the greater the enemy he will become when he discovers your hand.”
The Monral snorted. “He will never discover it.”
* * *
Light and warmth and heaviness returned. Laura opened her eyes. A middle-aged woman in a yellow robe bustled about at the table next to her bed, opening a cabinet underneath, pulling out toweling, placing it beside a large basin, going about her work with serene contentedness. She smiled over at Laura.
“I am an apothecary’s aide,” she said. “I will bathe you now, if you wish.”
Laura rubbed her eyes and tried to nod, but her head still wouldn’t move. She took a breath.
Eau de Laura
wafted into her nose. “I would like that.” She yawned. “How long did I sleep?”
The woman dipped a cloth in the basin. It came up dripping, and she wrung it out. “Since yesterday in the morning.” She sat on the edge of the bed and began to massage Laura’s face with the pleasantly cold cloth.
Another voice came from the direction of the door. “May I enter?” Without waiting for a reply, the woman called Marianne walked in, a bright smile on her lightly-freckled face, eyes sparkling, her glow lively. She took a seat in a chair on the other side of the bed. “How are you feeling?”
“Weak,” Laura replied. “Where is your baby?”
Marianne grinned and leaned forward. “With her nurse in the next room. Do you remember me at all?”
“I remember you from yesterday, but I have never seen you before then.”
The aide dipped the cloth in the basin and moved down to rub it over her neck.
Marianne’s mouth quirked sideways. “I hope to change that.”
“Is that why you are here? To help me remember?”
“You have known me longer than anyone else on the planet. Syvra thinks talking to me might make it easier for you to remember.”
Laura studied Marianne. She seemed sincere, or at least, she believed what she said. Laura
reached
deeper.
Marianne started. “Stop that!” she yelped. “Probing without permission is rude.”
“What is?”
“What you were doing, reaching into my emotions.”
“Oh. I wanted to know if you were telling the truth. I do not know where I am or who any of you are. Am I in a…” Laura bit her lip. She couldn’t find the word for
infirmary
or
hospital
.
Marianne spoke a word she couldn’t understand. “This is where the apothecaries live and work and heal people, yes.”
The aide pulled down the blankets to wash her torso. Laura’s face heated, but Marianne’s gaze remained fixed on her face.
“Yesterday… was it yesterday? That man—the Paran—he said this planet orbits Beta Hydri.” Laura frowned. “He said it just before you came in. I tried to tell him we have not explored there yet.”
Marianne’s eyes glinted, and her lips twitched upward. “We? Who is
we
?”
“My… I cannot find the word for it. For John. The man I… I can see his face in my mind. When can I see him? Does he know where I am?”
Marianne shifted in her chair. “Laura, John is… gone. He—” She took a breath. “He died in the line of duty.”
The world spun. “What?”
“It has been a little more than a year.”
“John is dead?” Her eyes filled. “My John is dead?”
A cool, dry hand covered hers—Marianne’s. “I sorrow for you,” she whispered.
Tears rolled down the side of Laura’s face into her ears. The aide murmured something soothing and tucked the blanket back around her shoulders, then uncovered a leg.
“A year?” Laura took a deep breath. She had to get a grip on herself. Papa would be ashamed to see her weeping in front of others. She rubbed her face.
“But you are safe here,” Marianne said, giving her a cloth to wipe her tears. “You have a Tolari bond-partner now, a provincial ruler. The Paran.”
“The man in green who was here yesterday? He is my—my bond-partner?”
“The very one.”
Laura pressed the cloth against her face. John gone a year, and she involved with someone new. It didn’t seem possible. Answers. She needed answers. “That man
cannot
be my lover. He is far too young for me. He could not have more than thirty years. Thirty-five at the most.”