“Sixty-one.”
He almost scowled—who had wavered? Then he caught himself.
He had still prevailed!
When they had all seated themselves again, the Jorann spoke. “Do any challenge his worthiness or ability?”
He fixed the Sural with a stare. The
former
ruler of Tolar had no right to challenge here; and he would lose the goodwill of the ruling caste if he even attempted to…
“I challenge,” said a voice to his right. He turned. The Paran was already standing, his hands free, his face clouded but his eyes clear.
The Sural nodded. “Speak your challenge before the caste.”
There was a moment of confusion, and the ruler of Brialar stepped forward.
“You will find information on your tablets,” he said, “evidence collected during three independent investigations into a transport tunnel collapse that seized the lives of the heir to Parania and her first-bond son.”
A murmur rose around the room as the provincial delegations reached for their tablets among their belongings. The Monral’s skin prickled.
“The method used to collapse the tunnel is still unknown, but the pattern of damage is clearly artificial. You will note that while each investigation does not reveal the entire path to the one who bears responsibility, taken together, they build a road. It leads to Monralar.”
The Monral snatched his tablet from its pocket and scanned the information.
Impossible!
Brialar had collected records going back as far as five years—records he had erased—back to the time when the humans had left behind their portable phase platform.
How had they recovered those records?
He pocketed the tablet and met Brialar’s eyes. Beside him, his heir rose to stand, his face a mask of sudden loathing.
“Explain, Monralar,” the Sural commanded.
“There is nothing to explain,” the Monral replied. “Your so-called evidence is mere speculation.”
The voice of the Paran shook the chamber, disturbing the ancient dust.
“I call upon Monralar to answer my question before the Jorann: Did you assassinate my daughter while she parented a first-bond child? Or else I challenge him for leadership of our caste.”
Silence fell over the room. The Monral cast about in his mind for an answer. To give the truth, or anything the Jorann could read as a lie, was to forfeit his life—and he refused to walk into the dark while the Sural lived. His thoughts flew, and the answer came to him. He turned to face the Paran.
“I accept your challenge. Let the victor lead our world to its destiny.”
* * *
The Paran leaped from the dais. Laura bit her lip. He’d stopped translating when he jumped to his feet, and Azana couldn’t spare her attention from the fretting Laryth, but Laura didn’t need to know what the words meant to see the hostility and feel the conflict. The Jorann had pulled her senses in; Laura fanned hers out.
The Sural stood with barriers closed, probably unreadable to anyone but the Jorann—and herself. His eyes darted to hers and locked, the sympathy in them plain, and then he turned back to the two men in the room’s center
.
The Paran had wrapped himself with cold hatred, moving with lethal grace as he and the Monral began to circle each other. The Monral hid a roiling darkness within himself. Laura shuddered.
“
Lemtaan!
” the Sural called out.
Before he could finish the word, the Monral attacked, jabbing, testing. The Paran deflected the blows before they landed and gave no ground, making no unnecessary motions, his weight shifted forward. He was taller, but the Monral was broader. The Monral moved around him, unleashing more jabs.
Both men drew on the connections that went out from them, the bonds they shared with their people.
The Paran dodged and deflected, then followed a jab in, getting inside the Monral’s defenses and landing a hard blow to the stomach with the heel of a hand. Then he spun the Monral around, twisting him to the floor, and landed on him, pressing a knee into his back.
“Yield!” he demanded.
The Monral whispered something she couldn’t hear.
The Paran froze. Psychic agony roiled from him, and the flow from his ruling bond dammed. Laura gasped. The Monral surged out from under him, smashing a fist into his jaw. He sprang to his feet, grabbing the Paran’s collar, and landed another blow to his face, replenishing his own strength through his bonds, gathering himself.
The Monral pulled his fist back again, his intent clear to Laura, if it wasn’t to anyone else—to kill the Paran. Her heart stuttered as the Monral’s fist smashed into the Paran’s face again with a loud, meaty smack. Time seemed to stop.
No!
Reflex took control of her senses. She reached out, grasped the connections radiating from the Monral, and
pulled
.
* * *
The agony almost blinded him. The Monral staggered to one knee, gulping down a cry. Sharana’s scream rang off the walls, and she slumped to the blankets on his dais. Farric gasped.
The Paran’s body slammed into him, forcing him to the floor, pinning him face down. “Yield!” he demanded in Paranian, his voice ragged.
Still wracked with psychic pain, the Monral went cold. He had to kill the Paran before his opponent could reveal what he had done. “Kaz—” he started to whisper again, but the Paran slammed a fist into his mouth. His lip split.
“Yield!” the Paran repeated.
He spat blood. His bonds had disintegrated. Without them, he lacked the strength to fight the Paran, and without his pair-bond, he lacked the will. He went limp, staring up at the ancient woman who had destroyed his victory. Hatred flared within him.
“
Svedá
,” he said, in the old language.
The Paran lurched to his peds, staring down with a curling lip. “He
named
me,” he said, and spat, turning on his heel to return to his dais. He dropped onto the blankets, sitting on his buttocks with his knees drawn up before him to express his contempt. His
odalli
bond-partner threw her arms around him. Around the room, whispers and murmurs began. A man in yellow left the bond-partner’s place on the Vedelar dais and crossed the Circle to see to Sharana. The Monral pushed himself up to his knees.
The Jorann rose from her seat, eyes glittering. “Monralar is defeated,” she said. “What is your judgment, my rulers?”
Around the Circle, the caste stood. The Monral glanced around. The Paran stayed where he was, his black eyes malevolent, his posture an insult. One by one, every other member of the caste turned to face the wall. When the last pale robe faced away, the Jorann said, “I return your name,” and turned her back on him.
Had the Jorann not interfered, he would have bested the Paran. In the very moment of his triumph, she had snatched his victory from him. He set his jaw against the pain. His people would never fulfill their true potential as long as she meddled in their destiny.
The Sural turned back and approached, something flashing in one hand. His eyes riveted on it.
A blade.
A shock went through him. The Sural had come carrying a blade. He had planned for this.
“You are cast out,” the Sural said, in a voice loud enough to echo from the walls.
Each word took a piece of his soul. He inclined his head, and the Sural bent to grab his hair and slice through it at the neck. Free of the weight for the first time in conscious memory, he ran a hand through what was left of it, feeling light-headed.
The Sural walked away, still holding the severed hair, to lay it on the dais before Farric, then returned to his place below the Jorann’s throne. The man who had once been Monralar glanced in his son’s direction. Farric sat frozen next to the still-unconscious Sharana, staring at the knots of hair before him with wide, disbelieving eyes.
He heaved himself to his peds, wiping his bloody mouth with the sleeve of his robe. The rulers began to turn back to face him.
Now
. Now tradition required him to walk into the dark to save his province—if he were still bonded to it. He rubbed a spot in the middle of his chest, where the absence of that bond caused a physical ache. His province was safe from his dishonor. He shifted his attention to the Sural, standing at the foot of the Jorann’s chair, impossible to read but still betraying signs of satisfaction in his posture and his expression.
No
. He would not give them the pleasure of seeing him walk into the dark. He stared at the Jorann’s back and waited for the caste to mark his refusal.
At a signal from the Sural, the two youngest rulers, Camenar and Tarasia, stepped off their daises and converged on him. The Camenia extended a hand toward him, and he deflected it with a blow. The Taras hesitated. Glaring at them both, he loosed the fastenings and dropped the robe on the floor, kicking it at them, to stand before them all in his trousers.
The Jorann turned to face the Circle. “The caste will choose another candidate to present to me,” she said.
He turned and stalked out of the council chamber.
Laura hesitated in the door from her sleeping room. Azana wandered at random about the sitting room, patting a sleepy Laryth, who curled up on her shoulder like a bug. She had been avoiding Azana for fear of upsetting Laryth. Truth to tell, Laura didn’t want to upset her son’s fafea either.
She chewed on the inside of her lower lip. It hurt not to hold the baby she had made with the Paran. The one time would have to be enough for now.
“Artist?” Azana rounded a chair and walked along the back of a divan, her senses curling tighter around Laryth.
She blinked out of her reverie. “What?”
“Do you need something?”
“Oh. No.” She moved from the doorway and dropped onto the divan.
“The day grows old. Should you not try to sleep?”
“Probably.”
Azana wove through the chairs, patting and rubbing Laryth’s back. He uttered a soft belch.
Laura chuckled. “He is happier now.”
“Since the Paran reconciled with you and defeated Monralar,” Azana said, stopping to take a seat across a low table from her. “The tension is gone, and Laryth feels better.”
“Tolari babies are such dictators.”
Azana smiled. “He will not remain so intolerant for much longer.”
“I know nothing about baby empaths.”
“You will.”
“Maybe not.”
“You do not want an heir?”
She swallowed around a lump in her throat and threw up her empathic walls, picturing herself inside a stone room. Laryth didn’t stir.
Azana lowered her voice. “It doubles the tragedy.”
Laura shrugged with one shoulder, Tolari-style.
“Forgive me,” she went on. “If I could have saved him without taking him from you—”
“I understand,” Laura interrupted. “At least he is still alive. One of my aides told me the Paran would have had to find—” her throat tightened “—another woman to mother his heir, if Laryth had died.”
“Parania must continue.”
“How can you be so accepting of it?”
“It is our way. But that is also why you offered to give your heir to the Paran after his daughter was assassinated.”
“I… did?”
Warm approval sparkled through Azana’s glow. “You did. You engendered Laryth as your own heir. To transfer him to the Paran was a profoundly generous gift, more so because you are a sensitive.”
Laura took a deep breath.
The door to the hall opened, and the Paran entered. He looked from Azana to Laura and smiled, his face discolored, but he seemed to have allowed Meilyn’s attention, because it was no longer swollen. She let him inside her barriers as he slid onto the divan beside her.
“Long day?” Laura asked.
He slipped an arm around her. “Indeed. Every coalition is in disarray, but the Sural is turning that to his benefit, and to Tolar’s.”
“Good?”
“Good.” He turned to Azana. “And how is my son?”
* * *
He had awakened as—his thoughts shied away from a name that was no longer part of him. He had awakened as
the heir
. Now he paced the labyrinth of curving halls as Monralar’s bonded ruler.
I am too young
, he had told the Jorann. She dismissed his argument, stating that everyone now alive was nearly as young in her eyes. She looked into him, probed him to the bottommost depths of his soul, and declared him worthy.
You will rule with a council of advisors until you achieve the age tradition requires
, she said. Then she took his hands, and… The wonder of
being
Monralar, of being one with the lives and hearts of his people, sang through his heart. Nothing he ever imagined bore any resemblance to the reality.
The servants descended upon him when he returned to the Monrali quarters afterward. They pressed an embroidered robe on him, sat him down, put ruler’s knots in his hair, all the while smiling and chattering and taking turns for what they considered the honor of attending to him. Bertie watched it all with a bemused look that surely must have reflected the expression on his own face.
He escaped from the jubilant servants—had Father really been so disliked by those who served him?—to spend the rest of the day in meetings with fellow rulers. The events of the morning stunned the caste, and dazed most of its members with how close they had come to choosing a leader who could stoop to naming an opponent to defeat him, and who, rumor suggested, had made arrangements to give the humans present on Tolar to Central Command, for Monralar’s benefit.
Those
rumors, he had to admit, had some basis in truth. A shudder went through him. Sharana insisted Father was not irredeemable. He tied his heart to the hope she was correct.
A pang seared through him. The Jorann had helped him save his people. That mattered most. She interfered, stripped Father of his ruling bond before he disgraced himself, and saved the province. He would lay his forehead against her peds, if he could.
He stopped at the door he sought. This last duty in a long first day of rule, he feared, would prove the hardest. A servant opened the door and allowed him entry into the Paranian quarters.
The Paran, one side of his face discolored, sat curled with his bond-partner on a divan. His son’s fafea, allowing her concern to show, rose from her chair to disappear into one of the sleeping rooms with the infant. Without waiting for the Paran to move or speak, he bent almost double into a profound bow and stayed there.