The Marann (9 page)

“Indeed. It would be best if you chose
a regular hour to do so.”

“Thank you, high one,” she said, and
jumped up to run off to her quarters. Hands shaking, she powered on
the comms and explained her call.

“Who won the Super Six?” was her first
question when Adeline Russell came on the screen.

Adeline’s eyebrows shot up. “That’s
the
first
thing you want to know?”

Marianne nodded. “I
love
interplanetary pro cycling.”

“Just a second, I’ll look it up.”
Adeline looked away from Marianne for a moment. “Brad
Yates.”

“Yes!
” Marianne exclaimed. “He
looked
so
promising last year!”

Adeline just shook her head. “Whatever
makes you happy,” she muttered.

“What about my friend Susan? Do you
know if she’s… I don’t know, angry with me, for not
calling?”

“You shouldn’t have told your friends
you would keep in touch,” Adeline said with a frown, “but yes,
she’s fine. She’s dating the Spanish teacher we sent to replace
you.”

Marianne blinked. “What, really?
What’s he like? Is he treating her right?”

Adeline laughed. “Relax, Marianne,
he’s perfect for her, all sexy and Spanish.”

“A real Spaniard?” Marianne broke into
laughter. “That’s perfect! At least he’s not the boy next door. She
really didn’t want to marry him.”

Thereafter, Marianne called the ship,
if it was in orbit, every morning after transmitting written
reports to the Admiral and the Ambassador—if it wasn’t too late in
the night, ship’s time. The ship remained in orbit for three
terrestrial months at a time, then headed back to Earth for a
month. When the
Alexander
orbited the planet, it helped
Marianne keep track of Earth time. She was prone to lose track on
Tolar, where the twenty-five hour days threw her off and the Tolari
counted time in terms of seasons or years, if they counted it at
all.

On most mornings, she chatted with
Adeline, who functioned as the Ambassador’s administrative aide.
When Adeline was unavailable, she chatted with the Admiral’s calm
and motherly wife Laura who, though not the brightest star in the
sky, was insightful and wise. Laura had children Marianne’s age and
could see right through her. That was a little disconcerting, so
she preferred to chat with Adeline—or Addie, as she wished to be
called.

“Kyza is learning to eat at the
refectory table with us,” she told Adeline on one winter morning
when the temperatures in Suralia fell lower than usual. “Though all
she does is climb all over the table, grabbing and chewing on her
daddy’s food, while her nurses have to scramble to keep her from
falling on her head.”

Adeline laughed. “She sounds
indulged.”

“You could say she’s a bit spoiled,”
Marianne admitted. “But the Sural doesn’t let her do anything that
would bring her to harm. She’s not allowed outside the keep,
however much she wants to go play in the snow. The cold out there
is dangerous, even for them. Deep winter, they call it. And the
glaciers are growing. They don’t make it to the stronghold plateau,
but they’re close enough.”

“I see you’re wearing a Tolari robe,”
Adeline teased. “You’re not going native on us, are
you?”

Marianne shook her head, laughing.
“It’s cold in the stronghold—well, to me anyway—and these robes are
warmer than anything I brought with me.”

“Really?”

“There could be a good market for this
fabric on ice worlds. Something to think about trading for, or
maybe teaching them to mass produce. I don’t know what it’s made
of—the Sural becomes cagey when I ask. It feels thin and
lightweight, like silk, but it’s fantastically warm. I’m wearing a
pair of their slippers, too, though they don’t fit right in the
toe. Tolari don’t have toes.”

“What huh?”

“Imagine if the skin between your toes
all fused together but the bones were still there, with the same
joints. Still useful for balance because the big toe bone is the
same, but less individual flexibility. They can’t bend just one
part, the whole assembly flaps. And they don’t call them feet. They
call them peds.”

“Huh,” Adeline said again. Marianne
could see her making notes. “How’d you find this out?”

“Kyza used to pull off her slippers to
suck on her peds. And chew on them too, but she stopped doing that
when she started getting teeth.” Marianne grinned, remembering the
surprise on Kyza’s face the first time she bit herself.

“Looks like you’re happy down
there.”

“It’s tolerable,” Marianne
said.

“No, you’re happy, I can
tell.”

“Addie, now you’re as bad as
Laura.”

Adeline laughed.

<<>>

The Sural leaned back at his desk,
thrumming with satisfaction. His daughter’s tutor
was
happy,
now that she had the social contact she required. She had emerged
from her gloom and smiled her captivating smile more often. An
image of that smile played across his mind’s eye, and his own lips
curved of their own accord.

He shook himself. She still hid
something, though she was not a trained operative. It was obvious
she had been ordered to report everything she learned—he had
expected Central Command to use any human they sent as a passive
spy—but she lacked any covert training. No, something troubled and
even pained Marianne. He could sense it when it came to the surface
now and again.

On occasion, he attempted to lead her
into talking about it, but when the subject turned to adolescence
and relationships, she would become evasive and close down her
emotions. He was convinced she had never formed an intimate
attachment with another individual. In fact, she seemed to have no
attraction at all to others.
The Spinster Schoolmarm
, he had
heard her call herself, for all that she was so young by his
people’s standards—twenty-eight human years was a season less than
fourteen on Tolar, little more than a child on a world where the
young came of age at thirteen.

His thoughts turned to Kyza. His
daughter delighted all who came into contact with her. In the
family wing’s privacy, he could play with her and let her laugh
with abandon. He wished he could share that with Marianne, but what
he did not wish the humans on the ship to know, he could not allow
her to see. It might force her into choosing between her loyalty to
her people and her growing loyalty to himself, at least for the
present, and it necessitated keeping his own emotions under tight
control so that Kyza never displayed strong feelings when Marianne
was present. He regretted the deception, but the humans had to
continue believing for now that his people were cold and heartless.
They would learn otherwise soon enough, but it suited his purposes
to delay the revelation.

Kyza began to stir, sending tendrils
of need through the parental bond he shared with her, unusual as it
was for a Tolari father to be bonded to a child so young. In the
normal course of their development, infants bonded to the women who
bore them, regardless of whose heir they were, for their first six
or seven seasons of life if they were boys and closer to ten
seasons if they were girls, but the woman who mothered Kyza had
died soon after giving birth. The tragedy had forced him to attempt
bonding with his newborn daughter.

The leader of Suralia’s science caste,
a woman of great strength and intellectual genius, had mothered
Kyza. Her consent to his request for an heir represented a great
honor, but he had not chosen her for high caste rank. Genetic
analysis indicated she could give him an exceptional child—one who
could, perhaps, survive the great trial. That had been his primary
consideration—but he had not expected it to cost the woman her
life.

By law, because he belonged to the
ruling caste, she had lived in his stronghold while she increased,
joined by her heir and her bond-partner. The same law would have
required her to continue there until Kyza was ready to transfer her
bond to him—had the woman lived.

He had been present, as stunned as the
apothecary—who expected to save her—when the woman had succumbed to
shock after suffering a massive hemorrhage during the birth. His
daughter then, on instinct, tried to follow her into the dark.
Shaking himself out of the empathic daze death could cause the
unprepared, he had wrapped his senses around Kyza and surrounded
her with love before she could shut herself down. She had struggled
against him like a flutter trying to escape a net, seeking to
follow the mother she knew in the womb.

He had refused to let go, and the
contest of wills had continued for much of a day. Kyza was
exhausted and close to the dark when she turned back and bonded to
him, allowing him to comfort and cradle her into a warm, contented
glow. She had opened her eyes and lived. He had wept with joy, even
while the woman’s bond-partner had sobbed in devastated grief and
followed his beloved that night into the dark.

It was a pity he needed the humans to
believe his people were cold and emotionless.

Chapter Five

Midnight. Marianne ran through a cornfield, lungs
burning, terror forcing whimpers from her throat. Running as fast
as she could, she dodged among the corn stalks, trying to slip out
of sight, trying to lose her pursuer. Faster—faster—heedless of the
leaves slashing at her face and her bare arms. Then her foot caught
on a clod of earth and she sprawled on her face in the fragrant
soil.

She screamed and scrambled to her
feet. The Sural would protect her. The Sural had promised to
protect her. The Sural... where was the Sural? Marianne searched
the darkness as she ran and found him, far down the row, turning to
look at her. She reached out her arms to him just as her ankle
twisted in the shallow rut formed by a fallen cornstalk, throwing
her to the ground a second time. She screamed again and woke with a
cry, a red haze fading into the darkness before her eyes. Panting,
sweat pouring from her body, she sat up and remembered where she
was: an alien stronghold, on an alien world, where there were no
cornrows and no one to chase her through them.

The Sural awoke with a start and sat
bolt upright, staring into the darkness, through the walls,
straight across the stronghold to the spot where Marianne lay
asleep in her quarters—or rather should have been. She was awake,
radiating psychic agony.

He had felt her reach out to him. He
could feel her now, wanting him to protect her from... something.
Something evil that had happened to her long ago. He reached out to
her through the tenuous connection she had—astoundingly—forged
across the night, letting strength and comfort flow through it,
hoping she would not sense it was him.

Marianne slumped back onto her
sleeping mat and dug the heels of her palms into her eyes. In the
space behind her eyes, she could almost see the Sural looking at
her. Desperate for any sort of contact, even imaginary, she let
herself sink into thoughts of him, imagining him holding her close
to comfort her, imagining—

NO!
Every fiber of her being
screamed, shutting down the fantasy with a snap. She arched her
back and slammed her head and fists into her mat, eyes squeezed
shut. Then she curled into a tight ball of desolation and
sobbed.

Guards all over the stronghold
flickered from the empathic blast, and the Sural’s head whirled in
pain, his senses scalded. Kyza woke, screaming in fright, seeking
her bond with him. He scooped her up from her cot to cradle her in
his arms, soothing her, heedless of his burned, aching senses.
Working to shield Kyza from his own pain, he communed with her,
letting awareness of the surroundings slip away as Kyza drew
strength from him.

Marianne had accepted comfort from
him, if only for a moment. What had triggered the terror and the
powerful emotional blast, he could only wonder. It had to be
connected to the pain she hid. He was convinced of it.

<<>>

During the next morning’s meal, Kyza
interrupted her busy exploration of the high table to throw herself
into the Sural’s lap and curl up against his chest. He cradled her
there, eyes closed, allowing her to commune with him despite
Marianne’s presence at the table. After a few long moments, Kyza
pulled away and climbed back onto the table, taking some of his
meal with her.

When he opened his eyes, Marianne
gazed at him with a wistful expression. He smiled at her. Lack of
sleep tinted her eyes red, and he could see signs that she had
wept.

“Rest today,” he said in sudden
decision. “Ask a servant to show you to the library. The one in the
family wing.”

“Yes, high one,” she said, nodding,
weariness in her voice.

“I cannot stay.” He stood and gathered
up Kyza. “I must work. Are you distressed?”

“I’m fine. I’m just tired. I didn’t
sleep well.”

“Perhaps you should have a talk with
Adeline Russell or Laura Howard.”

She gave one of her odd,
two-shouldered human shrugs and made a visible effort to brighten
up, offering him a tired smile.

“I’m fine, honest,” she said. “And
I’ve already spoken with Adeline this morning, but thank you for
giving me the day off.”