The apothecary shook her head. “Such disparate choices can happen here, but it is almost unknown. No one is ever compelled, but normally an heir wants to follow in the parent’s profession. A second heir, on the rare occasions when one is granted, does often choose different work to establish a new family line.”
“And you work for your father.”
Cena cocked her head. “He is not my father, high one,” she said. “He is the man who fathered me, although my position here proves there are advantages to being fathered by the Sural.”
“But don’t you love him just because he’s your— because he fathered you?”
Cena smiled. “Of course. He is kind and generous to those who serve him, and I can take pride that I was fathered by such an honorable man.” She picked up the device from Marianne’s belly. “You may dress now. I will inform the Sural of all this. I cannot predict what the coming season will bring. Your body is producing both Tolari and human hormones, and they are not, as the humans say, ‘playing well together.’”
Marianne quirked a grin. “Hormones. That explains a lot. Oh, one more thing—”
“Yes, high one?”
“When you saw me in the corridor yesterday, how did you know?”
“I smelled the difference in your body chemistry.”
Memory sparked. You even smell different, her bond-partner had said. “The Sural said I smell different.”
Cena nodded. “He would notice, but without training he would not know its significance.”
* * *
The Sural, working at the desk in his open study off the audience room, put aside the tablet he’d been reading, pleased with his head apothecary. Marianne had, on her own initiative, begun a personal conversation with the healer.
“She needs a friend,” he said. “You have my permission to be familiar with her.”
“My gratitude, high one,” Cena said.
“Choose an assistant for yourself, to assume those of your duties which do not deal directly with me,” he added.
“High one?”
“It will give you more time to spend with the Marann.”
She nodded. “She would benefit from more time spent with you as well. Your influence on her is normally soothing.”
“And yet avoid coupling.”
“Unless she initiates, yes, high one. For her sake, work off your appetite sparring with your guards.”
He leaned back in his chair, steepling his fingers in front of him. “I understand.”
“Good,” she said, flashing one of his own crooked smiles. Then she gave him a more clinical look. “You allowed yourself sufficient rest? You are consuming enough food to replenish yourself?”
He chuckled. “I slept past first light, and I have been eating enough for three Surals.”
She nodded approval. He chuckled again and sent her away, then picked up his tablet and began to sort through his reports to determine which of them could be delegated to aides and advisors and which demanded his personal attention.
* * *
Marianne was wandering through the garden when the Sural winked into sight beside her. He wrapped her in a hug.
“Beloved,” she breathed into his robes. Warmth from the sun clung to them.
“You are not to be alone,” he chided. “Why did you send away the aide my apothecary assigned to you?”
“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.”
Chapter Three
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.”
Laughter bubbled out of her. “That attempt was a one-off, Admiral. It can’t happen again. As long as I’m under the Jorann’s protection, the Sural’s enemies won’t touch me, and his allies would give their lives for me. So tell me the real reason you want me off Tolar. Could it be that Central Command wants something from me they can’t get any other way?”
The Admiral didn’t reply. The Sural dropped his camouflage, working on his tablet as he moved in front of the monitor. Marianne tapped the console to shift the focus to him. The Admiral’s face went slack in shock, but he swallowed hard and remained silent.
“Explain why you are threatening me,” the Sural demanded, speaking Tolari.
Marianne chewed on the inside of her cheek. Would the Admiral realize the Sural’s choice of language meant he was asserting his authority? Perhaps. Howard appeared to backpedal.
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