“And that’s important.”
“Very important.”
She sighed. The Monral had said the Paran’s allies wouldn’t think less of him for her sake. “I can understand the attraction. The Monral was really very charming when I met him.”
Kellandin laughed. “Such is not my impression of the man. He must have liked you.”
“He seemed to. So what happens now?”
“Monralar’s opposition bloc has achieved a majority, but that matters little when a grandchild of the Jorann leads. It is all a political game. Nothing changes for the rest of Tolar.”
Laura hoped with all her heart that he was correct.
A particularly bright shooting star blazed across the heavens. Denara squealed, despite all her effort to observe a decorous objectivity before the adults.
“It still upsets the Paran,” Laura said.
Kellandin chuckled. “Of course. He is ruling caste. Ambition is bred into him.”
Laura leaned back on her elbows and fell silent. The Paran had gone grim, but he had left his study and was approaching. She sent affection through their bond to soothe his mood. Gratitude blossomed in him. Smiling, she hauled herself back to her feet and picked her way along the low retaining wall at the roof’s edge, making for the stairs.
She laughed when she tripped on the corner of a blanket, until she reached for something to catch herself and found only empty air.
* * *
“I have him.” Azana pushed the words past gritted teeth. Hands took her arms, lending her strength. Concentrating so hard she almost could not see, she held on with all her strength to the glow within Laura and let the hands hurry her along. Voices flowed around her.
“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.
Chapter Twenty
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.
Mariann
e 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 r
uler. 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.”
“Tolari live a long time. He is actually much older than you.”
“No!”
The aide stopped in the middle of scrubbing a leg and looked up at Marianne. “High one, she must remain calm.”
“Forgive me,” Marianne murmured.
Laura stared at the pale, almost white stone of the ceiling above her. The aide laved her shin and calf with the cloth, and a strange, soothing feeling accompanied each stroke. She swallowed around a lump in her throat, and her heart slowed to a calmer pace. John was gone, and she lay on… a hospital bed? On another planet?
“Tell me how I came to be here, on this planet.”
Marianne hesitated. “It is not a pretty story.”
“I need to know.”
“The short form of it is, Central Command kidnapped you and used you in an effort to abduct me.”
“You? What is so special about you?”
Marianne shrugged. “I stumbled onto something they wanted to know.”
“Oh.” She would have nodded if she could. Central Command would do that.
“The Sural—the planetary ruler—killed the man who held you captive. When it was all over, you were marooned here, and we all thought you would be safer if Central Command thought you were dead.”
“You mentioned this Sural before.”
“My bond-partner. Rose’s father. You stayed with us in Suralia for a time, but then you met the Paran, and the two of you became entwined. You came here to Parania to be with him. You were happily bonded and increasing when you fell off the roof.”
The word increasing sounded strange for a moment, and conjured up feelings of warmth, and growth, and watery movement, just like… Laura blinked and put a hand on her midsection. It was soft. Not as flat as it should be, but she knew she wasn’t pregnant. “Increasing? That cannot be true. I am too old.”
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