Kinsman's Oath

by Susan Krinard

  He died. A strong, slender hand grasped his collar and pulled him from the womb of darkness.

  Ronan?

  Cynara released him and stepped away, hands shielding her eyes. Where is Tyr?

  He shook the veil from his face and held out his hand. Come back with me, Cynara.

  I told you to stay away.

  I could not. Come with me now.

  She laughed. Not without Tyr.

  Tyr is dead. He will not return.

  He lives.

  This is not life, Cynara. Tyr was never with you.

  We survive because of him.

  Ronan knew she would not listen, here in this plane where Tyr's presence lingered in the power she had given him. She must come back to herself, to the doubts that had made her deny the reality of that terrible joining.

  He could not carry her across the threshold. She must shake off the false past as he had done, or she would never be free even if she survived the Kinsmen.

  He filled his thoughts with every good moment they had shared: Kord's rescue, the long conversations, the escape from Dharma, their last mating.

  And the love he was too great a coward to express.

  You are my life, Cynara. Without you I will die.

  Her confusion sucked him into a vortex of discordant emotions. It was Tyr, not Cynara, who had suggested freely giving up her knowledge in exchange for life and eventual freedom; Tyr who had expressed contempt for Ronan; Tyr who would gladly sacrifice a friend, a mate, a nation in order to survive.

  With all his will, Ronan made her see that he spoke truth, made her accept the bond he had thrust upon her when he had claimed the right to defend her life with his body. The lambent blaze of her hair fell across her eyes. She trembled.

  And took his hand.

  Cynara had often dreamed of falling a great distance and hitting the ground with shattering force, only to find herself waking in her own bed.

  She opened her eyes to the sight of bare bulkheads and merciless light. Ronan sat cross-legged beside her, stirring with the same sluggishness she felt in her own body. She knew that touching him with her thoughts would be easier than reaching out with her shaking hand.

  Her mind was clear. Achingly, profoundly clear.

  Kinsmen. She pushed herself erect, struggling to rebuild the mental shields that surely must have failed. The ship remained silent save for the vibrations of the engines.

  "I do not know," Ronan said, "how much longer my defenses will hold. Are you well?"

  Well? She turned to him, and it was as if she had forgotten the look of his face, the color of his eyes, the sound of his voice.

  Mother Sea… she had forgotten how much she loved him.

  You are my life.

  'Tyr," she whispered. "What did you do?"

  Ronan shifted his weight but moved no closer. "You were lost, Cynara. It was necessary to bring you back if you are to escape the Kinsmen."

  Back. She followed a trail of memory to Ronan's hut, Sihvaaro's warning, the challenge and its inevitable conclusion. Bitter, galling helplessness.

  That was when she'd given up the battle she'd fought every day since Tyr's death. She surrendered her pride, the fierce determination to deny what her heart had always told her.

  Tyr had come. Tyr had given her the dispassion to act without fear or remorse. She'd felt nothing for Ronan's grief, and only a kind of grim satisfaction when she took Lenko hostage and won freedom from their captors. She would have killed the shaaurin if necessary. All the time she and Ronan ran from the Kalevi settlement—even when they fell into Kinsman hands—she had judged every action with a calculating eye to survival.

  "You believed Tyr would do what you could not," Ronan said. "I had abandoned you, and you saw no other way. But Tyr was never able to help you… not now, nor at any time since his death."

  She could hardly endure his sadness. "I know I hurt you," she said. "You must believe… whatever I did or said—"

  "I know." He touched her hand. "You have no cause for regret."

  No cause. "You shouldn't have done it, Ronan," she said, closing her eyes to the firm belief in his. "Tyr was the one who had the power to resist the Kinsmen. He was the one who took Lenko hostage and got us free of the shaauri. Without him—"

  "Without your mistaken beliefs of Tyr to bind you, you may have a chance of leaving this ship."

  She shook her head and pressed her face to her knees. "I never told you everything about Tyr's death. I should have made you understand."

  "I do understand." He unfolded his legs and leaned forward, regarding her as if she might break at a touch. "I saw it happen through your eyes, Cynara. It was not as you remember."

  She bit her tongue to keep from laughing. "You weren't there."

  "I know why you remember the events as you have. You changed them because they were too terrible to bear."

  "I could have saved Tyr, and I killed him."

  "Because he would have killed you."

  "He gave me everything. He used the last of his life to transfer all his education, his skills, even his telepathic abilities. And I took them without thinking of the price. If I had refused, he might have recovered—"

  "You are wrong. When he knew he was dying, he attempted to destroy your mind and take your body for his own. He would live on in any way he could, even at the cost of your life. The knowledge you received from him was only the unforeseen consequence of his attack, burned into your mind when you forced him to withdraw."

  One of them must be mad. "I couldn't have. He was a thousand times more powerful than I am."

  "You were made to believe this, so that you would never be tempted to defy the last bonds that held you to Dharma and offer your services to the Alliance as a free and equal va'laik'in. As Tyr's potential rival. But when you faced death at Tyr's hands, you fought back." He reached out, curling his fingers into a fist. "You felt him die."

  Cynara's skull rang with memories as deafening as the surf at Highcliff. Sucking blackness. Blind, senseless hatred. She clutched her head between her hands, trying to shut them out.

  "You blamed yourself for the circumstances of his death," Ronan continued, "but not in the way they truly occurred. You had quarreled with Tyr on the bridge when he discovered your presence as a stowaway. You were still with him when the shaauri striker appeared. You became convinced that this quarrel distracted Tyr at a moment when he should have acted to save the ship from shaauri attack. He fed your guilt. But it was his own weakness that failed him, Cynara."

  The ringing in her head became klaxons of alarm. Men dashed about the bridge, stared at the screen framing the shaauri striker, called out questions that received no answer.

  'Tyr's courage, his skill as a leader, masked a great flaw," Ronan said. "When the shaauri striker attacked the Pegasus, he was faced with a choice between capture or almost certain death. He had sworn never to let the Pegasus fall into enemy hands, yet he feared his own extinction too much. He froze, and thus condemned himself… just as your idealized memory of him almost made you lose your life."

  Tyr had stood there beside the captain's chair, unmoving, ignoring the crew, ignoring the shaauri. One of the torpedoes had disabled half the bridge. Crewmen screamed in pain. Tyr fell.

  "All the events that followed Tyr's critical error were lost to your memory, Cynara. No one knew what Tyr attempted to do to you. But they saw how you rose up and took command of the Pegasus, acting as your cousin should have, boldly winning escape."

  "I couldn't have done it—"

  He took her in his arms. "It was your courage that saved the Pegasus, even though you had experienced the depths of Tyr's hatred and felt his death. A lesser person would have been crippled in mind and spirit. You rose to your true nature and earned the right to become captain."

  Devastating revelation. Terrible, unthinkable hope. "All these years… I've felt Tyr within me, reminding me of his sacrifice. Anything I did worth doing was because of him.

  But I was afrai
d—afraid I would lose everything if I ever let him out. If I let go, even for a moment, he would… become me." She rode the edge of hysterical laughter. "They were right, the Dharmans who judged me as tainted."

  "They were wrong." He tucked her head under his chin, folding himself around her. "On Aitu, you sacrificed yourself to Tyr when you believed you had no other choice—to save my life. You believed you might never return, not as you knew yourself."

  "I became Tyr. I only returned… because you claimed I could save you."

  "You can, Cynara. But Tyr will not help you. His influence would have led you to surrender what you most desire to protect. But he is dead. Only your erroneous guilt made him real and stronger than he ever was in life."

  "I lied to myself," she said, numb with shock.

  "You could not face the hatred and betrayal of a kinsman you loved and admired. You pretended that he had given you his gifts and knowledge out of that same love."

  The truth of everything he had said crashed over her, filling her nose and lungs as if she were drowning.

  Tyr was dead. He had never been with her at all. Now she understood why she'd always been afraid of letting him out… because he had tried to take her and almost succeeded. Part of her had remembered the battle for her existence even when she had forgotten how it came about. And how it ended.

  Carter VelShaan had removed Cynara's memory of Tyr because she'd recognized how much it crippled her. The Kinswoman had done it out of compassion, but only Cynara had the power to banish Tyr forever.

  She wrenched out of Ronan's arms and banged her fist against the bulk so hard that pain shot through to her elbow. There was no one else to receive this overwhelming rage. Tyr was dead.

  Hate was the flame that would annihilate his presence even from memory. The conflagration exploded outward to consume all within the radius of its uncontrolled fury. She willed it to burn until nothing was left of the Cynara who had been.

  Too late she remembered Ronan. He knelt with his hands resting on his thighs, eyes closed, accepting her rage as Tyr could not. Instinctively she tried to recall her hatred, but it had taken on a life of its own. She grabbed Ronan with both hands. His muscles were rigid, his body engulfed in agony.

  She plunged into his mind. His suffering became her own. Pain upon pain, the grief of unbearable loss, utter aloneness.

  My father.

  He held Sihvaaro in his arms and watched his dearest friend die, knowing himself the cause. He wept without ceasing, though his eyes never betrayed him. He wanted to die.

  But he did not. Cynara kept him alive.

  Tyr's ghost had spared her the full knowledge of Ronan's intolerable grief. Hatred was as nothing to this. Sihvaaro was dead. With him died Ronan's only true tie to the people who had taken him in, sheltering his body but denying him the right to be one of them.

  Outcast. Ne'lin. Human.

  Everything he had done, everything he had borne at the hands of shaauri and Kinsmen alike, had been to earn a place among his adopted people. All of it he had sacrificed for Cynara's sake. His shaauri father had died because she forced herself into Ronan's world, a life she couldn't possibly understand. In an act of desperation he had claimed her as his lifemate, perverting sacred shaauri tradition and revealing to the Ain'Kalevi just how human he was.

  "Cynara."

  She looked up. Ronan's eyes were remarkably clear, a facade of calm and serenity.

  'They will come soon," he said. "I could not conceal your emotions, or my own."

  She smiled bitterly. "And you called me strong."

  "It is your strength I require now. And your trust."

  "You consider my trust of value after all that's happened?"

  "I will ask something you have reason to fear above any other fate."

  "The fate we face now is death." She framed his cold face in her hands. "But you want to die. If not for me, you'd force them to kill you."

  "Hear me, Cynara. You know I have certain skills, those the Kinsmen prepared me to use in my mission. When I entered the engineering room of the Pegasus, I became invisible to the eyes and minds of the crew. I made An Charis forget she had come to my cabin. I could influence the crew of this ship in a similar manner, though these opponents are far more formidable."

  Kinsmen, not untrained nontelepaths. Cynara snatched at the scrap of hope he offered. Any plan, however desperate, would keep his mind from thoughts of death.

  "What can I do, Ronan?"

  "You must give me your mind. We will join, not as before in thoughts and feelings, but to the last particle of consciousness. You must surrender your very self to me."

  Ronan's words swept past her rational brain and slashed at the raw wounds Tyr had left behind. Your body will walk this deck, but nothing of you will be left to enjoy it.

  Tyr raped her mind again, taking pleasure in her helplessness, hating her because she had witnessed his downfall, his ignominious ruin. Pushing, thrusting, filling her up with himself until she struck out with the only weapon left to her: hatred. Hatred, animal instinct, the rage to kill.

  Ronan had seen what Tyr had done. He'd made her see it, exposed her deepest fears. He could not be demanding this obscene perversion of what they'd once shared.

  But there was no mistaking what he implied: her very being transformed to a witless extension of his, a puppet, a shadow with no self beyond what he chose to let her keep. Worse than the half-life of a Dharman woman, worse than the madness Artur Constano VelRauthi offered. Worse than death.

  Surrender. Lose yourself. Nothing left…

  She knew what she saw in Ronan's eyes. Tyr wasn't gone. He was still here, masquerading as the man she loved.

  'Trust me," Tyr said, laughing at her weakness, her despicable frailty.

  Never. Never again.

  She lashed out, striking at Ronan with fists and the scourge of her bitterness. He took the blows without flinching. He bore the holocaust of hatred as he had borne the punishment of shaauri who rejected his very right to exist.

  It could not continue. One of them must break, but Ronan simply absorbed the punishment as if it was no less than what he deserved.

  He was not Tyr. He could never be. In this man was goodness, generosity, compassion checked only by his self-contempt and the certainty of his own unworthiness to exist. She gave anger and received love in return, love beyond the scope of any language.

  "Scylla take you, Ronan," she whispered. "Will you never fight back?"

  He smiled and lifted a damp strand of her hair. "Not you, Aho'Va."

  She groaned and slumped against him. "I know." Her mouth filled with the sour taste of shame. "I'm sorry, Ronan. I wasn't my—" Tyr is gone. When have you ever been more yourself? "I'm no better than any of them."

  His hand came to rest on her hair in a kind of benediction. His gaze was quiet, wise and frighteningly detached, as if Sihvaaro had taken up residence in his body.

  "Can you do what must be done?" he asked.

  "Yes."

  "Your mind will attempt to defend itself."

  "You aren't Tyr. I won't resist you." She touched his cheek gingerly, dreading the marks her beating might have left on his flesh. "VelRauthi offered us a choice. I choose."

  He stroked her cheek with the back of his hand. "Whatever may come, know that I honor you, Cynara D'Accorso."

  Into her mind flowed the understanding of what she must do. She closed her eyes, attuning her thoughts to Ronan's, surrendering control and fear and anything that might stand between them.

  His lips brushed hers. The memory of Tyr's violation faded. Gentle currents washed over her, rocking her on soothing swells that never reached a shore. Ronan made love to her without touching anything but her face, giving even as he took so that she felt as if nothing had been taken at all.

  Ronan's hands grew cold. She covered them with her own to warm them, but they slipped free.

  "It is done," he said.

  * * *

  Chapter 28

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  Cynara opened her eyes. Ronan knelt before her, his head resting on the deck. She pressed her temples, searching for the difference within herself, the sense of having lost something precious and unique. But her heart beat strong and sure, and her mind…

  Her mind was full to bursting, synapses sparking with a hundred new ideas, new concepts, tools for the use of her telepathy that she had barely imagined. She sat in stunned silence while her brain struggled to make sense of the raw data, organize it, make it ready for her use.

  Ronan's knowledge. Everything he had learned about wielding the mind as a subtle weapon and shielding it from attack, the varied and effective means of deceiving the lesser talents of the Concordat. And more: the focus and discipline to use it as only the most highly trained individual could hope to do.

  Tyr had tried to take her life, her will, herself. Ronan had given.

  "No," she said. She grabbed Ronan's shoulders and pulled him up. His eyes were glazed, unseeing. She shook him, and then in her terror she slapped him hard enough to leave an impression of her hand on his cheek.

  He focused. "Do they listen to us? Can we speak freely?"

  Scylla's teeth. He asked her. He expected her to know, and she did. She knew she'd feel it in an instant if anyone tried to eavesdrop telepathically.

  "Have you given it all to me," she asked, "or only shared it? Ronan!"

  He drew up onto his knees with quiet dignity. "I have not lost my knowledge, or my skill. But I will not be able to use telepathy… for some time. You must act in my place."

  It all became sickeningly clear. Ronan had exhausted the stores of his mental strength down to the last cell and synapse, just as a man might deplete his body's energy after a hard swim of many kilometers. He couldn't recover without a long rest, if he recovered at all. VelRauthi wouldn't give him the chance.

  "Why?" she begged.

  But she knew. Perhaps he had not intended that she realize the truth, but he couldn't give so much of himself and keep it from her.