The Marann (18 page)

“What’s he done this time?”

“Damned near killed his daughter in
one of their damnable tests. She might not live.”

Adeline rocked back a little.
“Ouch.”

“Eight years we’ve been waiting since
she was born, another eighteen years before she’s old enough to be
their ambassador, and they risk it all in one of their damned
trials!” He cursed the Tolari custom that a ruler’s ambassador must
be his heir and quit the chair to take up a brooding stance at the
viewport, staring out at the planet below.

Adeline picked up his drink and handed
it to him, then slipped her arms about his waist. “Too bad we can’t
offer to send down a medical team.”

He glared at her. “’Course not,” he
grated. “Sometimes I forget these people aren’t human. They look so
much like us—unless that’s camouflage too.”

“Oh Smitty,” she said. “I’m sorry.
I’ll put her on my prayer list.”

“Damned girl should already be on your
damned prayer list. Or maybe the damned little alien shouldn’t be
on any proper prayer list.”

“Smithton!”

He turned and gave her an unrepentant
smirk.

“You’re impossible!” Adeline
accused.

“No, just highly improbable,” he
retorted.

He couldn’t resist her silver
laughter.

<<>>

A purple dawn filtered through the
dark, wooden blinds in the head apothecary’s quarters. The Sural,
sitting on the edge of the examination bed on which Kyza lay,
studied his daughter, looking for signs of returning consciousness.
He had not left her side for two days, rejecting the head
apothecary’s suggestions to get some sleep. She had given up trying
to convince him to rest and instead had joined him, monitoring his
daughter’s condition.

During the night, he sensed Kyza begin
to approach consciousness and refused to leave for any reason. Now
the dawn rewarded his long vigil. When the sun’s first rays reached
through the windows, Kyza stirred.

She almost could not stifle a cry and
arched her back as agony slammed into her awareness, every nerve in
her body on fire. She clamped her jaw and convulsed, a scream
trying to escape her throat. Her eyes fluttered open, unseeing, as
she fought to remain silent. She could not, would not, draw the
enemy to her.

Somewhere in the distance, she heard
her father’s voice. “I am here, daughter.” A gentle hand touched
her forehead. He took one of her hands in his. “You are not alone.
Take strength from me.”

Father!
She dug her nails into
his hand and threw her head back so far the bones in her neck
popped, gritting her teeth to stifle a cry as the pain increased.
Desperate, she threw her senses at her father, beating against him.
He caught her with practiced care and wrapped his own senses around
hers, letting her cling to him and draw strength from him. His love
surrounded and supported her. Her rebellious body began to relax.
As she regained control, the pain receded enough for her
surroundings to come into focus. The hard comfort of an examination
bed, the smell of the apothecaries’ potions biting her nostrils,
and—her eyes slitted open.

“Father.” Her voice was almost
inaudible, even to her own ear. She sensed more than saw him
sitting on the bed beside her.
How am I alive?
Memory
sparked. “A test?”

“Yes, daughter.”

Kyza tried to swallow. “I regret my...
failure, Father,” she whispered. “Forgive me.”

“You did not fail, Kyza.” Her father
chuckled.

She twitched her brows together. “But
I... live. I would be in... enemy hands. I... have
failed.”

“You were outstanding, daughter. The
guards and proctors could not find you, and you chose death before
capture.”

Death. Capture. A test? She tried to
make sense of it, but her thoughts muddled. “Father?”

“Death was the trial, Kyza. Do you
think we would tell you that you must walk into the dark, if we did
not know how to bring you back?”

“If you can—”

The Sural laid a finger on her lips.
“Suralia knows the way. It is one of our secrets.” He took a small
cup from the apothecary. “Now, daughter, my apothecary has
something for your pain. You will drink it.”

“Father—”

“Do not disobey the Sural, Kyza. I
know your tutors have taught you to refuse drugs, but you have
passed this trial—and
one
of the rewards is relief from the
pain it inflicts. Drink.” He slid a hand under her head, lifting
it, and held the cup to her lips until she drank its entire
contents. “Good. Now, did that taste as bad as all her other
medicinals?”

She could not laugh, but a faint smile
curved her lips. The Sural nodded. “I suspected as much.” Her eyes
unfocused as the drug took effect. “I will leave you to your
dreams,” he said, stroking her hair. “Sleep now,
daughter.”

Warm muzziness closed in.

<<>>

“Well, thank God for that.” The
Ambassador grumbled as he tossed Marianne’s latest status report
away from him onto his desk.

“Thank God for what, Smitty?” came
Adeline’s voice from the next room. Smithton scowled. Adeline could
infuriate him when she pretended to be deaf to what she didn’t want
to hear, but mention God and she was all ears.

“The girl is going to live,” he
called.

Adeline, clad in a pink leotard and
tights with a loose red sash tied around her waist, ran into the
room and threw her arms around him.
Damn she’s a fine-looking
woman,
he thought, as his arms went around her.

“That’s
wonder
ful!” she cried,
giving him a sound kiss on the nose. That accomplished, she
disentangled herself from him and jogged back into the next room.
Twentieth century rock-n-roll began to play. The Beatles, he
thought, but he didn’t know the era well enough to be
sure.

“What the hell are you doing in there,
Addie?”

“Exercising! What do you think of the
Rolling Stones?”

Rolling Stones, Beatles, it was all
the same to him. He was past trying to figure out why she listened
to six-hundred-year-old music rather than something more
modern.

“Can’t you do that in the ship’s gym?”
he growled.

“What, and have all those callow
youths drooling over the wife of Earth’s Ambassador to Tolar?” He
could hear the capital letters. “Besides, they don’t like twentieth
century music.”

“Neither do I!” he
bellowed.

“But I’m allowed to torture
you
.” Glee filled her voice.

Smithton grunted and left to find a
quieter place to work.

<<>>

In her quarters in the guest wing,
Marianne opened a new bottle of essential oil of lavender and
applied a single drop to the warmest part of her neck. It was one
of her favorite scents. Adeline had had it phased down from the
ship a few hours earlier with her vitamin and protein supplements.
The Tolari could not comprehend why she mixed her body’s odor with
such scents. To them, it was a form of deceit, or at least they had
thought so until they understood her sense of smell was quite dull
compared to theirs. Most of the time, she complied with their
preferences, but it was the end of a long day and she felt like
indulging. She’d bathe in the morning and remove the scent, but for
now, she breathed it in and sighed.

The guard by the door—a woman, since
any guard assigned to her quarters was a woman—flickered into view.
I wish they wouldn’t do that,
Marianne thought, a little
startled. The guards in her quarters, as a general rule, remained
camouflaged and silent. The lavender’s scent must have been a
little too strong for this one.

The guard, as observant as any Tolari,
noted her reaction and bowed an apology. “Forgive me, proctor,” she
said in English.
More and more of them know English now,
Marianne thought. “I did not mean to startle you.”

“Is there something you wished to
say?” Marianne asked.

The guard started to shake her head,
but her curiosity seemed to get the better of her. “That fluid,
proctor, what is it?”

“Lavender oil. Lavender is a flower on
my world, on Earth. This is an essential oil derived from the
plant. It has medicinal properties as well as a pleasant scent. Do
you like it?”

The guard spread her arms in apology,
shaking her head. “Perhaps in a weaker concentration,” she
suggested. “Do you use it now for its medicinal
properties?”

Marianne thought about it a moment. “I
might be,” she answered. “It can soothe anxieties, and I was
worried about Kyza.”

“Worried?”

She sighed. The Tolari also could not
comprehend human worry, or at least the guards didn’t. They didn’t
worry about anything at all, that Marianne had ever detected. For
the guard, as for every other Tolari in the stronghold, either Kyza
survived her tests, or she didn’t. Since she had survived, they
were unconcerned. If she hadn’t survived, they would have grieved,
but it never occurred to them to anticipate grief before it
happened.

“I can’t answer you, guard,” she
responded, “It’s a human thing.”

The guard nodded, bowed, and
disappeared into the background.

Marianne settled back in her chair and
picked up the tablet containing her personal library. She felt like
reading a little Jane Austen. “Life in the fishbowl,” she muttered.
In Hungarian, so none of the invisible guards would
understand.

<<>>

Kyza opened her eyes on the quiet
darkness of night and lifted her head. Then she stirred her arms
and legs, pushing herself up on her elbows. No pain. The
apothecary’s noxious-tasting potion had done its work. She sat up
with care. An apothecary’s aide watched her but did not speak or
interfere. Weakness pulled at her limbs, but not so much that she
could not stand—she thought. Scooting to the edge of the bed, she
slid down until her peds touched the floor, then tilted forward as
a wave of dizziness washed over her. She avoided falling by letting
the momentum carry her to the window.

Clinging to the sill, she looked out
into the night, panting, until the dizziness passed. Tolar’s single
large moon, half full, hung above the far mountains, beyond a
mist-filled valley spotted with the tops of an occasional tree.
Paperbark trees, she thought. She could not be sure on that point;
her academic education had not yet progressed beyond giving her a
fluent ability to read. She remembered Storaas mentioning that
paperbark trees grew so tall they pierced the fog in the Kentar
Valley. The peaks beyond were the High Fralentolar Mountains along
Suralia’s border with Detralar province. She knew they lay farther
away than they looked.

Feeling steadier now, Kyza turned away
from the window and navigated through the room to the keep’s main
corridor. Hunger gnawed at her. Perhaps the kitchen workers had
left some food out—sometimes they did, to allow it to cool for the
morning meal. She walked down the corridor, feeling the camouflaged
family guards watching her. She could sense where they stood but
ignored them. Training enabled her to cross the entire stronghold
blindfolded without touching a single wall or piece of furniture or
unseen guard, but—

Kyza stopped halfway down the hall
when she encountered an unfamiliar smell. It alarmed her into
camouflaging until she realized the new smell mingled with her
human tutor’s scent. Marianne must have anointed herself with one
of those strange, scented oils she favored, one Kyza had not yet
encountered. Satisfied, she dropped out of camouflage and moved on
to continue her quest for food, calculating how long she had slept.
More than two days had passed.

Moonlight streamed through the
kitchens’ large windows, illuminating trays of grain rolls set out
to cool. Her mouth watering, she plucked one from its tray and bit
into it, hunger driving her to devour the entire roll before
slowing down. Still not satisfied, she grabbed another and chewed
on it as she leaned back against the near wall, sliding downward
until she sat on the floor with her knees against her
chest.

Eating at a more civilized pace, she
finished half the second roll, thinking about the trial. If it had
accomplished anything, it had removed any fear she had of the dark.
Perhaps that had been its purpose? When she became the Suralia
someday, she must have no fear of the dark and be willing to lay
down her life for her people. The pain, though—she shivered and
closed her eyes, leaning her head on her knees. If honor ever
required her to walk into the dark, she would make certain she was
too far from a Suralian apothecary to be brought back.

Chapter Ten

At dawn, the cooks found Kyza asleep in the
kitchen with a half-eaten grain roll in one hand. She woke when one
of them approached her. Stumbling to her peds, she let the smiling
head cook shoo her out of the way and into the refectory. Steaming
carafes of tea stood on a table by the door, with a collection of
mugs beside them. She poured some and went to her usual seat at the
high table to finish off the roll. Her father walked in as she ate
the last bite.