Free Schism: Part One of Triad by Catherine Asaro

me.”
    “Your son never gives up, does he?” He couldn’t stay calm. “You stopped him from killing me. You stopped him from having me declared incompetent. You stopped him from having me caged in a lab while they studied my brain. Now he retaliates by taking my children.”
    Roca stared at him. She didn’t try to deny his words; they both knew the extremes Kurj had taken in his attempts to end their marriage. “That was a long time ago. He’s changed.”
    Eldrinson struggled to breathe. “Apparently not much.”
    “Listen. Kurj had to choose his heirs. The Assembly voted on it And his heirs have to be Rhon psions. I’m Deyha’s heir. Our children are the only real choice.”
    Eldrinson stared at her. “You knew?” His world was breaking apart. He had nowhere to stand.
    “I knew they had voted. I didn’t realize Kurj had done anything until now, when Althor told me.”
    He gripped the banister. “Soz told me.”
    Her forehead furrowed. “About Althor?”
    “No! Herself. Kurj chose them both.”
    “Gods above. That was what Althor meant.”
     
    “Meant by what?”
    She exhaled. “That it was Soz’s decision what to say.”
    Eldrinson didn’t know where to put his dismay, his anger, all this pain.
    “Where is Althor?”
    “Outside, in the courtyard—”
    He pushed past her, taking the stairs two at a time.
    “Eldri, wait!” Roca caught up with him. “You have to calm down. You’ll have a seizure.”
    He kept going, unwilling to hear, unwilling to acknowledge that he owed his life to the doctors of her people, to hated technology he barely understood, to the Skolians who were stealing his children.
    At the bottom of the stairs, he strode through the house until he reached the archway out to the courtyard with the potted plants. Shoving open the doors, he saw Althor talking to Del by the fountain. Arches of blue water spouted into the air and fell in sprays back into the round basin.
    Eldrinson walked over to them. “Althor.”
    His son turned. He started to smile, then stopped. Eldrinson didn’t know how his face looked, but given the way Althor stiffened, he doubted it was pleasant. He heard Roca nearby, but he kept his attention on his son. “Soz says she is leaving with you tonight.”
    Althor let out a breath. “She talked to you, then.”
    Eldrinson strove to keep from clenching his fists. He wouldn’t threaten his own son. “I have forbidden her to leave.”
    “What did she say?”
    “That she will go anyway.”
    “Father, I’m sorry. But she has to make her own decision—”
    “No!” Eldrinson was losing the battle to stay cool. “She is a child. She does not have to make her own decisions.”
    Althor regarded him, his metallic eyes and face glinting in the sunlight, so much like his mother. Like Kurj. “She is seventeen. Twenty-one, in octal.
    Here that makes her an adult” He spoke quietly. “If she is old enough to marry a man more than twice her age, she is old enough to decide her own future.”
     
    “According to Skolian law, she is a child. They break their own laws to take my daughter?” He couldn’t believe Althor would do this. “If you take her against my wishes, you will violate the basis of every trust I have ever put in you.”
    Althor spread his hands out from his body. “Father, she is a genius. A technological genius. A military genius. You can’t cage her spirit here. She would be miserable.”
    “Miserable?” He gave Althor an incredulous look. “Miserable to have a happy life with a good, decent man? Instead I should send her to war, to gods only know what violence?” His voice was shaking. “What if she were taken prisoner by the Traders? Could you live with knowing you had made it possible for them to torture and enslave your sister? Are you out of your mind?”
    “The choice isn’t ours to make,” Althor said. “It is hers.”
    Eldrinson ground out his words. “If you take her on that ship tonight, you are no longer my son.”
    Roca