Free The Marann by Sky Warrior Book Publishing Page B

enough, but it suited his purposes
to delay the revelation.
    Kyza began to stir, sending tendrils
of need through the parental bond he shared with her, unusual as it
was for a Tolari father to be bonded to a child so young. In the
normal course of their development, infants bonded to the women who
bore them, regardless of whose heir they were, for their first six
or seven seasons of life if they were boys and closer to ten
seasons if they were girls, but the woman who mothered Kyza had
died soon after giving birth. The tragedy had forced him to attempt
bonding with his newborn daughter.
    The leader of Suralia’s science caste,
a woman of great strength and intellectual genius, had mothered
Kyza. Her consent to his request for an heir represented a great
honor, but he had not chosen her for high caste rank. Genetic
analysis indicated she could give him an exceptional child—one who
could, perhaps, survive the great trial. That had been his primary
consideration—but he had not expected it to cost the woman her
life.
    By law, because he belonged to the
ruling caste, she had lived in his stronghold while she increased,
joined by her heir and her bond-partner. The same law would have
required her to continue there until Kyza was ready to transfer her
bond to him—had the woman lived.
    He had been present, as stunned as the
apothecary—who expected to save her—when the woman had succumbed to
shock after suffering a massive hemorrhage during the birth. His
daughter then, on instinct, tried to follow her into the dark.
Shaking himself out of the empathic daze death could cause the
unprepared, he had wrapped his senses around Kyza and surrounded
her with love before she could shut herself down. She had struggled
against him like a flutter trying to escape a net, seeking to
follow the mother she knew in the womb.
    He had refused to let go, and the
contest of wills had continued for much of a day. Kyza was
exhausted and close to the dark when she turned back and bonded to
him, allowing him to comfort and cradle her into a warm, contented
glow. She had opened her eyes and lived. He had wept with joy, even
while the woman’s bond-partner had sobbed in devastated grief and
followed his beloved that night into the dark.
    It was a pity he needed the humans to
believe his people were cold and emotionless.

Chapter Five
    Midnight. Marianne ran through a cornfield, lungs
burning, terror forcing whimpers from her throat. Running as fast
as she could, she dodged among the corn stalks, trying to slip out
of sight, trying to lose her pursuer. Faster—faster—heedless of the
leaves slashing at her face and her bare arms. Then her foot caught
on a clod of earth and she sprawled on her face in the fragrant
soil.
    She screamed and scrambled to her
feet. The Sural would protect her. The Sural had promised to
protect her. The Sural... where was the Sural? Marianne searched
the darkness as she ran and found him, far down the row, turning to
look at her. She reached out her arms to him just as her ankle
twisted in the shallow rut formed by a fallen cornstalk, throwing
her to the ground a second time. She screamed again and woke with a
cry, a red haze fading into the darkness before her eyes. Panting,
sweat pouring from her body, she sat up and remembered where she
was: an alien stronghold, on an alien world, where there were no
cornrows and no one to chase her through them.
    The Sural awoke with a start and sat
bolt upright, staring into the darkness, through the walls,
straight across the stronghold to the spot where Marianne lay
asleep in her quarters—or rather should have been. She was awake,
radiating psychic agony.
    He had felt her reach out to him. He
could feel her now, wanting him to protect her from... something.
Something evil that had happened to her long ago. He reached out to
her through the tenuous connection she had—astoundingly—forged
across the night, letting strength and comfort flow through it,
hoping she would not sense