Seen (Heartstone Book 2)

by Frances Pauli

  “I would not choose it!” She rushed forward, placed her hands on arms suddenly crossed over his chest. A wall between them. His fury and despair folded into one armor. “I would not. Shayd, I would never choose that.”

  “But you will do it.” His head tilted. His eyes found her like knives. Glinting and deadly. “You will walk away from me. Go to him willingly?”

  “To save my people, yes.” When he pulled back, she felt the absence, the slap of it and her cat snarled. “There is no other way. You do not understand. To defy a seeing only brings more wretched consequences. It would call down a greater tragedy.”

  “I understand.” But he didn’t. Not for a second. She heard his anger and cringed away from it. “I understand that you won’t even try.”

  “No.” She backed away. Even the cat agreed now, it bristled, defended her against the man it knew would never harm her. “You understand nothing.”

  He dropped his arms and spun in a swift, furious about-face. Rowri’s chest tightened. This was not how she’d seen their garden tryst, was it? This scene, she never would have chosen. Shayd stormed from her like a furious cloud, like a swirl of smoke, like the explosion in the jungles of Choma, and she could only watch him leave. The man-made jungle swallowed him, and the priestess held her breath.

  He would return. She’d already seen it. But if he didn’t, if he nursed his wounds and ran forever, it would prove that visions could be dodged. In running from her, he could free them from the inevitability that loomed above their heads.

  Rowri could not bring herself to hope for that. Instead, she watched the plantings and felt the future sweeping in. The leaves parted exactly as she’d seen it. The man returned, exactly as she’d known he would.

  He stormed to her and stopped. Froze and stared down into her face with wide, horrified eyes.

  “You have seen this too,” she said.

  “Yes.” He choked back the sob and leaned into the kiss. His arms pulled her in and Rowri dove forward into the inevitability. That which was seen must come to pass. Shayd’s lips pressed his fire into her mouth, and she let the moment devour her.

  They would have this forever. She would keep this in her heart while the Tolfarians tortured her. She twisted her fingers into long hair, stroked soft lilac skin, and set her heart loose. The cat rumbled and clawed to be nearer to him, to possess his body as it did hers, and the Shrouded Seer opened willingly, let in the beast senses and moaned against her neck.

  He nipped at the soft skin, and Rowri dragged her nails over his shoulders. She raked aside the cloth and tasted him, kissed his chest and jaw and curled up to find his lips again.

  “Shayd, please.” She growled it, and didn’t know or care what she was asking for.

  He understood anyway, lifted her from the ground and carried her around the pond, to a stretch of shorter flowers, a clear spot sheltered in the arch of vines. Blood red flowers blossomed on a green mat, and the Seer placed her gently among them. He sat beside her and drew her into his arms again.

  “I’m sorry, Rowri. I don’t know how to save us.”

  He trembled beside her. Rowri shook as well, but she crawled into his lap and they clung to one another. No one could save them, but then, no one could take this away either. No matter how many stars stretched between them, they were one person.

  “There is no separation,” she whispered. “No distance.”

  “No time or space.” He chanted it too, held her tighter and buried his face in her hair. “The Heart is always right.”

  *-*-*

  Dielel waited in the darkness, but his heart was lighter than it had ever been. The Heart had forgiven him! It had brought his bonded into the hole to find him, and the sacred stone would free them from hell. The veins of his prison would lead them to a new life, to redemption and a future he’d traded away for Haftan’s sake.

  He moved jerkily from the narrow cot and paced forward and back across the room. Haftan the would-be-king had never loved him. Haftan had let him fall, had turned his back on Dielel to save his own ambitious neck.

  He’d never once come to see him.

  But Jadyek had come. He’d found him by the glow of their heartbond and, like an angel, he would bring them to freedom as well.

  “Dielel,” Jarn snarled and hissed from the vents again, but he found ignoring the man easier today. “Where is your savior now, Dielel? Is it dark up there?”

  “Shut up.” He stamped a foot against the stone and felt a stab of pain in his calf. He’d grown weak in here, lean and without any muscle for the task ahead. “You should be moving, Jarn. If you cannot make the journey, we’ll leave you behind.”

  He felt a rush of power, a surge of something entirely new to him. Jarn’s curses rose through the air ducts, but so did the sound of his movement. He mocked the plan, certainly. But the man followed Dielel’s suggestion. He moved, and that meant he believed in the possibility at least.

  Dielel laughed, and then froze and listened to the echo bounce. It didn’t sound like him, like the shadow of a false king who never acted without direction. He’d done as the Seer had told him, done as Haftan told him, as his wretched father had. All his life he’d followed other men.

  Now he would lead them. He caught himself shrinking in, curling against the idea, and forced his spine straight. He would lead them out. Dielel would. He’d seen the stone flare. He’d heard the song, and it would tell him exactly where to go.

  Just as soon as his bonded returned with supplies. As soon as Jadyek came again. Then they’d be free to run together. If that meant they had to loose the devil in his basement, who was he to care?

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Haftan woke them far too early. His shadow fell across Shayd’s face, and the warmth of his bonded against his side shifted. The girl moved and the Seer groaned and pulled her closer.

  “I’m sorry.” Haftan stood beside the path. He’d turned his back, looked out over the pond, but he was here, interrupting and bringing their doom along with him. “They’ve told me to bring the girl.”

  “Already?” Rowri’s voice warbled. She sat up, but remained glued to him. In his mind, he could feel her cat’s terror. He understood, once they’d shared the creature’s thoughts, exactly what she left him for. He would try to understand the why later.

  “I’m sorry.” Haftan shrugged and didn’t face them. “Omira will take the generator back to Choma on a Summit vessel. We’ve been commended…but dismissed from the mission.”

  “Dismissed.” Shayd snarled, felt the beast’s anger backing his own. “Fired, you mean.”

  “The Tolfarians will leave as well.”

  “With Rowri?” Panic bloomed like a fire in his gut. He made a vise of his arms and refused to believe it. “You mean that she must go.”

  “I’m afraid so.” Haftan turned just enough to look sideways in their direction. He didn’t quite intrude on the moment, but his words held a question. He still thought there was hope for them. “Unless she doesn’t wish it?”

  Rowri tightened her grip on him, hugged him with the strength of her Uraru behind it. But her voice was clear and hard, unyielding. “I will go.”

  She called down their fate like a hammer, and Shayd felt tears on his cheeks. The woman released him, but he felt her in his soul still, would always feel her. She stood, brave as a lion, and he would have to stand as well, to hold up, to go on.

  Her hand slid into his. He used that touch, the power of the threads between them to straighten his legs, to rise and stand tall beside her. His heartmate. His life. Their fingers laced together once, a brief embrace that fell away too quickly. Rowri marched from him. She went to Haftan like a soldier to battle, and she never looked back.

  Haftan did. He turned an expression on the Seer that only half reflected the tragedy he was witnessing. “Mofitan wants to go to Eclipsis before we return. He said to ask you…”

  “Yes.” Eclipsis would buy him a little time. It would put off his return to Shroud and to the
Heart that he served and that he never wanted to see again.

  If they expected him to follow, Shayd never knew. He couldn’t have done it if he’d tried. The Choma priestess left beside Haftan, wafted away like the smoke and fire that she was, and he stood like a stone in the center of the garden. He held still and held tight. He closed his eyes, followed the threads of their bond, and in his soul, he walked beside her.

  *-*-*

  Rowri’s cat howled to the skies. It thrashed and whipped its tail, tore furrows in her belly with sharp claws that never left a mark, that allowed her to keep moving, to walk beside her escort without fighting…or turning back.

  They climbed into a waiting transport, and the city streaked away, taking everything good with it. She breathed in the stale air of the vehicle’s interior and let it turn her to stone, to rock and steel and emptiness where feelings could not enter. Even the Uraru silenced, and by the time they entered the Vade port again, Rowri had grown still and solid and blocked out any thought but her next steps.

  Those took her, alongside the Shrouded escort, to the base of a ramp where Senior Priestess Omira and the Tolfarian General waited. They waited for her, and her future blanketed them in an evil fog.

  “Rowri, at last.” Omira smiled, but her words belied just how worried she had been. Had she believed they would flee in the end? “You are feeling better now?”

  “Yes.” Never had a larger lie been uttered. Rowri dipped into a polite bow. “Yes, Senior.”

  “Good. This is Tchao Rimawdi.”

  It should have held more ceremony, that introduction. If Tchao didn’t know that, Omira definitely did. If this was the deal that would save her people, that would spark a new friendship, nurture a lost kinship, there should have been a ritual to it. But it was all a lie.

  Of them all, perhaps, only Haftan missed that fact. He had done his duty, had been dismissed, and he left her there without knowing that she went into the darkness. He returned to his ship—the cat yowled for Shayd—and Rowri stood in front of the man who meant to destroy her.

  They knew it. Each of them knew it and knew the others did as well.

  Still, they played it out. That which is seen. Rowri nodded politely to Tchao, took the hand he offered and did not run screaming from the touch of vile, blue-laced skin.

  “You are as lovely as I imagined.” His eyes argued that he found her disgusting.

  “You are kind.” She gave him an equal lie.

  “The generator is safely on board your vessel, Senior?”

  “Yes.” Omira only sounded defeated.

  “If you follow my instructions exactly, it will repair the damage.”

  “Yes.”

  “And should you need us for anything in the future…”

  “We have opened communications between the Choman races again,” Omira said. “All is as I have seen it.”

  Tchao did not hide his flinch in time, but the Senior missed it. She looked to Rowri and her words, it seemed, were meant to reassure instead of terrify. As I have seen it. But Omira had confessed her vision had been the end of her. Rowri found little to hope for herself in the Senior’s death. How her people might suffer more than that, she didn’t want to see.

  “Goodbye, Rowri. See well.”

  “See well, Senior.” She should have run away with the Shrouded Seer. Rowri didn’t need to see that much. She should have run, and consequences be damned.

  “Shall we?”

  “Of course.”

  Tchao Rimawdi gave Rowri his arm, and she took it, marched up the ramp beside him with the hollow echo of their steps ringing across the port. She wondered if Shayd still stood in the garden, if he still lingered in the vines and flowers, waiting for her.

  The ramp retracted as they reached the hatch. Tchao helped her over the threshold and barked an order to the uniformed Tolfarian who stood just inside the hatch. “Close her up, Mr. Prill.”

  The man hit a button in the shadows and a heavy metal panel lowered over the opening. Rowri turned to watch it. She stared backwards while the Vade spaceport and the buildings beyond shrank under the press of that blockage. If she hadn’t, she might have missed the grimace on Mr. Prill’s face, the sharp look of defiance he tried to hide behind his arm.

  “This way,” Tchao said. He kept his gaze forward, tugged at her arm until Rowri turned and faced the interior of the Tolfarian vessel. They stood in a short hallway. Every surface had a polished, silver cast and everywhere colored lines ran forward and back, pointing the way to every door, hatch or access panel. Efficient, that design, if you understood what the colors meant.

  Tchao didn’t take the time to explain them. His cheek twitched, and he tugged again. This time, pulling Rowri forward at his side until her feet caught up and she was able to walk. His grip tightened on her arm, fingers pressing in, digging uncomfortable divots in her muscle.

  “Get us in the air, Mr. Prill.” His voice filled the corridor. He didn’t check for compliance, didn’t stall for a moment in his forward progress. He had no doubts about obedience, this one. He was as cold and unreadable as the walls of his ship. “And underway quickly.”

  Their march ended in a door panel, and that opened on a box-sized room. Tchao herded Rowri into the lift, released her arm, and ordered the controls to take them to level seven in the same tone he’d commanded Mr. Prill. He brushed at the front of his dark uniform and then looked at her, suddenly and with his full attention.

  “Are you stupid?” He spoke in the same flat tone, and she couldn’t tell if he meant it as an insult or a simple curiosity.

  “What?”

  “Not important.” He sniffed and squinted at her. His eyes moved from her hair to her toes and back, impassive, flat, and completely shielded. Only the wires in his face flickered. “But you can see? You have this thing…this foresight?”

  “Yes.” She heard his voice in her mind, and echo of the seeing, and her blood chilled.

  “Very good.” He snapped back to attention, stared at the lift door until it opened on level seven. Another hall, twin to the first waited, another maze of colored lines that went everywhere and nowhere. “This way.”

  Make her see for me.

  Rowri stepped from the lift at Tchao Rimawdi’s side. He moved on, stiff and glowing from his implants, an alien commander, a robot. This one had nothing but danger inside him, and she knew where he led her long before they arrived.

  She’d seen the tables in her dreams. She’d heard the scratching and smelled the chemical, antiseptic smell without an identifiable source.

  When Tchao stopped, Rowri’s cat curled into a ball and closed its mind to her. It knew what she did. It understood, perhaps, even better than she did. The door they faced was shut tight. A single, white line led down from the ceiling to mark the portal’s location.

  What did it mean? In the directory of the Tolfarians’ vessel, did a white line mean pain, torture or hell?

  Tchao’s hand reached for the panel, and Rowri’s control failed her. The cat only curled tighter, but the priestess felt the shaking fear in her bones.

  “What is in there?” She tried to step back, to slide away from the door, but the Tolfarian grabbed her arm and twisted it, bringing her into his side, close enough to feel the soft heat of his implants hard at work. His grip was steel and fire. “Where are you taking me?”

  “To see the doctor.” Tchao laughed. His teeth flashed and his free hand slapped the panel. The door slid open, revealing a room of light and wires, of familiar, horrible sounds. “Dovali will make certain you are fit.”

  “Fit for what?” She tried to twist free, but her struggles only stretched the Tolfarian’s smile wider. He jerked his head and then dragged her into the room.

  “Don’t worry, priestess.” He made the word a vile thing. “Dovali is an expert. You’ll be in very good hands.”

  She heard the doctor approaching, but he came from behind her, from an angle she couldn’t catch while pinned to Tchao’s side. He twisted her ar
m further, unnecessarily, maybe for the sport of it alone. Rowri cried out against the stab of pain. She cried out against her seeing, her fate and her entire culture.

  Let them all fall, if only she could be free! Let her die too, if only she could leave this room first. There would be no escape, no wedding to the Tolfarian. No truce, no peace, no future could survive the frigid, inhuman Tolfarian with his blue wires and his doctor.

  She heard the scratching already, cringed from the noise even before she felt the sharp, piercing bite of the needle someone inserted into her neck.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  It took them two days to reach Eclipsis. Shayd spent them in his room. He spent them pacing, crying, cursing, and imagining where she was. The Senior Priestess had left with the Galactic Summit’s next pawn. They’d traded Rowri for this generator and left her to her fate without compunction.

  He beat his fists against the cot until he had no strength left. Then he sagged against it, pressed his forehead against the frame, and tried to drill away the guilt swimming in his thoughts. He’d let her go too. He’d stood by while it happened.

  That which is seen must come to pass. He heard her words echo and growled with her cat’s fury. His door opened. Haftan didn’t bother to knock. They’d tried that enough apparently, and were ready to invade without invitation now.

  “We’ll be landing soon.”

  Shayd stared at the lower cot and said nothing.

  “Eclipsis has petitioned for Shrouded assistance.”

  “Because we did such a great job on the last mission.”

  “Shayd.” Haftan shifted from one foot to the other. He’d lost too. The Summit hadn’t offered them a thing for their trouble. Despite their promise, they still “deliberated” on the status of Shroud. “We’re landing is all. They’ll be waiting in Wraith.”