Ren eased down on the edge of his bed, shook his head. “Do you mean do I watch your thoughts like a vidcast? No. I’m not a telepath. But even if I were, we’re taught selectivity. Control. Or else everyone’s emotions would overwhelm us, drive us close to insanity. Of course, as an empath, if someone is experiencing intense emotions I’d be aware of that. But in most cases, I rarely read people’s emotions. I only do if I feel I could be of some help. Perhaps to pray with them.”
I caught that he denied, again, being a telepath. But I also heard his “even if I were.”
The muted thud of a door closing in the hallway and the heavy sound of footsteps halted any further questions on my part. Sully appeared, grinning, in the open doorway, cot and folded blanket tucked under one arm. “Someone here order a cot?”
I played to his jovial mood. “Should have been here an hour ago. Hope you’re not expecting a tip.”
He dropped the cot on the floor behind me, dumped the blanket over my head. “Hope you’re not expecting a pillow.”
“Sully!” Ren sounded honestly horrified.
I flipped the blanket over my head and laughed. And wondered again what Ren “saw.” Or did he just sense a playfulness?
“Chaz needs someone to tease her.” Sully pulled the blanket off my shoulders, tossed it onto the cot. “After all those years of being called Captain, she takes herself far too seriously. What do you say, Ren, shall we teach her how to play with the big boys?”
I was about to protest when he suddenly leaned over and scooped me into his arms. His body felt hot and hard, very male. Something glinted in his eyes that I thought I recognized, and it wasn’t playfulness. I yelped, my arms flailing behind him as I squirmed, wanting to reach for my dagger. His arms tightened around me with a strength that seemed almost nonhuman. Fear flashed through me. I had no intention of finding out what his version of playing with the big boys meant. I had no intention—
—of landing flat on my back in the middle of Ren’s narrow bed, my dagger still around my wrist, Sully grinning down at me like the Devil’s own kin. I scrambled backward, almost kicking Ren in the process. “Sullivan, you—”
“Play cards? Of course I do, my angel. Scoot over now, will you?” He plopped down next to me and threw a deck of cards in my lap.
Ren, who was reaching for Sully, stopped.
For a few seconds the entire scene froze in my mind. Sully’s wicked, sensual smile. Ren’s face, tight with fury, right arm lashing out, stopping only inches from Sully’s throat.
Ren had clearly felt my fear at what I thought was going to be an attack, a possible gang rape. And Ren had reacted, defending me, from …
… Sully. Whose joviality masked something much deeper. Anger. Pain. Which Ren had to have felt as well.
But not an intention to hurt me. Once Sully had dropped me on the bed, I saw that. There was nothing threatening in his posture, nothing but childish mischief on his face. I’d misjudged him. Mistaken his continuing game of “bait Chaz” so Ren could empathically read my emotions.
Well, if they wanted to know what fear and anger felt like, they’d just seen it.
I was breathing hard. So, I noticed, was Sully. Only Ren had pulled back within himself, calmly, his hand resting peacefully against his knee. But his voice had an odd timbre to it when he spoke. I had the feeling he didn’t approve of Sully’s actions just then.
“Sully. Hand me the cards. I will deal.”
The cards had fallen from my lap when I’d tucked my legs underneath. Sully picked up the deck and held it out to the blind Stolorth. The six-fingered hand closed around his with a surety, a firmness. Quite possibly a message.
Sully laughed and pulled his hand away. “Keep an eye on him, Chaz,” he said as Ren shook the deck from the box, feathered the cards with a professional air. “He cheats.”
6
I learned several things that night.
I learned the blind could play cards if the cards have raised areas they can distinguish through touch. “There are other words for it, in other cultures,” Ren told me. “We call the system vaytar.”
I learned that other blind Stolorths do exist, but predominantly in a small Englarian community on Calfedar. One more bit of information that ran opposite to what I’d been taught in NonHuman Cultures. We were taught the Englarians viewed a Stolorth’s Ragkiril mind talents as soul-stealing, something far more heinous in their view than the violation of privacy as defined by the Baris Human Rights Accord. But the blind ones—their blindness a “gift” from the abbot, as Drogue had said—were considered acceptable.
Which made me question, again, the extent of Ren’s talents. Drogue seemed so sure he was nothing more than an empath. Or was a limited telepathy acceptable to the Englarians as well?
Ren had lost his sight gradually, had been brought to the compound when he was seven, fully blind by then. He still remembered being able to see.
“What do I miss seeing the most? My ocean. It’s a brilliant blue-green. And there’s a flower we call a maiisar that grows along the shore. Quite lovely. A deep reddish-brown in color but streaked with gold. It glistens. It’s very soft, with a marvelous scent.”
I was watching Ren describe his memories and didn’t know Sully had reached for me until his hand ran down my braid.
“Like Chasidah’s hair,” Sully said.
Could empaths receive a sense of color?
I learned that Ren had spent very little time with humans. The Englarian compound was staffed by Takan families devoted to the church. Humans he saw only at church services or in upper-level classes at school, and then mostly males.
I was the third human female he’d ever spoken to at any length. He admitted he’d never met the real Sister Berri, only listened to reports of her work. I was one of two human females he’d ever shared a meal with, played cards with. Obviously, the only female roommate he’d ever had.
I learned he was thirty years old, five years younger than myself. But that was in human terms. Stolorths had longer life spans. If his own kind didn’t kill him, he could expect to live at least one hundred fifty years.
It was almost 2330 hours, station time, before I could dislodge Sully from the game and the bed. No MOC or stripers came calling. Save for several outbursts of colorful epithets related to the sequence of the cards, it was blissfully quiet. The earlier tensions between Sully and myself had dissolved. And I accepted that much of what I’d thought was about to happen had been due strictly to misinterpretation.
It didn’t take much self-analysis to note I was overwrought and exhausted.
Sully left, grumbling. He owed Ren four thousand two hundred twenty-one credits. Add that to the one million, seven hundred thousand credits he already owed the Stolorth, and someday Ren would be very wealthy. If Sully ever paid.
I broke even and was tired enough to almost trip on my robe on the way into the shower. I fell gratefully into the cot, which now held a pillow as well, while Ren went to soak in the tub.
I read Drogue’s pamphlet on Englarian rituals for a little while, but couldn’t keep my eyes open. Any questions I’d wanted to pose to Ren slipped from my mind. I don’t remember hearing Ren finish his bath or climb into his own bed. But he must have, because when I awoke, disoriented for a moment, I could see the outline of his form. The clock on the wall read 0420.
Morning meditation was at 0600. I rolled onto my back. I’d had only about five hours’ sleep, but it was more than I’d had in one stretch since I’d been taken to Moabar. I could make it to morning meditations. But I didn’t know if I was expected to attend.
I’d ask Ren when he woke. Maybe ask him about other things as well. I found I looked forward to that—not so much because I could get some questions answered, but because he was truly pleasant to talk to. It felt odd to feel a friendship toward an adult male Stolorth, yet not. He wasn’t a Ragkiril capable of intruding into my thoughts and manipulating them. And he might be a thirty-year-old male, but he was in many ways th
e most innocent thirty-year-old male I’d ever known. There was an eagerness in him, an honest desire to please that reminded me of Willym, my nine-year-old half brother.
I’d seen Willym a few times last year when my orders had brought me through Marker. That’s when Thad and I still, marginally, got along. And my stepmother, Suzette, was in a mood to irritate my father.
I was sure they’d told Willym I was dead. I hoped they had. He was a good kid. He didn’t need to grow up with any shadows. Or ghosts.
“Sadness, Chasidah?” Ren’s voice was as soft as the pale glow of light filtering under the door.
He was reading my emotions. Given the early hour, I felt guilty for awakening him. “Sorry. My mind was wandering.”
“I’ve been reciting my meditations. It was no disturbance. And please, I didn’t mean to intrude.” His covers rustled as he turned on his side.
“You’re not.” I knew he was doing what Sully had asked him. But he was also, I suspected, genuinely concerned.
“Your sadness is so very singular. This is normal for all human females, yes?”
“Singular?” That struck me first as an odd comment, and then terribly true. We did suffer quietly, within ourselves. “Humans can’t share emotions like you can.”
“And when you’re sad, you … think about it? You hold it within yourself until it goes away?”
That was an accurate description. “Usually. Some people cry a lot. Some drink. Or just talk to a friend.”
“This dispels it?”
“For a while. What do you do, Ren, when you’re sad?”
“I rarely am.”
This from a blind Stolorth cut off from his own people by a death sentence. Like I’d been. “Stolorths just don’t get unhappy, or you don’t?”
“My people are always linked to the Great Sea. To the stars. Through the wisdom of Abbot Eng, I reconnect with that.”
“But not as a telepath?” This was my key question.
“This still concerns you. I lost the High Link when I lost my sight.”
I accepted his answer for the moment. There were times to press, times to pull back. “And your family?”
“Was that the source of your sad thoughts, Chasidah? My family were the Takas who raised me, and all my brothers and sisters in the church. And now I have more family with Sully, Marsh, Dorsie, and Gregor. And you.”
I recognized two of the names. Gregor was Sully’s pilot, Marsh his second in command before his well-publicized demise two years ago on Garno. I’d often wondered what happened to them.
I also had a feeling they were the “advisers” who’d voted against my rescue. I’d never made their lives particularly pleasant.
I sat up in the darkness, now wide awake. 0435. “Join me for some tea? Coffee?”
“That’s always needed at this hour, yes.”
I’d slept in the long shift. It was probably wrinkled, but my robe would cover it. I splashed water on my face, and when I came out of the bath Ren was dressed.
I was sitting on the cot, combing the knots out of my hair when he came out of the bath, his long hair also unbound. Something else we had in common.
I held up the comb and then belatedly realized he couldn’t see it. “I’ll do yours if you’ll do mine.”
He tilted his face.
“Hair,” I told him. “I’ll do your braid, if you like. Unless your arms bend backward more easily than mine do.”
He chuckled. “There are some times that I miss what families do for each other.”
He sat on the edge of the bench. I straddled it behind him, combed out his hair. It was a beautiful shade of blue; its texture thick, silky, magnificent. In the room’s lighting, his damp skin was silvery. He closed his eyes as I worked his braid, his lashes dark against his cheeks.
I leaned slightly sideways to study Ren’s profile as the braid flowed through my fingers. His nose was straight, his mouth generous, the lines of his jaw and cheekbones almost regal. He had a handsomeness defined by elegance. Which was reflected in the fluid way he moved. In the gentleness—and genuineness—I heard in his voice.
He handed me a short leather tie as I finished off the braid. “Thank you. My marala used to do that for me.”
“Marala?”
“It is a Takan term of affection for mother.”
“My mother used to braid mine too.” I switched places with him, pressed the comb into his hand. It was webbed and six-fingered. It didn’t bother me as it would have a week ago.
He pulled my hair back through both hands. “Your hair’s very long.” He sounded surprised.
Empaths couldn’t see images, then.
“It’s thick, though, so it braids up shorter,” I told him. His fingers moved in an unfamiliar pattern. I reached back, felt his work. Intricate. I’d have to look in a mirror later. Though from what my fingers could feel, I doubted I could replicate it.
“It’s all right?”
“Different pattern. I like it.”
“The color’s beautiful. Like a maiisar blossom.”
“You can sense the color?”
A moment of silence. “Sully told me.”
I remembered that. I handed him a short hair tie, let him wrap the end. Ran my hand down it one more time. Good braid. It would stay nicely in place.
“It’s ten after five,” I told him as he stood and reached unerringly for the desk to put the comb on top. The red numbers glowed on the wall. “I want to get coffee.” I hesitated, remembered I was talking to an empath, plunged ahead. “But first I need—”
“Something disconcerts you. How I can help?”
His responses were an admission that he was sensing me, reading me. “Did Sully ask you to read my emotions because he thinks my allegiance is still to the Fleet?”
He thought for a moment. Or perhaps read some more of my emotions. “Sully is very worried about you. But I’m his friend, not his spy. He knows what you’ve been through. His respect, and faith toward you, is greater than you realize.”
“I don’t think he trusts me.”
“He trusts you, Chasidah. He fears you do not trust him.”
“I believe in what he’s trying to do. Shut down an illegal gen-lab.”
“So do I, or I’d not be here.” He ran his hand across the row of hooks on the wall by the bed. Both our robes hung there. He fingered the small tag at the neckline, correctly chose his own. Touch-labeled, like the playing cards Sully carried.
He draped the robe over his arm. “Chasidah …”
When my name hung in the air without anything further, I nodded, then remembered again he couldn’t see that. “Hmm?” The universal noncommittal.
“May I ask … may I request a small favor as well?”
“Sure.” After all, he’d just answered my prying question.
“May I see you?”
“See me?” I didn’t quite understand.
“Yes, see you. I’d like to see your face. I’ve not … I’d like to believe, in spite of our beginnings dirtside, we are friends. Am I presuming too much?”
“No, you’re not.” I thought I understood his request. Blindness was an infirmity unknown in humans in the Empire. I’d read accounts, in Ancient History classes in the academy, of times when blind humans could “see” a face through touch. “If you touch my face, you’ll know what I look like, is that it?”
He nodded. “If this is too intrusive, tell me. I just … it’s just that I’ve not known anyone like you before.”
“Don’t know many court-martialed Fleet captains turned prison escapees, is that it?” I grinned wryly.
A small laugh. “You are unique, Chasidah Bergren.”
“I’m not the one with blue hair and six fingers,” I quipped.
I sat on the bench. Ren dropped his robe to the floor and sat facing me, his back to the door. He raised both hands, cupped my face. His touch was soft yet firm. His clouded silver eyes watched me, unmoving.
Both thumbs moved up my jaw, fingers traced
my ears, moved across my cheekbones, down my nose. Ren’s explorations reminded me of a sculptor examining the details of a carving. I was very aware he was male, but there was nothing intrusive, nothing erotic, in his touch.
“I have freckles,” I told him. “But you can’t feel those.”
“Freckles?”
“Tiny darker spots of pigment, across my cheeks and nose. I was always told they were cute. Once I passed the age of twelve, I hated them.” I hated being cute, though I long ago resigned myself to the fact that the description probably fit.
“Ah, freckles. Kisses from the sun on the face.” His fingers brushed across my brows. I closed my eyes. He softly touched my lids, my lashes.
“What color are your eyes?”
“Like my hair. Brown and gold.”
His hands cupped my jaw again. “Sully told the truth, then. You’re a beautiful woman.”
I laughed off the compliment. “I have a feeling Sully thinks all women are beautiful.”
“That’s not what he tells me.”
I didn’t have an answer to that one. But I remembered the fool I saw in the mirror in the monastery, and the obsidian eyes watching her. And I remembered a mouth brushing mine in that dark bar in Port Chalo. Gabriel Ross Sullivan was a dangerous man, who played dangerous games. I didn’t even know the rules.
Ren held my face a moment longer. “Thank you.” He leaned his forehead against mine. I felt a strange calmness, a warmth flutter through me.
Then a sound, a hushed whoosh. And a sharp intake of breath.
“Lovely. What do we have here?” The voice was harsh, deep, very male. Very Sully.
I jerked back. He stood in the doorway in his monk’s sand-gray robe. His dark brows were slanted into a frown.
Ren turned toward the door. His hand drifted down, casually clasped my wrist. A slight pressure, a squeeze. Reassuring warmth traveled up my arm from his touch. “Sully. Blessings of the hour. We were going to get a light breakfast.”
“Really?” One word, heavily laced with sarcasm.
“Sully.” Ren’s voice was a combination of gentleness and firmness. I didn’t know how he did that. He should give classes at the academy.
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