Chapter Three
Her father sighed audibly, and Francesca smiled to herself, pleased to have gotten a reaction.
“I wish you wouldn’t call me Pop,” he said. “It was funny when you were little. It’s not funny now.”
“I don’t do it to be funny,” she said. “I do it because it annoys you.”
A pained look crossed his face. “Why do you feel a need to irritate me? You’re my daughter, and I love you. Don’t you love me?”
“Of course I do, Pop.” She crossed the room to give him a hug. He might be a nuisance sometimes, but he was all she had. “But you insist on running my life for me—like this foolish scheme to drag a poor unsuspecting savage here and make him into a loyal consort for me. I could have you committed if I were willing to make that one public.”
He frowned, unwilling, as usual, to admit she might be right. “I hardly think so, Francesca. And it’s not so foolish.”
So he was going to go through with it. She would have to work fast to get him to change his mind or she would find herself trapped in a ridiculous situation. “I concede your point on marriage; we need to continue the House. But you could find someone for me—a real person, not some anonymous aborigine.”
“This man has a name. He’s Ran-Del Jahanpur, a warrior of the Falling Water Clan.”
She laughed without any humor in her voice. Didn’t he realize how absurd it sounded? “I’m sure I’ll look delightful introducing him at the next spring festival. ‘This is my fiancé, Ran-Del Jahanpur. Don’t you just love the bone in his hair?'”
His mouth twisted in annoyance. “Stop it, Francesca. The Sansoussy don’t wear bones—in their hair or elsewhere. Besides, by the time spring rolls around again, I hope to have you safely married—maybe even with a kid on the way.”
Have a child with some nameless savage? Not bloody likely! She frowned back at him. He could be stubborn, and he had the law behind him. If he persisted in this plan, her only choices would be to opt out of the House of Hayden—giving up her inheritance altogether—or to go along with his decision. “I’m not going to marry some wild man just because you’ve gotten paranoid in your old age.”
His expression turned suddenly dour, his eyes darker than ever. “I only wish it were as easy as that, sweetie. I wish it were all in my head.”
“Don’t call me that,” she said, irritated that he had succeeded in making her afraid. “I’m not a child anymore. And don’t look at me like that—as if someone were walking on your grave or something.”
“For all I know, they are.”
Francesca tried and failed to repress a shiver. “You’re doing that on purpose, just to scare me.”
He shook his head. “I’d never scare you without reason. And I would never have dragged that poor man out of his forest unless I had no choice. Hayden is the only independent Great House left in Shangri-La. The others have all been swallowed up by the cartels.”
She snorted. “Like I don’t know that?”
He clenched his jaw as if he were barely holding on to his patience. “If I don’t get you safely married to someone who can’t be used against you, then it leaves us vulnerable. If I were to get taken out tomorrow, there’d be a line of men at the door eager to marry you. Some of them would plan on selling Hayden to the highest bidder, and some might have dreams of maintaining control themselves, but not one of them would care a whit what happened to you.”
Francesca couldn’t argue with his facts, but his solution still appalled her. “I’d turn them all away. I could run our House myself. You’ve taught me how, ever since Mom died. Even Nisa says I have a good head on my shoulders.”
“I know you could do it.” His tone was placating now, like she was fourteen and asking to go out without her security detail. “That’s one reason I need to find you a husband who won’t get in the way.”
How like him to twist her argument to support his own. “I always expected you to arrange a marriage—but why some uneducated boor who can’t even read and write?”
His voice still held a coaxing note. “Who in this city could it be? If we proposed an alliance with a young man from another Great House, we’d be inviting a takeover. And if I were to break with tradition and pick an ordinary man from a reputable profession, how could we be sure he couldn't be bought? The Sansoussy believe in a kind of honor that we left behind a long time ago. If we can win him over, we can trust this man.”
He made it sound like he was hiring an assistant. “And I won’t have to worry about him reading my messages.”
He smiled as if she were the one being unreasonable. “Ran-Del isn’t really uneducated. He knows quite a lot of things that you and I have no knowledge of at all. And he can learn to read and write. Besides, I’m not certain this man is the right one yet. I have hopes, but I haven’t finished testing him.”
Francesca saw a glimmer of hope. If Pop decided to toss this one back, it would at least buy her more time. “So how did it go? Is he housebroken or does he need to learn that, too?”
Her father blinked. He looked suddenly tired. “I don’t really know yet. I suppose the next few hours will tell.” He seemed to come to with a start and sat down at the desk. “I almost forgot. I need to make a call.”
Francesca watched as he switched on the com. In a few seconds he was speaking to a gray-haired woman with a severe expression on her face. “Good afternoon, Doctor Bentick,” he said pleasantly.
“Good afternoon, Baron Hayden,” she replied. “How can I help you?”
“I need something,” Pop said, his tone guileless. “Isn’t there a medical device used by people with weak hearts? It measures their vital signs, and if they show signs of heart failure, it injects them with the proper drug.”
What the hell was this about? Surely the savage didn’t have a bad heart.
“There is,” the doctor said. “It’s called a cardiometric resuscitator. But why would you need one? There’s nothing wrong with your heart. I checked you out myself, not more than a month ago.”
Pop nodded agreement. “I know, but I have a guest—a young relative—who borders on suicidal. He got involved with a cult and was trained in controlling his autonomic functions. We’re worried that he may try to kill himself by stopping his heart. He tried it once, and we prevented his death only by a timely injection of empranimine.”
Francesca opened her eyes wide, then smiled to herself. Apparently, the savage could be stubborn, too. She might have an unwitting ally.
The doctor frowned. “You should get him treatment.”
“Oh, we have.” Pop’s voice oozed reassurance. “He’s made a lot of progress, but we don’t want to take any chances. Could you obtain a cardiometric resuscitator for me, Dr. Bentick, and calibrate it properly for my needs?”
“I suppose so, When would you need it?”
“Right away. How about if I send someone to fetch it from the clinic in an hour?”
The doctor agreed with faint reluctance. Pop severed the connection and turned to face Francesca.
She gave him her most cynical smile. “It always astonishes me how well you lie. Did the savage really try to kill himself?”
“Yes. He came damn close, too.”
She had to admit it was an impressive feat. “Just by willing his heart to stop?”
“There's more too it than that. The Sansoussy can sort of stop themselves. Unless a shaman is handy, they die.”
Her father had often talked about the Sansoussy in the past. If she had known he would come up with this bat-brained idea, she would have paid more attention. “I thought a shaman was a clan leader, a chief or something.”
Pop looked pleased. She’d have to be careful not to let any curiosity about Sansoussy customs show, or he would think she was won over. “That’s one function of shamanship. The shaman leads the clan and also teaches the young people some of the mental Disciplines. That’s why a shaman needs strong psy powers.”
“Well, it all sounds like witchcraft to me.” Francesca le
aned back in her chair, losing interest fast as the discussion grew more abstract. “Why would they want to be able to do that?”
He leaned toward her as he spoke, a sure sign of his intensity. “They’d rather face death than dishonor. That’s one reason I decided a Sansoussy would be the only safe choice for you. If Ran-Del can be induced to give you his loyalty, it’ll be for life. The Sansoussy don’t suffer from indecision and inconstancy like the rest of us mere mortals.”
Francesca had had enough. “Fine. Make him loyal. But why do I have to sleep with him?”
He smiled at her in that benign way he had that made her feel very young. “Is that what’s bothering you? You needn’t worry. He’s quite nice looking, and since he’s most likely a virgin, he won’t have picked up any bad habits. You can teach him whatever you want him to know.”
Francesca sat up straight, her interest revived. “A virgin? How old did you say he is?”
“About your age. Maybe a season or two younger. And I can’t say for sure about his being a virgin. I can tell from his hair that he’s never been married, and he’s not currently betrothed. If he had been betrothed and she’d broken it off, he’d have had some experience but there’d be no sign.”
The details made no sense to Francesca. What did hair have to do with virginity—or virginity with marriage, come to that? “They sound like very strange people.”
“They’re different.”
“When do I get to see him?”
He reached over and flicked the switch on his desk projector. A holographic image of a man in leather trousers and a vest appeared over the desk.
“There,” Pop said. “That’s him. We recorded him in the forest, before he was aware of us.”
The man in the holo looked tall, although there was little to judge him against except blackwoods. The holo cameras tracked him as he walked. He stepped slowly and cautiously and seemed always to be listening. He had brown hair, worn long enough to brush his shoulders, and strongly molded features with prominent cheekbones. The vest hid very little of his torso. He had a nice body. A very nice body.
As Francesca watched with growing curiosity, the Sansoussy looked up, as if he had heard something, and then stepped back in alarm. The camera zoomed in on him as he stared straight into the lens. She just had time to see that his eyes were a cloudy shade between green and brown before the image disappeared. “He looks like something out of those old Terran holoflicks they show over and over at the library,” she said, trying to sound cross. “And I never liked being with a man whose hair was longer than mine.”
“Don’t worry about that.” Pop sounded suspiciously bland. “He’ll cut it quite short on your wedding day. It’s a Sansoussy custom.”
She sniffed, trying hard not to show any softening of her opinion about his scheme. “Do I have to cut mine, too?”
Her father smiled, and she wondered if she had given herself away. “Sansoussy women never cut their hair short after they’re grown. They just pin it up after they’re married.”
Francesca made no further comment, but after he left, she ran the hologram again, twice.
The Sixth Discipline Page 6