“Why do you persist in anger?” he demanded after a minute from right behind me. “You are not unaware of the doings of this world, you are not unaware of the fact that I mean to keep you. Why must you be forever challenging my authority over you, forever denying my right to do as I must and should? Why have you not yet learned that your strength and abilities entitle you to no more?”
“You dare to speak of what I’m entitled to?” I snapped, jerking around to glare up at him. “I’m a Prime of the Centran Amalgamation, entitled to anything I damned well please! Everyone knows that, with the single exception of the barbarians of this miserable world! You have no right keeping me here and forcing me to obey you, and it would serve you right if I decided to take over instead of simply leaving!”
“Again you speak of challenging me?” he asked, folding those massive arms in annoyance as he stared down at me. “I have no interest in further indulgence in such foolishness, wenda. You are able to face me with neither sword nor dagger nor empty hands, a fact which has already been well proven. You are meant to obey me, not I you, and this, too, has been proven.”
“Has it really?” I murmured, suddenly tempted beyond denial. I’d found the idea of controlling Aesnil impractical due to the fact that she would be out of my reach so much of the time, but Tammad was another matter. He usually insisted on having me near him most of the time, an arrangement which would make no one suspicious. I had no interest in running the rest of those barbarians through him, but I had a great interest in returning to my embassy where transportation to a civilized world would be available. After that I could find a place to stop and breathe, and think of a way to get them all to leave me alone.
“I don’t understand why you keep saying you want me here,” I said, looking up into his eyes and reaching toward him with my mind. “What you really want is to return me to my embassy, isn’t it? You have Len to read people for you, and Garth to do whatever you plan for him to do, and Gay King to please your body. All you have to do is go and get her, which can be accomplished easily after you leave me at the embassy. Isn’t that what you really want?”
A frown had formed on his broad face at the first of my words, his mind immediately beginning to deny those words. I let the denial slide past me, not even touching it, waiting for the faint agreement I knew would come when I mentioned Len and Garth and Gay. The agreement wasn’t as strong as I thought it would be, but strength wasn’t necessary. Just having the agreement did the trick, letting me grab it and increase it as I smiled.
“You see how nicely it will all work out?” I pressed, expanding his agreement by force against the frown he still showed. “Len wants to work for you and so does Garth. Gay is dying to please you, and will never refuse you no matter what you tell her to do. Since you have all that, it would be foolish to keep one small, useless wenda on top of it, now wouldn’t it? A wise man would rid himself of her as soon as possible, wouldn’t he?”
His agreement writhed in my mental hands, fighting to change to denial. He stood with eyesight directed inward, his teeth clenched, his no-longer-folded arms tense at his sides with straining fists. I felt the sweat break out on my forehead as he fought me, shocked that he was able to resist as much as he was doing. The last time I’d fought his mind I’d won easily, brushing aside his mental strength the way he would brush aside the physical strength of someone not quite his giant size. Mentally I was his superior; how was it possible for him to resist me like that?
“Just think how good it would be to have no one around to oppose you!” I gasped in desperation, trying to thrust delight in to bolster the wavering agreement. “Everyone around you doing exactly what you say, more than pleased to obey completely! The one bane of your existence would be gone, and you’d never have to see her again!”
Red-hot rage suddenly exploded in his mind, crashing through the wavering agreement I held, shattering my grip and back-blasting into my wide-open mind. I choked and clutched at my head, barely feeling it when my knees hit the carpeting, wrapped in a yellow-red blaze of pain that didn’t even let me scream. I writhed in the conflagration, fighting to breathe, and just as quickly as it had come it was gone, leaving behind a booming throb of an ache interspersed with stabbing pains. My body wilted with the withdrawal of that unbelievable pain, and I would have collapsed to the carpeting completely if two strong arms hadn’t caught me. Somehow, unbelievably, I’d lost to him again, and the magnitude of that loss was unbearable. I tried to shout against the words coming at me behind the thunder of surf, but I lacked the strength even to moan. Blackness developed due to the frenzy of the attempt, and gathered me in completely.
2
Consciousness came back slowly and reluctantly, as though afraid to face again the pain it knew was waiting. I moaned as the ache welled up behind my closed eyes, making my head echo with the throb, vaguely wondering what it would be like if my shield weren’t closed tight. I became aware of a dampness across my forehead and fought my arm up to grope in an attempt to find out what it was, clumsily encountering a length of folded cloth. I began to pull the wet cloth away with a grunt, but another hand came to keep me from doing it.
“You’ll be better off leaving it there,” Len’s voice came, soft with the knowledge of what loud noises would do to me. “You may not think it’s helping, but it is.”
I forced my eyes open to look in the direction his voice came from, blinked back the blurriness, then finally managed to focus on him. He sat looking down at me from no more than a foot away, his brand-new sword gone, his face wearing a wry expression. Looking around showed me a silver and blue room, one of the rooms of the suite Tammad and I shared, definitely not the last sight I remembered before tuning out. It came to me then that I was lying on the wide pile of furs the barbarian and I used as a bed, with Len sitting on its edge to my right. My eyes flickered again to the rest of the room, searching for something I didn’t want to think about, and Len made a sound of subdued amusement.
“If you’re looking for Tammad, he’s in the next room,” my brother empath informed me, his voice as dry as the desert air. “Bite off a little more than we could chew, did we?”
His eyes and tone told me that his poor opinion of me was back in full force, but that was hardly unexpected. I closed my eyes and put an arm over them, then took a deep breath.
“I can’t decide whether I have a greater dislike for your old personality or your new one,” I told the darkness in a very soft croak, feeling the reverberation of every word. “Your new personality is unspeakably patient, but the old one gloats.”
“I’m not gloating,” he denied, trying to shed some of the dripping satisfaction in his voice. “I’m just wondering what you tried to do this time—and curious as to why it backfired.”
“What I tried to do was get that barbarian to take me back to the embassy,” I admitted, making no effort to keep the disgust out of my voice. “Not only didn’t it work, it also exploded in my face. As far as the why goes, your guess is as good as mine. Last time I looked, I was stronger than he was.”
“And this time he walked all over you,” Len agreed in a thoughtful voice. “If anyone had asked me, I would have bet against this sort of an outcome. Are you sure that’s all you did, try to force him into taking you back to the embassy?”