To The Princess Bound (8 page)

Understanding

Her voice had been low and quiet, but it had also been laced with bitterness and contempt.  “That’s where you’re wrong.”

Dragomir felt his breath catch, losing control of his emotions for the first time since the prince invaded his home and dragged him, alone, back onto the ship.  He felt the energy around him spike with horror even as his heart rama flung itself wide open, releasing a floodgate of compassion.  “Oh my gods.”

She said nothing, hunched in silence on the other side of the bed.

Suddenly, everything he had seen within her heart-rama began to make sense.  Automatically, he found himself feeding his consciousness back through the tiny needle-entrance to get another look.  The cruel visions of pain and humiliation were strangling the rich silver
gi
inside, choking the rama to a tiny shadow of what it could have been. 

“They
took
you,” he managed, shocked.  “The rebels took you.”

She didn’t respond physically, but her heart-rama slammed shut and her energy solidified around her, forcing his consciousness back outside her
au
.  He heard a small sound, low and quiet.  Dragomir, frustrated, twisted his hands in their shackles.  She needed to be held—every inch of him could feel it.  Chained and hobbled like he was, though, any movement he made would only scare her.

“I’ll hold you, if you want,” he finally offered.  Perhaps, if he had any luck, she could feel the dormant connection between them.  If she did, it might make her more willing to trust him.  If she didn’t, he was walking on glass.  Most non-Gifted, he had noticed, rarely felt such things, or even believed they existed.

The crying stopped for a moment, and he winced.  When she didn’t scream disgusted curses at him, as he expected, he allowed himself a bit of hope.

“Stop talking,” she said.  Her voice was ice.

Once again, he was reminded that the woman had the power of life or death over him, and that she was very close to exercising it.  Again, Dragomir wondered what had he been thinking, telling her—a
royal
princess
—that he was a ‘mutagenic anomaly,’ as the Imperium liked to call it.  The Imperials
killed
people like him.  By all rights, she should have called in her guard the moment he let it slip what he was.  Yet, for some unknown reason, this girl who was so obviously terrified of him had let him live.  Why?

Unhappily, he closed his eyes and focused on reaching into his core and sending what warmth he could, in his own humiliated state.

After a moment, she quieted.  Her rama petals ticked open a bit, once again allowing a thin stream of his golden
gi
to pass beyond its protective shell.

She gasped.  “
You’re
doing that, aren’t you?”

Dragomir froze.  He had long ago learned that the Imperials feared what they didn’t understand.  And one of the things that Imperials could not seem to grasp was that Emps
could not
hurt people.  It was against their nature.  Yet, by Imperial decree, Emps were cancerous tumors of society that needed to be excised before they murdered whole villages ‘as they had on the core planets.’  Official Imperial policy, last he heard, was that Emps were mass-murderers.

Yet, if Emps were psychopathic serial-killers, how did the Imperials manage to snatch them from their homes and drag them to the headsman’s block without losing hundreds of soldiers in the process?  It was a small thing for Dragomir to cut a few gi lines and prematurely end a life.  He assumed that his brethren—those who hadn’t been hunted and killed by the invaders—could do the same.  Yet, despite the capability, Dragomir never had.  Even the Praetorian who had deserved it most had died by Dragomir’s fists, instead.   He’d never
heard
of an Emp hurting someone with their gift.  It just wasn’t done.

“Answer me,” the princess grated.

Dragomir lowered his forehead to stare at the blanket, dark beneath the sheet.  He felt his own life balancing on his next word.  “Yes,” he managed.

She hissed, half snarl, half rage, and fisted her hand in the tether at his neck, pulling it tight.  “You dare?!”  He knew then that she was going to kill him.  He could feel it rolling off of her in a sick, black rage.  Pinned by the chain, arms fixed in helplessness behind him, he was utterly incapable of defending himself, and the experience left him humbled, more than a little terrified.  Even when hanging from the rack, screaming his rage as her brother whipped the objections out of him, he hadn’t felt so utterly at another’s mercy.

He felt her get up onto the bed, putting her knee on the chain to pin it in place to the mattress, felt the tide of emotions clash around her as she approached him with a heavy golden statue grasped in a fist.  Then, silence.  For long moments, he waited for her killing blow. 

“I was wrong about you,” the woman finally whispered.  Dragomir lifted his head and looked at her nervously from under the sheet.  Her green eyes were stony, her normally pale skin flushed, her freckles tightened in a scowl.  She had a thundercloud of negative energy swirling around her like a winter storm, and her pert chin was jutting out imperiously.  “You can’t actually read my mind, can you?”

Dragomir shook his head.

“Then you’re an Emp,” she said.  She hefted the golden mermaid thoughtfully.  “If you were a Psi, you would’ve known I had planned on killing you just now.”

“I was getting that general idea,” Dragomir whispered up at her.

Her eyes were cold green emeralds.  “I still haven’t decided yet.”

“I know.”  He swallowed.

“Close your eyes.  Turn your head away.”

Oh gods,
a part of Dragomir’s mind screamed. 
That’s what they say before they execute you.
  Once, as a small child, he had witnessed an Imperial squad line up a group of village men.  They shot all of the ones that were huddling, backs to the soldiers, but one of them refused to look away.  Even after his fellows were dead on the ground around him, he kept peering into the eyes of the soldier who was to kill him.  The soldier kept screaming,
“Close your eyes.  Turn around!
”

And, eventually, he did.  And the soldier shot him.

They buried their bodies in a shallow pit in a mountain meadow.  They used Imperial tanks to fill it in.

Looking into the princess’s eyes, Dragomir remembered Meggie.  He remembered what had been done to her, remembered being unable to save her, remembered the rope that had been strangling him when his brother had come hurtling up the road, at night in his underwear, to cut him down, remembered lying on the ground in his brother’s arms, willing himself to let go, when his brother had loosened the rope and pounded on his chest, forcing him back.

He remembered this Imperial’s connection hitting him like an avalanche, rocking him out of his seat, sloshing the poisoned mead across the table, leaving him in a daze for hours, lying in a puddle, staring at the rafters in his ceiling as he tried to understand what had hit him.

A month later, an Imperial ship had set down on the grass outside his home.  The green-eyed devil—flanked by twenty black-clad Praetorian—had put a gun to his head and told him to get on the ugly black vessel.  Dragomir had almost fought them.  Almost.  Something, though, some nagging tug, had told him to cooperate.  So, instead of infusing the Praetorian with terror long enough to escape into the mountains, Dragomir had allowed the green-eyed devil to put him in chains.

Now he was wondering why.

Dragomir had spent many sleepless nights trying to understand why the Universe had spared him.  Brought to a
princess
like he had been this morning, after being shackled in the hull of a ship for two days in the dark, bound for for some unknown destination, then hung from a rack and tortured for another three days for crimes that were never specified, he had harbored a faint hope that perhaps it had all been to help this soon-to-be ruler heal, that she was the reason why Life had sent Thor up the road that night, instead of leaving Dragomir to stiffen in the breeze. 

Reluctantly, Dragomir turned his head, and for long heartbeats, he expected her to smear his brains across her mattress.  But, after minutes had passed in pounding silence, she eased closer, then gingerly lowered her hand to his shoulder.  With each movement of his breath beneath her hand, he felt her body struggling against a deep, rising panic that was infecting his own
au
, making it difficult for him to breathe.

“Do it again,” she said.

Dragomir’s mind gave a startled twist of surprise, realizing she
wanted
him to work with her
gi
.  “Uh.  Are you sure?”

“Hurry,” she whimpered.  “It’s coming back.”  Indeed, the flood of images was once more rising from her ramas like a tornado.

I’ll do my best,” he whispered, stunned.  He knew from experience that most Imperials would rather stick their head in a blacksmith’s furnace than willingly place themselves in the hands of an Emp.  He’d once wandered the remnants of a battlefield, offering to help the wounded soldiers of both sides.  Rebels had either stabilized or passed in peace with his touch.  But the Imperials, to a man, had screamed and tried to shoot, stab, or, in one man’s case, beat him to death with the broken, cast-off tread of an Imperial tank when he offered his help.

Dragomir closed his eyes, concentrated, and somehow managed to slip to the crystalline core through the cloud of fears, worries, and distractions roiling through him.  He bathed in the energy, sank into the calm power he found there, then began feeding it outward, spiraling it around them, infusing her
au
once more.

She let out a little gasp and he felt her hand tighten on his shoulder.

“You want me to stop?” Dragomir whispered, hesitating.

For a moment, she said nothing.  Then, “Keep going.  Please.”

Still unable to penetrate her core, Dragomir fed every good, nourishing emotion he could think of to her
au
, pushing it out through his heart-rama, wrapping the two of them in it like a swath of warm, moving cotton.

He felt the woman relax against him, slowly.  He felt another petal of her heart rama tentatively tug free of the stale energy that bound it, widening the needle-fine passage by a fraction of an inch.  She felt her tense, heard her inhale sharply as a tiny thread of his energy began to filter through to her center to join the emerald tendril of her brother.

As he watched with his mental eye, his gold began to make the woman’s rama shudder and the petals shift, stretching against the energies binding it in place.  Sensing his opportunity to free her from her prison of fear, Dragomir began to gently push, increasing the amount of energy he was feeding her.  The rama shuddered, straining against the net of trauma that held it. 

The princess’s hand tightened on his shoulder, fingers digging into the muscle, and for a moment, Dragomir thought he might succeed.  The old energies, however, were too strong, too ingrained.  After a moment’s struggle, the net simply tightened, drawing the petals back to a close. 

He let out a frustrated sigh.

For the course of several minutes, neither of them spoke.  Then, softly, she whispered, “What did you just do?”

He flinched and turned his head to her anxiously.  “Did it hurt?”  Often, working with
gi
blocks—especially pushing against a longtime locked-down rama—ached, like stretching an atrophied muscle.  And that was just getting the rama open again.  Had he actually managed to break the old energies free, they would have flooded outward and engulfed her, and she would have experienced them all anew as their energies dissolved and passed through her
au
.

Next time,
he chastised himself,
Think before you do something that stupid.

But she was staring at him in awe, green eyes stunned.  “It felt wonderful.”

“I tried to help you re-open your heart rama,” Dragomir said.

She frowned at him.  “Tried?”  Then her frown deepened, wrinkling her freckled brow.  “What is a rama?”

Dragomir opened his mouth, trying to think of some way to explain the seven energy centers to an Imperial who insisted such energies did not exist…yet tried to kill everyone who used them.  Finally, he said, “Think of your body as machine floating within a vast vat of liquid energy.”

When she didn’t snort and turn away, but instead watched him with an acute, intelligent stare, he tentatively continued, “Your body is controlled by spirit, which gives the machine orders.  The ramas are like conduits that allow the body to suck in the energy all around it, so that the spirit can make the machine move.”

The princess’s frown was deepening. 

Unsure if he should continue, yet afraid to stop, Dragomir blindly pressed on.  “The ramas allow many good things to pass into the machine that help it, though some bad things can get through, too…  It all depends on the energy in the vat.  Sometimes, if the energy is bad enough, it will block the rama, and slow down the body’s ability to digest energy from outside.  In very bad cases, when trauma blocks the flow of
gi,
or when the spirit has decided the energy outside is too painful to absorb any longer, the rama will close completely.  This is when illness develops.”