Scattered Suns - Kevin J. Anderson [97]
She waited in silence, letting him continue.
“I want to spend time with you, get to know you. You are my own daughter, and I have placed such a heavy burden on you. I thought we might tour Mijistra, visit museums, or go to the streams.” His words petered out.
“Yazra’h has already shown me those things.”
The Mage-Imperator sat on his bed cushions. “Then the most important thing I can do for you—for both of us—is to tell you about your mother. Nira was...very special to me.”
“And now she’s dead.”
He looked stung. “Yes.”
Though Osira’h already knew everything about her mother, unfiltered and uncensored from Nira’s own mind, she decided to test her father. Curious to see how closely he would adhere to the truth, she let Jora’h explain himself, in his own way.
Chapter 44—NIRA
After escaping from the isolated island where Designate Udru’h had stranded her, Nira was still alone. Unlike Ildirans, however, she did not view such solitude with mortal terror. The company she had been forced to endure in recent years had been nightmarish.
On her endless walk across the uninhabited landscape, Nira’s emerald skin provided her through photosynthesis with all the sustenance she needed. She could survive; she was a green priest. But the pounding silence all around her and inside her throbbing head weighed upon her. Though she had healed long ago, her head still ached from where the guards had clubbed her after they’d dragged her away from Osira’h...her daughter, her princess.
She walked on and on, seeing no one as she crossed the vast landscape of the empty continent. Dobro was a very sparsely settled Ildiran world. Perhaps to keep others from seeing the horrific breeding work? Grasses and weeds whispered into the silence around her, speaking with leaves and stalks and blossoms, but she could not comprehend the language. Unlike the worldtrees back on her beloved Theroc...
What Nira longed for most was Jora’h, her lover from the bright and colorful Prism Palace. But he did not know she was alive. She wondered if he had forgotten about her; as Prime Designate, Jora’h had had so many lovers. On his last visit to her isolated island, the Dobro Designate had told her the fat and scheming old leader was dead, and that Jora’h had taken his place. He was now the Mage-Imperator.
Surely he would have come for me by now, if he’d wanted to.
After floating across the broad inland sea, Nira had abandoned her makeshift raft on the shore and continued her trek across the southern continent. In spite of sore feet and tired muscles, she forced herself to keep moving through wind and rain and bright sunlight. Though she had no map and did not know where to go, she tended generally northward.
Her fear and her goal were the same: Up there, somewhere far away, lay the Dobro breeding camps and the other human prisoners. Nira shuddered at the prospect of going there again, but the Ildiran settlement, the one inhabited place on Dobro, had the only ships that could take her away. And Osira’h.
Nira could either hide forever, or she could try to get away...to go home. Back to the worldforest.
The Designate had kept her hostage to use her as a bargaining chip against Jora’h. She did not want to be a pawn; neither did she want to be a danger to Jora’h. She would rather die out here alone than let that happen. Alone and in silence.
Even as a novice, Nira had communed with worldtrees. She had read stories aloud to them, telling the sentient forest of human history. Then, when she’d been chosen to become a priest, the forest had accepted her, changed her, given her access to a new universe of thoughts and experiences.
Once she’d taken the green, she had always