To The Princess Bound Read Free Page B

and desolate place.  They had never managed to afford the windows she had wanted, in life, so there was still a horrible draft.  Thor had tacked blankets over the openings, but Dragomir had torn them down.  Meggie liked the sun.
    No curtains in my home , she had told him firmly.  He’d hated that certainty, called her ‘bossy.’  He had complained every morning he could remember, waking up with the sun in his eyes.  He’d wanted to put curtains in, and more than once, they had ended up sleeping in different rooms over the subject.  Now, Dragomir couldn’t even stand anything sitting on the window-sill to block the light.  The sun reminded him of her.
    He sat down at the table and lifted the overturned pot, revealing his brew.  Without another moment to think about it—two hours had been more than enough—Dragomir wrapped his fist around the little warped cup, lifted it from the worn wooden table, and put it to his lips.
    I’ll see you soon, Meggie…  
    The sudden blast of energy through his heart rama launched Dragomir backwards over his chair, dropping him to the floor in a wash of mead and flower petals.  He lay there, dazed, staring up at the rough-hewn rafters of his ceiling, overwhelmed by the sudden rush of energy, wondering what the hell had just hit him.  Like someone had reached out and grabbed him by the heart and tugged.  He was pretty sure it hadn’t been the mead—his lips weren’t even wet.
    “Meggie?” Dragomir whispered, trying to feel for her spirit.  “Was that you?”  He didn’t think so.  Meggie had never been a very strong being, and he doubted she had enough power, even dead, to hit him that hard.  She’d been a younger soul, one he had shared only two previous lifetimes with out of thousands, and didn’t have the richness and depth that he felt in on that other end.  Richness and depth and…hurt?  Terror?  Whose terror?  It was slamming into him down the tendrils lashed to his heart.  Dazed, disoriented, he weakly tried to grab the table-leg to pull himself back up, but his arms failed him and he slipped back to the wet earthen floor.
    “Who’s there?” Dragomir asked hoarsely.  Silence answered him.  His chest, always feeling pressured and burdened by the energy around him, now felt like it was roaring with power.  Dragomir frowned and felt out the new gi pathway carved out of his heart-rama, twined out into the ether.  More vast than anything he’d ever experienced before, yet infinitely delicate and…desperate.  He groaned and dropped his head back to the earth. 
    As the full force of the initial blast died down, Dragomir felt the power drain from the channel, leaving it an open sore, a dormant link between him and some stranger.  He knew it wasn’t Meggie.  Though ghosts could certainly touch the living lightly here or there, they could never leave the massive, vibrating lines that he now felt spinning out into the ether, connecting him to someone on the other side of the planet.

The Princess’s Return
     
    Adjudicator Keene looked up as his son stepped through the expensive double-doors of his war-chamber at a brisk walk, slamming the huge portal wide and marring the exquisitely-carved mahogany trim.  Seeing that, Keene made a face. 
    For all its landmass, Mercy was cold, rocky, and grew very few lumber-worthy trees.  Despite repeated imperial timber-farming experiments, Keene had been forced to import his mahogany, maple, and cherry from a planet closer to the central core at a cost of sixty slaves a ton, and that had been at an imperial discount.  Regularly priced, the wood in his doors, end-tables, shelves, bed, and desk alone would have cost him an entire freighter of natives.  The void-like marble floor, the soaring white marble pillars, the polished granite bathtub, and the carved jade statuary, however, had been free.
    Living betwixt the glittering granite spires and towering marble cliffs of Mercy, stone was the one thing the