“I’m not lying,” Olivia said calmly. “I’m so sorry, hon, but it’s true. She tried to kill you last night—in fact, she thought she had killed you. She called us here at the Med Center asking to be taken in and tortured because she had murdered you.” She shook her head. “It was awful.”
“Tortured?” Brand was horrified. “What did you do to her? Where is she? What happened?”
“I’m afraid we had to return her to her people.” The new voice came from the doorway. Looking up, Brand saw Commander Sylvan coming into the room. “Kindred law does not allow the execution of women, even in the event of attempted murder,” he said, coming over to Brand’s bedside. “So we sent her back to the Q’ess for whatever they deemed was the appropriate punishment.”
“You sent her back?” Brand shook his head. “I don’t understand this—I don’t understand how any of this could happen!”
“Do you remember anything at all?” Olivia asked him. “Were you awake when she stabbed you?”
“I remember waking up from some kind of dream and seeing her hovering over me with a dagger in her hands,” Brand said. “Then she said something…” He wrinkled his brow, trying to remember. “Something about how she had to fulfill her oath.” He shook his head. “And that’s the last thing I remember aside from a shooting pain in my chest.” He touched the right side of his chest again, where the pain was greatest.
“We think she was trying to stab you in the heart,” Sylvan said grimly. “But she stabbed the right side of your chest instead of the left.”
“Probably because the Q’ess have all their organs reversed, so their hearts are on the right side, instead of the left,” Olivia put in. She frowned. “But tell me again—you said she was talking about fulfilling an oath?”
Brand nodded, unable to speak. The idea that his wife—the woman he had loved and trusted and protected and cared for—had tried to kill him, was finally beginning to sink in. And Goddess, it hurt so much.
“Do you think the mention of an oath was significant?” Sylvan asked, frowning.
“I don’t know.” Olivia wrinkled her brow. “I remember Kat saying she’d run across some kind of article having to do with a Q’ess oath-taking ceremony—only she said it sounded more like a religious rite meant to brainwash someone. She found it when she was looking for articles about the Q’ess so she could plan the wedding.”
“Call her,” Sylvan said. “Ask her to send us the article—it might shed some light on what happened last night.”
“I’ll do it right away,” Olivia promised. She squeezed Brand’s hand once more and left, presumably to call Kat.
“I can’t tell you how sorry I am,” Sylvan said to Brand. There was true regret in his pale blue eyes. “I feel like this is all my fault. I never should have let you volunteer to Join with one of the Q’ess. They have claimed us as their enemy for hundreds of cycles—I should never have allowed one of them aboard the Mother Ship in the first place.”
“It’s not your fault, Commander.” Brand shook his head. “I volunteered. I thought…thought it was the will of the Goddess. But I don’t understand how she could let something like this happen.”
“The Goddess doesn’t promise us we will have no problems or burdens in this life, Brand,” Sylvan said gently. “We don’t live in a perfect universe, after all. But she does promise to help us bear the problems and burdens that come to us.” He sighed and gripped Brand’s shoulder. “Though I must say, this seems like a heavy burden indeed.”
“I still love her.” Brand looked up at his commanding officer, begging for understanding. “I know it sounds crazy after she tried to kill me, but I can’t help myself. I can’t just…turn off my emotions.”
“Of course you can’t,” Sylvan said firmly. “You wouldn’t be a thinking, feeling being if you could. Allara came to mean a lot to you in a very short period of time. It’s natural for you to still have feelings for her. She—”
“Got it!” It was Olivia, rushing back into the room. She was waving a communications pad in one hand triumphantly. “The Ceremony of the Unbreakable Oath—Kat sent it to me,” she said, coming over to Brand and Sylvan again. “And you won’t believe what it says!”
She read the article rapidly aloud and as he listened, fragments of it seemed to lodge in Brand’s brain.
“So…they’re indoctrinated as children?” he asked when Olivia finished.
“And programmed as the perfect assassins.” Sylvan shook his head wonderingly. “Gods, who would have guessed?”
“Not me,” Brand admitted. “Allara seemed perfectly fine and normal until after the conversation with her aunt and father yesterday. It was after that she seemed to just …shut down.”
“Then they must have triggered her somehow!” Olivia exclaimed. “Something they said to Allara tripped the mental switch inside her and set the assassin part of her in motion.”