“If you get your bond dissolved, Ksar will be bondless again,” Harry had said, looking at him pleadingly. “He’s been waiting until you reach the age of majority as it is. If you get your bond dissolved, he’ll have no other options. Everyone else is matched up.”
Seyn didn’t feel particularly sympathetic.
Harry had sighed. “Fine. Let’s say you found a way to get to Earth and stay there for months. Let’s say you got the bond to Ksar dissolved. What are you going to do, then?”
Was Harry kidding?
“I don’t know,” Seyn had said with a wide grin. “But I’ll be free to make my own choices. I’ll be free of him. I’ll be free to do whatever I want.”
He could travel. He could fall in love. Hell, he could have sex.
Sex.
The idea was deliciously naughty. It was the bond that turned Calluvians into sexless beings until they married their bondmates at the age of twenty-five. Actually, if the technology of artificial wombs had already been invented at the time, Seyn was sure the Council wouldn’t have even bothered to give them back the ability to have sex.
Seyn had always found it strange that bonded Calluvians couldn’t feel sexual arousal until their wedding—and then suddenly could. Now it all made sense. The Council had made a single amendment into the Bonding Law fifteen years after the law was introduced. The bonding ceremony at the age of twenty-five hadn’t been in the original law. The Council probably hadn’t expected that the childhood bond would suppress the brain’s sexual arousal centers too, so the problem was likely fixed by a mind adept during the bonding ceremony—without affecting other parts of the bond.
Even thinking about how much their brains were messed with made him feel a little bit sick.
“It almost makes me wish the technology of artificial wombs still didn’t exist,” Seyn had told Harry. “Then they wouldn’t have bonded me to another male.”
Noticing Harry’s exasperated look, Seyn had shut up, flushing. He knew he was a little obsessed with the subject. Fine, he was more than a little obsessed where Ksar was concerned, his hatred for him clouding his ability to think straight. It was ridiculous of him to wish for the technology of artificial wombs not to exist—he wouldn’t have been born at all without it, since his parents were a same-sex couple.
But soon, Ksar wouldn’t matter.
Soon, Seyn would be rid of him.
Now he just had to get himself to Sol III. Himself and Harry—apparently Harry had a human friend he wanted to visit. They would go to Sol III, Seyn would pretend to be a human, and wait until his stupid bond finally broke. Pretending to be a human wouldn’t be the hard part—most sentient races in the galaxy looked similar enough, even though there were still differences. The hard part would be getting to Sol III.
Earth, Seyn corrected himself, trying to get used to the planet’s new name. Their records said that the planet’s native name was Terra, but it made sense that the planet’s language would change in the thousands of years that had passed since Sol III had been first located.
Getting to Earth wasn’t going to be easy. The use of TNIT—transgalactic nearly instantaneous teleportation—was heavily regulated and monitored by the Ministry of Intergalactic Affairs, especially when it came to trips to pre-TNIT planets like Earth. There was no way they could use the Calluvian TNIT—as the Lord Chancellor of the Calluvian branch of the Ministry, Ksar would never sanction it—so Seyn had to look for other options. Traveling on a spaceship all the way to Earth was obviously out of question; those things were slow as hell and outdated for a reason.
Luckily, Seyn had a lot of friends on other planets; being a sociable person (not an attention whore, as Ksar tackily put it) finally paid off.
So seven days later, Seyn sent Harry a message that said, “Get ready and come to my house at ten in the evening. We’re leaving.”
He was finally going to be free.
Chapter 4
Ksar was attending the quarterly session of the Chamber of Lords on Planet Redoran when the Queen informed him of Harht’s disappearance. In truth, he paid her words little mind, immersed in the intricacies of new Intergalactic Revenue Service depreciation rules, and confident that the Queen could handle her favorite son’s misbehavior.
But when he returned to Calluvia a month later and found his brother still absent and the King-Consort out of his mind with worry, Ksar put his work aside and gave the problem his full attention for the first time.
There were several concerning matters besides his brother’s disappearance. Apparently Harht’s bondmate, Leylen, had come to the palace soon after Harht’s disappearance and reported that she had stopped feeling Harht in her mind.
Ksar’s familial link to Harht was completely silent too, which indicated that his brother was very far from Calluvia.