Keeper of the Heart (3 page)

“It’s not only that,” Shanelle mumbled.

“What was that? Did I hear that we’ve wasted all this time on only half of the problem?”

“Cut it out, Martha. If you know so much, then you know what the main problem is, and there isn’t any of your high-tech logic or reasoning to refute the fact that warriors don’t feel love. They feel lust, and a measure of caring for their lifemates, but they don’t experience love like women do. And before you throw it in my face that my father does, I happen to know how hard mother had to fight with him to get him to realize it and admit to it. And besides, father is an exception. There is no other warrior like him. Even my brother admits he doesn’t understand what father feels for mother. He’s never experienced it and
he’s
only half Sha-Ka‘ ani.”

Silence. Depressing silence. Why had she thought that Martha might be able to dispute that glaring fact of Sha-Ka’ani life? Martha had been studying and analyzing warriors for the past twenty years. If she couldn’t reassure Shanelle at this point, then there
was
no reassurance to be found. And Shanelle was
not
going to hook up with a man for life who could only offer her great sex-sharing and a little fondness. She wanted more. She wanted what her mother had found, but she wouldn’t find it on Sha-Ka’an.

“I don’t know about you, Shani, but I’m so excited about getting to see your world, I can barely contain it.”

Caris looked it, too, Shanelle noted, but she didn’t understand why her friend felt this way. Sha-Ka’an was
not
a world she would want to visit if she didn’t have a reason to. But she supposed a visit there became so enticing because it was forbidden to the average citizens of other worlds.

Caris confirmed that by adding for Yari’s and Cira’s benefit, “It was open for a while to tourism after Shani’s mother first discovered it. But a few idiots didn’t obey the local laws and ruined it for the rest of us. Now the planet is closed up tight with one of those Global Shields that prevent even the most sophisticated spacecraft from entering the atmosphere outside the designated Spaceport. If you want to land, you have to have permission from the Visitor’s Center, and you better be a Trade Ambassador or in a dire emergency, or you can forget it. Only the ambassadors are allowed there now, and even they can’t go any farther than the Visitor’s Center. Without your invitation, Shani, we would never have had this opportunity. I hope you know how much we appreciate it.”

Shanelle felt uncomfortable with that kind of gratitude. All she’d done was invite a few of her new friends home for a free vacation, since graduates didn’t have enough earned Exchange Tokens to afford to go off-planet, while she had a Transport Rover at her disposal, a spaceship big enough to accommodate a thousand people comfortably. It didn’t even need a crew, since Martha was capable of running the entire ship.

But Shanelle had invited only the three girls, Caris, Yari, and Cira. The two young men, Jadd and Dren Ce Rostt, Yari’s first and only sex-sharer, had invited themselves along, Jadd for deluded reasons and Dren for almost the same reason, because he couldn’t bear to be parted from Yari, sex-sharing being new and apparently wonderful for both of them.

Actually, they were inseparable, and they had been having a great deal of fun in the two weeks since they had left Kystran, and that could be taken both ways, since one of the Sha-Ka’ani expressions for lovemaking was “having fun.” It certainly made Caris and Cira jealous, and both had remarked that they intended to pounce on the first males they came across as soon as they landed. They had also both tried to interest Jadd in a little sex-sharing, but he had decided that if he couldn’t have Shanelle, he wouldn’t have anyone.

Shanelle had also been feeling a little jealous of Yari’s happiness, but not as much as the other two girls, since she didn’t know what she was missing out on, whereas they did. It was expected that every cadet would spend the first night after graduation getting acquainted with sex-sharing, and that was exactly what this group had done, all except Shanelle. She had spent graduation night with Garr Ce Bernn, who was presently in his third ten-year term as Director of Kystran. It was Garr who had got Shanelle into the World Discovery class as a favor to Tedra, and Garr who had got her into the Sec exercise class, too. He had, in fact, made the past nine months very easy and enjoyable for her. Anytime she got lonely, she was able to visit him, and he would cheer her up with stories about her mother, since Garr used to be Tedra’s boss.

She had had to make many adjustments, mostly in her way of looking at things, despite the fact that Martha had been her teacher for most of her life and had prepared her for such an advanced culture as Kystran’s. Because she had been an otherworld student, which was a rarity on Kystran, she hadn’t been required to live in the Learning Center complex like the rest of the students, so she had had daily dealings with Kystrani adults, and had learned that everything her mother and Martha had told her about Kystran was true.

The citizens really did look at lovemaking differently than the inhabitants of any other world. Sex-sharing, they called it, and because they’d discovered some healthful benefits from it, it was now mandatory for all citizens except students, to whom it was forbidden until graduation. They even had laws to govern it, it was such an integral part of their culture.

But their culture wasn’t Shanelle’s. Unfortunately, neither was her own culture, which was why she was having such a hard time dealing with the fact that she would have so little say in the choice of her lifemate, a man who would have complete control of her for the rest of her life, a man whom she was expected to obey, respect, and supposedly love. Fat chance, she thought, not once he started punishing her.

The only reason she hadn’t yet been mated for life was because Tedra had put it off by finding fault with every warrior Challen had
considered.
And then the pilot training had come up, and Tedra had got her way in that, too. But Tedra wasn’t going to be able to delay the momentous event much longer. Shanelle was two years past the average age for starting her own family. In fact, she might be returning home to find the
decision
already
made.

She would have to ask Martha to contact Tedra to find out. She just might not be returning after all...

Stars,
what
was she going to do? Perhaps her mother
had
done her a disservice by encouraging her to think for herself. If she had had any other mother besides Tedra, she wouldn’t be agonizing over this issue now. Instead she would be happy to let her father decide her future, without the least doubt that he would make the perfect choice for her, because, above all, he wanted her happiness. But the plain truth was, she preferred her mother’s philosophy when it came to sex-sharing.

Though Tedra came from the Kystrani culture, she didn’t subscribe to all of it, especially having something as personal as sex governed by someone else. What she did subscribe to was individual choice, and Shanelle wanted that individual choice.
She
wanted to choose, and she was more than ready to choose, more than ready to find out what was making Yari so happy, what had made her mother so happy all these years.

She was ready. She just hadn’t found the man who could “knock her socks off,” didn’t even know what that was supposed to feel like. Her mother had assured her she would know when it happened, and when it happened, she was to take full advantage of it if she wanted to. It would be
her
choice. And her father either could approve of the man after the fact or not. She would still have made her choice. But Tedra seemed to think she could get around Challen’s displeasure. Shanelle was counting on that being so.

Shanelle was drawn back to the conversation in progress when she was asked a question. They were gathered in the Rec Lounge, having finished the last meal for the day. Shanelle would have liked to retire already, but her friends were too excited to sleep.

“What was that?”

Caris answered, “Cira wants to know if she’ll be allowed to sample the local wares when we arrive.”

“Wares?”

“The barbarians.”

Shanelle groaned inwardly. She really should have gone to bed. But she offered her friends a half smile.

“The Sha-Ka’ani don’t like to be called barbarians, now that they know what meaning advanced worlds give that name. And they aren’t really true barbarians anyway, though they might seem like it at first. But yes, you can share sex with a warrior if he’s interested. You just have to make sure you tell him beforehand that you are protected by the
shodan,
to avoid any misunderstandings.”

“What kind of misunderstandings are you talking about?” Cira asked. “Was this mentioned in those rules and laws Martha supplied us with?”

“Martha gave you the standard stats supplied to all visitors, but as you’ve already realized, your case is unique. Usually, the only visitors allowed to leave the Center are those who have requested an audience with the
shodan.
If he agrees to see them, they are escorted to the palace by the Center’s Security. They take care of their business quickly and then they are escorted right back to the Center. If there is a female in the party, she isn’t going to stop along the way to share sex with a warrior, so there’s no reason to mention something like this in the stats.”

Caris’s green eyes widened considerably. “My Stars, you’re talking about that claiming business you once mentioned to me, aren’t you?”

“I’m afraid so,” Shanelle replied, and explained further for Cira’s and Yari’s benefit. “If a warrior thinks you aren’t protected, and you don’t have a male escorting you, then he is within his rights to claim you if he wants to, and there won’t be anything anyone on my planet or yours can do about it once he does. But as long as you tell him up front that you’re under a warrior’s protection, he’ll make sure you’re telling the truth before he does any claiming.”

“Are
you
sure about that?” Cira queried.

Shanelle could understand that they might not be so eager now to sample the local males, but she hadn’t meant to dissuade them from having a little Sha-Ka’ani fun, just to be cautious. “Only two female visitors have been claimed in all these years, and those two wanted to be claimed, so no one got upset about it, least of all the females. And claiming protection does work, because a warrior who tries to claim a protected woman knows he’ll have to end up fighting her protector, and warriors don’t fight over women.”

“Why not?” Yari asked with interest.

Shanelle anticipated their reaction with a mixture of dread and disgust because of her own feelings on the subject. “Any warrior will tell you he doesn’t know what jealousy is—or love.”

“Oh, come on, Shani,” Caris said doubtfully. “You’ve said that your father loves your mother, and we all know he’s a warrior.”

“My father happens to be an exception.” But Shanelle’s tone turned dry as she added, “You could say my mother has been a bad influence on him.”

Caris and Cira laughed, but Yari put in, “Well, I think it’s great. Imagine not having to deal with possessiveness and jealousy.”

“Is that right?” Dren asked with a twinge of annoyance in his voice. He was even shorter than Shanelle was, and too slim of frame by half, but he’d been the most handsome boy in their class. “You weren’t thinking of trying any of these warriors yourself, were you?”

Yari grinned and wrapped herself around him on the adjusticouch they shared. He was short, but she was still shorter. In fact, not one of the girls was taller than five and a half feet, which made Shanelle occasionally feel uncomfortable with her own height and lushly rounded figure.

“Don’t get your nose bent out of joint, babe,” the petite brunette told him. “From what I’ve heard, those warriors are just
too
big for me. I like my skin white and creamy, not black-and-blue.”

“Farden hell, I never thought of that,” Cira groaned in complaint.

Shanelle chuckled and sat back with her goblet of Antury wine.
“That
doesn’t happen to be something you need to worry about. There is no man more gentle with a woman than a warrior because he
is
always conscious of his size and strength. The female Darasha of the servant class are much shorter than you are, Cira, and they have no complaints.”

“Are these females someone Jadd and I might like to sample?” Dren asked, to get back some of his own, but what he got was a poke in the belly from Yari.

Shanelle answered anyway. “The Darash females are available for anyone’s use, and they don’t mind. I sometimes wonder if they even know how to say no.”

“You
certainly know how to say no,” Jadd said as he brought his wine over and sat down next to Shanelle on her own couch. “I wonder if—”

He didn’t get to finish. He’d no sooner taken the new seat than Corth was there and about to sit right on top of him if Jadd didn’t move himself real fast. He did scramble out of the way, spilling his wine in the process. Two robocleaners came out from two different sides of the huge room to clean up the mess, but no one noticed them. Jadd was glowering at Corth, Shanelle was laughing— she simply couldn’t help herself—and the others were all staring at Corth as if he’d malfunctioned.

“Why did he
do
that, Shani?” Caris finally asked for the lot of them.

Shanelle was too busy laughing to come up with an answer, but Jadd wasn’t. “He’s her
protector,”
he said, making it sound like a dirty word. “No one can share sex with her while he’s around. They can’t even
touch
her!”