“He lives,” Zul replied. “How do you not sense this?”
She took a breath then explained again, trying to make him understand: “Remember, I told you that the mental connection of a mate bond disappears over great distances.”
He nodded.
“I don’t know how far we are from the capital, but I’m sure it’s a lot further than a day or night’s flight on a wyvern.”
He nodded again.
“That distance doesn’t make the connection go away,” she rubbed her palm against her breastbone. “It’s more like the connection goes quiet as if it were waiting to pick up the signal again.” She shook her head, unsure whether her description made sense. “It’s not an absence or void like I felt after Crow died. It’s a… a… stillness, awaiting.” She realized she was rubbing that spot over her heart raw and moved her hand to her lap. “I don’t know how else to describe it.”
“Bran lives,” Zul said again, offering that small reassurance. Then he ripped it away because withholding the information likely did more harm than divulging it. “Gil told me he was tortured.”
“Tortured?” she cried out.
“Bran did not reveal our location because he does not know it. He stayed strong.”
“Oh, poor Bran! And Gil?”
“Gil is surrounded by his fellow rebels, and they are more than enough to intimidate the Guard Supreme.” He paused. “In fact, Gil told me it was the Omari Prime who persuaded the commander of the Guard Supreme not to torture Bran to theextent the governing council wished. He managed to convince them that severing a limb or two or blinding him or something else fundamentally damaging would enrage the populace and backfire on them.”
“Severing a limb?Blindinghim?” Ursula echoed faintly. “That’sbarbaric!”
Zul agreed. “Gil informed me this afternoon that Bran was returned to his care.”
“How is he?”
“Injured. Badly so. But he’s alive and in possession of all his necessary parts.”
She looked away in an effort to master her emotions, then she raised tear-filled eyes to him. “Zul, I need to return to him—them.”
He nodded. “And they need you. But they also need you to be safe, and that is what Bran and Gil charged me to do: keep you and Crow safe. I will do that to my last breath.”
“I know,” she replied, her voice soft with acceptance. She looked away, eyes focused in the dark distance and not seeing anything beyond the orange flicker of fire in her peripheral vision. “I’msoready for this to end.”
Zul was, too, but he was determined never to lie to her again and refused to offer false comfort. “I will let you know the moment it is safe to return home.”
She returned her gaze to his, solemn and steady. “I’ll hold you to that.”
Chapter 32
The meeting at the High Temple of the Suns had not gone well, and the council members who deigned to meet with the revolutionaries had reneged on their agreement to turn Bran over to them. The Supreme Council’s perfidy resulted in violent backlash, and much of the capital city now lay in rubble. Victory was bittersweet, but what remained of the Guard Supreme finally delivered Bran to Gil’s care. Yiis wasted no time summoning a physician.
Gil urged the physician to greater effort to save his Prime. Bran looked worse than Crow had after the berserker’s last, fatal battle. He tried to console himself with the fact that the Guard Supreme had not lopped off any limbs, although no other part of Bran’s body remained free of damage. Contusions, lacerations, and burns covered him from pate to tail tip to toenails, some of which had been pulled out. The council had not fed him well, either, if the protrusion of his ribs and general gauntness were any indication.
The physician withdrew the flexible tube which delivered both sustenance and healing agents directly into Bran’s veins. He looked up and sighed. “That’s all I can do for now. The restis up to him.”
Gil understood what the physician did not say: that Bran needed the full complement of his bonds. They would give him the connections of encouragement, love, mental and emotional strength, and support he needed to live. The physician could only tackle the physical damage.
His consciousness traveled up the triad bond which still remained silent. He paused at the barrier Bran had erected to keep his pain and suffering from flooding the connection and igniting Zul’s berserker rage where that rage could not be relieved without hurting those whom they cared about. Gil wanted to think that Bran had sought to spare him, too. Bran was noble like that.
However, Bran was now weak and the barrier flimsy. Gil broke through it with ease, although it would have been more accurate to say he dismantled it. Dismantling involved guile and subtlety, not brute force. Sliding through the thin barrier to the core of the connection, he found the blood-red strand that led to Zul. With ghostly fingers, he plucked the strand.
Zul responded immediately.Gil.
Zul. It’s time to return. Come to the capital.
There was a brief pause.How is Bran?
