Sharon Green - Terrillian 03, page 34
I was too furious to really notice that he was actually backing up away from me as I advanced on him, but if I’d stopped to think about it I wouldn’t have been all that surprised. I was projecting the same sort of anger at him that he usually sent toward me, and my projections were still stronger than his.
I’d copied that sense of deadliness and thrown that in as well, giving him a taste of what had time and again sent me cringing back from him. He didn’t cringe the way I had but he did back up, shaking his head to throw off the effects of my projection. He was damned sensitive, all right, to know so accurately when someone was projecting at him, but he didn’t get anywhere until that heavy calm swirled back into his mind, blocking off most of my efforts. He used that calm as both a shield and a control on his own emotions, and once he had it in place he stopped backing up.
“That’s a good question Terry just asked,” Len put in, coming up to stand next to me. “The least she ever got for unauthorized projecting was a good whacking on the backside, which is a lot less than what you gave me for doing the same thing to her. Now that we’ve found you doing it, what do you get for it?”
“You may attempt to do to me what I did to you,” Tammad told Len in a mutter, his hand to his head as he fought to throw off the lingering effects of my projection. “You need not even wait till this throbbing abandons me, should the matter touch you strongly enough. I feel no regret for what punishments I gave, for your power was exercised willfully while mine was not. Should this insanity be true.”
His last sentence sent a quiver through his mind, a rippling in the calm that showed how upset he really was. He didn’t want anything to do with empathy, especially from the inside out, and all the anger drained out of me as though it had been blotted up in a giant towel. I used pain control to soothe away the throbbing headache my projection had given him, then turned and hurried back to the windows.
“My thanks, Lenham,” I heard him say with a sigh as I sank down among the cushions. “To give aid rather than seek revenge shows you to be a man of strength.”
“Don’t thank me,” Len denied with a snort of amusement. “I don’t have that sort of strength, character-wise or pain-controlwise. Don’t you recognize the touch of a Prime?”
“Terril?” Tammad said, and I could almost see his incredulity even though I was facing toward the windows. “Her power has returned?”
“That’s the good news I was trying to tell you about,” Garth said, a bemused quality to his mind. “I didn’t know then just how much news there was.”
“That’s what brought us up here,” Len said, his tone wry. “We-ah-discovered that Terry had her ability back and came to congratulate her. You found her crying because she had the foolish idea that you wouldn’t be happy to have her the way she used to be. Now wasn’t it silly of her to believe you wouldn’t want her.”
There was no answer from Tammad to that, and I closed my eyes and put my face in my hands. That rigid calm was keeping me from seeing how he really felt the way it usually did, but I didn’t have to read him to know the truth. He had told me the truth, and he didn’t lie.
“Terril, hama, you must not weep,” his voice came then, startlingly right behind me. His hand stroked my hair as he sat down next to me, and then he was pulling me to him. “There is nothing that would cause me to not desire you, this you cannot doubt. My love will not fail you.’
“You said you can’t cope with an empath,” I sobbed, throwing my arms around him as I buried my face in his chest. “You can’t tell me you were lying to make me feel better, because I know you weren’t. I don’t want to be beyond you-I’d rather be crippled!”
“No, hama-sadendra, I was not lying.” He sighed as he tightened his arms around me, and I could feel the sadness flowing through his calm. “I did indeed have difficulty coping with a woman with the power, yet this difficulty did not, in fine, cause me to turn from her. No less a thing than death could do so. Fool that I am, I should not have refrained from saying this sooner, yet I had not thought your power would return. As for being beyond me-wenda, should Lenham be correct, that will never again be so. Perhaps now I may be beyond you.”
“You think you’re better than a trained Prime?” I exclaimed, shocked into leaning back away from him. And then I saw his grin and heard the chuckle in his mind, and understood what he’d done. “You said that deliberately to get a rise out of me,” I accused with a black look, then couldn’t help laughing.
“You’re a mean, nasty beast of a barbarian, but I love you anyway. Even if you are too good for me.”
“I may perhaps be too good for you after you have aided me in the use of this-power,” he said with a grimace, wiping the last of the tears off my cheek. “Sooner would I have no more than a woman with the power, for the difficulties are bound to be many and large.”
“We’ll take care of them together,” I reassured him, hugging him around again.
I’d train him to use what he had, and somehow get back to Central to retrieve our child, and do my damnedest to help him conquer the whole damned universe, if that’s what he wanted. I’d heard that Cinnan had rescued Aesnil from her slavery, and the two of them had worked things out even better than Tammad and I had. We’d probably leave Gerleth with them and go back to Grelana for the rest of Tammad’s l’lendaa, and then we’d head back home. After that we had the Amalgamation to tackle, and I was actually looking forward to it.
“We’ll take care of everything together,” I repeated, still hugging him.
“Especially getting you trained. I wouldn’t want you in danger of being punished any longer than necessary.”
“Speaking of punishment,” Len drawled, “did I mention, Tammad, how Garth and I knew Terry had regained her abilities? You see, we were in the exercise court just below this window, and all of a sudden … .”
“Len, don’t!” I squeaked suddenly filled with pure panic, but it was much too late. The unreasonably large arms around me were no longer gently soft, and a cloud of anger was rolling straight through the billowing calm. I looked up to see two hard blue eyes staring down at me, and frantically shook my head. “It was an accident!” I pleaded, trying to make Tammad believe me. “I didn’t do it on purpose just to get even for what they did to me! I didn’t! You can’t punish me for an accident!”
Damned barbarian. He did.
Table of Contents
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
Warrior Rearmed, Sharon Green - Terrillian 03
