But he had not been meant to remember until he reached the Archon. It was Cynara, and his union with her mind, that had disrupted the Kinsmen’s careful work. Now his memory was complete.
Kill the Archon.
He could do it easily, moving faster than any human eye could follow, snapping the Archon’s neck and then turning on Miklos as well before his guards recognized the danger.
No.
Kinsman faces watched him, filled with cruel purpose. For your people, Ronan. For your House and your Line.
I will not.
His body shuddered like a ba’laik’in’s Tag doll. Something touched him, and it was as if scalding metal had been laid against his skin. Then other hands grasped, held him still, confined him in a cage of flesh. Janek’s eyes—Damon’s—stared into his.
“You,” he whispered. “Take him to a holding cell and set two teams to watch him until I order otherwise. Go!”
“Damon!” Miklos said sharply. “He—”
‘This is my charge, Uncle,” he said. “He was mine from the moment he boarded the Pegasus.” He bowed stiffly to the Archon. “My lord. Forgive this intrusion.”
The Archon could hardly be seen behind a wall of ve’laik’i, bristling with drawn weapons. Ronan was incapable of fighting. His limbs had lost their strength, severed from the mastery of his brain. The guards half dragged him from the room and out another door, into narrow, featureless corridors and a lift that carried them down beneath the palace into the rock itself.
They threw him into a cell and activated the transparent containment field. Ronan collapsed against the far wall, between the narrow bunk and the facilities, and closed his eyes.
He had betrayed them all: shaauri, their Kinsman allies, his House and Line—the crew of the Pegasus, Kord and Lizbet and Miya Zheng, Magnus Jesper, Lord Miklos with his ready smile and welcome. Not one had he served with honor.
And Cynara. Even she had not guessed the possible extent of his betrayal. She had believed in him.
Cynara. Strange that he almost felt as if she were with him, though she would be aboard the Pegasus and far across space on her way to Dharma. Her faith had been for nothing, yet still he sensed her like a pinpoint of light in the back of his brain, never quite extinguished.
He tried to sleep for a while, and wakened again when a new presence touched the edge of his consciousness. The Kinswoman Brit Carter VelShaan entered the corridor, passed through the wall of guards, and stood before the containment field with her hands clasped behind her back.
“Ronan VelKalevi,” she said with a slight nod. “I’ve heard why you are here.”
He looked beyond her to the ve’laik’i, and she smiled. “I have permission to be here and speak to you in any manner I wish.”
Ronan approached the field, careful not to touch it. “What is there to say?”
“As much as you’re willing to share.” She glanced about the cold, gray cell. “I regret that it has come to this.”
“Why did Damon Challinor send me here?”
“He believes you intended to kill the Archon.”
It was not Damon’s suspicion that surprised Ronan, but the fact that he had guessed a truth hidden from Ronan himself.
“Did you, Ronan?”
“You have the means to find out, sh’eivalin.”
“Means I prefer not to use except in direst extremity—no matter what the shaauri Kinsmen do.” She sighed. “I don’t believe that you meant to kill the Archon. But I am not confident of your loyalties. Lord Damon’s word is influential on Persephone.”
“Is he a telepath?”
“We didn’t believe so, but we have apparently overlooked certain talents he chose not to share with us.”
“If he believes shaauri sent me here to kill the Archon, it will not matter what I say.”
“I disagree. Perhaps your reasons for leaving the Shaauriat were complex, and perhaps you didn’t have complete control over your fate.”
“I determine my own fate.”
“Do you?”
Suddenly his fragile discipline wavered, and the images that had come to him in the Archon’s presence returned in all their horror. Kinsman faces, Kinsman voices, demanding and promising, minds pushing into his with commands hidden within commands like the pieces of a ba’laik’in’s nesting puzzle.