Chapter 4
*** TOREN ***
The days settled into a rhythm that Toren hadn't expected and couldn't stop enjoying.
Mornings were for surveys. Marina took teams out to map the terrain, collect samples, and search for the metal alloys that Rowan needed to repair the Vulcana.
Toren went with her. So did Auren, who'd appointed himself the expedition's entertainment director, and Athena, who'd appointed herself its bodyguard.
Khrelan stayed near the ship, ostensibly to guard it, actually because proximity to this many humans at once made his skin crawl.
Toren didn't push it. Khrelan would come around or he wouldn't, and either way, the truce held.
The afternoons were for talking.
That was the part Toren hadn't planned for.
Marina asked questions the way other people breathed; constantly, instinctively and with no apparent awareness that she was doing it.
She wanted to know everything. How Weredragon physiology worked.
How the shift between forms functioned at a cellular level.
What the Colony's power systems ran on. How their language was structured.
Whether they dreamed. Whether they had art.
"Of course we have art," he'd replied, slightly offended. "We carve volcanic glass into sculptures. We compose resonance patterns that are played through crystal arrays in the deep caverns. We tell stories."
"What kind of stories?"
"Mostly about survival, overcoming enemies and building something from nothing." He'd paused. "They're not very happy stories."
"Earth has those too. We call them epics. They're usually about someone going on a long journey and suffering a lot and eventually getting home."
"That sounds exactly right."
Marina had smiled. Not the diplomatic smile she wore in front of her crew. A real one. Smaller, slightly crooked, and devastating in a way he was absolutely not prepared for.
* * *
The problem; and Toren was honest enough to call it a problem, was that he liked her.
Not in the abstract, theoretical way he'd liked humans from a distance through their movies and books.
He liked her specifically. He liked the way she chewed her lower lip when she was thinking hard.
He liked the way she could explain complex scientific concepts in simple language without ever sounding condescending.
He liked that she was afraid of the Drogs but went outside every day anyway because the data wasn't going to collect itself.
He especially liked the way she looked at him when she forgot to be professional.
There were moments that were brief and unguarded.
They were usually when he said something that surprised her; when the diplomatic mask slipped and he could see the person underneath.
She was curious, warm, a little lonely, and interested in him in a way that had nothing to do with interspecies politics.
He wasn't supposed to notice. He definitely wasn't supposed to care.
He cared.
Auren, naturally, noticed before anyone else.
"You're staring," Auren observed on the fourth morning, as they watched Marina and Dr. Patel examine a mineral deposit near the southern ridge.
"I'm observing. It's different."
"It's really not." Auren was sitting on a rock with his gray scales soaking up the heat, looking entirely too comfortable for someone on an alien planet.
"She's pretty and she's smart. She laughs at your jokes, which I find astonishing because your jokes are terrible.
And you've been finding excuses to stand closer to her every day this week. "
"I haven't."
"Yesterday you volunteered to carry her sample case. You don't carry things, Toren. You're a prince. You haven't carried anything heavier than a data tablet since you were twelve."
"The case was heavy."
"The case weighs about seven pounds. You can lift a Drog." Auren grinned at him with the deeply annoying certainty of a friend who knew he was right. "You like her."
"I respect her professional competence."
"That's the most romantic thing I've ever heard you say."
Toren didn't respond because there was nothing to say that wouldn't confirm Auren's assessment.
He did like her. The liking was inconvenient and growing and he didn't know what to do about it.
On Dobromia, romantic attachments followed established patterns.
There was a formal courtship, family negotiations and the bond ceremony.
None of those patterns applied to a situation where the woman in question was a human scientist stranded on a desert planet who didn't know he was a prince.
Well, she knew now. He'd told her. That conversation had gone better than he'd feared and worse than he'd hoped, because the honesty had created a new kind of closeness between them that made the liking harder to ignore.
"Khrelan thinks you're compromised," Auren added, because apparently the day wasn't complicated enough.
"Khrelan thinks everyone is compromised. It's his default setting."
"He's not wrong this time, is he?"
Toren looked at Marina. She was crouched beside the mineral deposit, explaining something to Patel, her red hair catching the light of the twin suns.
She glanced up, caught him watching, and gave him a small wave.
He waved back. The gesture was ridiculous; the prince of Dobromia, waving at a human woman across a field of alien rock like a teenager with his first crush.
"No," he admitted. "He's not wrong."
* * *
Khrelan confronted him that evening.
The navy-scaled Weredragon waited until Auren was asleep and the humans were inside the ship, then appeared at the entrance to the shallow cave where Toren had been reviewing the day's observations.
"We need to talk," Khrelan stated. He didn't sit. He stood with his arms crossed and his tail rigid behind him; the body language of a soldier delivering an unwelcome report to a superior who wasn't going to like it.
"About the surveys?"
"About the human."
Toren had been expecting this. He set aside his data tablet and gave Khrelan his full attention. "Say what you need to say."
"You're losing focus. The mission was to scout Ceylara for resources and return to Dobromia.
Instead, you've established an unauthorized alliance with a human species, revealed your identity as the prince, and now you're proposing to bring them to the Colony.
Your father didn't sanction any of this. "
"My father doesn't know about any of this."
"Exactly my point." Khrelan's red-tinged eyes were hard. "When he finds out, and he will, there will be consequences. The D'Karr doesn't approve of unsanctioned contact with human species. You know this."
"My father's position on human contact was established when we had no reason to believe they could help us. The situation has changed."
"Has it? Or have you changed? Because from where I'm standing, you look like a man who's making strategic decisions based on personal attraction, and that's a dangerous foundation for diplomacy."
The words hit harder than Toren expected.
Partly because Khrelan wasn't wrong. The attraction was there, and it was influencing his choices, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. But Khrelan was also not entirely right.
The alliance was sound regardless of how Toren felt about Marina.
The humans had technology, food production capacity, and a planet that wasn't dying. Those were facts, not feelings.
"I hear your concern," Toren replied. He kept his voice steady.
"And I take it seriously. But the strategic argument stands on its own.
These humans can help our people, Khrelan.
Not because I find their lead scientist attractive, but because Dobromia is running out of time and they have resources we need. "
"And if your father disagrees?"
"Then I'll make my case. That's what the visit is for. I want him to see what I've seen."
"What you've seen," Khrelan repeated. "Red hair and green eyes and a woman who asks too many questions."
"I've seen a species that shares food with strangers.
That fights for each other. That builds communities out of disaster.
" Toren stood. He was taller than Khrelan, though he rarely used the height advantage.
He used it now. "I've seen what Dobromia could become if we stopped being afraid of everything that isn't us. That's what I want my father to see."
Khrelan held his gaze for a long moment. Then he did something Toren didn't expect. He uncrossed his arms. The rigid posture softened by one degree. It wasn't agreement. It was the concession of a man who'd made his objection and respected the response.
"I'll follow your lead," Khrelan said. "But if this goes wrong; if the D'Karr sees this as a betrayal, I won't go down with you. I'll protect myself and Auren. You and your human are on your own."
"Understood."
Khrelan left. The cave was quiet. Outside, the twin suns had set, and the stars filled the sky with the cold, indifferent beauty that Toren had come to associate with Ceylara's nights.
He thought about Marina. About the wave across the field. About the crooked smile and the terrible coffee and the way she'd said "Let me talk to my crew" with the careful authority of someone who took the weight of other people's lives seriously.
He thought about his father. About the obsidian council chamber and the gold-scaled king who ruled from a throne carved into volcanic rock. About what would happen when Boradrith learned that his son had not only made contact with humans but had fallen for one.
Fallen. The word arrived in his mind without permission, and he let it stay.
There was no point in fighting it. He'd watched enough human movies to know that fighting this particular feeling never worked.
The characters who tried always ended up in the same place as the ones who didn't; they just wasted more time getting there.