Resenting the Hero Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Teaser chapter

  A Heart to Heart Talk

  Karish rose to his feet. “Let’s take a walk, Lee.”

  Now he wanted privacy. Excellent timing. And quite the perfect example of the magnanimous lord escorting the servant out for a well-bred chastisement.

  He strode down the sidewalk. I glared at him, for I needed two steps to his one. I probably looked like some little rat-dog scampering along beside him.

  He pushed a hand through his hair. “What the hell did I do, anyway?”

  “Sorry?”

  “What did I do? Tell me. My hair isn’t blond? I’m not tall enough?”

  Prat. Did he really think I cared about such trivial things? “I am a simple girl, Karish,” I said. He snorted in disbelief, which surprised me. “And I never anticipated being bonded to the Stallion of the Triple S.”

  “You may stop referring to me in that manner any time now,” he instructed me coolly.

  “I didn’t want to work with a legend. I wanted a quiet life, do my job without anyone much noticing.” I let myself sigh. “No chance of that, now. Certainly, you’ll be the focus of all the attention but some of it is bound to splash onto me. Lord Shintaro Karish’s Shield, easiest road to his favor.” Oh, he didn’t like that at all, and he scowled to prove it. Well, too bad. He’d asked for it. “You’ve got no right to complain about my behavior. I’ve been polite.”

  “Barely.”

  “Right back at you . . .”

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

  Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), Cnr. Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand

  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196,

  South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  RESENTING THE HERO

  An Ace Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Ace edition / March 2006

  Copyright © 2006 by Moira J. Moore.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  eISBN : 978-0-441-01388-3

  ACE

  Ace Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  ACE and the “A” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For my parents, Charlie and Kathy,

  and my sisters, Deirdre and Eileen

  Acknowledgments

  There have been so many people who have provided an ear, advice, and support, and I know I won’t be able to list them all here. Melissa Stone is my best friend, first reader, and gentle critic. Joe and Alisa Spinelle read an early draft and trusted me enough to give me excellent constructive criticism. People who have listened to me talk plot lines and character development for hours include Elizabeth DiSabato, Deirdre Flynn, and Erin Kinnally. Finally, I have to thank my agent, Jack Byrne, and my editor, Anne Sowards, for taking a chance on me.

  Chapter One

  “Not feeling any uncontrollable urges, are you?” the low voice in my ear teased.

  I looked up at the speaker and said, “Huh?”

  Lamer put a hand on my shoulder and pulled me into her taller, leaner frame. “Picture it,” she said. “The dark night sky, the torches, the drums. Brought here from our academy in carriages with the windows covered, we stand in the Matching Circle, finally Shields, dressed in our best whites and our brand-new braids.” She plucked at the tightly sewn knots in the left shoulder of my robe. “Knowing you have to compete with fourteen of your peers to be Chosen by one of—is it six, this Match?—Sources. Who are out there somewhere, waiting in their best blacks, for the chance to look us over like a herd of cattle.”

  I snickered.

  “The excitement. The anticipation. The fear. Doesn’t it make you feel like . . . dancing?”

  “Dancing? Are you crazy?”

  “Don’t try to kid me, Mallorough. I heard about that night after the First Landers’ play.”

  “Ah.” That explained everything. “So have I. Don’t I wish it had been that interesting.” Alas, never had I ever, under the influence of either alcohol or music, danced on a table.

  How did these rumors start?

  Lamer suddenly sighed with impatience. “What’s taking so long?”

  McAllistair, standing on my other side, snorted in amusement. “Karish, I’ll wager,” he said. “Maybe there’s a mirror back there.”

  “Hm.” That seemed to pacify Lamer somewhat. “Can’t rush perfection, I guess.”

  I didn’t roll my eyes. I was proud of myself.

  Karish was one of the Sources. We would be meeting six that night, and six of us might end up bonded to one of them as a result.

  Lord Shintaro Karish was a name I’d heard most of my life, and he was the Source all the Shields wanted. He was, according to rumor and his records, talented, gorgeous, and charming. He was called the Darling of the Triple S because he could feel natural events—earthquakes, cyclones, anything—long before they happened, and he could channel enormous amounts of power, eliminat
ing the events before most people even realized there was any danger. He was called the Stallion of the Triple S for talents that had nothing to do with being a Source.

  Katherine Devereaux was also an excellent Source who had proven herself while training in the field, but she had avoided the need to make an icon of herself. Reputed to be a steady, sedate woman, she was more my style than any of the other Sources I would be meeting that day. I had high hopes for her. She and I would work well together.

  Thomas Black was a solid, reliable Source, no dramatic rescues in his history but no major screwups, either. A little too proud for some, but no one could expect humility in a Source. If his portrait were any indication, he wasn’t bad looking, either. Not that such things mattered, but I had no objection to looking at a pretty face.

  Then there were the twins, one man, one woman. Therefore not identical but looking so much alike they might as well have been. They were, to all reports, extremely weak and would probably never be sent anywhere dangerous. Viola and Sebastian Bradford were said to recognize their limitations cheerfully and were rumored to be two of the kindest, friend-liest people a person could ever hope to meet.

  The fear of not being Chosen was the first reason the Shields were so tense. A Shield who was never Chosen might end up a professor in the academy, or part of its maintenance staff, or sent out hunting for new young Shields and Sources, all occupations far inferior to that of being a properly bonded Shield.

  Stevan Creol was the second reason. He was an adequate Source but was said to be odd, even cruel. Reputed to have tormented younger years as a student, he carried rumors of assault and rape as an adult. Nothing that anyone was prepared to submit to the law, but I’d yet to hear from a person who’d worked with him who had anything good to say about him. Some said he was crazy. Others claimed he was just evil. All anyone could say for sure was that he seemed unable to Choose a Shield. He was forty and still hadn’t managed it.

  My first choice was Devereaux, then Black, then either of the twins. If I didn’t get Chosen by one of them, I didn’t want to get Chosen that Match at all. I wanted someone calm, steady, and reliable. As calm, steady, and reliable as a Source could be, anyway.

  But I didn’t get to choose. Neither did the Sources, not in the true sense of the word. When Source met Shield for the first time, if they were meant to work together they knew it the moment they looked at each other. Kind of like love at first sight only permanent, and it had nothing to do with physical attraction or emotional compatibility.

  The bond, everyone thought, matched skill to skill and created a stronger partnership than what could be found in an unbonded Pair. It enabled a Shield to feel when his or her Source’s mental protections were lowered or raised. Sources needed mental Shields to protect their minds from the various forces swirling about the world, the forces that made the sun rise and set and the winds blow and the tides flow and ebb. Otherwise the minds of the Sources would be overrun and destroyed by those forces, a vulnerability unique to their kind.

  Those mental barriers needed to be lowered when the Sources channeled, leaving their minds vulnerable. It was the unique talent of the Shields to shape secondary barriers for the Sources, protecting them while still allowing them the freedom necessary to work.

  Any Shield could protect any Source, but bonded Shields and Sources worked better together. And only a bonded Shield could feel the Source’s protections lowering without being told, which was a necessary ability when the partners were not in physical proximity.

  Poetry, songs, and plays written by regulars added all sorts of other attributes to the bond. Things like the partners being able to read each other’s mind, or see through each other’s eyes and hear through each other’s ears. They made entertaining reading, and none of them were true. All the bond did was facilitate Shielding.

  There were, however, other effects of the bond. Some Pairs experienced a sort of physical harmony. It had been described to me as an added comfort level when the two partners were in close contact, and even some relief of pain when they touched. It was a rare phenomenon, thank Zaire. It seemed rather intrusive to me.

  Other effects were even less positive. The bond seemed to search out inherent emotional characteristics of the partners, drawing them out and amplifying them, and the wrong combination of such characteristics could be disastrous. Some partners hated each other, and this could be a serious problem, for once the bond was formed it was permanent. There was no separating, no working with anyone else. And the death of one meant the death of the other, the bond was that powerful.

  Without training and emotional preparation the bond could be destructive, resulting in obsessive love or hatred between the partners, drawing them into each other and rendering them incapable of dealing with the rest of the world in a rational manner. So young unPaired Sources and Shields were segregated from the rest of society and each other until they were Chosen, the best that could be done to prevent spontaneous pairings. It was impossible to eliminate all instantaneous pairings, for some Sources and Shields remained undiscovered for years, and not all such Pairs were afflicted with emotional instability, but everyone felt the separate academies were the best way to keep such unfortunate Choices to a minimum.

  I had been sent away to one of the Shield academies when I was four years old, and had remained there for the following seventeen years of my life. It was the only home I could remember.

  And so I stood in the Matching Circle with most of the members of my class and a handful of older Shields who had not yet been Chosen. We stood in a single long line, side by side, waiting. We were watched by friends, family, and former instructors. We had been placed in alphabetical order according to our family names.

  I was Dunleavy Mallorough. I was somewhere near the middle.

  A door creaked as it opened. Heads whipped around. I felt the Shields around me stiffening, standing straighter, standing prouder. The Sources had arrived.

  They filed into the Matching Circle silently, and I had to admit they looked a little eerie, black figures floating over the white floor. Most of them didn’t look at all nervous, which I found irritating. This night was as important to them as it was to us, and they had no more control over the results than we did. They should have been as apprehensive as we were. More so. They were Sources, after all. They were supposed to overreact to everything.

  I was not nervous. To be nervous was to waste one’s strength on a fruitless emotional reaction. I was calm. I was always calm.

  Really.

  I would not wipe my palms against my trousers. I would not shift my feet. I would not flick my hair off my shoulder. I would be calm, I would be serene, in success or failure.

  But I wouldn’t fail. I would be Chosen. This was a certainty. That I was standing with fourteen others who were just as firmly convinced of their success was irrelevant, because I was right. I was always right.

  Damn it, I couldn’t feel the floor against my bare feet. That wasn’t good.

  All Shields were rather insensitive to physical sensation—to better enable us to concentrate solely on our Sources, it was said—but I’d always been particularly insensitive. Which was an endless source of humor for my classmates. I had been taught to feel things, of course, as all Shields were. It was just that sometimes I sort of forgot.

  The floor was wood. Sanded so smooth it felt like cloth. Cool and almost soft against the skin, as incongruous a thought as that seemed.

  The door was closed behind the last Source. I looked them over discreetly, noting the differences between the portraits we’d been shown and the people standing before me. We waited.

  Another, smaller door opened in a dark corner of the room. An elderly man, wearing the black braid of a Source, stepped in, followed by an elderly woman wearing the white braid of a Shield. Source Ivan McCrae and Shield Emil Cloudminder, the Presiding Pair of the Match. They walked between the row of the Shields and the row of the Sources, ascending onto the low dais at the other end of
the room.

  Cloudminder cleared her throat. “We would like to welcome you all to this, the third Match of the 573rd year of recording.” Her voice was clear and surprisingly strong for a woman of her age and stature.

  Silence greeted her words.

  “It is perhaps best, at this time, to acknowledge our origins,” the Shield continued. “To remember that nearly seven centuries past, our ancestors arrived here from another world, brought here in huge ships that flew between the stars. And in this world they saw beauty and wealth, and they thought to settle here.”

  I had been warned to expect this, the recital of our history. As though we didn’t already know it. Waste of time.

  “We are told that they brought with them great tools. Tools for speaking to each other over great distances. Tools for traveling with rapidity and without effort. Tools for raising buildings and tilling soil. Even, it was written, tools that controlled the sun and the sky.”

  This was where the story always lost me. I believed in the tools, in their existence. A professor at the academy had shown me articles made of strange, light metals, the use for which no one could guess. But controlling the sun and the sky? That couldn’t be possible.

  “Yet for all the wonder and power of these tools, this world was stronger still. The tools lost their power here. This world resisted their use, with earthquakes of such ferocity, with cyclones of such destructive force, with volcanoes of such frequency and reach, that these tools were largely destroyed and swept away from all hands.

  “The destruction did not end there. The great cities of the ancestors were leveled. Their crops, stretching wide, were laid waste. Their high dams were swallowed whole.

  “Our ancestors decided they could not shape this world as they wished. Those who were weak left our world, returning to their own.” And the Shield made a dismissive gesture with one trembling hand. “The strong remained to build a new life, one more suited to this world. But that life was hard. One might almost feel that the world was angry, that our ancestors dared to use such tools against it. Cities built with nothing more than human hands were quickly torn down again. Our modest crops were destroyed by droughts and floods. Many, many died. People fell into despair and became certain that the planet would kill them all. Yet they strove to survive. They rebuilt. They sowed new crops. They had children.