“They buried you alive?”

Flatly he said, “My mother made a heartbroken plea to our jailors. Said she couldn’t bear to think of her husband in that cold wasteland. In compassion for the beautiful bereaved widow, they agreed to let an ISC ship recover his casket from space. In honor of his wishes, it would spend one day in orbit, and then ISC would make the pickup.” He paused. “By the time I awoke from sedation, I would be safe on the Ascendant.”

Relief poured over Kamoj. “It was a trick! To get you away from your enemies. And it worked.”

“Yes. It worked.” His cheek twitched. “With just one little glitch.”

“Glitch?”

“An Allied bureaucrat stalled the pickup.” In a quiet voice, he added, “No one told my family. The Allieds didn’t want to upset them. But minutes after the launch, someone somewhere along the line changed his mind and said they wouldn’t give up the body.”

Kamoj felt as if her stomach dropped. “No.”

“Don’t look so grim.” He flexed his fist, jerkily opening and closing his hand. “Negotiations to recover the body began even before I woke up.”

“You woke up inside the coffin?”

“Yes.”

Kamoj tried to imagine it, buried alive, with only a box separating you from the sky and stars, knowing something had gone terribly wrong, that you were here when you should have been there, safe and free.

Vyrl swallowed. “Do you know what ‘sensory deprivation’ means? No sound. No sight. No taste. No smell. No weight. After a while I couldn’t even feel the inside of the coffin. And my mind—I couldn’t—as a telepath, I need to be close to people to pick up anything. My mind opened up, searching for anyone. Anything. Anything. I was wide open and there was nothing.”

“How long?” she whispered.

The brittle edge of his voice broke. “Thirty-one days. When the team on the Ascendant finally got me out, I was screaming, raving insane.”

Kamoj had no idea what to say. No words would take away this horror, no touch heal it.

“Don’t look so dismayed,” he said. “They took care of me. Treated me. Hell, it even helped. To a point.” His head jerked. “But the psiber centers in my brain went dead. ISC got their precious Ruby psion, but they broke him in the process. Turned me into a crippled telepath.” He swallowed. “Except when I sleep. Then my mind opens up like in the coffin. But this isn’t space. People are all around. So I go into telepathic overload. If they isolate me and I can’t pick up anything, I start to scream again.” Dully he added, “And every time Dazza sedates me, all I can think is that I’ll wake up in that coffin.”

“There must be some cure—something—”

“The rum deadens my brain. It lets me sleep.”

She took his hands. “Surely some other solution exists. Can’t Dazza and her people help you?”

“They can all go to hell.”

“But—”

His voice hardened. “Two people on the Ascendant knew my father’s body wasn’t in that coffin: the special operations officer assigned to the mission and General Ashman, the ship’s commander. They could have ended it any time by revealing that a living man was out there. ISC would have lost me back to the Allieds, but I would have been free from that nightmare.” His fists clenched. “They wanted me any way they could get me, and to the hell with my sanity.”

“Hai, Vyrl.” She thought she understood now, both his pain and the desperation that drove his military to such an extreme. Gently she said, “When did you start to feel thoughts again?”

“With you.” With an obvious effort, he relaxed his hands. “You’re wide open to me, water sprite. I felt it that day I saw you in the river.”

Kamoj remembered Dazza’s face when the doctor had realized Vyrl was picking up his bride’s thoughts. Joy. Hope. Elation. All signs of a healer whose patient had begun a recovery she feared would never happen.

Vyrl took her hand and climbed onto the bed, drawing her with him. As they lay down together, the quilts enveloped them in billowy cloth, soft from many washings and fragrant with the scent of spice-soap.

She touched his damp cheek. “We have a saying in Argali: ‘Tears wash clean the debris of the heart.’”

“I’m not crying.” Another tear slid down his cheek. “I never cry. Only children do that.”

Kamoj thought of all the tears she had held in over the years. “Maybe children know better than we.”

His voice caught. “Ai, water sprite. Something inside me is breaking. I don’t know what, only that it’s thawing.”

“Like ice on a lake in spring.”

He pulled her into his arms. “Be my spring, Kamoj.”

Night curled around them, quiet and foggy. As they made love, a low-lying cloud seeped in the window. Afterward they lay together, drowsing, their heads together, Vyrl’s lips touching her hair.

Some time later he said, “Look. The Lion came up.”

Kamoj opened her eyes. The fog in the room had reached as high as his desk, but their view of the window was clear. The Lion constellation was stalking across the sky, his head thrown back, his mane flowing in a wind of stars.

“See the star in his front paw?” Vyrl said.

“The yellow one?”

“Yes. That’s a sun of my home world. It’s why we made up the name Lionstar.”

“Lionstar isn’t your real name?”

He gave her a guilty look. “It isn’t even close.”

“What are you called?”

“A lot of nonsense.”

“Tell me.”

“You don’t really want to hear it.”

She smiled. “But I do. The whole thing.”

“All right. But I warned you.” With a grimace, he said, “Prince Havyrl Torcellei Valdor kya Skolia, Sixth Heir, once removed from the line of Pharaoh, born of the Rhon, Fourth Heir to the Web Key, Fifth Heir to the Assembly Key, and Fifth Heir to the Imperator.”

Kamoj blinked. “So many names.”

He touched her cheek. “And you?”

“Just Kamoj Quanta Argali.” It didn’t sound nearly so impressive as his.

“Quanta?” He laughed. “Ai, Kamoj, you’re a bound quantum resonance.”

It relieved her to see his spirits lighten, even if his words were odd. “You think my name means resonance too?”

“Argali refers to a Breit-Wigner scattering resonance. It comes from the Iotic word akil tz’i.” He paused. “Actually akil tz’i originally meant leash. It’s used now for resonance. Some people say it derives from a Mayan language, but no one really knows.”

Kamoj knew nothing about “Mayan,” but she had no doubts about her own language. “Argali means vine rose.”

“Not really. It just got mixed up with another Iotic word, akil tz’usub, which means vine runner.”

Just like that, he took away her entire name and gave her a new one, without even realizing it. “What does ‘Mayan’ mean?”

He pushed up on his elbow to look at her, as if her appearance could give him a clue to his own past. “My people have tried to determine our origins by comparing our languages to those on Earth. Some similarities exist between classical Iotic and Tzotzil Mayan. Other of our words suggest we came from the Mediterranean or Near East. But no matter how you look at it, none of it makes sense, unless my ancestors were shifted in time as well as space. Our history on Raylicon goes back six thousand years, and at that time no culture on Earth even vaguely resembled that of my ancestors.”

“Then how can you be sure about the language?” She shook her head. “Scattering resonance? It makes no sense.”

“It’s like when you roll bowballs on a table and they bounce off each other.” He lay on his side again. “Particles do that too.”

“Particles? You mean dust?”

“Smaller. Much smaller. And they can change state.”

“What is ‘change state’?”

“Deform, spin different ways, that sort of thing.”

“This is what ‘resonance’ means?”

“A resonance is when one ball captures another.”

She gave him a skeptical look. “Vyrl, I have never heard of bowballs capturing each other.”