Johanna Lindsey - Keeper of the Heart

Of course, the planet couldn’t be closed down completely. Compromises had to be made. So bus stations had been installed outside every town and city, inconspicuous, mere telecomms where a Transport airobus could be sent for if someone had something he wished to trade. The airobuses brought the Sha-Ka’ani merchants to the Visitor’s Center, then returned them to their towns. The Trade Ambassadors no longer got to go seeking for what they wanted, but had to wait and hope it would come to them. Not surprising, the Ba-Har-ani never traded again with anyone outside their own country.

“Did you know about this, Martha?” Shanelle asked as she looked over the brand-new, shiny sky-blue Transport airobus.

“ ‘Course I did. Tedra ordered it right after you left for Kystran. Of course, that was before she figured out that piloting for the Center wasn’t all you were planning to do.”

“Let’s not rehash that again. I will make a sincere effort to fall in love very quickly, at least before my father makes his decision and it’s out of my hands.”

“Mutual lust will do for starters. After all, Tedra didn’t love Challen right off. It took at least a week.”

Shanelle touched down on the solidite landing pad at the bottom of Mount Raik without a hitch. The airobus handled like a dream. It was much larger than the one-seater Fleetwing II that she had been using on Kystran to get around in, but then she had learned in her World Discovery class how to fly all of the more modern single-pilot ships known in the Centura Star System. The airobus seated twenty comfortably, with a large cargo bay in the back for trade goods.

Shanelle opened the hatch just before turning to her friends. “This is the end of the easy part. From here on we rough it.”

“You don’t mean on those, do you?” Jadd asked, staring in horror at the waiting hataari on one end of the solidite paving.

Shanelle grinned, following his gaze. The four-legged Sha-Ka’ani beasts did take getting used to.

Huge, shaggy-haired, with long, wide backs that were as high off the ground as Shanelle was tall. But they were placid creatures, well adjusted to working with man.

But before she could reassure Jadd, Caris said with a good deal of awe, “My Stars, Shani, so that’s what they look like!” She wasn’t even looking at the hataari, but at the four warriors waiting with them. “I expected them to be big, but not that big.”

“Shani said they’re gentle with women,” Cira reminded her, her own voice sounding eager. “I’m willing to find out.”

“You may have to wait on that,” Yari put in. “Looks like we got trouble coming.”

Shanelle glanced toward the other end of the landing pad as she stepped off the airobus, and sure enough, a party of five men was heading in her direction, none of them looking very friendly. In fact, the short, rotund fellow in the lead looked as if he was just short of hopping-around mad.

Corth moved in front of Shanelle to block her view of the group just as it arrived. Six feet four and dressed in the leather bracs of a warrior, complete with sword-Shanelle’s sword, to be exact- Corth brought the round, little man up short, but not too short. The fellow was still seething with belligerence.

“Get out of my way, man,” he ordered Corth. “I demand to speak with the pilot of this bus.”

Corth, of course, didn’t budge, so Shanelle stepped to the side of him to say, “That would be me.”

“Then I will inform you, young woman, that I will have the job of every incompetent at your Center. How dare you people treat His Eminence, the High King, in such a shoddy manner. Do you even know who you’re dealing with? This is intolerable-”

Shanelle had the feeling he was only working up to a really good tirade, so she cut in. “It’s not the Center’s fault that so many visitors showed up for the competitions and that there weren’t enough hataari to carry them all. But I’m here to offer you a ride if you want it.”

“Well, that’s more like it,” the man huffed. “You will fly us immediately-”

“Sorry, but if you want a ride, it will have to be on those hataari over there. I’m not going back to the Center, and even I can’t land an airobus within the city, or didn’t you people read the laws of this planet to know that isn’t allowed?”

The man visibly bristled at that. “Then you are as stranded here as we are, because we have already been informed by those ignorant savages that those particular animals are not for rent.”

Shanelle did some bristling of her own at that point. “Those men happen to be my father’s warriors, under his orders to escort me to him, so they wouldn’t give up hataari brought for my use no matter who the hell you say you are. And I’ll have an apology on their behalf, or you can-”

“How dare you speak to me so! How dare you-”

“Oh, for Star’s sake,” Shanelle said in disgust and turned away, finished with trying to get through to someone that pompous.

Only she came face-to-face with the four warriors who had quietly come to join the group, and who were each looking down at her in what was so obviously amusement. Likely they had heard what had been said, and that was what they were so amused about, that she had come to their defense. They wouldn’t have taken insult themselves, not from someone so beneath their notice as the rotund visitor was.

“The little man with the big voice requires your assistance, Shanelle,” she was told by Lowen, a brown-haired warrior with eyes almost as light an amber as her own. “Best you see to it.”

She thought she was being reminded of the ride she had offered, until she heard the groan. She swung around to find that the visitor must have tried to stop her from turning away from him, because Corth now had the man’s fingers closed in his own fist and was bending those fingers back in such a way that the visitor dropped to his knees under the pressure.

“Let him go, Corth.”

The man was released instantly, but another voice was heard from, quietly commanding, “You should have known by the way she was dressed that she was Ly-San-Ter’s daughter. Apologize, Alrid.”

“But, Jorran-”

“Apologize!”

The little man, still on his knees, began a long spiel about how sorry he was to have offended the daughter of the shodan, and damned if he didn’t sound sincere. But Shanelle was barely listening.

She was looking down at herself and trying to figure out how they had guessed her identity by what she was wearing. She wasn’t wearing the chauri that all Kan-is-Tran women wore. Her calf-length skirt might be of the same length as the chauri, her blouse also sleeveless, but there the similarities ended. Her outfit didn’t consist of the semi-sheer scarves that made up the skirt and top of the chauri, but was solid white with muted silver glitter, thin, surely, but in no way transparent. The skirt was narrow; the short blouse hung loose, but conformed to her ribs and waist in the way it was draped, outlining her figure. She wore white boots instead of sandals, and even her hair was tightly rolled at her nape instead of left unbound.

Of course, she was forgetting the one item that she took for granted, that would make her father send her straight home to the palace if she wasn’t wearing it: the white cloak thrown back over her shoulders that said clearly she was under the protection of the shodan. A blue cloak would have done just as well, blue being the color of the Ly-San-Ter family. But no Kan-is-Tran woman went out without her cloak; otherwise she became claimable.