your soul, and told you what was right, what was good, what to think, to feel. Even their marriage had been arranged, another order to obey, to love each other.
Now that was gone, the Master and the bonds blown away with a bullet from Holden’s own gun, and he didn’t know how to be a husband. He didn’t know how to be anything, except a sailor. The Master had bonded them together, and in that bond they’d found something, yet now it was gone she seemed to grow further from him every time he looked. So he and Ilsa shared a bed because they were married, because they’d once been bonded together and had shared a bed and more besides. But now they each lay alone in that bed, separated by a gulf of ignorance, of not knowing, of fear at that unknowing.
Holden didn’t know whether he loved her, or whether he just thought he should because he’d once been told to. He didn’t know if she loved him, or why she stayed when there were other cabins, other beds. Maybe because she’d been told to. He wanted to find out though.
He looked at her in the mirror. So pretty, he’d thought when the Master first presented her to him for his wife, so pretty but for the blankness behind her eyes, the lack of self that the bond caused. The blankness was gone, and she was still pretty, more than pretty. Her copper-bronze Remorian skin glowed in the candlelight, seemed sheened with gold, smooth and soft and waiting to be stroked. Yet he couldn’t bring himself to. She’d been told to love him, and had. Maybe now she had no love for him. Maybe the way she followed Van Gast about, the way her lips didn’t turn down when he was around, was Holden’s answer and he couldn’t bear that. He wanted to ask, to know, but dared not for fear that she’d say it was true.
“Ilsa.” His voice startled him and made her jump. He didn’t know he was going to speak till he did, didn’t know what words would come tumbling out. The right ones, he hoped, that would make everything better. “Ilsa, I can sleep in another bed if you’d prefer. If it would make you happy.”
The brush stopped its sweeping and she stared at his reflection in the mirror. Her lips parted but she said nothing, only stared at him with wide, startled eyes. Finally the brush started again, no longer slow and languorous but with short, vicious bursts.
“Ilsa, please, talk to me. Tell me what you want.”
Her dark eyes were afraid again. She’d seemed so happy, so free when the bond had first come off, when her mind had become her own. He wished she could have stayed that way. But he thought she struggled with it more than he did, with the world and her own thoughts too big for her head.
“Ilsa, do you want to stay? In this cabin I mean, with me. You don’t have to, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to, not anymore.”
She turned her face from him in the mirror. One shoulder twitched, maybe a shrug, maybe a shiver. “I don’t know,” she said at last. “I don’t know what to do, to think anymore. I’ve lost myself, lost everything I was. I lost you too, when…they took you from me. Do you understand? I’ve nothing left of the life I knew. Not even the same man as my husband. All I have left of my life is a gray dress and a scar on my wrist.”
Holden reached out a hesitant hand for her shoulder and remembered his own panic when Van Gast had cut off his hand in order to cut off the bond at his wrist. How he’d floundered and given in and gone back to ask for another. Asked to be a slave again, so that everything would be normal, so he wouldn’t have to deal with all the thoughts that flooded his brain. Ilsa hadn’t had that chance. Holden had to help her by being strong for her, make her see it was better.
“I understand how hard this is for you, for all of us. I just want you to be happy.”
She turned away from his gaze in the mirror.
They went to bed, lying almost close enough to touch but with worlds between them, unspoken wants a barrier as strong as steel. Holden lay under the sheet and stared at the