The Clan Chronicles Series

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Excerpt from Ties of Power (Some spoilers)

Prelude

Memories and socks.

Barac sud Sarc, Third Level Adept and former First Scout of the Clan, shook his head as he added the holocube image of his murdered brother Kurr to the clothes already in the travel case. Memories, indeed.

I wondered when you would go, the words formed in his mind, the touch soft and familiar.

“First Chosen,” Barac acknowledged out loud, continuing to pack. “Come in—” He triggered the locking mechanism on the door with a thought.

His mother entered, her movements gracious despite the pain he could sense rippling the unseen M’hir between them. The M’hir. Barac swallowed, suddenly unsure how long it would be before he could touch another of his kind this way. Clan philosophers debated if the M’hir had existed before Clan thought, some believing it to have been an emptiness waiting to be filled with Clan power, others arguing it was a construct of Clan minds and not truly a place at all. Like most, Barac merely accepted that every Clan mind existed in part there, in that nothingness through which Clan thoughts and form could pass at will. It was the medium making them one, regardless of strength or ability. Or dispute.

Barac studied his mother’s face, feeling as though he had to memorize every detail: the delicately pale skin and fine bone structure he saw in every mirror, the dark eyes and generous mouth edged by laughter lines.

Not at this moment, however. “Where will you go?” she asked calmly enough, aloud. It was her right to question his intentions—not as his mother, Clan family structure was almost non-existent—but as Enora, First Chosen of the House of sud Sarc.

Barac tossed an old coat on the lopsided pile of discards covering his bed and some of the floor. “Must be time to move on,” he commented instead of answering directly. “Look at all this junk!”

“You could stay.”

He hesitated in the midst of closing the final bag, then made his decision. He turned to face her. “If you knew what I do, First Chosen, you’d send me yourself.”

 Enora frowned, taking a step closer to her son. Her elegant hand waved in a complex gesture, as if drawing threads from the air. “What are you talking about, Barac? Why would I—?”

Barac shook his head. It’s time you saw the Clan Council as I do, he sent. He opened his thoughts to hers, using his greater strength to forge the gentlest of links with her ordered mind, then drew her into his memories, letting Enora relive with him events of which she’d only been told. And, as the Clan knew well, words were the easiest way to lie.

It didn’t take long. Barac withdrew, somberly watching his mother as she groped one-handed for a chair’s back, oriented herself, then sank down into it slowly. “Sira—” she whispered, shying from the intimacy of mind touch as she sought to control her emotional response. “A lawbreaker. She did all this…”