“None?”
“Not even parent to child. Phrixian children are viewed as property of the government. Parents don’t have them, nor do they raise them, because they want them or love them. They do so because it’s their national duty to breed warriors to fight, and daughters to procreate the next generation of soldiers.”
Horrified by what Darling described, he stared at him. “I can’t even wrap my mind around what you’re telling me.”
“I know. Their world is mind boggling. Kids can be, and will be, taken from any parent who is deemed too lenient with them. At sixteen, their males are all conscripted into the military. Some girls, if they make the cut, can join, but it’s frowned upon. There, they are viewed as government property until they’re forty-two years old. Until then, they can’t own anything or marry. Should they have a child, it’s raised by the government and they know nothing of the child’s upbringing.”
“What happens to their daughters?”
Darling rolled his eyes in disgust. “If they’re deemed beautiful or have the right lineage, they’re put into the marriage pool as virgin trophies for the retiring warriors to choose a mate from. The rest become social servants, which includes servicing the conscripted soldiers whenever they earn sex privileges.”
Ture frowned. “I’m confused. Mari was engaged and had property at one time. He’s told me that much.”
“Maris is a prince. While they still have to abide by the same laws as everyone else, they, alone, are allowed to own property before they leave military service, and can marry should their father need them for a political match. Even married, they still can’t live with their wife until they turn forty-two and are released from service. The only other honorable way out, for any of them, is to be good enough to join the League as assassins, such as Saf and Kyr.”
Where they were forced to be celibate, and where no one could retire. Assassins were killed the moment they became too old or too injured to continue their duties.
Tears filled Ture’s eyes as he tried to imagine how horrible that existence had been for his peace-loving Maris. “Mari said that the League forced his father to give up one son to mix with humans.”
Darling nodded. “Maris was a political prisoner for ten years.”
Ture narrowed his gaze at Darling. “Prisoner? From the way he explained it, I thought he was just fostered by a human family.”
Darling let out a bitter, angry laugh. “I so love how Mari sugarcoats things for the ones he loves.” His gaze seared Ture. “He was barely five, and couldn’t understand a single word of Universal or any language other than Phrixian, when his own father handcuffed him and surrendered him to League custody with one order... You bring any shame to Phrixus and we’ll dine on your liver.”
Nauseated, Ture stared at him. “What?”
Glancing back toward Zarya, Darling sighed heavily. “His father wasn’t joking. He would have killed Mari had he received any report of misbehavior or problems. So there was Mari, with no understanding of kindness or love or compassion of any kind, unable to comprehend what the foreign people around him were saying, thrown to the wolves. Alone.”
As little more than an infant.
And Darling made no mention of Mari’s amphibious nature and the stress of keeping that secret. Even though he abhorred violence, Ture wanted to kill Maris’s family for the cruelty of abandoning a boy so young.
“On Phrixus,” Darling continued, “anyone does anything you don’t like, you two fight until one of you loses consciousness or dies. That is the Prime Law. Suddenly, Maris was thrown into a world where he was forbidden to strike out at all. For any reason. Everything he’d been trained and taught from birth was the exact opposite of what was expected of him once he left Phrixian territory. He had to curb every instinct he possessed or die for it. The League told him he better not even swat and kill a fly or they’d retaliate. First against him. Then his people.”
Ture’s stomach cramped at the horror Maris must have felt as a small child, alone in a world he didn’t understand. “Where did he live?”
“The League handed him over to the Ultaran royal family.”
Ture wasn’t sure where Ultara was, but he knew the name of the planet. “Why there?”
“The Ultarans had been at war with the Phrixians for centuries. No one cared about it, until a League convey was caught in the crossfire. Since the Phrixians were the ones who blew it apart, they were punished more severely than the Ultarans. The League High Command demanded that the Phrixian emperor hand over a son for a decade to the Ultarans to guarantee a cease fire between their empires.”
“And the Ultarans? What was their punishment?”
“They basically skated with a slap on their wrist.”