"Kate Elliott - Jaran 1 - Jaran" - читать интересную книгу автора (Elliott Kate)

JARAN
JARAN BOOK 01
Kate Elliott
“Bodies attract each other with a force

that varies directly as the product of

their masses and inversely as the square

of the distance between them."

—Isaac Newton
Earth, Nairobi Port

A.L.C. 261 month 5 day 3

Terese Soerensen to Charles Soerensen

Dear Charles,

Please don't think I'm running away. I really did mean, when I decided to go to Dao Cee
system, to visit you on Odys—but I need to be by myself right now, without you trying to give
me well-meant advice or telling me that being your heir is just a technicality and that it doesn't
mean that much. Because it's not true.

Charles, I didn't tell you that I got engaged six months ago. He insisted that we keep it a
secret, and now I know why. Obviously he figured you would see through his "love" for me to
his real motives. I made the mistake of telling him that under Chapaliian law a sister loses all
right to her brother's [INSERT: or her father's] goods and titles upon marriage—that she
assumes, totally, her husband's position. That was one month ago.

One month ago I was still engaged, and I didn't know that humiliation could help a
person do six month's work in five weeks. I feel sick. I hate myself for being so stupid. And I
can't even tell you his name, because he's studying Xenodiplomacy at the Sorbonne, and I'm
afraid he'll think I sabotaged his career. He's one of those men who think women have no
honor. Can you understand how I fell in love with him? Because I can't.

I thought that I had the courage to tell you to your face that I don't want to be your heir,
that I'm sick and tired of people implying that my success at Univerzita Karlova is due to your
position and not to my talent, that I'm never seen as myself but only as an extension of you.
Can't I just abdicate being your sister and let you adopt? Or is it only death or marriage that
will remove me from your title? Not, of course, that I'm likely to find either situation appealing.
God, Charles, I feel like I have no direction, that I can't trust my own judgment, that I've been
abandoned in the middle of nowhere. And I hate being melodramatic.

[ERASE DOCUMENT]

Earth, Nairobi Port

A.L.C. 261 .5.3