“There’s no need to send anyone, Lord Alton.” Danilo Syrtis came away from the fire and bowed courteously. He was a slender, bright-eyed boy of fourteen or so, wearing shabby garments which I vaguely recognized as once having been my brother’s or mine, long outgrown. That was like Father; he’d make sure that any protégé of his started with the proper outfit for a cadet. Father laid a hand on his shoulder. “You’re sure? Well, then, run along, my lad, and good luck go with you.”
Danilo, with a polite formula murmured vaguely at all of us, withdrew. Dyan Ardais, warming his hands at the fire, looked after him, eyebrows lifted. “Nice looking youngster. Another of your nedestro sons, Kennard?”
“Dani? Zandru’s hells, no! I’d be proud enough to claim him, but truly he’s none of mine. The family has Comyn blood, a few generations back, but they’re poor as miser’s mice; old Dom Felix couldn’t give him a good start in life, so I got him a cadet commission.”
Regis turned away from the fire and said, “Danilo! I knew I should have recognized him; he was at the monastery one year. I truly couldn’t remember his name, Uncle. I should have greeted him!”
The word he used for uncle was the casta term slightly more intimate than kinsman: I knew he had been speaking to my father, but Dyan chose to take it as addressed to himself. “You’ll see him in the cadets, surely. And I haven’t greeted you properly, either.” He came and took Regis in a kinsman’s embrace, pressing his cheek, to which Regis submitted, a little flustered; then, holding him at arm’s length, Dyan looked closely at him. “Does your sister hate you for being the beauty of the family, Regis?”
Regis looked startled and a little embarrassed. He said, laughing nervously, “Not that she ever told me. I suspect Javanne thinks I should be running around in a pinafore.”
“Which proves what I have always said, that women are no judge of beauty.” My father gave him a black scowl and said, “Damn it, Dyan, don’t tease him.”
Dyan would have said more—damn the man, was he starting that again, after all the trouble last year—but a servant in Hastur livery came in quickly and said, “Lord Alton, a message from the Regent.”
Father tore the letter open, began to swear volubly in three languages. He told the messenger to wait while he got into some dry clothes, disappeared into his room, and then I heard him shouting to Andres. Soon he came out, tucking a dry shirt into dry breeches, and scowling angrily.
“Father, what is it?”
“The usual,” he said grimly, “trouble in the city. Hastur’s summoned every available Council elder and sending two extra patrols. Evidently a crisis of some sort.”
Damn, I thought. After the long ride from Armida and a soaking, to call him out at night . . . “Will you need me, Father?”
He shook his head. “No. Not necessary, son. Don’t wait up, I’ll probably be out all night.” As he went out, Dyan said, “I expect a similar summons awaits me in my own rooms; I had better go and find out. Good night, lads. I envy you your good night’s sleep.” He added, with a nod to Regis, “These others will never appreciate a proper bed. Only we who have slept on stone know how to do that.” He managed to make a deep formal bow to Regis and simultaneously ignore me completely—it wasn’t easy when we were standing side by side—and went away.
I looked around to see what remained to be settled. I sent Marius to change out of his drenched clothes—too old for a nanny and too young for an aide-de-camp, he’s left to me much of the time. Then I arranged to have a room made ready for Regis. “Have you a man to dress you, Regis? Or shall I have father’s body-servant wait on you tonight?”
“I learned to look after myself at Nevarsin,” Regis said. He looked warmer now, less tense. “If the Regent is sending for all the Council, I suspect it’s really serious and not just that Grandfather has forgotten me again. That makes me feel better.”
Now I was free to get out of my own wet things. “When you’ve changed, Regis, we’ll have dinner here in front of the fire. I’m not officially on duty till tomorrow morning.”
I went and changed quickly into indoor clothing, slid my feet into fur-lined ankle-boots and looked briefly in on Marius; I found him sitting up in bed, eating hot soup and already half asleep. It was a long ride for a boy his age. I wondered again why Father had subjected him to it.
The servants had set up a hot meal before the fire, in front of the old stone seats there. The lights in our part of the castle are the old ones, luminous rock from deep caves which charge with light all day and give off a soft glow all night. Not enough for reading or fine needlework, but plenty for a quiet meal and a comfortable talk by firelight. Regis came back, in dry garments and indoor boots, and I gestured the old steward away. “Go and get your own supper; Lord Regis and I can wait on ourselves.”
I took the covers off the dishes. They had sent in a fried fowl and some vegetable stew. I helped him, saying, “Not very festive, but probably the best they could do at short notice.”
“It’s better than we got on the fire-lines,” Regis said and I grinned. “So you remember that too?”
“How could I forget it? Armida was like home to me. Does Kennard still break his own horses, Lew?”
“No, he’s far too lame,” I said, and wondered again how Father would manage in the coming season. Selfishly, I hoped he would be able to continue in command. It’s hereditary to the Altons, and I was next in line for it. They had learned to tolerate me as his deputy, holding captain’s rank. As commander, I’d have all those battles to fight again.
We talked for a little while about Armida, about horses and hawks, while Regis finished the stew in his bowl. He picked up an apple and went to the fireplace, where a pair of antique swords, used only in the sword-dance now, hung over the mantel. He touched the hilt of one and I asked, “Have you forgotten all your fencing in the monastery, Regis?”
“No, there were some of us who weren’t to be monks, so Father Master gave us leave to practice an hour every day, and an arms-master came to give us lessons.”
Over wine we discussed the state of the roads from Nevarsin.
“Surely you didn’t ride in one day from the monastery?”
“Oh, no. I broke my journey at Edelweiss.”
That was on Alton lands. When Javanne Hastur married Gabriel Lanart, ten years ago, my father had leased them the estate. “Your sister is well, I hope?”
“Well enough, but extremely pregnant just now,” Regis said, “and Javanne’s done a ridiculous thing. It made sense to call their first son Rafael, after her father and mine. And the second, of course, is the younger Gabriel. But when she named the third Mikhail, she made the whole thing absurd. I believe she’s praying frantically for a girl this time!”
I laughed. By all accounts the “Lanart angels” should be named for the archfiends, not the archangels; and why should a Hastur seek names from cristoforo mythology? “Well, she and Gabriel have sons enough.”
“True. I am sure my grandfather is annoyed that she should have so many sons, and cannot give them Domain-right in Hastur. And I should have told Kennard; her husband will be here in a few days to take his place in the Guard. He would have ridden with me, but with Javanne so near to her time, he got leave to remain with her till she is delivered.”
I nodded; of course he would stay. Gabriel Lanart was a minor noble of the Alton Domain, a kinsman of our own, and a telepath. Of course he would follow the custom of the Domains, that a man shares with his child’s mother the ordeal of birth, staying in rapport with her until the child is born and all is well. Well, we could spare him for a few days. A good man, Gabriel.
“Dyan seemed to take it for granted that you would be in the cadets this year,” I said.
“I don’t know if I’ll have a choice. Did you?”
I hadn’t, of course. But that the heir to Hastur, of all people, should question it—that made me uneasy.
Regis sat on the stone bench, restlessly scuffing his felt ankle-boots on the floor. “Lew, you�
�re part Terran and yet you’re Comyn. Do you feel as if you belonged to us? Or to the Terrans?”
A disturbing question, an outrageous question, and one I had never dared ask myself. I felt angry at him for speaking it, as if taunting me with what I was. Here I was an alien; among the Terrans, a freak, a mutant, a telepath. I said at last, bitterly, “I’ve never belonged anywhere. Except, perhaps, at Arilinn.”
Regis raised his face, and I was startled at the sudden anguish there. “Lew, what does it feel like to have laran?”
I stared at him, disconcerted. The question touched off another memory. That summer at Armida, in his twelfth year. Because of his age, and because there was no one else, it had fallen to me to answer certain questions usually left to fathers or elder brothers, to instruct him in certain facts proper to adolescents. He had blurted those questions out, too, with the same kind of half-embarrassed urgency, and I’d found it just as difficult to answer them. There are some things it’s almost impossible to discuss with someone who hasn’t shared the experience. I said at last, slowly, “I hardly know how to answer. I’ve had it so long, it would be harder to imagine what it feels like not to have laran.”
“Were you born with it, then?”
“No, no, of course not. But when I was ten, or eleven, I began to be aware of what people were feeling. Or thinking. Later my father found out—proved to them—that I had the Alton gift, and that’s rare even—” I set my teeth and said it, “even in legitimate sons. After that, they couldn’t deny me Comyn rights.”
“Does it always come so early? Ten, eleven?”
“Have you never been tested? I was almost certain . . .” I felt a little confused. At least once during the shared fears of that last season together, on the fire-lines, I had touched his mind, sensed that he had the gift of our caste. But he had been very young then. And the Alton gift is forced rapport, even with non-telepaths.
“Once,” said Regis, “about three years ago. The leronis said I had the potential, as far as she could tell, but she could not reach it.”
I wondered if that was why the Regent had sent him to Nevarsin: either hoping that discipline, silence and isolation would develop his laran, which sometimes happened, or trying to conceal his disappointment in his heir.
“You’re a licensed matrix mechanic, aren’t you, Lew? What’s that like?”
This I could answer. “You know what a matrix is: a jewel stone that amplifies the resonances of the brain and transmutes psi power into energy. For handling major forces, it demands a group of linked minds, usually in a tower circle.”
“I know what a matrix is,” he said. “They gave me one when I was tested.” He showed it to me, hung, as most of us carried them, in a small silk-lined leather bag about his neck. “I’ve never used it, or even looked at it again. In the old days, I know, they made these mind-links through the Keepers. They don’t have Keepers any more, do they?”
“Not in the old sense,” I said, “although the woman who works centerpolar in the matrix circles is still called a Keeper. In my father’s time they discovered that a Keeper could function, except at the very highest levels, without all the old taboos and terrible training, the sacrifice, isolation, special cloistering. His foster-sister Cleindori was the first to break the tradition, and they don’t train Keepers in the old way any more. It’s too difficult and dangerous, and it’s not fair to ask anyone to give up their whole lives to it any more. Now everyone spends three years or less at Arilinn, and then spends the same amount of time outside, so that they can learn to live normal lives.” I was silent, thinking of my circle at Arilinn, now scattered to their homes and estates. I had been happy there, useful, accepted. Competent. Some day I would go back to this work again, in the relays.
“What it’s like,” I continued, “it’s—it’s intimate. You’re completely open to the members of your circle. Your thoughts, your very feelings affect them, and you’re wholly vulnerable to theirs. It’s more than the closeness of blood kin. It’s not exactly love. It’s not sexual desire. It’s like—like living with your skin off. Twice as tender to everything. It’s not like anything else.”
His eyes were rapt. I said harshly, “Don’t romanticize it. It can be wonderful, yes. But it can be sheer hell. Or both at once. You learn to keep your distance, just to survive.”
Through the haze of his feelings I could pick up just a fraction of his thoughts. I was trying to keep my awareness of him as low as possible. He was, damn it, too vulnerable. He was feeling forgotten, rejected, alone. I couldn’t help picking it up. But a boy his age would think it prying.
“Lew, the Alton gift is the ability to force rapport. If I do have laran, could you open it up, make it function?”
I looked at him in dismay. “You fool. Don’t you know I could kill you that way?”
“Without laran, my life doesn’t amount to much.” He was as taut as a strung bow. Try as I might, I could not shut out the terrible hunger in him to be part of the only world he knew, not to be so desperately deprived of his heritage.
It was my own hunger. I had felt it, it seemed, since my birth. Yet nine months before my birth, my father had made it impossible for me to belong wholly to his world and mine.
I faced the torture of knowing that, deeply as I loved my father, I hated him, too. Hated him for making me bastard, half-caste, alien, belonging nowhere. I clenched my fists, looking away from Regis. He had what I could never have. He belonged, full Comyn, by blood and law, legitimate—
And yet he was suffering, as much as I was. Would I give up laran to be legitimate, accepted, belonging?
“Lew, will you try at least?”
“Regis, if I killed you, I’d be guilty of murder.” His face turned white. “Frightened? Good. It’s an insane idea. Give it up, Regis. Only a catalyst telepath can ever do it safely and I’m not one. As far as I know, there are no catalyst telepaths alive now. Let well enough alone.”
Regis shook his head. He said, forcing the words through a dry mouth. “Lew, when I was twelve years old you called me bredu. There is no one else, no one I can ask for this. I don’t care if it kills me. I have heard”—he swallowed hard—“that bredin have an obligation, one to the other. Was it only an idle word, Lew?”
“It was no idle word, bredu,” I muttered, wrung with his pain, “but we were children then. And this is no child’s play, Regis, it’s your life.”
“Do you think I don’t know that?” He was stammering. “It is my life. At least it can make the difference in what my life will be.” His voice broke. “Bredu . . .” he said again and was silent, and I knew it was because he could not go on without weeping.
The appeal left me defenseless to him. Try as I might to stay aloof, that helpless, choked “Bredu . . .” had broken my last defense. I knew I was going to do what he wanted. “I can’t do what was done to me,” I told him. “That’s a specific test for the Alton gift—forcing rapport—and only a full Alton can live through it. My father tried it, just once, with my full knowledge that it might very well kill me, and only for about thirty seconds. If the gift hadn’t bred true, I’d have died. The fact that I didn’t die was the only way he could think of to prove to Council that they could not refuse to accept me.” My voice wavered. Even after almost ten years, I didn’t like thinking about it. “Your blood, or your paternity, isn’t in question. You don’t need to take that kind of risk.”
“You were willing to take it.”
I had been. Time slid out of focus, and once again I stood before my father, his hands touching my temples, living again that memory of terror, that searing agony. I had been willing because I had shared my father’s anguish, the terrible need in him to know I was his true son—the knowledge that if he could not force Council to accept me as his son, life alone was worth nothing. I would rather have died, just then, than live to face the knowledge of failure.
Memory receded. I looked into Regis’ eyes.
“I’ll do what I can. I can test you, as I was te
sted at Arilinn. But don’t expect too much. I’m not a leronis, only a technician.”
I drew a long breath. “Show me your matrix.”
He fumbled with the strings at the neck, tipped the stone out in his palm, held it out to me. That told me as much as I needed to know. The lights in the small jewel were dim, inactive. If he had worn it for three years and his laran was active, he would have rough-keyed it even without knowing it. The first test had failed, then.
As a final test, with excruciating care, I laid a fingertip against the stone; he did not flinch. I signaled to him to put it away, loosened the neck of the case of my own. I laid my matrix, still wrapped in the insulating silk, in the palm of my hand, then bared it carefully.
“Look into this. No, don’t touch it,” I warned, with a drawn breath. “Never touch a keyed matrix; you could throw me into shock. Just look into it.”
Regis bent, focused with motionless intensity on the tiny ribbons of moving light inside the jewel. At last he looked away. Another bad sign. Even a latent telepath should have had enough energon patterns disrupted inside his brain to show some reaction: sickness, nausea, causeless euphoria. I asked cautiously, not wanting to suggest anything to him, “How do you feel?”
“I’m not sure,” he said uneasily. “It hurt my eyes.” Then he had at least latent laran. Arousing it, though, might be a difficult and painful business. Perhaps a catalyst telepath could have roused it. They had been bred for that work, in the days when Comyn did complex and life-shattering work in the higher-level matrices. I’d never known one. Perhaps the set of genes was extinct.
Just the same, as a latent, he deserved further testing. I knew he had the potential. I had known it when he was twelve years old.
“Did the leronis test you with kirian?” I asked.
“She gave me a little. A few drops.”
“What happened?”
“It made me sick,” Regis said, “dizzy. Flashing colors in front of my eyes. She said I was probably too young for much reaction, that in some people, laran developed later.”
Heritage and Exile Page 3
