“I’d like to be firmly allied to the Aillards—”
“We’re that already, sir, with Linnell handfasted to Derik. But we won’t be if you alienate them by losing face for Callina by marrying her off against her will—and to Aldaran,” Regis said. “And you’re forgetting the most important thing, Grandfather.”
“What’s that?” The old man snorted, getting up and pacing the room restlessly. “All this business about Sharra?”
“Don’t you see what’s happening, Grandfather? Derik did this behind our backs, and Beltran will be here on Festival Night. Which means he’s already on the road, unless he’s patched things up enough with the Terrans to get an aircraft or two, and it’s not very easy to fly through the Hellers.” He remembered someone telling him that they had been, profanely, dubbed worse things than that by the only Terrans to try to fly over them in anything slower and lower than a rocketplane; they were a nightmare of up-drafts, down-drafts and wild thermal patterns. “So when he gets here, what do you say? Please, Lord Aldaran, turn around and go home again, we’ve changed our minds!”
Old Hastur grimaced. “Wars have been fought for a lot less than that on Darkover.”
“And the Aldarans haven’t always observed the Compact that well,” Regis pointed out. “Either we have to let him marry Callina—or we have to insult Beltran by saying, maybe in public, ‘Sorry, Lord Aldaran, the woman won’t have you,’ or by telling him that our Prince and Ruler is a ninny who can’t be entrusted even with the making of a marriage for his paxman! Either way, Beltran will have a grievance! Grandfather, I find it hard to believe you couldn’t have foreseen this day!”
Hastur came and dropped in his carved and gilded presence-chair. He said, “I knew Derik couldn’t be trusted to make any important decision. I said again and again that I didn’t like him going about with Merryl! But could I have foreseen that Merryl would have the insolence to speak for the head of his Domain—or that Aldaran would listen?”
“If you had faced the fact that Derik was witless—well, not witless, not a ninny who should be in leading-strings with a he-governess to look after him, but certainly without the practical judgment of a boy of ten, let alone the presumptive Heir to the Throne—” Regis began, then sighed. He said, “Sir, done is done. There’s no point in arguing what we should have done. The question now is, how do we get out of this without a war?”
“I don’t suppose Callina would consent to marry him, just to go through the ceremony as a formality—” Hastur began, but broke off as his servant entered and stood near the door.
“Yes?”
“Domna Javanne Lanart-Hastur and her consort, Dom Gabriel.”
Regis went to kiss his sister’s hand and draw her into the room. Javanne Hastur was a tall, handsome woman, well into her thirties now, with the strong Hastur features. She glanced at both of them and said, “Have you been quarreling with Grandfather again, Regis?” She spoke as if reproving him for climbing trees and tearing his best holiday breeches.
“Not quarreling,” he said lightly. “Simply exchanging views on the political situation.”
Gabriel Lanart grimaced and said, “That’s bad enough.”
“And I was reminding my grandson and Heir,” said Danvan Hastur sharply, “that he is old to be unmarried, and suggesting that we might even marry him to Linnell Aillard-Lindir, if that will convince him to settle down. In Evanda’s name, Regis, what are you waiting for?”
Regis tried to control the anger surging up in him and said, “I am waiting, sir, to meet a woman with whom I can contemplate spending the rest of my life. I’m not refusing to marry—”
“I should hope not,” his grandfather snorted. “It’s—undignified for a man your age, to be still unmarried. I don’t say a word against the Syrtis youngster; he’s a good man, a suitable companion for you. But in the times that are coming, one of the things we don’t need is for anyone to name the Heir to Hastur in contempt as a lover of men!”
Regis said evenly, “And if I am, sir?”
His grandfather was denying too many unpalatable facts this evening. Now let him chew on this one. Javanne looked shocked and dismayed. Granted, it was not the right thing to say before one’s sister, but after all, Regis defended himself angrily, his grandfather knew perfectly well what the situation was.
Danvan Hastur said, “Nonsense! You’re young, that’s all. But if you’re old enough to have such pronounced views, and if I’m supposed to take them seriously, then you ought to be willing to convince me you’re mature enough to be worth hearing. I want you married, Regis, before this year is out.”
Then you will be in want for a long time, Grandfather, Regis thought, but he did not say it aloud. Javanne frowned, and he knew that she, who had somewhat more telepathic sensitivity than his grandfather, had followed the thought. She said, “Even Dyan Ardais has provided his Domain with an Heir, Regis.”
“Why, so have I,” said Regis. “Your own son, Javanne. Would it not please you if he were Hastur-lord after me? And I have other sons by other women, even though they are nedestro. I am perfectly capable of—and willing—to father sons for the Domain. But I do not want a marriage which will simply be a hoax, a sham, to please the Council. When I meet a woman I wish to marry, I wish to be free to marry her.” And as he spoke, it seemed to him that he walked side by side with someone, and the overpowering emotion that surged up in him was like nothing he had ever felt, except in the first sudden outpouring of love and gratitude when Danilo had awakened his laran and he had allowed himself to accept it, and himself. But although he knew there was a woman by his side, he could not see her face.
“You are a romantic fool,” said Javanne. “Marriage is not like that.” But she smiled and he saw the kindly look she gave Gabriel. Javanne was fortunate; she was well content in her marriage.
“When I find a woman who suits me as well as Gabriel suits you, sister, then I will marry her,” he said, and tried to keep his voice light. “And that I pledge to you. But I have not found such a woman yet, and I am not willing to marry just because it would please the Council, or you, or grandfather.”
“I don’t like hearing it said,” Javanne said, frowning, “that the Heir to Hastur is a lover of men. And if you do not marry soon, Regis, it will be said, and there will be scandal.”
“If it is said, it will be said and there’s an end to it,” Regis said, in exasperation. “I will not live my life in fear of Council tongues! There are many things that would trouble me more than Council’s speculation on my love life—which, after all, is none of their affair! I thought we came here to discuss Derik, and the other troubles we had in Council! And to have dinner—and I’ve seen no sign of food or drink! Are we to stand about wrangling over my personal affairs while the servants try to keep dinner hot, afraid to interrupt us while we are quarreling about when to hold my wedding?”
He was ready to storm out of the apartments, and his grandfather knew it. Danvan Hastur said, “Will you ask the servants to set dinner, Javanne?” As she went to do it, he beckoned a man to take Gabriel’s cloak. “You could have brought your son, Gabriel.”
Gabriel smiled and said, “He has guard duty this night, sir.”
Hastur nodded. “How does he do in the cadets, then? And Rafael, he’s in the first year, isn’t he?”
Gabriel grinned and said, “I’m trying hard not to notice Rafael, kinsman. He’s probably having the same trouble any lad of rank does in the cadets—young Gabe last year, or Regis, or Lew Alton—I still remember having to give Lew some extra skills in wrestling. They really had it in for him, they made his life miserable! I suppose Kennard himself had the same trouble when he was a first-year cadet. I didn’t, but I was out of the direct line of Comyn succession.” He sighed and said, “Too bad about Kennard. We’ll miss him. I’ll go on commanding the Guardsmen until Lew is able to make decisions—he’s really ill, and this business of Sharra hasn’t helped. But when he recovers—”
“You certainly don�
�t think Lew’s fit to rule the Alton Domain, do you?” Hastur asked, shocked. “You saw it as well as I did! The boy’s a wreck!”
“Hardly a boy,” Regis said. “Lew is six years older than I, which means he is halfway through his twenties. It’s only fair to wait until he’s recovered from the loss of his father, and from the journey from Vainwal. Kennard told me, once, that most long passages have to be made under heavy sedation. But when he recovers from that—”
Hastur opened his mouth to speak, but before he could say anything, Javanne said, “Dinner is on the table. Shall we go in?” and took her husband’s arm. Regis followed, with his grandfather. Dinner had been laid on a small table in the next room, with elegant cloths and the finest dishes and goblets; Javanne, at her grandfather’s nod, signaled for service and poured wine. But Gabriel said, as he spread his napkin on his knees, “Lew’s sound enough, I think.”
“He has only one hand; can he command the Guards as a cripple?”
“Precedent enough for that too,” said Gabriel. “Two or three generations ago, Dom Esteban—who was my great-grandfather and Lew’s too, I think—commanded the Guards for ten years from a wheelchair after he lost the use of his legs in the Catmen’s War. For that matter, there was Lady Bruna, who took up her sword and made a notable commander, once, when the Heir was but a babe—” he shrugged. “Lew can dress himself and look after himself one-handed—I saw him. As for the rest—well, he was a damned good officer once. And if he wants me to go on commanding the Guards—well, he’s the head of my Domain, and I’ll do what he says. And the boys coming up—and there’s Marius. He hasn’t had military training, but he’s perfectly well-educated.”
“Terran education,” Hastur said dryly.
Regis said, “Knowledge is knowledge, Grandfather.” He remembered what he had been thinking in Council, that it made more sense to have Mikhail, perhaps, instructed under the Terrans than to shove him into the cadets for military discipline and training in swordplay. “Marius is intelligent—”
“And has some unfortunate Terran friends,” said Javanne scornfully. “If he hadn’t involved himself with the Terrans, he wouldn’t have brought out all that business about Sharra today at Council!”
“And then we wouldn’t know what was going on,” said Regis. “When a wolf is loose in the pastures, do we care if the herdsman loses a night’s sleep? And whose fault is it that Marius was not given cadet training? I’m sure he would have done as well there as I did. We chose to turn him over to the Terrans, and now, I’m afraid, we have to live with what we have made of him. We made certain that one Domain, at least, would remain allied to the Terrans!”
“The Altons have always been too ready to deal with the Terrans,” said Hastur. “Ever since the days when Andrew Carr married into that Domain—”
“Done is done,” Gabriel said, “there’s no need to hash it over now, sir. I didn’t see any signs that Lew was so happy among the Terrans that he can’t rule the Altons well—”
“You’re acting as if he were going to be Head of the Domain,” said Hastur.
Gabriel laid down his spoon, letting the soup roll out on the tablecloth. “Now look here, Grandfather. It’s one thing for me to claim the Domain when we had no notion whether Lew was alive or dead. But Council accepted him as Kennard’s Heir, and that’s all there is to it. It’s up to him, as head of the Domain, to say what’s to be done about Marius, but I suppose he’ll name him Heir. If it were Jeff Kerwin I might challenge—he doesn’t want the Domain, he wasn’t brought up to it—”
“A Terran?” asked Javanne in amazement.
“Jeff isn’t a Terran. I ought to say, Dom Damon—he has no Terran blood at all. His father was Kennard’s older brother. He was fostered on Terra and brought up to think he was Terran, and he bears his Terran foster-father’s name, that’s all,” Gabriel explained, patiently, not for the first time. “He has less Terran blood than I do. My father was Domenic Ridenow-Lanart, but it was common knowledge that he was fathered by Andrew Carr. Twin sisters married Andrew Carr and Damon Ridenow—”
Danvan Hastur frowned. “That was a long time ago.”
“Funny, how a generation or two wipes out the scandal,” said Gabriel with a grin. “I thought that had all been hashed over, back when they tested Lew for the Alton Gift. He had it, I didn’t, and that was that.”
Danvan Hastur said quietly “I want you at the head of the Alton Domain, Gabriel. It is your duty to the Hastur clan.”
Gabriel picked up his spoon, frowned, rubbed it briefly on the napkin and thrust it back into his soup. He took a mouthful or two before he said, “I did my duty to the Hastur clan when I gave them two—no, three—sons, sir, and one of them to be Regis’s Heir. But I swore loyalty to Kennard, too. Do you honestly think I’m going to fight my cousin for his rightful place as Alton Heir?”
But that, Regis thought, watching the old man’s face, is exactly what Danvan Hastur does think. Or did.
“The Altons are allied to Terra,” he said. “They’ve made no secret of it. Kennard, now Lew, and even Marius, have Terran education. The only way we can keep the Alton Domain on the Darkovan side is to have a strong Hastur man in command, Gabriel. Challenge him again before the Council; I don’t even think he wants to fight for it.”
“Lord of Light, sir! Do you honestly think—” Gabriel broke off. He said, “I can’t do it, Lord Hastur, and I won’t.”
“Do you want a half-Terran pawn of Sharra at the head of the Alton Domain?” Javanne demanded, staring at her husband.
“That’s for him to say,” said Gabriel steadily. “I took oath to obey any lawful command you gave me, Lord Hastur, but it isn’t a lawful command when you bid me challenge the rightful Head of my Domain. If you’ll pardon my saying so, sir, that’s a long way from being a lawful command.”
Old Hastur said impatiently “The important thing at this time is that the Domains should stand fast. Lew’s unfit—”
“If he’s unfit, sir—” and Gabriel looked troubled—“it’ll be apparent soon enough.”
Javanne said shrilly, “I thought they had deposed him as Kennard’s successor after the Sharra rebellion. And now both he and his brother are still tied up with Sharra—”
Regis said, “And so am I, sister; or weren’t you listening?”
She raised her eyes to him and said, disbelieving, “You?”
Regis reached, with hesitant fingers, for his matrix; fumbled at taking it from its silk wrapping. He remembered that Javanne had, years ago, taught him to use it, and she remembered too, for she raised her angry eyes and suddenly softened, and smiled at him. There was the old image in her mind, as if the girl she had been—herself motherless, trying to mother her motherless baby brother—had bent over him as she had so often done when he was small, swung him up into her arms— For a moment the hard-faced woman, the mother of grown sons, was gone, and she was the gentle and loving sister he had once known.
Regis said softly, “I am sorry, breda, but things don’t go away because you are afraid of them. I didn’t want you to have to see this.” He sighed and let the blue crystal fall into his cupped hand.
Raging, flaming in his mind, the form of fire . . . a great tossing shape, a woman, tall, bathed in flame, her hair rising like restless fires, her arms shackled in golden chains . . . Sharra!
When he had seen it six years ago at the height of the Sharra rebellion, his laran had been newly waked; he had been, moreover, half dead with threshold sickness, and Sharra had been only another of the horrors of that time. When he had seen it briefly in Marius’s house, he had been too shocked to notice. Now something cold took him by the throat; his flesh crawled on his bones, every hair on his body rose slowly upright, beginning with his forearms, slowly moving over all his body. Regis knew, without knowing how he knew, that he looked upon a very ancient enemy of his race and his caste, and something in his body, cell-deep, bone-deep, knew and recognized it. Nausea crawled through his body and he felt the sour taste of t
error in his mouth.
Confused, he thought, but Sharra was used and chained by the forge-folk, surely I am simply remembering the destruction of Sharra loosed, a city rising in flame . . . it is no worse than a forest fire—but he knew this was something worse, something he could not understand, something that fought to draw him into itself. . . . recognition, fear, a fascination almost sexual in its import . . .
“Aaahh—” It was a half-drawn breath of horror; he heard, saw, felt Javanne’s mind, her terror reaching out, entangled. She clutched at the matrix under her own dress as if it had burned her, and Regis, with a mighty effort, wrenched his mind and his eyes from the Form of Fire blazing from his matrix. But Javanne clung, in terror and fascination. . . .
And something in Regis, long dormant, unguessed, seemed to uncoil within him; as a skilled swordsman takes the hilt in his hand, without knowing what moves he will make, or which strokes he will answer, knowing only that he can match his opponent, he felt that strangeness rise, take over what he did next. He reached out into the depths of the fire, and delicately picked Javanne’s mind loose, focusing so tightly that he did not even touch the Form of Fire . . . as if she were a puppet, and the strings had been cut, she slumped back fainting in her chair, and Gabriel caught her scowling.
“What did you do?” he demanded, “What have you done to her?”
Javanne, half-conscious, was blinking. Regis, with careful deliberation, wrapped up his matrix. He said, “It is dangerous to you too, Javanne. Don’t come near it again.”
Danvan Hastur had been staring, bewildered, as his grandson and granddaughter stared in terror, paralyzed, then, as they withdrew. Regis remembered, wearily, that his grandfather had little laran. Regis himself did not understand what he had done, only knew he was shaking down deep in the bones, exhausted, as weary as if he had been on the fire-lines for three days and three nights. Without knowing he was doing it, he reached for a plateful of hot rolls, smeared honey thickly on one and gobbled it down, feeling the sugar restoring him.
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