Lew buried his face in his hand, and Regis, unable to shut out anything, felt the full, terrifying flow of his thoughts.
Ah Gods, merciful Evanda, I thought that was all a dream . . . burning, burning with rage and lust. . . . Marjorie in my arms, but turning, in the mad way dreams do, to Thyra even as I kissed her. . . . Kadarin had done this to me . . . and I remember Thyra weeping in my dream, crying as she had not done even when her father died. . . . It was not her choice either, Thyra was Kadarin’s pawn too. . . .
“She was born a few seasons after Caer Donn burned,” Rafe said. “Something happened to Thyra when this child was born; I think she went mad for a little while. . . . I do not remember; I was very young, and I had been ill for a long time after the—the burning. I thought, of course, that it was Kadarin’s child, he and Thyra had been together so long . . .”
And Regis followed Rafe’s thoughts too, a frightening picture of a woman maddened to raving, turning on the child she had not wanted to bear, conceived by a shameful trick . . . with a man drugged and unaware. A child who had had to be removed to safety from time to time. . . .
The little girl was awake now, sitting up, looking at them all curiously with those wide, improbable amber eyes. She looked at Rafe and smiled, evidently recognizing him. Then she looked at Lew, and Regis could feel it, like a blow, her shock at the sight of the ragged, ugly scars. Lew was scowling. Well, I don’t blame him—to find out, that way, that he had been drugged, used . . . Regis had seen Thyra only once or twice, and that briefly, but he had somehow, even then, sensed the tension of anger and desire between Thyra and Lew. And they had been together, sealed to Sharra . . .
The little girl sat up, tense as a small scared animal. Regis could feel again Lew’s shock at the sudden, frightening resemblance to Marjorie.
Then Lew said, his rough voice muted, “Don’t be scared, chiya. I’m not a pretty sight, but believe me, I don’t eat little girls.”
The little girl smiled. Her small face was charming, pointed in a small triangle. A tooth had come out of the middle of her smile.
“They said you were my father.”
“Oh, God, I suppose so,” Lew said. Suppose so. I know I am, damn it. He was wide open now, and Regis could not shut out his thoughts. Lew sat down uneasily on the edge of the cot. “What do they call you, chiy’lla?”
“Marja,” she said shyly. “I mean—Marguerida. Marguerida Kadarin.” She lisped the name in the soft mountain dialect. Marjorie’s name! “But I just be Marja.” She knelt upright, facing him. “What happen to your other hand?”
Regis had seen enough of Javanne’s children—and his own—to know how direct they were; but Lew was disconcerted by her straightforwardness. He blinked and said, “It was hurt and they had to cut it off.”
Her amber eyes were enormous. Regis could feel her thinking this over. “I’m sorry—” and then she said, trying the word out on her tongue, “Father.” She reached up and patted his scarred cheek with her small hand. Lew swallowed hard and caught her against him, his head bent; but Regis could feel that he was shaken, close to tears, and again could not shut out Lew’s thoughts.
I saw this child once, even before Marjorie and I were lovers, saw her in a vision, and thought it meant that Marjorie would bear my child, that all would be well with us. . . . I foresaw; but I did not foresee that Marjorie would have been dead for years before ever this daughter of mine and I should meet. . . .
“Where were you brought up, Marja?”
“In a big house with lots of other little boys and girls,” she said, “They’re orphans, but I’m something else. It’s a bad word that Matron says I must never, never say, but I’ll whisper it to you.”
“Don’t,” Lew said. He could guess; Regis remembered that there were still those who had called him bastard, even after he was acknowledged Heir to Alton. He had her snuggled on his lap now, in the curve of his arm.
If I had known, I would have come back—come back sooner. Somehow, somehow I would have managed to make amends to Thyra for what I did not remember doing . . .
Before Regis’s questioning look, Lew raised his head. He said doggedly, “I was drugged with aphrosone. It’s vicious stuff; you live a normal life—but you forget from minute to minute what is happening, remember nothing but symbolic dreams. . . . I’ve heard that if you tell a psychiatrist what you remember of the dreams under the drug, he will be able to help you remember what really happened. I didn’t want to know—” and his voice stuck in his throat.
That must have been after they escaped from Aldaran, Regis thought; Marjorie and Lew escaped together, and Kadarin dragged them back, and drugged him, forcing him to serve as the pole of power for Sharra. . . . No wonder he did not want to remember.
“It doesn’t matter,” Lew said, reading Regis’s thoughts, and his arm went around the child, so fiercely that she whimpered in protest. “She’s mine anyhow.”
He looks ugly but he’s nice, I’m glad he’s my father. . . .
They all stared at her in astonishment; she had reached out and touched their minds. Regis thought, but children never have the Gift. . . .
“Thyra was half chieri, they said,” Lew said quietly. “Obviously, Marja does have it. It’s not common, though it’s not unknown. Your Gift waked early, didn’t it, Rafe—nine or ten?”
Rafe nodded. He said “I remember our—foster-father Lord Aldaran—telling us about our mother. She was daughter to one of the forest-folk. And Thyra—” he hesitated, not wanting to say it.
“Go ahead,” said Lew, “whatever it is.”
“You did not know . . . Thyra. She was . . . like the chieri. Emmasca; no one was sure whether she was boy or girl. I can remember her like that, when I was very small, but only a little. Then Kadarin came—and very soon after, she began to wear women’s clothing and think of herself as a woman . . . that was when we began to call her Thyra; before that, she had another name . . . you did not know that she was as old as Beltran, that she was past her twentieth year when Marjorie was born.”
Lew shook his head, shocked. Regis picked up the thought, I believed she was three or four years older than Marjorie, no more . . . and a welter of images, resentment and desire, Thyra playing her harp, looking up at Lew in passionate wrath, Thyra’s face suddenly, dreamlike, melting into Marjorie’s . . . Marjorie, saying gently; “You were a little in love with Thyra, weren’t you, Lew?”
Lew set the child down. “I’ll have to find a nurse for her; there’s no woman in my apartments to look after her.” He stooped down and kissed the small rosy cheek. “Stay here with my kinswoman Linnell, little daughter.”
She caught at his hand and asked shakily, “Am I going to live with you now?”
“You are,” Lew said firmly, and gestured to Rafe and Regis to leave the room with him. Regis said, with a note of warning, “They are going to use her to depose you . . .”
“I’m damned sure they’ll try,” Lew said grimly, “A nice, peaceful puppet, pliant in Hastur hands—no, I don’t mean you, Regis, but the old man, and Dyan, and that precious kinsman of mine, Gabriel—the Council never did trust the male adult Altons too much, did they? So they exile me to Armida, or to a Tower, and bring this youngster up in the way they think she should go.” His face looked strained and he clenched his good hand so tightly that Regis was glad he was not the object of Lew’s wrath.
“Let them try,” he said, and his hand twitched as if he had it around the neck of some one, “Just let them try, damn them! She’s mine—and if they think they can take her away from me again, they are welcome to try!”
Regis and Rafe exchanged glances of mingled relief and dismay. Regis had hoped that something, somehow, would awaken Lew out of his deadly apathy, make him care for some one and something again. Now it seemed as if something had done just that. Well, they had raised the wind—but there might be hell to pay before this was over!
CHAPTER TEN
(Lew Alton’s narrative)
The day
was darkening toward twilight. Looking out over the city, I could see the streets beginning to fill with the laughing, masked, flower-tossing crowds of Festival Night. I would be expected to appear for the Alton Domain at the great ball in the Comyn Castle; it was simply part of being what I was, and although they had not made any overt move to depose me from my place as Head of the Domain, I intended to give them no chance to say I was neglecting any part of my duty. Now, among other things, I must somehow arrange proper care for Marja. Andres would guard her with his life, if he knew she were mine, but a child that age needed a woman to look after her, to dress her and bathe her and make sure she had proper playthings and companionship. Regis offered to place her in Javanne’s care; his sister had twin daughters who were about her age. I thanked him but refused; Javanne Hastur has never liked me, and Javanne’s husband, Gabriel Lanart-Hastur, was one of the main contenders for the Domain. The last thing I wanted was to place this child in his keeping.
I thought regretfully of Dio. I had been too quick to dissolve our marriage. She had wanted my child, and even though our son had died, perhaps she would have allowed this one to fill the place left vacant . . . but no; that would be asking too much, that she should love another woman’s child as her own. When I thought of her, the old suffering and resentment surfaced. In any case, if she were here, I could consult her about the proper way to raise a girl child. . . . I wondered how Callina would feel about it. And then I remembered that Callina had sworn to marry Beltran.
Over my dead body, I vowed silently, left Marja in Andres’s care (he said that he knew a decent woman, the wife of one of my father’s paxmen, who would come to care for her, if I took her home to Armida) and went to seek out Callina.
She looked weary and harried.
“The girl’s awake,” she said. “She was hysterical when she wakened; I had to give her a sedative. She’s calmed down a little, but of course she doesn’t speak the language, and she’s frightened in a strange place. Lew, what are we going to do now?”
“I won’t know till I see her. Where is she?”
So much had happened in the intervening hours that I had all but forgotten Ashara’s plan, the woman who had been brought through the Screen. She had been moved to a spacious room in the Aillard apartments; when we came in she was lying across the bed, her face buried in the covers, and she looked as if she had been crying; but it was a tearless and defiant face she raised to me. She was still Linnell’s double; even more so, having been decently dressed in clothing I supposed—correctly—to be some of Linnell’s own.
“Please tell me the truth,” she said steadily, as I came in. “Am I mad and locked up somewhere?” She spoke one of the dialects I knew perfectly well . . . of course; I had talked with her at length, that night on Vainwal when my son had been born, and died. And even as this crossed my mind I saw the memory reflected in her face.
“But I remember you!” she cried out, “The man with one hand—the one who had that—that—that terribly deformed—” My face must have done something I didn’t know about, because she stopped. “Where am I? Why have you kidnapped me and brought me here?”
I said quietly, “You needn’t be afraid.” I remembered saying the same thing to Marja; she had been afraid of me too. But I could not reassure her with the same words that had comforted a five-year-old child. “Allow me to introduce myself. Lewis-Kennard Montray-Lanart, z’par servu. . . .”
“I know who you are,” she said steadily. “What I don’t know is how I got here. A red sun—”
“If you’ll be calm, I’ll explain everything,” I said. “I am sorry, I cannot remember your name—”
“Kathie Marshall,” she said.
“Terranan?”
“Yes. But I know we’re not on Terra, nor on Vainwal,” she said, and her voice trembled; but she made no display of fear. I said, “The Terranan call this Cottman’s Star. We call it Darkover. We brought you here because we need your help—”
“You must be crazy,” she said. “How could I help you? And if I could, what makes you think I would, after you’ve kidnapped me?”
That was, I supposed, a fair question. I reached out to try to touch her mind; if she could not understand our language, at least this might reassure her that we meant no harm.
Callina said, “You were brought here because you were twinned in mind with my sister Linnell—”
She backed away. “Twinned minds? That’s ridiculous! Do you think I believe in that kind of thing?”
“If you do not,” said Callina quietly, “how is it that suddenly you can understand what I am saying?”
“Why, you’re speaking Terran . . . no!” she said, and I saw the terror rise in her mind again. “Why, what language am I speaking—?”
It was reasonable that if she was Linnell’s Cherillys double, she would have laran potential; at least she could understand us now. Callina said, “We hoped we could persuade you to help us; but there will be no compulsion and certainly no force.”
“Where am I, then?”
“In the Comyn Castle in Thendara.”
“But that’s halfway across the Galaxy . . .” she whispered, and turned frantically to stare out the window, at the red light of the declining sun. I saw her white hands clench on a fold of curtain. “A red sun—” she whispered, “Oh, I have nightmares like this when I can’t wake up . . .” She was so deathly white I feared she would collapse; Callina put an arm around her, and this time Kathie did not pull away.
“Try to believe us, child,” Callina said. “You are here, on Darkover. We brought you here.”
“And who are you?”
“Callina Aillard. Keeper of Comyn Council.”
“I’ve heard about the Keepers,” Kathie said, then, shakily, “This whole thing is crazy! You can’t take a Terran citizen and pull her halfway across the Galaxy like this! My—my father will tear the planet apart looking for me—” She covered her face with her hands. “I—I want to go home!”
I wished that we had never started this whole thing. I was remembering the aureole of doom, fate, death which I had seen around Linnell . . . merciful Evanda, was it only last night? I wondered if this had endangered Linnell in some way; what happened when Cherillys duplicates met one another? There was not even a legend to guide me. There was an old legend from the Kilghard Hills, about a mountain chief, or a bandit lord—in those days, I supposed, it would be hard to distinguish between them—who had located his duplicate so that he could command his army by being in two places at once; but I couldn’t remember any more than that, and I had no idea what had happened to the duplicate once his day was done. Possibly the bandit chief let his duplicate be hanged for his own crimes. In any case, I was sure he came to a bad end.
Would this woman’s presence endanger Linnell? There was one precaution I could take; I could put a protective barrier around her mind, so that she would keep her invulnerability, her complete unawareness of these Darkovan forces. I hoped that in touching her mind, to give her knowledge of the language, I had not already breached that unawareness; at least I would make sure no one else did so. In effect, I meant to put a barrier around her mind so that any attempt to make telepathic contact with Kathie, or dominate her mind, would be immediately shunted, through a sort of bypass circuit built into the barrier, to me.
There was no sense in trying to explain what I meant to do. I would have to start by explaining the very nature of the laran Gifts, and since, as Linnell’s exact duplicate, she had laran potential, when I had done explaining, she might be adapted and vulnerable to Darkovan forces. I reached out as gently as I could, and made contact.
It was an instant of screaming pain in every nerve, then it blanked out, and Kathie was sobbing compulsively.
“What did you do? I felt you—it was horrible—but no, that’s crazy—or I’m crazy—what happened?”
“Why couldn’t you wait till she understood?” Callina demanded. But I had done what I had to do, and I had done it now, because I wan
ted Kathie safely barriered before anyone saw her and guessed. But it hurt to see her cry; I had never been able to stand Linnell’s tears. Callina looked up helplessly, trying to soothe the weeping girl.
“Go away. I’ll handle this.” And as Kathie’s sobs broke out afresh, “Lew, go away!”
Suddenly I was angry. Why didn’t Callina trust me? I bowed elaborately and said, “Su serva, domna,” in my coldest, most ironic voice, turned my back and went out.
And in that moment, when I left Callina in anger, I snapped the trap shut on us all.
As darkness fell, every light in the Comyn Castle began to glow; once in every journey of Darkover around its sun, the Comyn, city folk from Thendara, mountain lords with business in the lowlands, offworld consuls and ambassadors and Terrans from the Trade City, mingled together on Festival Night with a great show of cordiality. Now it involved everyone of any importance on the planet; and Festival opened with a great display of dancing in the great ball-room.
Centuries of tradition made this a masked affair, so that Comyn and commoner might mingle on equal terms. In compliance with custom I wore a narrow half mask, but had made no other attempt at disguise; though I had worn my mechanical hand, simply so that I would not be a marked man. My father, I thought wryly, would have approved. I stood at one end of the hall, talking idly with a couple of Terrans in the space service, and as soon as I decently could, I got away and went to one of the windows, looking out at the four miniature moons that had nearly floated into conjunction.
Behind me the great hall blazed with colors and costumes reflecting every corner of Darkover and much of our history. Derik wore an elaborate and gaudy costume from the Ages of Chaos, but he was not masked—one part of a prince’s duty is simply to be visible to his subjects. I recognized Rafe Scott, too, in the mask and whip of a kifirgh duelist, complete with clawed gloves.
In the corner reserved by tradition for young girls, Linnell’s spangled mask was a travesty of disguise. Her eyes were glowing with happy consciousness of all the eyes on her; as comynara she was known to everyone on Darkover—at least in the Domains—but she rarely saw anyone outside the narrow circle of her cousins and the few selected companions permitted to a lady of the Aillard Domain. Now, masked, she could speak to, or even dance with, complete strangers; the excitement of it was almost too much for her.
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