Andrew saw, with relief, that the lonely, introspective sadness slid off his face as Ellemir and Callista came in.
“Come, Ellemir, see the rooms I have chosen for us.”
He took her through a door at the far end, and Andrew sensed, rather than heard, that he was kissing her. Callista followed them with her eyes and smiled. “I am glad to see them so happy.”
“Are you happy too, my love?”
She said, “I love you, Andrew. I do not find it so easy to rejoice. Perhaps I am naturally a little less light of heart. Come, show me the rooms we are to have.”
She approved of nearly everything, though she pointed out half a dozen pieces of furniture which, she said, were so old they were not safe to sit on, and called a steward, directing that they be taken away. She called the maids and gave directions about what things were to be brought from the household storerooms for bedroom and bath linens, and sent another to have her clothing brought and stored in the enormous clothes-press in her dressing room. Andrew listened in silence, finally saying, “You are quite a homemaker, Callista!”
Her laugh was delightful. “It is all pretense. I have been listening to Ellemir, that is all, because I do not want to sound ignorant in front of her servants. I know very little about such things. I have been taught to sew, because I was never allowed to let my hands sit idle, but when I watch Ellemir about the kitchens, I realize that I know less of housekeeping than any girl of ten.”
“I feel the same way,” Andrew confessed. “Every thing I learned in the Terran Zone is useless to me now.”
“But you know something of horse-breaking—”
Andrew laughed. “Yes, and in the Terran Zone that was considered an anachronism, a useless skill. I used to take Dad’s saddle horses and break them, but I thought when I left Arizona that I’d never ride again.”
“Does everyone on Terra walk, then?”
He shook his head. “Motor transit. Slidewalks. Horses were an exotic luxury for rich eccentrics.” He went to the window and looked out on the sunlit landscape. “Strange, that of all the known worlds of the Terran Empire, I should have come here.” A faint shudder went through him at the thought of how narrowly he could have missed what now seemed his fate, his life, the true purpose for which he had been born. He wanted desperately to reach out and draw Callista into his arms, but as if his thought had somehow reached her, she went tense and white. He sighed and stepped a pace away from her.
She said, as if completing a thought that no longer interested her much, “Our horse-handler is already an old man, and without Father at hand, it may be up to you to teach the younger ones.” Then she stopped and looked up at him, twisting the end of one long braid.
“I want to talk to you,” she said abruptly.
He had never decided whether her eyes were blue or gray; they seemed to vary with the light, and in this light they were almost colorless. “Andrew, will this be too hard on you? To share a room when we cannot—as yet—share a bed?”
He had been warned of this when they first discussed marriage, that she had been conditioned so deeply that it might be a long time before they could consummate their marriage. He had promised her then, unasked, that he would never hurry her or try to put any pressure on her, that he would wait as long as necessary. He said now, touching her fingertips lightly, “Don’t worry about it, Callista. I promised you that already.”
Faint color crept slowly across her pale cheeks. She said, “I have been taught that it is . . . shameful to arouse a desire I will not satisfy. Yet if I stay apart from you, and do not rouse it, so that in turn your thoughts may act on me, then things may never be different at all. If we are together, then, slowly perhaps, things may be different. But it will be so hard on you, Andrew.” Her face twisted. She said, “I don’t want you to be unhappy.”
Once, once only, and with great constraint, and briefly, he had spoken of this with Leonie. Now, as he stood looking down at Callista, that brief meeting, difficult on both sides, came back to his mind as if again he stood before the Comyn leronis. She had come to him in the courtyard, saying quietly, “Look at me, Terran.” He had raised his eyes, unable to resist. Leonie was so tall that their eyes were on a level. She had said, in a low voice, “I want to see to what manner of man I am giving the child I love.” Their eyes had met, and for a long moment Andrew Carr felt as if every thought of his entire life had been turned over and rummaged through by the woman, as if in that one glance, and not a long one, she had drawn the very inmost part from him and left it to dangle there, cold and withering. Finally—it had not been more than a second or two, but it had seemed an age—Leonie had sighed and said, “So be it. You are honest and kind and you mean well, but have you the faintest idea of what a Keeper’s training means, or how hard it will be for Callista to lay it down?”
He had wanted to protest, but instead he had only shaken his head and said humbly, “How can I know? But I will try to make it easy for her.”
Leonie’s sigh had seemed ripped up from the very depths of her being. She had said, “Nothing you could do, in this world or the next, could make it easy for her. If you are patient and careful—and lucky—you may make it possible. I do not want Callista to suffer. And yet in the choice she has made, there will be much suffering. She is young, but not so young that she can put aside her training without pain. The training that makes a Keeper is long; it cannot be undone in a little while.”
Andrew had protested. “I know—” and Leonie had sighed again. “Do you? I wonder. It is not only a matter of delaying the consummation of your marriage for days, or perhaps for seasons; that will be only the beginning. She loves you, and is eager for your love—”
“I can be patient until she is ready,” Andrew had sworn, but Leonie had said, shaking her head, “Patience may not be enough. What Callista has learned cannot be unlearned. You do not want to know about that. Perhaps it is better for you not to know too much.”
He had said again, protesting, “I’ll try to make it easy for her,” and again Leonie had shaken her head and sighed, repeating, “Nothing you could do could make it easy. Chickens cannot go back into eggs. Callista will suffer, and I fear you will suffer with her, but if you are—if you both are lucky, you may make it possible for her to retrace her steps. Not easy. But possible.”
Indignation had burst out of him then. “How can you people do this to young girls? How can you destroy their lives this way?” But Leonie had not answered, lowering her head and moving noiselessly away from him. When he blinked she was gone, as swiftly as if she had been a shadow, so that he began to doubt his sanity, began to wonder if she had ever been there at all, or if his own doubts and fears had constructed an hallucination.
Callista, standing before him in the room that—tomorrow—would be theirs to share, raised her eyes again, slowly, to his. She said in a whisper, “I did not know Leonie had come to you that way,” and he saw her hands clench tightly, so tightly that the small knuckles were white as bone. Then she said, looking away from him, “Andrew, promise me something.”
“Anything, my love.”
“Promise me. If you ever . . . desire some woman, promise me you will take her and not suffer needlessly. . . .”
He exploded. “What kind of man do you think I am? I love you! Why would I want anyone else?”
“I cannot expect—It is not right or natural. . . .”
“Look here, Callista,” and his voice was gentle, “I’ve lived a long time without women. I never found it did me all that much harm. A few, here and there, while I was knocking around the Empire on my own. Nothing serious.”
She looked down at the tips of her small dyed-leather sandals. “That’s different, men alone, living away from women. But here, living with me, sleeping in the same room, being near me all the time and knowing . . .” She ran out of words. He wanted to take her into his arms and kiss her till she lost that rigid, lost look. He actually laid his hands on her shoulders, felt her tense under the touch,
and let his hands drop to his sides. Damn anyone who could build pathological reflexes into a young girl this way! But even without the touch, he felt the grief in her, grief and guilt. She said softly, “You have no bargain in a wife, Andrew.”
He replied gently, “I have the wife I want.”
Damon and Ellemir came into the room. Ellemir’s hair was tousled, her eyes shining; she had that glassy-eyed look which he associated with women aroused, excited. For the first time since he had seen the twins, he saw Ellemir as a woman, not merely as Callista’s sister, and found her sensually attractive to him. Or was it that for a moment he saw in her the way Callista might, one day, look at him? He felt a flicker of guilt. She was his promised wife’s sister, in a few hours she would be his best friend’s wife, and of all women, she was the one at whom he should not look with desire. He looked away as she collected herself, slowly coming back to ordinary awareness.
She said, “Callie, we must have new curtains brought in; these have not been aired or washed, since—since”— she groped for analogy—“since the days of Regis the Fourth.” Andrew knew that she had been in close contact with Damon, and smiled to himself.
Just before high noon a clatter of hooves sounded in the courtyard, a commotion like a small hurricane, riders, sounds, cries, noises. Callista laughed. “It is Domenic; no one else ever arrives with such a fury!” She drew Andrew down to the courtyard. Domenic Lanart, heir to the Domain of Alton, was a slight, red-haired boy, tall and freckled, astride an enormous gray stallion. He flung the reins to a groom, jumped down, grabbed Ellemir and hugged her exuberantly, then threw his arms around Damon.
“Two weddings for one!” he exclaimed, drawing them up the steps at his side. “You’ve been long enough about your wooing, Damon. I knew last year that you wanted her; why did it take a war to bring you to the point of asking her hand? Elli, will you have a husband so reluctant?” He turned his head from side to side, kissing both of them, then broke away and turned to Callista.
“And for you a lover insistent enough to win you from the Tower! I am eager to meet this marvel, breda.” But his voice was suddenly gentle, and when Callista presented him to Andrew, he bowed. For all the exuberant noise and boyish laughter, he had the manners of a prince. His hands were small and square, calloused like a swordsman’s.
“So you are to marry Callista? I suppose that crowd of old ladies and graywigs in the Council won’t like it, but it’s time we had some new blood in the family.” He stood on tiptoe—Callista was a tall woman, and for all his lanky height, Domenic was not, Andrew thought, quite full-grown yet—and brushed her cheek lightly with his lips. “Be happy, sister. Avarra’s mercy! You deserve it, if you can dare to marry like this, without Council permission or the catenas.”
“Catenas,” she said scornfully. “I had as soon marry a Dry-Towner and go in chains!”
“Good for you, sister.” He turned to Andrew as they went into the hall. “Father said in his message that you were a Terran. I have talked with some of your people in Thendara. They seem good enough folk, but lazy. Good Gods, they have machines for everything, to walk on, to lift them up a flight of stairs, to bring them food at table. Tell me, Andrew, do they have machines to wipe themselves with?” He shouted boisterous boyish laughter, while the girls giggled.
He turned to Damon. “So you’re not coming back to the Guards, cousin? You’re the only decent cadet-master we’ve had in ages. Young Danvan Hastur’s trying his hand at it now, but it’s not working. The lads are all too much in awe of him, and anyway, he’s too young. It needs a man of more years. Any suggestions?”
“Try my brother Kieran,” Damon suggested, smiling. “He likes soldiering more than I ever did.”
“You were a damn good cadet-master, though,” Domenic said. “I’d like you back, though I suppose it’s no job for a man, being a sort of he-governess to a pack of half-grown boys.”
Damon shrugged. “I was glad enough to have their liking, but I am no soldier, and a cadet-master should be one who can inspire his cadets with a love of a soldier’s trade.”
“Not too much love of it, though,” said Dom Esteban, who had listened with interest as they approached, “or he’ll harden them and make them brutes, not men. So you have come at last, Domenic, my lad?”
The boy laughed. “Why, no, Father, I am still carousing in a Thendara tavern. What you see here is my ghost.” Then the merriment slid off his face as he saw his father, thin, graying, his useless legs covered with a wolfskin robe. He dropped to his knees beside the wheelchair. He said brokenly, “Father, oh, Father, I would have come at any moment, if you had sent for me, truly—”
The Alton lord laid his hands on Domenic’s shoulders. “I know that, dear lad, but your place was in Thendara, since I could not be there. Yet the sight of you makes my heart more glad than I can say.”
“I too,” said Domenic, scrambling up and looking down at his father. “I am relieved to see you so well and hearty; reports in Thendara had you at the point of death, or even dead and buried!”
“It is not as bad as that,” Dom Esteban said, laughing. “Come sit here beside me, tell me all that goes on in Guard-hall and Council.” It was easy to see, Andrew thought, that this merry boy was the very light of his father’s eyes.
“I will, and gladly, Father, but this is a wedding day and we are here for merrymaking, and there is little mirth to that tale! Prince Aran Elhalyn thinks I am all too young to have command of the Guards, even while you lie here sick at Armida, and he whispers that tale night and day into the ears of Hastur. And Lorenz of Serrais—forgive me for speaking ill of your brother, Damon—”
Damon shook his head. “My brother and I are not on the best of terms, Domenic, so say what you will.”
“Lorenz, then, damn him for a warped scheming fox, and old Gabriel of Ardais, who wants the post for that bullying wretch of a son of his, are quick to sing the same chorus, that I am all too young to command the Guards. They are about Aran night and day with flattery and gifts that stop just that one step short of being bribes, to persuade him to name one of them Commander while you are here in Armida! Will you be back before Midsummer festival, Father?”
A shadow passed over the crippled man’s face. “That must be as the Gods will have it, my son. Would the Guards be commanded, think you, by a man chair-bound, with legs of no more use than fish-flippers?”
“Better a lame commander than a commander who is no Alton,” Domenic said with fierce pride. “I could command in your name, and do all for you, if you were only there, to command as the Altons have done so many generations!”
His father gripped his hands, hard. “We shall see, my son. We shall see what comes.” But even that thought, Damon could see, had fired the Alton lord with a sudden hope and purpose. Would he, indeed, be able to command the Guards again from his chair, with Domenic at his side?
“Alas that we have now no Lady Bruna in our family,” Domenic said gaily. “Say, Callista, will you take up the sword as Lady Bruna did, and command the Guardsmen?”
She laughed, shaking her head. Damon said, “I do not know that tale,” and Domenic repeated it, smiling. “It was generations ago—how many I do not know—but her name is written in the rolls of Commanders, how Lady Bruna Leynier, when her brother, who was Lord Alton then, was slain, leaving a son but nine years old, took the lad’s mother in freemate marriage to protect her, as women may do, and ruled the Guards till he came of age to command. In the annals of the Guards, it says she was a notable commander too. Would you not have that fame, Callista? No? Ellemir?” He shook his head with mock sadness as they declined. “Alas, what has come to the women of our clan? They are not what they were in those days!”
Standing around Dom Esteban’s chair, the family resemblance was overwhelming. Domenic looked like Callista and Ellemir, though his hair was redder, his curls more riotous, his freckles a thick golden splotch instead of a faint gilt sprinkle. And Dezi, quiet and unregarded behind the wheeled chair, was lik
e a paler reflection of Domenic. Domenic looked up and saw him there, giving him a friendly thump on the shoulder.
“So you are here, cousin? I heard you had left the Tower. I don’t blame you. I spent forty days there a few years ago, being tested for laran, and I couldn’t get away fast enough! Did you get sick of it too, or did they chuck you out?”
Dezi hesitated and looked away, and Callista interposed. “You learned nothing there of our courtesies, Domenic. That is a question which must never be asked. It is between a telepath and his own Keeper, and if Dezi chooses not to tell, it is inexcusably rude to ask.”
“Oh, sorry,” said Domenic good-naturedly, and only Damon noticed the relief in Dezi’s face. “It’s just that I couldn’t get out of the place fast enough, and wondered if you felt the same way. Some people like it. Look at Callista, she had nearly ten years of it, and others—well, it wasn’t for me.”
Damon, watching the two lads, thought with pain of Coryn, so like Domenic at this age! He seemed to taste again the half-forgotten days of his own boyhood, when he, the clumsiest of the cadets, had been accepted as one of them because of his sworn friendship with Coryn, who, like Domenic, had been the best liked, the most energetic and outrageous of them all.
That had been in the days before failure, and hopeless love, and humiliation had burned so deep . . . but, he thought, it was also before he knew Ellemir. He sighed and clasped her hand in his. Domenic, feeling Damon’s eyes on him, looked up and smiled, and Damon felt the weight of loneliness slip away. He had Ellemir, and he had Andrew and Domenic for brothers. The isolation and loneliness were gone forever.
The Forbidden Circle Page 24
