The two cadets hurried down their own way. Regis was thinking that he had never known Lew felt like that They must have been hard on him, especially Dyan. But how did he know that?
Danilo said, "I wish all the officers were like Lew. I wish he were the cadet‑master, don't you?"
Regis nodded. "I don't think Lew would want to be cadet‑master, though. And from what I've heard, Dyan is very serious about honor and responsibility. You heard him speak at Council."
Danilo's mouth twisted. "Anyhow, you don't have to worry. Lord Dyan likes you. Everybody knows thatl"
"Jealous?" Regis retorted good‑naturedly.
"You're Comyn," Danilo said, "you get special treatment"
The words were a sudden painful reminder of the distance between them, a distance Regis had almost ceased to feel. It hurt. He said, "Dani, don't be a fool! You mean the fact that he uses me for a partner at sword practice? That's an honor I'd gladly change with you! If you think it's love‑pats I'm getting from him, take a look at me naked some day‑you're welcome and more than welcome to Dyan's love‑pats!"
He was completely unprepared for the dark crimson flush that flooded Danilo's face, the sudden fierce anger as he swung around to face Regis. "What the hell do you mean by that remark?"
Regis stared at him in dismay. "Why, only that sword‑practice with Lord Dyan is an honor I'd gladly do without He's much stricter than the arms‑master and he hits harder! Look at my ribs, you'll see that I'm black and blue from shoulder to knee! What did you think I meant?"
Danilo turned away and didn't answer directly. He only said, "We're going to be late. We'd better run."
Regis spent the early evening hours on street‑patrol in the city with Hjalmar, the giant young Guardsman who had first tested him for swordplay. They broke up two budding brawls, hauled an obstreperous drunk to the brig, directed half a dozen lost country bumpkins to the inn where they had left their horses and gently reminded a few wandering women that harlots were restricted by law to certain districts in the city. A quiet evening in Thendara. When they returned to the Guard hall to go off duty, they fell in with Gabriel Lanart and half a dozen officers who were planning to visit a small tavern near the gates. Regis was about to withdraw when Gabriel stopped him.
"Come along with us, brother. You should see more of the city than you can from the barracks window!"
Thus urged, Regis went with the older men. The tavern was small and smoky, filled with off‑duty Guardsmen. Regis sat next to Gabriel, who took the trouble to teach him the card game they were playing. It was the first time he had
been in the company of older officers. Most of the time he was quiet, listening much more than he talked, but it was good to be one of the company and accepted.
It reminded him, just a little, of the summers he'd spent at Armida. It would never have occurred to Kennard or Lew or old Andres to treat the solemn and precocious boy as a child. That early acceptance among men had put him out of step, probably forever, he realized with a remote sadness, with lads his own age. Now though, and the knowledge felt as if a weight had fallen from him, he knew that he did feel at home among men. He felt as if he was drawing the first really free breaths he had drawn since his grandfather pushed him, with only a few minutes to prepare for it, into the cadets.
"You're quiet, kinsman," Gabriel said as they walked back together. "Have you had too much to drink? You'd better go and get some sleep. You'll be all right tomorrow." He said a good‑natured good night and went off to his own quarters.
The night officer patrolling the court said, "You're a few minutes late, cadet. It's your first offense, so I won't put you on report this time. Just don't do it again. Lights are out in the first‑year barracks; you'll have to undress in the dark."
Regis made his way, a little unsteadily, into the barracks. Gabriel was right, he thought, surprised and not altogether displeased, he had had too much to drink. He was not used to drinking at all, and tonight he had drunk several cups of wine. He realized, as he hauled off his clothes by the moonlight, that he felt confused and unfocused. It had, he thought with a strange fuzziness, been a meaningful day, but he didn't know yet what it all meant. The Council. The somehow shocking realization that he had reached his grandfather's mind, recognized Lew by touch without seeing or hearing him. The odd half‑quarrel with Danilo. It added to the confusion he felt, which was more than just drunkenness. He wondered if they had put kirian in his wine, heard himself giggle aloud at the thought, then fell rapidly into an edgy, nightmare‑ridden half‑sleep.
... He was back in Nevarsin, in the cold student dormitory where, in winter, snow drifted through the wooden shutters and lay in heaps on the novices* beds. In his dream, as had actually happened once or twice, two or three of the students had climbed into bed together, sharing blankets and
body warmth against the bitter cold, to be discovered in the morning and severely scolded for breaking this inflexible rule. This dream kept recurring; each time, he would discover some strange naked body in his arms and, deeply disturbed, he would wake up with an admixture of fear and guilt. Each time he woke from this repeated dream he was more deeply upset and troubled by it, until he finally escaped into a deeper, darker realm of sleep. Now it seemed that he was his own father, crouched on a bare hillside in darkness, with strange fires exploding around him. He was shuddering with fright as men dropped dead around him, closer and closer, knowing that within moments he too would be blasted into fragments by one of the erupting fires. Then he felt someone close to him in the dark, holding him, sheltering his body with Ms own. Regis started awake again, shaking. He rubbed his eyes and looked around him at the quiet barracks room, dimly lit with moonlight, seeing the dim forms of the other cadets, snoring or muttering in their sleep. None of it was real, he thought, and slid down again on his hard mattress.
After a while he began to dream again. This time he was wandering in a featureless gray landscape in which there was nothing to see. Someone was crying somewhere in the gray spaces, crying miserably, in long painful sobs. Regis kept turning in another direction, not at first sure whether he was looking for the source of the weeping or trying to get away from the wretched sound. Small shuddering words came through the sobs, / won't, I don't want to, I can't. Every time the crying lessened for a moment there was a cruel voice, an almost familiar voice, saying, Oh, yes you will, you know you cannot fight me, and at other times, Hate me as much as you will, I like it better that way. Regis squirmed with fear. Then he was alone with the weeping, the inarticulate little sobs of protest and pleading. He went on searching in the lonely grayness until a hand touched him in the dark, a rude indecent searching, half painful and half exciting. He cried out "No!" and fled again into deeper sleep.
This time he dreamed he was in the student's court at Nevarsin, practicing with the wooden foils. Regis could hear the sound of his own panting breaths, doubled and multiplied in the great echoing room as a faceless opponent moved before him and kept quickening his movements insistently. Suddenly Regis realized they were both naked, that the blows struck were landing on his bare body. As his faceless op‑
ponent moved faster and faster Regis himself grew almost paralyzed, sluggishly unable to lift his sword. And then a great ringing voice forbade them to continue, and Regis dropped his sword and looked up at the dark cowl of the forbidding monk. But it was not the novice‑master at Nevarsin monastery, but Dyan Ardais. While Regis stood, frozen with dread, Dyan picked up the dropped sword, no longer a wooden practice sword, but a cruelly sharpened rapier. Dyan, holding it out straight ahead while Regis looked on in dread and horror, plunged it right into Regis' breast. Curiously, it went hi without the slightest pain, and Regis looked down in shaking dread at the sight of the sword passing through his entire body. "That's because it didn't touch the heart," Dyan said, and Regis woke with a gasping cry, pulling himself upright in bed. "Zandru," he whispered, wiping sweat from his forehead, "what a nightmare!" He realized that his heart was still poundi
ng, and then that his thighs and his sheets were damp with a clammy stJckiness. Now that he was wide awake and knew what had happened, he could almost laugh at the absurdity of the dream, but it still gripped him so that he could not lie down and go to sleep again.
It was quiet in the barrack room, with more than an hour to go before daybreak. He was no longer drunk or fuzzy‑headed, but there was a pounding pain behind his eyes.
Slowly he became aware that Danilo was crying in the next bed, crying helplessly, desperately, with a kind of hopeless pain. He remembered the crying in his dream. Had he heard the sound, woven it into nightmare?
Then, in a sort of slow amazement and wonder, he realized that Danilo was not crying.
He could see, by the dimmed moonlight, that Danilo was in fact motionless and deeply asleep. He could hear his breath coming softly, evenly, see his turned‑away shoulder moving gently with his breathing. The weeping was not a sound at all, but a sort of intangible pattern of vibrating misery and despair, like the lost little crying in his dream, but soundless.
Regis put his hands over his eyes in the darkness and thought, with rising wonder, that he hadn't heard the crying, but knew it just the same.
It was true, then. Laran. Not randomly picked up from another telepath, but his.
The shock of that thought drove everything else from bis
mind. How did it happen? When? And formulating the question brought its own answer: that first day in barracks, when Dani had touched him. He had dreamed about that conversation tonight, dreaming he was his father for a moment Again he felt that surge of closeness, of emotion so intense that there was a lump in his throat. Danilo slept quietly now, even the telepathic impression of noiseless weeping having died away. Regis worried, troubled and torn with even the backwash of his friend's grief, wondering what was wrong.
Quickly he shut off the curiosity. Lew had said that you learned to keep your distance, in order to survive. It was a strange, sad thought. He could not spy on his friend's privacy, yet he was still near to tears at the awareness of Dani's misery. He had sensed it, earlier that day, when Lew talked to them. Had someone hurt him, ill‑treated him?
Or was it simply that Danilo was lonely, homesick, wanting his family? Regis knew so little about him.
He recalled his own early days at Nevarsin. Cold and lonely, heartsick, friendless, hating his family for sending him here, only a fierce remnant of Hastur pride had kept him from crying himself to sleep every night for a long time.
For some reason that thought filled him again with an almost unendurable sense of anxiety, fear, restlessness. He looked across at Danilo and wished he could talk to him about this. Dani had been through it; he would know. Regis knew he would have to tell someone soon. But who should he tell? His grandfather? The sudden realization of his own laran had left Regis strangely vulnerable, shaken again and again by waves of emotion; again he was at the edge of tears, this time for his grandfather, reliving that fierce, searing moment of anguish of his only son's terrible death.
And, still vulnerable, he swung from grief to rebellion. He was sure his grandfather would force him to walk the path ready‑made for a Hastur heir with laran. He would never be free! Again he saw the great ship taking off for the stars, and his whole heart, his body, his mind, strained to follow it outward into the unknown. If he cherished that dream, he could never tell his grandfather at all.
But he could share it with Dani. He literally ached to step across the brief space between their beds, slip into bed beside him, share with him this incredible dual experience of grief and tremendous joy. But he held himself back, recalling with an imperative strange sharpness what Lew had said; it was
like living with your skin off. How could he impose this burden of his own emotions on Dani, who was himself so burdened with unknown sorrow, so troubled and nightmare‑driven that his unshed tears penetrated even into Regis' dreams as a sound of weeping? If he was to have the telepathic gift, Regis thought sadly, he had to learn to live by the rules of the telepath. He realized that he was cold and cramped, and crawled under his blankets again. He huddled them around him, feeling lonely and sad. He felt curiously unfocused again, drifting in anxious search, but hi answer to his questioning mind he saw only flimsy pictures in imagination, men and strange nonhumans fighting along a narrow rock‑ledge; the faces of two little children fair and delicate and baby‑blurred in sleep, then cold in death with a grief almost too terrible to be borne; dancing figures whirling, whirling like wind‑blown leaves in a mad ecstasy; a great towering form, blazing with fire ...
Exhausted with emotion, he slept again.
Chapter EIGHT
(Lew Alton's narrative)
There are two theories about Festival Night, the great midsummer holiday in the Domains. Some say that it is the birthday of the Blessed Cassilda, foremother of the Comyn. Others say that it commemorates the time of year when she found Hastur, Son of Aldones, Lord of Light, sleeping on the shores of Hali after his journey from the realms of Light Since I don't believe that either of them ever existed, I have no emotional preference about either theory.
My father, who hi his youth traveled widely in the Empire, told me once that every planet he has ever visited, and most of those he hasn't, have both a midsummer and midwinter holiday. We're no exception. In the Domains there are two traditional celebrations for summer Festival; one is a private family celebration in which the women are given gifts, usually fruit or flowers, in the name of Cassilda.
Early this morning I had taken my foster‑sister Linnell Ail‑lard some flowers, in honor of the day, and she had reminded me of the other celebration, the great Festival ball, held every year in the Comyn Castle.
I've never liked these enormous affairs, even when I was too young for the ball and taken to the children's party in the afternoon; I've disliked them ever since my first one, at the age of seven, when Lerrys Ridenow hit me over the head with a wooden horse.
It would be unthinkable to absent myself, however. My father had made it clear that attending was just one of the unavoidable duties of an heir to Comyn. When I told Linnell that I was thinking of developing some illness just severe enough to keep me away, or changing duty with one of the
Guard officers, she pouted. "If you're not there, who'll dance with me?" Linnell is too young to dance at these affairs except with kinsmen so, ever since she's been allowed to attend at all, I've been reminded that unless I'm there to dance with her she will find herself watching from the balcony. My father, of course, has the excellent excuse of his lameness.
I resolved to put in an appearance, dance a few dances with Linnetl, be polite to a few old ladies and make an unobtrusive exit as early as politeness allowed.
I came late, having been on duty in the Guard hall where I'd heard the cadets gossiping about the affair. I didn't blame them. All Guardsmen, whatever their rank, and all cadets not actually on duty, have the privilege of attending. To youngsters brought up in the outlands, I suppose it's an exciting spectacle. I was more disinclined to go than ever because Marius had come in while I was dressing. He'd been taken to the children's party, had made himself sick with sweets and had skinned knuckles and a black eye from a fight with some supercilious little boy, distantly kin to the Elhalyns, who had called him a Terran bastard. Well, I'd been called worse in my day and told him so, but I really had no comfort for him. I was ready to kick them all in the shins by the time I went down. It was, I reflected, a hell of a good start to the evening.
As was customary, the beginning dances were exhibitions by professionals or gifted amateurs. A troupe of dancers in the costume of the far mountains was dcfing a traditional dance, with a good deal of skirt‑swirling and boot‑stamping. I'd seen it danced better, a while since, on my trip into the foothills. Perhaps no professionals can ever give the mountain dances the true gaiety and excitement of the people who dance them for pure pleasure.
I moved slowly around the edges of the room. My father was being polite to elderly
dowagers on the sidelines. Old Hastur was doing the same thing with a group of Terrans who had probably been invited for political or ceremonial reasons. The Guardsmen, especially the young cadets, had already discovered the elegant buffet spread out along one wall and kept replenished by a whole troop of servants. So early in the evening, they were almost the only ones there. I grinned reminiscently. I am no longer required to share the men's mess, but I remembered my cadet years vividly enough to
know how good the plentiful delicacies would look after what passes for supper in the barracks.
Danilo was there, in dress uniform. A little self‑consciously, he wished me a joyous Festival. I returned the greeting. "Where is Regis? I don't see him anywhere."
"He was on duty tonight, sir. 1 offered to change with him‑all his kinsmen are here‑but he said he would have years of it, and I should go and enjoy myself."
I wondered which officer, in malice or by way of emphasizing that a Hastur could expect no favors in the cadets, had made certain that Regis Hastur would draw a tour of duty on Festival Night. I only wished I had so good an excuse.
"Well, enjoy yourself by all means, Dani," I told him.
The hidden musicians had struck up a sword dance and Danilo turned eagerly to watch as two Guardsmen came with torches to place the swords. The hall lights were lowered to emphasize the ancient and barbaric quality of this oldest of traditional mountain dances. It is usually danced by one of the greatest dancers in Thendara; to my surprise, it was Dyan Ardais who strode forward, wearing the brilliantly barbaric costume whose history was lost before the Ages of Chaos.
There are not many amateurs, even in the Hellers, who still know all the traditional steps and patterns. I'd seen Dyan dance it when I was a child at Armida, in my father's hall. I thought that it went better there, to the music of a single drone‑pipe, by the glare of firelight and a torch or two, than here in the elaborate ballroom, surrounded by ladies in fancy party costumes and bored noblemen and city folk.
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