Stormqueen!

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  “No convulsions?”

  “None.”

  Renata nodded. “Some strains have it more severely than others. You seem to have the relatively minor one, and Lord Aldaran’s kin the lethal form. Is there Hastur blood in your family?”

  “Damisela, I have not the faintest notion,” Donal said stiffly, and the others heard his resentment as if he had spoken the words aloud: Am I a racing chervine or a stud animal to be judged on my pedigree?

  Renata laughed aloud. “Forgive me, Donal. Perhaps I have dwelt too long in a Tower and had not considered how offensive another might consider such a question. I have spent so many years studying these things! Although indeed, my friend, if I am to care for your sister I must indeed study her lineage and pedigree as seriously as if she were a racing animal or a fine hawk, to find out how this laran came into her line, and what lethals and recessives she may be carrying. Even if they are quiet now, they could cause trouble when she comes to womanhood. But forgive me, I meant no offense.”

  “It is I should beg your pardon, damisela, for being churlish when you are studying ways to help my sister.”

  “Let us forgive one another then, Donal, and be friends.”

  Allart, watching them, felt sudden bitter envy of these young people who could laugh and flirt and enjoy life even when burdened with impending disasters. Then he was suddenly ashamed of himself. Renata had no light burden; she could have placed all the responsibility on father or husband, yet she had worked since her childhood to know what she should do, how best to take responsibility, even if it meant destroying the life of an unborn child and bearing the reproach toward a barren woman in the Domains. Donal had had no careless youth either, living with the knowledge of his own strange laran which could destroy him and his sister.

  He wondered if every human being, indeed, walked through life on a precipice as narrow as his own. Allart realized that he had been acting as if he alone bore an intolerable curse, and all others were lighthearted, carefree. He watched Renata and Donal laughting and jesting, and then he thought, and it was a new and strange thought to him, Perhaps Nevarsin gave me too exaggerated a seriousness about life. If they can live with the burdens they bear, and still be light of heart and enjoy this journey, perhaps they are wiser than I.

  When he rode forward to join them he was smiling.

  They came to Aldaran late in the afternoon of a gray and rainy day, little spits of sleet hiding in the wind and rain. Renata had wrapped her cloak over her face and protected her cheeks with a scarf, and the banner-bearer had put away his flag to protect it and rode muffled in his thick cape, looking dour. Allart found that the increasing altitude made his heart pound, so that he felt light-headed. But with every day’s ride Donal had seemed to cast off care and to look merry and youthful, as if the altitude and the worsening weather were only a sign of homecoming; even in the rain he rode bareheaded, the hood of his riding-cloak cast back, disregarding the sleet on his face, which was reddened with the wind and cold.

  At the foot of the long slope that led upward to the castle, he paused and waved in a signal, laughing. Renata’s nurse grumbled, “Are we to ride ordinary animals up that goat-track, or do they think we are hawks that can fly?” Even Renata looked a little daunted by the last steep path.

  “This is the Aldaran keep? It seems as inaccessible as Nevarsin itself!”

  Donal laughed. “No, but in the old days, when my foster-father’s forebears had to keep it by force of arms, this made it impregnable—my lady,” he added, with sudden self-consciousness. During the days of the journey they had become

  “Allart” and “Renata” and “Donal” to one another; Donal’s sudden return to formal courtesy made them realize that whatever happened, this period of forgetfulness was ended and the burden of their separate destinies lay upon them again.

  “I trust the soldiers on those walls know we are not come to attack,” grumbled the guardsman who had borne the truce-flag.

  Donal laughed and said, “No, we should be small indeed for a war party, I think. Look—there is my foster-father on the battlement, with my sister. Evidently he knew of our arrival.”

  Allart saw the blank look slide down over Donal’s face, the look of the telepath in contact with those out of earshot.

  A moment later Donal smiled gaily and said, “The horse path is not so steep, after all. On the far side of the castle there are steps carved from the rock, two hundred and eighty-nine of them. Would you prefer to climb up that way, perhaps? Or you, mestra?” he added to the nurse, and she made a sound of dismay. “Come, my foster-father awaits us.”

  During the long ride, Allart had made use of the techniques he had learned at Nevarsin, to keep the crowding futures at a distance. Since he could do nothing whatever about them, he knew that allowing himself to dwell upon them, with morbid fears, was a form of self-indulgence he could no longer give mental lease. He must deal with whatever came, and look ahead only when he had some reasonable chance of deciding which of the possible futures could be rationally affected by some choice actually within his own power to control. But as they reached the top of the steep slope, coming in out of the sleet and winds of the height into a sheltered courtyard, with servants crowding about to take the horses, Allart knew he had lived this scene before in memory or foresight. Through the momentary disorientation he heard a shrill childish voice crying out, and it seemed to him that he saw a flare of lightnings, so that he physically shrank from the voice, in the moment before he actually heard it clearly. It was simple after all, no danger, no flare of strange lightning, nothing but a joyous child’s voice calling out Donal’s name—and a little girl, her long plaits flying, ran from the shelter of an archway and wrapped him in her arms.

  “I knew it must be you, and the strangers. Is this the woman who is to be my guardian and teacher? What is her name? Do you like her? What is it like in the Lowlands? Do flowers truly bloom there all year as I have heard? Did you see any nonhumans as you traveled? Did you bring me back any gifts? Who are these people? What kind of animals are they riding?”

  “Gently, gently, Dorilys,” reproved a deep voice. “Our guests will think us mountain barbarians indeed, if you chatter like an ill-taught gallimak! Let your brother go, and greet our guests like a lady!”

  Donal let his sister cling tightly to his hand as he turned to his foster-father, but he let her go as Mikhail of Aldaran took him into a close embrace.

  “Dearest lad, I have missed you greatly. Now will you not present our honored guests?”

  “Renata Leynier, leronis of Hali Tower,” Donal said. Renata made a deep curtsy before Lord Aldaran.

  “Lady, you lend us grace; we are deeply honored. Allow me to present my daughter and heir, Dorilys of Rockraven.”

  Dorilys lowered her eyes shyly as she curtsied.

  “S’dia shaya, domna,” she said bashfully.

  Then Lord Aldaran presented Margali to Renata. “This is the leronis who has cared for her since she was born.”

  Renata looked sharply at the old woman. Despite her pale, fragile features, her graying hair and the lines of age in her face, she still bore the indefinable stamp of power. Renata thought, If she has been in the care of a leronis since she was born, and Aldaran felt still that she needed stronger care and control—what, in the name of all the gods, does he fear for this charming little girl?

  Donal was presenting Allart to his foster-father. Allart, bowing to the old man, raised his eyes to look into the hawklike face of Dom Mikhail, and knew abruptly that he had seen this face before, in dreams and foresight, knew it with mingled affection and fear. Somehow this mountain lord held the key to his destiny, but he could see only a vaulted room, white stone like a chapel, and flickering flames, and despair. Allart fought to dismiss the unwelcome, confusing images until some rational choice could be made among them.

  My laran is useless, he thought, save to frighten me!

  As they were being led through the castle to their rooms, Allart found
himself nervously watching for the vaulted room of his vision, the place of flames and tragedy. But he did not see it, and he wondered if it was anywhere at Castle Aldaran at all. Indeed, it might be anywhere—or, he thought bitterly, nowhere.

  * * *

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  « ^ »

  Renata woke to sense the presence of an outsider; then she saw Dorilys’s pretty, childish face peeping around a curtain.

  “I am sorry,” Dorilys said. “Did I wake you, domna?”

  “I think so.” Renata blinked, grasping vaguely at fragments of a disappearing dream, fire, the wings of a glider, Donal’s face. “No, it does not matter, child; Lucetta would have waked me soon to go down to dinner.”

  Dorilys came around the curtain and sat on the edge of the bed. “Was the journey very tiring, domna? I hope you will have recovered soon from your fatigue.”

  Renata had to smile at the mixture of childishness and adult courtesy. “You speak casta very well, child; is it spoken so much here?”

  “No,” Dorilys said, “but Margali was schooled in the Domains, at Thendara, and she said I should learn to speak it well so that if I went to Thendara there would be none who could call me mountain barbarian.”

  “Then Margali did well, for your accent is very good.”

  “Were you trained in a Tower, too, vai leronis?”

  “Yes, but there is no need to be so formal as all that,” Renata said, spontaneously warming to the girl. “Call me cousin or kinswoman, what you will.”

  “You look very young to be a leronis, cousin,” Dorilys said, choosing the more intimate of the two words.

  Renata said, “I started when I was about your age.” Then she hesitated, for Dorilys seemed childish for the fourteen or fifteen she looked. If she was to educate Dorilys, as a nobleman’s daughter, she must quickly put a stop to so big a girl running about the courtyards with her hair flying, racing and shouting like a little girl. She wondered if, indeed, the girl was somewhat lacking in wit. “How old are you… fifteen?”

  Dorilys giggled and shook her head. “Everyone says I look so, and Margali wearies me night and day with telling me I am too old to do this and too big to do that, but I am only eleven years old. I shall be twelve at summer harvest.”

  Abruptly Renata revised her perceptions of the girl. She was not, then, a childish and ill-educated young woman, as she looked, but a highly precocious and intelligent preadolescent girl. It was perhaps her misfortune that she looked older than her years, for everyone would expect Dorilys to have a degree of experience and judgment she could hardly possess at that age.

  Dorilys asked, “Did you like being a leronis? What is a monitor?”

  “You will find that out when I monitor you, as I must do before I begin to teach you about laran,” Renata said.

  “What did you do in the Tower?”

  “Many things,” Renata said. “Bringing metals to the surface of the ground for the smiths to work them, charging batteries for lights and air-cars, working in the relays to speak without voice to those in the other Towers, so that what was happening in one Domain could be known to all, much faster than a messenger could ride…”

  Dorilys listened, finally letting out a long, fascinated sigh. “And will you teach me to do those things?”

  “Not all of them, perhaps, but you shall know such things as you have need to know, as the lady of a great Domain. And beyond that, such things as all women should know if they are to have control of their own lives and bodies.”

  “Will you teach me to read thoughts? Donal and Father and Margali can read thoughts and I cannot, and they can talk apart and I cannot hear, and it makes me angry because I know they talk about me.”

  “I cannot teach you that, but if you have the talent I can teach you to use it. You are too young to know whether you have it or not.”

  “Will I have a matrix?”

  “When you can learn to use it,” Renata said. She thought it strange that Margali had not already tested the child, taught her to key a matrix. Well, Margali was well on in years; perhaps she feared what her charge, headstrong and lacking in mature judgment, would do with the enormous power of a matrix. “Do you know what your laran is, Dorilys?”

  The child lowered her eyes. “A little. You know what happened at my handfasting…”

  “Only that your promised husband died very suddenly.”

  Suddenly Dorilys began to cry. “He died—and everyone said I had killed him, but I didn’t, cousin. I didn’t want to kill him—I only wanted to make him take his hands off me.”

  Looking at the sobbing child, Renata’s first, spontaneous impulse was to put her arms around Dorilys and comfort her. Of course she hadn’t meant to kill him! How cruel, to let a child so young carry blood-guilt! But in the instant before she moved, an intuitive flash of second thought kept her motionless.

  However young she was, Dorilys had laran which could kill. This laran, in the hands of a child too young to exercise rational judgment about it… the very thought made Renata shudder. If Dorilys was old enough to possess this terrifying laran, she was old enough—she would have to be old enough—to learn control, and its proper use.

  Controlling laran was not easy. No one knew better than Renata, a Tower-trained monitor, how difficult it could be, the hard work and self-discipline which went even into the earliest stages of that control. How could a spoiled, pampered little girl, whose every word had been law to her companions and adoring family, find the discipline and the inner motivation to tread that difficult path? Perhaps the death she had wrought, and her guilt and fear about it, might be fortunate in the long run. Renata did not like to use fear in her teaching, but at the moment she did not know enough about Dorilys to throw away any slight advantage she might have in teaching the girl.

  So she did not touch Dorilys, but let her cry, looking at her with a detached tenderness of which her calm face and manner gave not the slightest hint. At last she said, voicing the first thing she herself had been taught in the early discipline of Hali Tower, “Laran is a terrible gift and a terrible responsibility, and it is not easy to learn to control it. It is your own choice whether you will learn to control it, or whether it will control you. If you are willing to work hard, a time will come when you will be in command, when you will use your laran and not let it use you. That is why I have come here to teach you, so that such a thing cannot happen again.”

  “You are more than welcome here at Aldaran,” Mikhail, Lord Aldaran said, leaning forward from his high seat and catching Allart’s eyes. “It is long since I had the pleasure of entertaining one of my Lowland kin. I trust we will make you welcome. But I do not flatter myself that the heir to Elhalyn did the service which any paxman or banner-bearer could do, just for the sake of showing me honor. Not when the Elhalyn Domain is at war. You want something of me— or the Elhalyn Domain wants something, which may not be the same thing at all. Will you not tell me your true mission, kinsman?”

  Allart pondered a dozen answers, watching the play of firelight on the old man’s face, knowing it was the curious foresight of his laran which caused that face to wear a hundred aspects—benevolence, wrath, offended pride, anguish. Had his mission alone the power to raise all those reactions in Lord Aldaran, or was it something yet to pass between them?

  At last, weighing each word, he said, “My lord, what you say is true, although it was a privilege to travel north with your foster-son, and I was not sorry to be at some distance from this war.”

  Aldaran raised an eyebrow and said, “I would have thought in time of war you would have been unwilling to leave the Domain. Are you not your brother’s heir?”

  “His regent and warden, sir, but I am sworn to support the claim of his nedestro sons.”

  “It seems to me you could have done better for yourself than that,” Dom Mikhail said. “Should your brother die in battle, you seem better fitted to command a Domain than any flock of little boys, legitimate or bastard, and no doubt the folk of you
r Domain would rather have it so. There’s a true saying: when the cat’s a kitten, rats make play in the kitchen! So it goes with a Domain;, in times like this, a strong hand is needful. In wartime a younger son, or one whose parentage is uncertain, can carve out for himself a position of power as he could never do at any other time.”

  Allart thought, But I have no ambition to rule my Domain. However, he knew that Lord Aldaran would never believe this. To men of his sort, ambition was the only legitimate emotion for a man born into a ruling house. And it is this which keeps us torn with fratricidal wars… But he said nothing, if he did, Aldaran would immediately jump to the conclusion that he was an effeminate, or, worse, a coward. “My brother and overlord felt I could better serve my Domain on this mission, sir.”

  “Indeed? It must be more important than I had believed possible,” Aldaran said, and he looked grim. “Well, tell me about it, kinsman, if it is a mission of such great moment to Aldaran that your brother must entrust it to his nearest rival!” He looked angry and guarded, and Allart knew he had not made a good impression. However, as Allart broached his mission, Aldaran slowly relaxed, leaning back in his chair, and when the young man had done he nodded slowly, letting out his breath with a long sigh.

  “It is not so bad as I feared,” he said. “I have foresight enough, and I could read your thoughts a little—not much; where did you learn to guard them so?—and I knew you came to speak of this war to me. I feared you had come, for the sake of the old friendship between your father and me, to urge me to join with your folk in this war. Though I loved your father well, that I would have been reluctant to do. I might have been willing to aid in the defense of Elhalyn, if you were hard pressed, but I would not have wished to attack the Ridenow.”

  “I have brought no such request, sir,” Allart said, “but will you tell me why?”

  “Why? Why, you ask? Well, tell me, lad,” Aldaran said. “What grudge have you against the Ridenow?”