Heritage and Exile (45 page)

That damned thing was responsible for all our troubles. I'd have liked to heave it out the window, or better, send it out on a Terran rocket and let it work its mischief on cosmic dust or something! I heartily wished that Beltran and the Sharra matrix and Kadarin and old Desideria, with all her forge-folk about her, were all frying together on one of their own forges.

I was still in accord with Beltran's dream, but standing between us and the accomplishment of the dream was this ravening nightmare of Sharra. I knew, I knew with the deepest roots of my self, that I could not control it, that Marjorie could not control it, that nothing human could ever control it. We had only stirred the surface of the matrix. If it was roused all the way it might never be controlled again, and tomorrow I would tell Beltran so.

Clutching this resolve, I fell into an uneasy sleep.

For a long time I wandered in confused nightmares through the corridors of Comyn Castle; whenever I met someone, his or her face was veiled or turned away in aversion or contempt. Javanne Hastur refusing to dance with me at a children's ball. Old Domenic di Asturien with his lifted eyebrows. My father, reaching out to me across a great chasm. Callina Aillard, turning away and leaving me alone on the rain-swept balcony. It seemed I wandered through those halls for hours, with no single human face turned to me in concern or compassion.

And then the dream changed. I was standing on the balcony of the Arilinn Tower, watching the sunrise, and Janna Lindir was standing beside me. I was dreamily surprised to see her. I was back again where I had been happy, where I had been accepted and loved, where there was no cloud on my mind and heart. But I had thought my circle had been broken and scattered, the others to their homes, I to the Guards where I was despised, Janna married . . . no, surely that had been only a bad dream! She turned and laid her hand in mine, and I felt a deep happiness.

Then I realized it was not Janna but Callina Aillard, saying softly, mockingly, “You do know what's really wrong with you,” taunting me from the safe barrier of what she was, a Keeper, forbidden, untouchable. . . . Maddened by the surge of need and hunger in me, I reached for her, I tore the veils from her body while she screamed and struggled. I threw her down whimpering on the stones and flung myself atop her, naked, and through her wild cries of terror she
changed,
she began to flame and glow and burn, the fires of Sharra engulfing us, consuming us in a wild spasm of lust and ecstasy and terror and agony. . . .

I woke up shuddering, crying out with the mingled terror and enchantment of the dream. The Sharra matrix lay shrouded and dormant.

But I dared not close my eyes again that night.

After Lew had gone away, closing the door behind him, it was Regis who moved first, stumbling across the floor as if wading through a snowdrift, to clasp Dani's shoulders in a kinsman's embrace. He heard his own voice, hoarse in his ears.

“You're safe. You really are here and safe.” He had doubted Lew's word, though never in all his life had he reason to doubt. What kind of evil was here?

“Yes, yes, well and safe,” Danilo said, then drew a harsh breath of dismay. “My lord Regis, you're soaked through!”

For the first time Regis became aware of the heat from the fireplace, the hangings sealing off drafts, the warmth after the icy blasts of the corridors. The very warmth touched off a spasm of shivering, but he forced himself to say, “The guards. You are really a prisoner, then?”

“They're here to protect me, so they say. They've been friendly enough. Come, sit here, let me get these boots off, you're chilled to the bone!”

Regis let himself be led to an armchair, so ancient in design that until he was in the seat he was not sure what it was. His feet came out of the boots numb and icy-cold. He was almost too weary to sit up and unlace his tunic; he sat with his hands hanging, his legs stretched out, finally with an effort put his stiff fingers to the tunic-laces. He knew his voice sounded more irritible than he meant.

“I can manage for myself, Dani. You're my paxman, not my body-servant!”

Danilo, kneeling before the fire to dry Regis' boots, jerked upright as if stung. He said into the fire, “Lord Regis, I am honored to serve you in any way I may.” Through the stiff formality of the words, Regis, wide open again,
felt
something else, a wordless resonance of despair:
He didn't mean it, then, about accepting my service. It was . . . it was only a way of atoning for what his kinsman had done. . . .

Without stopping to think, Regis was out of the chair, kneeling beside Dani on the hearth. His voice was shaking, partly with the cold which threatened to rip him apart with shudders, partly with that intense awareness of Dani's hurt.

“The Gods witness I meant it! It's only . . . only . . .” Suddenly he knew the right thing to say. “You remember what a fuss it caused, when I expected anyone to wait on me, in the barracks!”

Their eyes caught and held. Regis had no idea whether it was his own thought or Danilo's:
We were boys then. And now . . . how long ago that seems! Yet it was only last season!
It seemed to Regis that they were looking back, as men, across a great chasm of elapsed time, at a shared boyhood. Where had it gone?

With a sense of fighting off unutterable weariness—it seemed he had been fighting off this weariness as long as he could remember—he reached for Danilo's hands. They felt hard, calloused, real, the only firm anchor-point in a shifting, dissolving universe. Momentarily he felt his hands going
through
Danilo's as if neither of them were quite solid. He blinked hard to focus his eyes, and saw a bluehaloed form in front of him. He could see through Danilo now, to the wall beyond. Trying to focus against the swarming fireflies that spun before his eyes, he remembered Javanne's warning, fight it, move around, speak. He tried to get his voice back into his throat.

“Forgive me, Dani. Who should serve me if not my sworn man . . . ?”

And as he spoke the words he
felt,
amazed, the texture of Danilo's relief:
My people have served the Hasturs for generations. Now I too am where I belong.

But the swift denial was understood by both, not as a personal rejection, but the very embodiment of what they both were, so that the giving of Danilo's service was the pleasure and the relief it was, so that Regis knew he must not only accept that service, but accept it fully, graciously.

Danilo's face suddenly looked strange, frightened. His mouth was moving but Regis could no longer hear him, floating bodiless in the sparkling darkness. The base of his skull throbbed with ballooning pain. He heard himself whisper, “I am . . . in your hands . . .” Then the world slid sidewise and he felt himself collapse into Danilo's arms.

He never knew how he got there, but seconds later, it seemed, he felt searing pain all over his naked body, and found himself floating up to the chin in a great tub of boiling water. Danilo, kneeling at his side, was anxiously chafing his wrists. His head was splitting, but he could see solid objects again, and his own body was reassuringly firm. A servant was hovering around with clean garments, trying to attract Danilo's attention long enough to get his approval of them.

Regis lay watching, too languid to do anything but accept their ministrations. He noticed that Danilo unobtrusively kept his own body between Regis and the Aldaran servant. Danilo chased the man out quickly, muttering under his breath, “I'm not going to trust any of them alone with you!”

At first the water had seemed scalding to his chilled body; now he realized it was barely warm, in fact it must have been drawn for some time, was probably a bath prepared for Danilo before he came in. Danilo was still bending over him, his face tight with worry. Suddenly Regis was filled with such intolerable anxiety that he cut off the intense, sensuous pleasure of the hot water soothing his chilled and stiffened body—eleven nights on the trail and not warm once!—and drew himself upright, hauling himself out of the hot tub, reaching for a towel to wrap himself in. Danilo knelt to dry him, saying, “I sent the servant for a healer-woman. There must be someone of that sort here. Regis, I never saw anyone faint like that before; your eyes were open but you couldn't hear me or see me . . .”

“Threshold sickness.” Briefly he sketched in an explanation. “I've had a few attacks before. I'm over the worst.” I hope, he added to himself. “I doubt if the healer could do anything with this. Here, give me that. I can dress myself.” Firmly he took the towel away from Danilo. “Go and tell her not to bother, and find out if there's anything hot to drink.”

Skeptically Danilo retreated. Regis finished drying himself and clambered into the unfamiliar clothing. His hands were shaking almost too hard to tie the knots of his tunic. What's the matter with me, he asked himself why didn't I want Dani to help he dress? He looked at his hands in cold shock, as if they belonged to someone else. I didn't want him to touch me!

Even to him that sounded incongruous. They had lived together in the rough intimacy of the barracks room for months. They had been close-linked, even thinking one another's thoughts.

This was different.

Irresistibly his mind was drawn back to that night in the barracks, when he had reached out to Danilo, torn by an almost frenzied desire to share his misery, the spasm of loathing and horror with which Danilo had flung him away. . . .

And then, shaken and shamed and terrified, Regis knew what had prompted that touch, and why he was suddenly shy of Danilo now. The knowledge struck him motionless, his bare feet cold through the wolfskin rug on the tile floor.

To touch him. Not to comfort Dani, but to comfort his own need, his own loneliness, his own hunger. . . .

He moved deliberately, afraid if he remained motionless another instant the threshold sickness would surge up over him again. He knelt on the wolfskin, drawing fur-lined stockings up over his knees and deliberately tying the thongs into intricate knots. On the surface of his mind he thought that fur clothing was life-saving here in the mountains. It felt wonderful.

But, relentless, the memory he had barricaded since his twelfth year burst open like a bleeding wound; the memory he had let himself lose consciousness before recovering on the northward trail: Lew's face, alight with fire, his barriers down in the last extremity of exhaustion and pain and fear.

And Regis had shared it all with him, there were no barriers between them. None. Regis had known what Lew wanted and would not ask, was too proud and too shy to ask. Something Regis had never felt before, that Lew thought he was too young to feel or to understand. But Regis had known and had shared it.

And afterward, perhaps because Lew had never spoken of it, Regis was too ashamed to remember. And he had never dared open his mind again. Why? Why? Out of fear, out of shame? Out of . . . longing?

Until Danilo, without even trying, broke that barricade.

And now Regis knew why it was Dani who could break it . . .

He doesn't know, Regis thought, and then with a bleak and spartan pride, He must never know.

He stood up, felt the splitting pain at his forehead again. He knew a frightened moment of disquiet. How could he keep this from him? Dani was a telepath too!

Lew had said it was like living with your skin off. Well, his skin was off and he was doubly naked. Taking a grip on himself, he walked out into the other room, decided his boots weren't dry. Inside he felt cold and trembly, but physically he was quite warm and calm.

How could he face Lew again, knowing this? Coldly, Regis told himself not to be a fool. Lew had always known. He wasn't a coward, he didn't lie to himself! Lew remembered, so no wonder he was astonished when Regis had said he did not have
laran
!

Lew had asked him why he could not bear to remember. . . .

“You should have gone straight to bed and let me bring you supper there,” Danilo said behind him, and Regis, firmly taking mastery of his face, looked around. Danilo was looking at him with friendly concern, and Regis remembered, with a shock, that Danilo knew nothing, nothing of the memory and awareness that had flooded him in the scant few minutes they had been parted. He said aloud, trying for a casual neutral tone, “I collapsed before I saw anything of the suite but this room. I have no idea where I'm going to be sleeping.”

“And I've had days with nothing to do but explore. Come, I'll show you the way. I told the servant to bring your supper in here. How does it feel to be quartered in a royal suite, after the student dormitory at Nevarsin?”

There was room enough for a regent and all his entourage in this guest suite: enormous bedrooms, servants quarters in plenty, a great hall, even a small octagonal presence chamber with a throne and footstools for petitioners. It was more elaborate than his grandfather's suite in Thendara. Danilo had chosed the smallest and least elaborate bedroom, but it looked like a royal favorite's chamber. There was a huge bed on a dais which would, Regis thought irreverently, have held a Dry-Towner, three of his wives and six of his concubines. The servant he had seen before was warming the sheets with a long-handled warming pan, and there was a fire in the fireplace. He let Danilo help him into the big bed, put a tray of hot food beside him. Danilo sent the man away, saying gravely, “It is my privilege to wait on my lord with my own hands.” Regis would have laughed at the solemn, formal words, but knew even a smile would hurt Danilo unspeakably. He kept his composure, until the man was out of earshot, then said, “I hope you're not going to take that formal my-lord tone all the time now,
bredu
.”