Текст книги "Sharra's Exile"

Автор книги: Marion Zimmer Bradley

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 27 страниц)

Derik said uneasily, “Come, come, Merryl, that’s no way to talk before ladies. We’ll discuss it later, my dear fellow. Let’s have peace and quiet here, by all means.”

Merryl sank into a seat, glowering.

Callina said quietly, “As for this marriage, I think everyone here knows that it is not marriage which is being discussed. It is power, my lords, power in the Comyn. Why should we not call things by their right names? The question before us, and I think my brother knows it as well as I do, is this: do we want to put that kind of power within Comyn in the hands of the Aldarans? I think not. And there sits one who can attest to the truth of what I say. Would you like to tell them, DomLewis, why it would be—unwise—to put that much power in the hands of Aldaran, or to trust him with it.”

I felt my forehead breaking out in cold sweat. I knew I should explain myself, calmly and quietly, how at one time I had trusted Beltran, and how I had been—betrayed. Now I must speak calmly, without undue emotion.

Yet, to drag it all out here, in Council, before all those kinsmen who had tried to deny me my very place in this room… I could not. My voice failed me, I felt it strangle in my throat, and knew if I spoke aloud I would crack completely. My father’s voice, the ravening flames of Sharra, the continuous unrhythmic waves of the telepathic jangle—my head was pandemonium. Yet Callina was standing there, waiting for me to speak, and I opened my mouth, trying to force myself to find words. I heard only a raw meaningless croak. I finally managed to say, “You—know. You were there at Arilinn—”

And I cringed before the pity in her eyes. She said, “I was there when Lew came to Arilinn with his wife, after they both risked their lives to break the link with Sharra.”

“Sharra is not relevant here,” said Dyan harshly. “The link was broken and the matrix controlled again. We are talking now of Beltran of Aldaran. And he, too, has a strong interest in seeing that nothing like that ever happens again. As for Lew—” his eyes turned on me. “I am sorry to say this, kinsman, but those who meddle with forces as strong as Sharra should not complain if they are—hurt. I cannot but think that Lew brought his trouble upon himself, and he has had his lesson—as Beltran has had his.”

I bent my head. Perhaps he was right, but that made it no easier. I had learned to live with what had happened, after a fashion. That did not mean I was willing to hear Dyan lecture me about it.

Regis Hastur rose to his feet within the Hastur enclosure. He said, not looking at me, “I cannot see that Lew was so much to blame. But whether or nor, I do not think we can trust Beltran. It was Beltran’s doing, and Kadarin’s. And Lew was Beltran’s kinsman, his guest and under the safeguard of hospitality. He imprisoned him; he imprisoned me; he kidnapped Danilo and attempted to force him to use his laranfor the Sharra circle. And if Beltran did thisto a kinsman—” he turned and gestured, with what seemed mute apology for turning all eyes to me—“how could anyone trust him?”

I could read the horror in the eyes turned on me; even through the telepathic damper their horror surged into my mind, the shock and horror… the scars on my face, the arm ending abruptly at the wrist, the horror that had surged into my mind from Dio when she saw in my mind the horror that had been our child… Merciful Avarra, was there no end to this agony? I dropped my forehead on my arms, hiding my face, hiding my mutilated arm. Marius laid his hand on my shoulder; I hardly felt it there.

Danilo’s voice, shaken with emotion, took up the tale where Regis had left off.

“It was Beltran’s doing; he had Lew tied and beaten. He stripped him of his matrix. All of you Comyn who have been in a Tower know what that means! And why? Because Lew begged him to use caution with Sharra, to turn it over to one of our own Towers and see if a safe way could be found for its harnessing! And look at Lew’s face! This—this torturer is the man you want to invite courteously into Comyn, to marry the head of a Domain and Ashara’s Keeper?”

Dyan’s voice lashed. “I did not give you leave to speak!”

Danilo turned to him. He was very pale. “My Lord, with all respect, I am testifying only to the truth of what I witnessed with my own eyes. And it is relevant to what is being discussed in the Comyn. I have Council-right; am I to sit silent?”

Hastur said, his displeasure evident in his voice, “It seems this is the day for all the unruly younger members of the Domains to speak in Council without leave of their elders!” His eyes rested on Merryl, on Danilo, then on Regis, and the younger man drew a deep breath.

“By your leave, sir, I can only repeat what my paxman said: I am testifying to what I myself saw and witnessed. When we see our elders and—and our betters, about to take a step which they could not honorably take if all the facts were known to them, then, for the—” again he hesitated, almost stammering—“for the honor of the Comyn, we must bring it to the light. Or are we to believe, sir, that the Comyn consider it of no importance that Beltran was capable of betraying, and torturing, a kinsman?” The words were impeccably courteous, and the tone; but his eyes were blazing.

“All this,” said Dyan, “took place a long time ago.”

“Still,” said Regis, “before we bring Beltran of Aldaran into Comyn itself—whether by marriage-right or any other way—should we not first assure ourselves that he has come to think otherwise about what has happened?” And then he said what I knew I should have said myself. “In the names of all the Gods, do we want the kind of thing that happened in Caer Donn to happen in Thendara? Do we want—Sharra?”

Lerrys Ridenow came down to the center of the dais. I had not seen him since shortly after my marriage to Dio; but he had not changed: slender, elegant, dressed now in Darkovan clothing, the green and gold of the Ridenow Domain, but exhibiting the same foppish grace as he had had in the clothing he had worn on the pleasure world.

He said, “Are you going to raise the bogey of Sharra again? We all know the link was broken and the matrix controlled again. The Sharra matrix is no trouble to anyone now—or rather,” he said, raising his head and cocking it a little to one side with a calculating glance at me, “it may be very grave trouble to Lew Alton, but he asked, after all, for his trouble.”

How could he have known that? Dio must have told him! How could she… how could she have betrayed to him what was so personal to me? And what else had she told him, what else had she betrayed? I had trusted her implicitly– My hand clenched and I bit back a rising surge of nausea. I did not want to believe that Dio could have betrayed me this way.

But next to me, Marius rose to his feet. I was startled, almost turned to him to remind him sharply that he had no voice here—then I remembered. He was one of the official claimants for the Alton Domain; they could no longer refuse to acknowledge his existence.

He said, and his voice was only a shred of sound. “That’s not true, DomLerrys. The matrix is—is active again. Lord Regis, tell that what you saw… in my father’s house, not three days ago.”

“It’s true,” Regis said, and he was very pale. “The Sharra matrix is alive again. But I did not know, at that time, that Lew Alton had returned to Darkover. I think he must have brought it back with him.”

I had had no choice, but there was no way I could tell them that. While Regis spoke, I listened, transfixed with horror. I clutched at Marius’s sleeve and said, “Rafe. He is in Thendara—”

But I hardly heard Marius’s reply.

Rafe was in Thendara.

That meant Kadarin and Thyra were—somewhere.

And so was the Sharra matrix.

And so—all the Gods of Darkover be merciful—so was I.

CHAPTER THREE

« ^ »

Even as he told the story of what he had seen in Kennard’s house the night Marius had come in panic to summon him, Regis watched Lew, thinking that he would hardly have known the older man, who had been like a brother in his childhood. Lew looked, he formed the thought without volition, like something hung up in a field to scare the birds! Not so much the gauntness, though he was thin enough, and looked worn, nor even the dreadful scars. No, it was something in the eyes, something haunted and terrible.

In six years, has he found no peace?

Surely it was only that Lew was travel-worn, still suffering with the shock of his father’s sudden death. Regis knew that when he could stop to think, he too would mourn the kindly and genial man who had been foster-father and friend, who had trained him in swordplay and given him the only family and home he had ever known. But this was no time for mourning. Tersely, he completed the tale.

“… and when I tried to look within my own matrix, it was as it had been in the Hellers, during that time when Sharra was freed and Lew was—enslaved. I saw nothing but the Form of Fire.”

From his place among the Altons, the big redheaded man who had come from Arilinn, and who was one of Lew’s kinsmen—Regis had only heard his name briefly and did not remember it—said, “I find this disturbing, Lord Regis. For look, my own matrix is free of any taint.” With the big fingers which looked better suited to the hilt of a sword—or to a blacksmith’s hammer—he deftly untwisted the silk about the cord at his neck; briefly, Regis saw a glow of pallid blue before the man covered it again.

“And mine,” said Callina quietly but without moving. Regis assumed that, as a Keeper, she would know the condition of her matrix without touching it. Sometimes he wished he had chosen to remain in a Tower, to be trained in the skills of using all of his latent laran, whatever it was. Usually, when this wish came upon Regis, it was when he saw a trained technician working with a matrix. It had not been strong enough to hold him in a Tower against the other claims of clan and caste, and he supposed that for a true mechanic or technician, that call must supersede other claims and needs.

Callina said quietly to Lew, “What of yours?”

He shrugged, and to Regis it seemed like the last hopeless movement of a man so defeated that there was no longer strength in him to fight this ultimate shame and despair. He wanted to cry out to Callina, Can’t you see what you are doing to him? At last Lew said tonelessly, “I have never been—free of it.”

But the others in the Crystal Chamber were growing restless. Already the quality of the light had altered, as the Bloody Sun beyond the windows sank toward the horizon and was lost in the evening mists; now the light was cold, chill and austere. At last someone, some minor noble somewhere within the Ardais Domain, called out, “What has this to do with the Council?”

Callina said in her sombre voice, “Pray to all the Gods you never find out how much this can have to do with us, comynari. There is nothing that can be done here, but we must investigate this—” She looked at Lew’s kinsman from Arilinn and said, “Jeff, are there any other technicians here?”

He shook his head. “Not unless the mother Ashara can supply some.” He turned back to the Hasturs and addressed himself to Regis’s grandfather.

“ Vai Dom, will you dismiss the Council for a few days, until we can look into this and find out why there has been this—this outbreak of a force we thought safely controlled.”

Hastur frowned, and Derik said shrilly, “It is too late to stop this alliance, Lord Hastur, and anyway I don’t think Beltran has anything to do with the Sharra people—not now. I think he’s had his lesson about that! Don’t you think so, Marius?”

Regis saw Lew start and stare in dismay at Marius, and wondered if Lew had not known about the ties between his brother and Rafe Scott—ties that probably meant with the Aldarans too. Well, they were Marius’s kinsmen, his mother’s people. We made a great mistake, he thought drearily, we should have kept Marius allied to us in bonds of friendship, kin-ties. We cast him out; where could he turn, save to the Terrans, or Aldarans, or both? And now it seems we must deal with him as Heir to Alton. It seemed fairly obvious that Lew was in no shape to take upon himself the rulership of the Alton Domain, even if the Council could be brought to accept him there.

There was once alaran which could foretell the future, Regis thought, and it was among the Hasturs. Would that I had some of that gift!

He had missed what Marius had said, but his grandfather looked distressed. Then he said, “There can be no question of alliance with Aldaran until we know something of this—” he hesitated and Regis saw the old man’s lip curl in fastidious distaste—“this—reappearance of Sharra.”

“But that’s what I am trying to tell you,” said Derik in exasperation. “We have sent the message to Beltran, and he will be here on Festival Night!” And, as he read the anger and dismay in old Hastur’s face, Derik added, defensive, petulant, like a small boy who has been caught at some mischief, “Well, I am Lord of Elhalyn! It was my right—wasn’t it?”

Danvan Hastur took the cup of warmed spiced wine that his body-servant had set in his hand, and propped his feet up on a carven footstool. Around him the servants were moving quietly, lighting lamps. Night had fallen; the same night after which he had had no choice but to dismiss the Council.

“I should send a message to see how Lew does,” Regis said, “or go and greet him. Kennard was my friend and foster-father; Lew and I were bredin.”

Hastur said with asperity, “You could surely find yourself a less dangerous friend in these days. That alliance won’t do you any good.”

Regis said angrily, “I don’t choose my friends for their political expediency, sir!”

Hastur shrugged that away. “You’re still young enough for the luxury of friendships. I remained convinced that Kennard was a good friend—perhaps for too long.” As Regis stirred, he said, “No, wait. I need you here. I have sent for Gabriel and Javanne. The question before us is this: what are we going to do about Derik?” As Regis looked blank he said impatiently, “Surely you don’t still think we can have him crowned! The boy’s not much better than a halfwit!”

Regis shrugged. “I don’t see what choice you have, Grandfather. It’s worse than if he were a halfwit; then everyone would agree that he can’t be crowned. The trouble is that Derik has nine-tenths of his wits, and he’s missing only the most important tenth.” He smiled, but knew there was no mirth in the joke.

But Danvan Hastur did not smile, he said, “In some lesser walk of life—even as the ordinary Head of a Domain—it wouldn’t be so important; he’s going to marry Linnell Lindir-Aillard, and she’s no fool. Derik loves her, he’s grown up with the knowledge that the Aillard women are the Heads of Council in their own right, and he would let himself be guided by her. I remember when my father married off one of the less stable Ardais to an Aillard woman; Lady Rohana was the real head of that clan well into Dyan’s time. But—to wear the crown of the Hasturs of Elhalyn—” he shook his head slowly, “and in the days that are coming now? No, I can’t risk it.”

“I don’t know that you have the power to risk it or not risk it, sir,” Regis pointed out. “If you had faced the fact, years ago, that Derik would never be fit for his crown, perhaps when he was twelve or fifteen, and instead had him put under Guardianship and had him set aside—who is the next Heir to Elhalyn?”

Danvan Hastur scowled, lines running down sharply from his jaw to his chin. “I can’t believe you are thatnaïve, Regis.”

“I don’t know what you mean, Grandfather.”

Danvan Hastur sighed and said heavily, as if he were explaining a thing to a child with the use of colored pictures, “Your mother, Regis, was King Stephen’s sister. His only sister.” Just in case Regis might have missed the implications of that, he added baldly, “You are nearest to the crown—even before the sons of Derik’s sisters. The oldest of those sons is three years old. There is also an infant at the breast.”

“Aldones! Lord of Light!” Regis muttered, and the imprecation was nevertheless a prayer. Words he had said, joking, to Danilo years before, came back to him now. “ If you love me, Dani, don’t wish a crown upon me!”

“If I had had him set aside,” his grandfather said, “who would have believed that I was not simply trying to consolidate power in my own hands? Not that it would have been such a bad thing, in these days—but it would have lost me the popular support that I needed to keep order in a crownless realm. I delayed, hoping it would become clear to everyone that Derik was really unfit.”

“And now,” said Regis, “everyone will think that you are trying to depose Derik the first time he makes a decision contrary to yours.”

“The trouble is,” his grandfather said, and he sounded despondent, “this proposed alliance with Aldaran might not be such a bad idea, if we could be absolutely certain that the Aldarans are once and for all out of the Terran camp. What happened during that Sharra business seemed to have broken off the closeness between Terrans and Aldaran. If we could get the Aldarans firmly on our side—” he considered for a moment.

“Grandfather, do you honestly think that the Terrans are going to pack up their spaceport and go away?”

The old man shook his head. “I want us to turn our backs on them completely. I think my father made a very great mistake when he allowed Kennard to be educated on Terra, and I think I compounded that mistake when I recognized Lew for Council. No, of course the Terran Empire won’t go away. But the Terrans might have respected us, if we hadn’t kept looking over the wall. We should never have let the Ridenow go offworld. We should have said to the Terrans, ‘Build your spaceport if you must, but in return for that, let us alone. Leave us with our own way of life, and go about your business without involving us.’”

Regis shook his head. “It wouldn’t have worked. You can’t ignore a fact, and the Terran Empire is a fact. It’s there. Sooner or later it’s going to affect us one way or the other, no matter how strictly we try to pretend it doesn’t exist. And you can’t ignore the fact that we are Terran colonists, or that we were once—”

“What we were once doesn’t matter,” Danvan Hastur said. “Chickens can’t go back into eggs.”

“The very point I’m trying to make, sir. We were cut off from our roots, and we found a way of life which meant we accepted ourselves as belonging to this world, compelled to live within its restrictions. That worked while we were still isolated, but once we had come back into contact with a—” he stopped, and considered—“with an empire which spans the stars, and takes world-hopping for granted, we can’t pretend to continue as we were.”

“I don’t see why not,” Hastur said. “The Terrans have nothing that we want.”

“Nothing youwant, perhaps, sir.” Regis made a point of not staring markedly at the silver coffee service on his grandfather’s table, but the old man saw his look anyhow and said, “I am willing to do without any Terran luxuries, if it will encourage the rest of our people to do likewise.”

“Once again, sir, won’t work. We had to turn to the Terrans during the last epidemic of Trailmen’s fever. There’s some evidence the climate’s changing, too, and we need some technological help there. People will die if they don’t see an alternative, but if we let them die when Terran medicine can help them, are we anything but tyrants? Sir, one thing no one can control is knowledge. We can use it or misuse it– like laran,” he added grimly, remembering that his own laran had brought him such unendurable self-knowledge that, at one time, he would willingly have had it burned forever from his brain. “But we can’t pretend it’s never happened, or that it’s our destiny to stay on this one world as if it was all there would ever be in the universe.”

“Are you trying to say that we must inevitably become part of the Terran Empire?” his grandfather asked, scowling so furiously that Regis wished he had never started this.

“I am saying, sir, that whether we join into it or not, the Terran Empire is now a fact of our existence, and whatever decisions we make, must be made in the full knowledge that the Terrans are there. If we had refused them permission to build their spaceport, at first, they might—I say they might, not that they would—have turned their backs, gone away and built it somewhere else. I doubt it. Most likely they would have used just enough force to stop our open rebellion against it, and built it anyhow. We could have tried to resist—and perhaps, if we still had the weapons of the Ages of Chaos, we might have been able to drive them away. But not without destroying ourselves in the process. You remember what happened in a single night when Beltran turned Sharraagainst them—” He stopped, shivering. “That is not the worst of the Ages of Chaos weapons, but I pray I will never see a worse one. And we do not, now, have the technology of the Ages of Chaos, so that those weapons, are uncontrollable. And even you, sir, don’t think we can drive away the Terrans with the swords of the Guardsmen—not even with every swordsman on Darkover under arms.”

His grandfather sat silent, head on handa, for so long that Regis wondered if he had said the unforgivable, if the next thing Danvan Hastur did would be to disown and disinherit him as a traitor.

But everything I said was true, and he is honest enough to know it.

“That’s right,” said Danvan Hastur, and Regis was, guiltily, startled; he had grown used to the knowledge that his grandfather was only the most minimal of telepaths, and never used mindspeech if he could possibly help it; so little, in fact, that sometimes he forgot there was any laranthey shared.

“I should be as witless as Derik if I tried to pretend that Darkover alone could stand out against anything the size of the Terran Empire. But I absolutely refuse to let Darkover become a Terran colony, and nothing more. If we can’t retain our integrity in the face of Terran culture and technology, perhaps we don’t deserve to survive at all.”

“It’s not that bad,” Regis pointed out. “That’s one reason Kennard was educated on Terra in the first place—to point out that our way of life is viable, even for us, and that we don’t need the worst of their technology—that we needn’t adopt it, for instance, to the level where our own ecology suffers. We can’t support the kind of technology they have on some of the city worlds, for instance; we’re metal-poor, and even too-intensive agriculture would strip our topsoil and forests within two generations. I was brought up with that fact and so were you. The Terrans know it, too. They have laws against world-wrecking, and they’re not going to give us anything we don’t demand. But with all respect, Grandfather, I think we’ve gone too far in the other direction and we’re insisting that we keep our people in a state—” he groped for words—“a state of barbarism, a feudal state where we maintain hold over people’s very minds.”

“They don’t know what’s good for them,” Hastur said despairingly. “Look at the Ridenow! Spending half their time on places like Vainwal—deserting our people when theymost need responsible leadership! As for the common people, they look at the luxuries Terran citizenship would give them– they think—and forget the price that would have to be paid.”

“Maybe I trust people more than you do, sir. I think that if we gave them more education, more knowledge—maybe they’d know what they were fighting and know why you were refusing it.”

“I’ve lived longer than you have,” pointed out the old man dryly, “long enough to know that most people want what’s going to give them the most profit and the least effort, and they won’tthink about the long-range consequences.”

“That’s not always true,” said Regis. “Look at the Compact.”

Hastur said, “That was forced on the people by one singleminded fanatic, when they were already frightened and exhausted by a series of suicidal wars. And it was kept only because the keepers of those old weapons destroyed them before they could be used again, and took the knowledge to their graves. Look how it’s been kept!” His lip curled. “Every now and then someone digs up an old weapon and uses it– or so they say—in self-defense. You’re not old enough to remember the time when the catmen darkened all the lands of the Kilghard Hills, or when some of the forge-folk—I suppose—raised Sharra against some bandits a couple of generations ago. If the weapons are there, people are going to use them, and to hell with the long-range consequences! Your own father was blown to pieces by smuggled contraband weapons from the Terran Zone. So much for the strength of our way of life against the Terrans!”

“I still think that could have been avoided if people had been dully warned against the consequences,” Regis said, “but I’m not saying we must become a Terran colony. Even the Terrans aren’t demanding that.”

“How do you know what they want?”

“I’ve talked with some of them, sir. I know you don’t really approve, but I feel it’s better to know what they’re doing—”

“And as a result,” said his grandfather coldly, “you stand here and defend them to me.”

Regis fought back a surge of exasperation. He said at last, “We were speaking of Derik, Grandfather. If he can’t be crowned, what’s the alternative? Why can’t we just marry him to Linnell and rely on her to keep him within bounds?”

“Linnell’s too good for him,” Danvan Hastur said, “and I hate to see him come any further under the influence of Merryl. I don’t trust that man.”

“Merryl’s a fool and a hothead,” said Regis, “and dangerously undisciplined. But I imagine Lady Callina can help there—if you don’t tie her hands by letting Merry marry her off. I don’t, and won’t, trust the Aldarans. Not with Sharra loose again.”

“I cannot go directly against the heir to the Throne, Regis. If I cause him to lose kihar—” deliberately, Danvan Hastur used the untranslatable Dry-Town word meaning personal integrity, honor, dignity—less and more than any of these, “before the Council. How can he ever rule over them after that?”

“He can’t anyway, Grandfather. Will you let him marry off Callina to save his face before Council? If you have to crown him—and I think perhaps you do—you must let him know beforehe’s crowned that the Council can always veto his decisions, or you’ll have him playing the tyrant over us in all kinds of foolish ways. Callina Lindir is Head of a Domain in her own right, and has been Keeper of Neskaya and Arilinn, and now here under Ashara. What about Callina’sloss of kihar?”

His grandfather scowled; Regis knew, though it was not– quite—telepathy, that Hastur was reluctant to allow Callina also that much Council power.

Not unless he’s sure she’ll support him and his isolationist notions. Otherwise he’ll marry her off just to get her out of the Council!

“I don’t suppose you’d be willing to marry her yourself?”

“Callina?” he asked in horror, “She must be twenty-seven!”

“Hardly senile,” said the old man dryly, “but I was speaking of Linnell. She’s too good for that fool Derik.”

Evanda’s mercy, is the old man harping on that string again? “Sir, Derik and Linnell have been sweethearts since Linnie’s hair was too short to braid! And you’ve encouraged it. She’s the only woman Derik would, perhaps, consent to be ruled by. You’d break both their hearts! Why separate them now?”

“I’d like to be firmly allied to the Aillards—”

“We’re that already, sir, with Linnell handfasted to Derik. But we won’t be if you alienate them by losing face for Callina by marrying her off against her will—and to Aldaran,” Regis said. “And you’re forgetting the most important thing, Grandfather.”

“What’s that?” The old man snorted, getting up and pacing the room restlessly. “All this business about Sharra?”

“Don’t you see what’s happening, Grandfather? Derik did this behind our backs, and Beltran will be here on Festival Night. Which means he’s already on the road, unless he’s patched things up enough with the Terrans to get an aircraft or two, and it’s not very easy to fly through the Hellers.” He remembered someone telling him that they had been, profanely, dubbed worse things than that by the only Terrans to try to fly over them in anything slower and lower than a rocketplane; they were a nightmare of updrafts, down-drafts and wild thermal patterns. “So when he gets here, what do you say? Please, Lord Aldaran, turn around and go home again, we’ve changed our minds!”

Old Hastur grimaced. “Wars have been fought for a lot less than that on Darkover.”

“And the Aldarans haven’t always observed the Compact that well,” Regis pointed out. “Either we have to let him marry Callina—or we have to insult Beltran by saying, maybe in public, ‘Sorry, Lord, Aldaran, the woman won’t have you,’ or by telling him that our Prince and Ruler is a ninny who can’t be entrusted even with the making of a marriage for his paxman! Either way, Beltran will have a grievance! Grandfather, I find it hard to believe you couldn’t have foreseen this day!”

Hastur came and dropped in his carved and gilded presence-chair. He said, “I knew Derik couldn’t be trusted to make any important decision. I said again and again that I didn’t like him going about with Merry! But could I have foreseen that Merryl would have the insolence to speak for the head of his Domain—or that Aldaran would listen?”

“If you had faced the fact that Derik was witless—well, not witless, not a ninny who should be in leading-strings with a he-governess to look after him, but certainly without the practical judgment of a boy of ten, let alone the presumptive Heir to the Throne—” Regis began, then sighed. He said, “Sir, done is done. There’s no point in arguing what we should have done. The question now is, how do we get out of this without a war?”

“I don’t suppose Callina would consent to marry him, just to go through the ceremony as a formality—” Hastur began, but broke off as his servant entered and stood near the door.

“Yes?”