Текст книги "Heritage Of Hastur"

Автор книги: Marion Zimmer Bradley

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Текущая страница: 24 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

She had on a thick woolen shift, knee-length and with long sleeves; I had seen her far more lightly clothed at Aldaran, but there was something about being here like this that roused an awareness that fear and weariness had almost smothered. All during this trip she had slept within the circle of my arm, but innocently. Perhaps because I was still recovering from the effects of Kadarin’s brutal beating. Now, all at once, I was aware again of her physical presence. She felt it—we were lightly in rapport all the time now—and turned her face a little away, color rising along her cheekbones. There was a hint of defiance as she said, “Just the same, I am going to take down my hair and comb and braid it properly, before it gets tangled like Mhari’s and I have to cut it off!” She raised her arms, pulled out the butterfly-shaped clasp that held her braids pinned at the nape of her neck, and began to unravel the long plaits.

I felt the hot flush of embarrassment. In the lowlands a sister who was already a woman would not have done this even before a grown brother. I had not seen Linnell’s hair loose like this since we were little children, although when we were small I had sometimes helped her comb it. Did customs really differ so much? I sat and watched her move the ivory comb slowly through her long copper hair; it was perfectly straight, only waved a little from the braiding, and very fine, and the sun, coming in cracks through the heavy wooden shutters, set it all ablaze with the glint of the precious metal. I said at last, hoarsely, “Don’t tease me, Marjorie. I’m not sure I can bear it.”

She did not look up. She only said softly, “Why should you? I am here.”

I reached out and took the comb away from her, turning her face up to meet my eyes. “I cannot take you lightly, beloved. I would give you all honor and all ceremony.”

“You cannot,” she said, with the shadow of a small smile, “because I no longer … ” the words were coming slowly now, as if it were painful to speak them. “—no longer acknowledge Beltran’s right to give me in marriage. My foster-father meant to give me to you. That is ceremony enough.” Suddenly she spoke in a rush. “And I am not a Keeper now! I have renounced that, I will not keep myself separate from you, I will not, I will not!”

She was sobbing now. I flung the comb away and drew her into my arms, holding her to me with sudden violence.

“Keeper? No, no, never again,” I whispered against her mouth. “Never, never again—”

What can I say? We were together. And we were in love.

Afterward I braided her hair for her. It seemed almost as intimate as lying down together, my hands trembling as they touched the silken strands, as they had when I first touched her. We did not sleep for a long time.

When we woke it was late and already snowing heavily. When I went to saddle the horses, the wind was whipping the snow in wild stinging needles across the yard. We could not ride in this. When I came inside again, Marjorie looked at me in guilty dismay.

“I delayed us. I’m sorry—”

“I think we are beyond pursuit now, preciosa. But we would only have had to turn back; we cannot ride in this. I’ll put the horses into the outbuilding and give them some fodder.”

“Let me come and help—”

“Don’t go out in the snow, beloved. I’ll attend to the horses.”

When I came in, Marjorie had kindled a fire on the long-dead hearth and, finding an old battered stone kettle discarded in a corner, had washed it, filled it at the well and put some of our dried meat to stew with the mushrooms. When I scolded her for going into the yard—in these snow-squalls men have been lost and frozen between their own barnyard and doorway—she said shyly, “I wanted us to have a fireside. And a … a wedding-feast.”

I hugged her close and said, “The minute he sees you my father will be delighted to arrange all that.”

“I know,” she said, “but I’d rather have it here.” The thought warmed me more than the fire. We ate the hot soup before the fire. We had to share one spoon and eat it straight from the old kettle. We had little fuel and the fire burned down quickly, but as it sank into darkness Marjorie whispered, “Our first fireside.”

I knew what she meant. It was not the formal ceremony, di catenas, the elaborate wedding-feast for my kin, her proclamation before Comyn Council, that would make her my wife. Everywhere in the hills, where ceremonies are few and witnesses sparse, the purposeful sharing of “a bed, a meal, a fireside” acknowledges the legal status of a marriage, and I knew why Marjorie had risked losing her way in the snow to kindle a fire and cook us up some soup. By the simple laws of the hills, we were wedded, not in our own eyes alone, but in a ceremony that would stand in the eyes of all men. I was glad she had been sure enough of me to do this without asking. I was glad the weather kept us here for another night. But something was troubling me. I said, “Regis and Danilo are nearer to Thendara now than we are to Arilinn, unless they have been recaptured. But neither of them is a skilled telepath, and I doubt if a message has gone through. I should send a message, either to Arilinn or to my father. I should have done it before.”

She caught my hand as I pulled the matrix from its resting place. “Lew, is it really safe?”

“I must, love, safe or not. I should have done it the moment I had my matrix back. We must face the possibility that they will try again. Beltran won’t abandon his aims so quickly, and I fear Kadarin is unscrupulous.” I backed off from speaking the name of Sharra aloud, but it was there between us and we both knew it.

And if they did try again, without my knowledge or control, without Marjorie for Keeper, what then? Playing with forest fire would be child’s play, next to the risk of waking that thing without a trained Keeper! I had to warn the towers.

She said hesitantly, “We were all in rapport. If you … use your matrix … can they feelit, trail us that way?”

That was a possibility, but whatever happened to us, Sharra must be controlled and contained, or none of us would ever be safe again. And in all these days I had sensed no touch, no seeking mind.

I drew out the matrix and uncovered it. To my dismay, I felt a faint, twisting tinge of sickness as I gazed into the blue depths. That was a danger signal. Perhaps during the days I had been separated from it, I had become somewhat unkeyed. I focused on it, steadying my mind to the delicate task of establishing rapport again with the starstone; again and again I was forced to turn my eyes away by the pain, the blurring of vision.

“Leave it, Lew, leave it, you’re too tired—”

“I cannot.” If I delayed, I would lose mastery of the matrix, be forced to begin again with another stone. I fought the matrix for nearly an hour, struggling with my inability to focus it. I looked at Marjorie with regret, knowing that I was draining my strength with this telepathic struggle. I cursed the fate that had made me a telepath and a matrix mechanic, but it never occurred to me that I should abandon the struggle unfinished.

If this had—unimaginably—happened in Arilinn, I would have been given kirianor one of the other psi-activator drugs and helped by a psi monitor and my own Keeper. Now I had to master it alone. I myself had made it impossible and dangerous for Marjorie to help me.

At last, my head splitting, I managed to focus the lights in the stone. Quickly, while I still had the strength, I reached out through the gray and formless spaces that we call the underworld, looking for the light-landmark that was the relay-circle at Arilinn.

For a moment I had it. Then, within the stone, there was a wild flaring flame, a rush of savage awareness, a too-familiar surge of fiery violence … flames rising, the great form of fire blotting out consciousness … a woman, dark and vital, bearing a living flame, a great circle of faces pouring out raw emotion …

I heard Marjorie gasp, fought to break the rapport. Sharra! Sharra! We had been sealed to it, we were caught and drawn to the fires of destruction …

“No! No!” Marjorie cried aloud, and I saw the fires thin out and vanish. They had never been there. They were reflected in the dying coals of our ritual marriage-fire; the eerie edge of light around Marjorie’s face was only the last firelight there. She whispered, trembling, “Lew, what was it?”

“You know,” I hesitated to say the name aloud, “Kadarin. And Thyra. Working directly with the sword. Zandru’s hells, Marjorie, they are trying to use it the old way, not with a Keeper-controlled circle of telepaths in an orderly energon ring—and it’s uncontrollable even that way, as we found out—but with a single telepath, focusing raw emotion from a group of untrained followers.”

“Isn’t that terribly dangerous?”

“Dangerous! The word’s inadequate! Would you kindle a forest fire to cook your supper? Would you chain a dragon-fire to roast your chops or dry your boots? I wish I thought they would only kill themselves!”

I strode up and down by the dead fire, restlessly listening to the battering of the storm outside. “And I can’t even warn them at Arilinn!”

“Why not, Lew?”

“So close to—to Sharra—my own matrix won’t work,” I said, and tried to explain how Sharra evidently blanked out smaller matrices.

“How far will that effect reach, Lew?”

“Who knows? Planet-wide, maybe. I’ve never worked with anything that strong. There aren’t any precedents.”

“Then, if it reached all the way to Arilinn, won’t the telepaths there know that somethingis wrong?”

I brightened. That might be our only hope. I staggered suddenly and she caught at my arm.

“Lew! You’re worn out. Rest here by me, darling.” I flung myself down at her side, dizzy and despairing. I had not even spoken of my other fears, that if I used my personal matrix, I, who had been sealed to Sharra, might be drawn back into that vortex, that savage fire, that corner of hell …

She knew, without my saying it. She whispered, “I can feel it reaching for us… . Can it draw us back, back into itself?”

She clung to me in terror; I rolled over and took her to me, holding her with savage strength, fighting an almost uncontrollable desire. And that frightened hell out of me. I should be drained, spent, exhausted, incapable of the slightest sexual impulse. That was frustrating, but it was normal, and I had long since come to terms with it.

But this wild lust—and it was pure lust, a hateful dark animal thing with no hint of love or warmth—set my pulses racing, made me gasp and fight against it. It was too strong; I let it surge up and overwhelm me, feeling the fire burn up in my veins as if some scalding ichor had replaced the blood in my body. I smothered her mouth under mine, felt her weakly struggling to fight me away. Then the fire took us both.

It is the one memory I have of Marjorie which is not all joy. I took her savagely, without tenderness, trying to slake the burning need in me. She met me with equal violence, hating it equally, both of us gripped with that uncontrollable savage desperation. It was fierce and animal—no! Not animal! Animals meet cleanly, driven only by the life-force in them, knowing nothing of this kind of dark lust. There was no innocence in this, no love, only raw violence, insatiable, a bottomless pit of hell. It was hell, all the hell either of us would ever need to know. I heard her sobbing helplessly and knew I was weeping, too, with shame and self-hatred. Afterward we did not sleep.

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Chapter TWENTY-ONE

Even at Nevarsin, Regis thought, it had never snowed so hard, or so persistently. His pony picked its way deliberately along, following in the steps of Danilo’s mount, as mountain horses were trained to do. It was snowing again.

He wouldn’t mind any of it, he thought, the riding, the cold or the lack of sleep, if he could see properly, or keep the world straight under him.

The threshold sickness had continued off and on, more on than off in the last day or so. He tried to ignore Danilo’s anxious looks, his concern for him. There wasn’t anything Danilo could do for him, so the less said about it, the better.

But it was intensely unpleasant. The world kept thinning away at irregular intervals and dissolving. He had had no attacks as bad as the one he’d had at Thendara or on the way north, but he seemed to live in mild chronic disorientation all the time. He didn’t know which was worse, but suspected it was whichever form he happened to have at the time.

Danilo waited for him to draw even on the path. “Snowing already, and it’s hardly midafternoon. At this rate it will take us a full twelve days to reach Thendara, and we’ll lose the long start we had.”

The more quickly they reached Thendara, the better. He knew a message mustget through, even if Lew and Marjorie were recaptured. So far there was no sign of pursuit. But Regis knew, cursing his own weakness, that he could not take much more of the constant exertion, the long hours in the saddle and the constant sickness.

Earlier that day they had passed through a small village, where they had bought food and grain for the horses. Perhaps they could risk a fire tonight—if they could find a place to build it!

“Anything but a hay-barn,” Danilo agreed. The last night they had slept in a barn, sharing warmth with several cows and horses and plenty of dry hay. The animals had made it a warm place to sleep, but they could not risk a fire or even a light, with the tinder-dry hay, so they had eaten nothing but hard strips of cured meat and a handful of nuts.

“We’re in luck,” Danilo said, pointing. Away to the side of the road was one of the travel-shelters built generations ago, when Aldaran had been the seventh Domain and this road had been regularly traveled in all seasons. The inns had all been abandoned, but the travel-shelters, built to stand for centuries, were still habitable, small stone cabins with attached sheds for horses and proper amenities for travelers.

They dismounted and stabled their horses, hardly speaking, Regis from weariness, Danilo from reluctance to intrude on him. Dani thought he was angry, Regis sensed; he knew he should tell his friend he was not angry, just tired. But he was reluctant to show weakness. He was Hastur: it was for him to lead, to take responsibility. So he drove himself relentlessly, the effort making his words few and sharp, his voice harsh. It only made it worse to know that if he had given Danilo the slightest encouragement, Dani would have waited on him hand and foot and done it with pleasure. He wasn’t going to take advantage of Danilo’s hero-worship. The Comyn had done too much of that … The horses settled for the night, Danilo carried the saddlebags inside. Pausing on the threshold, he said, “This is the interesting time, every night. When we see what the years have left of whatever place we’ve found to stay.”

“It’s interesting, all right,” Regis said dryly. “We never know what we’ll find, or who’ll share our beds with us.” One night they had had to sleep in the stables, because a nest of deadly scorpion-ants had invaded the shelter itself.

“Um, yes, a scorpion-ant is a lower form of life than I care to go to bed with,” Danilo said lightly, “but tonight we seem to be in luck.” The interior was bare and smelled dusty and unaired, but there was an intact fireplace, a pair of benches to sit on and a heavy shelf built into the wall so they need not sleep on the floor at the mercy of spiders or rodents. Danilo dumped the saddlebags on a bench. “I saw some dead branches in the lee of the stable. The snow won’t have soaked them through yet. There may not be enough to keep a fire all night, but we can certainly cook some hot food.”

Regis sighed. “I’ll come and help you get them in.” He opened the door again on the snow-swept twilight; the world toppled dizzily around him and he clung to the door.

“Regis, let me go, you’re ill again.”

“I can manage.”

“Damn it!” Suddenly Danilo was angry. “Will you stop pretending and playing hero with me? How the hell will I manage if you fall down and can’t get up again? It’s a lot easier to drag a couple of armfuls of dry branches in, than try to carry youthrough the snow! Just stay in here, will you?”

Pretending. Playing hero. Was that how Danilo saw his attempt to carry his own weight? Regis said stiffly, “I wouldn’t want to make things harder for you. Go ahead.”

Danilo started to speak but didn’t. He set his chin and strode, stiff-necked into the snowy darkness. Regis started to unload the saddlebags but became so violently dizzy that he had to sit down on one of the stone benches, holding on with both hands.

He was a dead weight on Danilo, he thought. Good for nothing but to hold him back. He wondered how Lew was faring in the mountains. He’d hoped to draw pursuit away from him, that hadn’t worked either. He felt like huddling on the bench, giving way to the surges of sickness, but remembered Javanne’s advice: move around, fight it. He hauled himself to his feet, got his flint-and-steel and the wisps of dry hay they had kept for tinder, and knelt before the fireplace, clearing away the remnants of the last travelers’ fire. How many years ago was that one built? he wondered.

Wind, and cold slashes of snow blew through the open doorway; Danilo, laden with branches, staggered inside, shoved them near the fireplace, went quickly out again. Regis tried to separate the driest branches to lay a fire, but could not steady his hands enough to manipulate the small mechanical flint-and-steel, fed with resinous oil, which kept the spark alive. He laid the device on the bench and sat with his head in his hands, feeling completely useless, until Danilo, bent under another load of branches, came in and kicked the door shut behind him.

“My father calls that a lazy man’s load,” he said cheerfully, “carrying too much because you’re too lazy to go back for another. It ought to keep the cold out awhile. Anyway, I’d rather be cold here than warm in Aldaran’s royal suite, damn him.” He strode to where Regis had laid the fire, kneeling to spark it alight with Regis’s lighter. “Bless the man who invented this gadget. Lucky you have one.”

It had been part of Gabriel’s camping-kit that Javanne had given him, along with the small cooking pots they carried. Dani looked at Regis, huddled motionless and shivering on the bench. He said, “Are you very angry with me?” Silently, Regis shook his head.

Danilo said haltingly, “I don’t want to … to offend you. But I’m your paxman and I have to do what’s best for you. Even if it’s not always what you want.”

“It’s all right, Dani. I was wrong and you were right,” Regis said. “I couldn’t even light the fire.”

“Well, I don’t mind lighting it. Certainly not with that gadget of yours. There’s water piped in the corner, there, if the pipes aren’t frozen. If they are, we’ll have to melt snow. Now, what shall we cook?”

The last thing Regis cared about at that moment was food, but he forced himself to join in a discussion about whether soup made from dried meat and beans, or crushed-grain porridge, would be better. When it was bubbling over the fire, Danilo came and sat beside him. He said, “Regis, I don’t want to make you angry again. But we’ve got to have this out. You’re no better. Do you think I can’t see that you can hardly ride?”

“What do you want me to say to you, Dani? I’m doing the best I can.”

“You’re doing morethan you can,” said Danilo. The light of the blazing fire made him look very young and very troubled. “Do you think I’m blaming you? But you must let me help you more.” Suddenly he flared out, “What am I to say to them in Thendara, if the heir to Hastur dies in my hands?”

“You’re making too much of this,” Regis said. “I never heard that anyone died of threshold sickness.” Yet Javanne had looked genuinely frightened …

“Maybe not,” Danilo said skeptically, “but if you cannot sit your horse, and fall and break your skull, that’s fatal, too. Or if you exhaust yourself and take a chill, and die of it. And you are the last Hastur.”

“No I’m not,” Regis said, at the end of endurance. “Didn’t you hear me tell Lew? I have an heir. Before I ever came on this trip I faced the fact that I might die, so I named one of my sister’s sons as my heir. Legally.” Danilo sat back on his heels, stunned, wide open, and his thought was as clear as if he had spoken aloud, For my sake?Regis forcibly stopped himself from saying anything more. He could not face the naked emotion in Danilo’s eyes. This was the time of danger, the forced intimacy of these evenings, when he must barricade himself continually against revealing what he felt. It would be all too easy to cling to Danilo for strength, to take advantage of Danilo’s emotional response to him.

Danilo was saying angrily, “Even so, I won’t have your death on my head! The Hasturs need you for yourself, Regis, not just for your blood or your heir!”

“What do you suggest I do about it?” Regis did not know, himself, whether it was an honest question or a sarcastic challenge.

“We are not pursued. We must rest here till you are well again.”

“I don’t think I shall ever be well again until I have a chance to go to one of the towers and learn to control this.” Laran? Gift? Curse, he thought. In his blood, in his brain.

But that was not the only thing making him ill, he knew. It was the constant need to barrier himself against his feelings, against his own unwelcome thoughts and desires. And for that there was no help, he decided. Even in the towers they could not make him other than he was. They might teach to conceal it, though, live with it.

Danilo laid his hand on Regis’ shoulder. “You must let me look after you. It is my duty.” He added after a moment, “And my pleasure.”

By an effort that literally made his head spin, Regis remained motionless under the touch. Rigidly, refusing the proffered rapport, he said, “Your porridge is burning. If you’re so eager to do something, attend to what you’re supposed to be doing. The damned stuif is inedible even when properly cooked.”

Danilo stiffened as if the words had been a blow. He went to the fire and took off the boiling concoction. Regis did not look at him or care that he had hurt him. He was beyond thinking about anything, except his own attempt notto think.

He felt a violent anger with Danilo for forcing this intimate confrontation on him. Suddenly he recalled the fight Danilo had picked in the barracks; a fight which, had it not been for Hjalmar’s intervention, might have gone far beyond a single blow. He wanted to lash out at Danilo now, flay him with cruel words. He felt a need to put distance between them, break up this unendurable closeness, keep Dani from looking at him with so much love. If they fought, perhaps Regis would no longer have to be constantly on guard, afraid of doing and saying what he could not even endure to think …

Danilo came with porridge in a small pannikin. He said tentatively, “I don’t think this is burned … ”

“Oh, stop being so damned attentive.” Regis flung at him. “Eat your supper and let me alone, damn you, just stop hovering over me! What must I do to make you realize I don’t want you, I don’t need you? Just let me alone!”

Danilo’s face went white. He went and sat on the other bench, his head bent over his own porridge. His back to Regis, he said coldly, “Yours is there when you want it, my lord.”

Regis could see clearly, as if time had slid out of focus, that searing moment in the barracks, when Danilo had flung him off with an insult. It was clear in Danilo’s mind, too: He has done to me, knowing, what I did to him, unknowing.

By main force Regis held himself back from immediate apology. The smell of the porridge made him feel violently sick. He went to the stone shelf and laid himself down, wrapping himself in his riding-cloak and trying to suppress the racking shudders that shook his whole body. It seemed to him that he could hear Danilo crying, as he had done so often in the barracks, but Danilo was sitting on the bench, quietly eating his supper. Regis lay looking at the fire, until it began to flare up, flame—hallucination. Not forest fire, not Sharra. Just hallucination again. Psi out of control.

Still, it seemed that he could see Lew’s face, vividly, by firelight. Suppose, Regis thought, when I reached up toward him, drew him down beside me, he had flung me off, slapped me? Suppose he had thought the comfort I offered him a thing too shameful to endure or acknowledge?

I was only a child. I didn’t know what I was doing.

He wasn’t a child. And he knew.

Unable to endure this train of thought, he let the swaying sickness take him again. It was almost a relief to let the world slide away, go dim and thin out to nothing. Time vanished. He heard Danilo’s voice after a time, but the words no longer made sense; they were just vibration, sound without sense or relevance. He knew with the last breath of sanity that his only hope of saving himself now was to cry out, get up and move around, call out to Danilo, hang on to him as an anchor in this deadly nowhere—

He could not. He could not surrender to this; he would rather die … and he heard some curious remote little voice in his mind say die, then, if it is so important to you.And he felt something like a giant swing to take him, toss him high, further out into nowhere with every swooping breath, seeing stars, atoms, strange vibrations, the very rhythm of the universe—or was it his own brain cells vibrating, madly out of control?

He’d done this to himself, he knew. He’d let it happen, too much of a coward to face himself.

Call out to Dani, that inner voice said. He’ll help you, even now, if you ask him. But you’ll have to ask, you’ve made it impossible for him to come to you again unless you call him. Call quickly, quickly, while you still can!

I can’t—

He felt his breathing begin to come in gasps, as if he hung somewhere in the far spaces which were all he could see now, with every breath coming for an instant back to that struggling, dimming body lying inert on the shelf. Quickly! Call out now for help or you will die, here and now with everything left undone because of your pride …

With the last of his strength Regis fought for enough voice to shout, call aloud. It came out as the faintest of stifled whispers.

“Dani … help me … ”

Too late, he thought, and felt himself slide off into nothingness. He wondered, with desperate regret, if he was dying … because he could not bear to be honest with himself, with his friend …

He swung in darkness, immobile, numb, paralyzed. He felt Danilo, only a dim blue haze through his closed eyes, bending over him, fumbling at his tunic-laces. He could not even feel Danilo’s hands except that they were at his throat. He thought insanely, Is he going to kill me?

Without warning his body convulsed in a spasm of the most hideous pain he had ever known. He was thereagain, Danilo’s face visible through a reddish blood-colored mist, standing over him, his hand just touching the matrix around Regis’ neck. Regis said hoarsely, “No. Not again—” and felt the bone-cracking spasm return. Danilo dropped the matrix as if it burned him and the hellish pain subsided. Regis lay gasping. It felt as if he had fallen into the fire.

Danilo gasped, “Forgive me—I thought you were dying! I knew no other way to reach your mind … ” Carefully, without touching it, Danilo covered the matrix again. He dropped down on the stone bed beside Regis, as if his knees were too weak to hold him upright.

“Regis, Regis, I thought you were dying—”

Regis whispered, “I thought so too.”

“I told myself, if I let you die because I could not forgive a harsh word, then I was a disgrace to my father and all those who had served Hastur. I am a catalyst telepath, there had to be somethingI could do to reach you—I shouted and you didn’t hear, I slapped and pinched you, I thought you were dead already, but I could feelyou calling me … ” He was entirely unstrung.

Regis whispered, “What was it that you did? I felt you—”

“I touched the matrix—nothing else seemed to reach you, I was so sure you were dying—” He broke down and sobbed. “I could have killed you! I could have killed you!”

Regis drew Danilo down beside him, holding him tight in his arms. “ Bredu, don’t cry,” he whispered. “See, I’m not dead.” He felt suddenly shy again. Danilo’s face, wet with tears, was pressed against his cheek. Regis patted it clumsily. “Don’t cry any more.”

“But I hurt you so—I can’t bear to hurt you,” Danilo said wildly.

“I don’t think anything less would have brought me back,” Regis said. “It’s my life I owe you this time, bredu.” He was still dizzy and aching with the aftermath of what he now knew must have been a convulsion. Later he was to learn that this last-resort heroic treatment, gripping a matrix, was used only at the point of death; when stronger telepaths determined that without it, the sufferer might wander endlessly in the corridors of his own brain, cutting off all outside stimuli, until he died. Danilo had done it by pure instinct. Now Regis remembered what Javanne had said. “I’ve got to get up and move around or it may come back. But you’ll have to help me, Dani, I’m too weak to walk alone.”

Danilo helped him upright. By the last light of the dying fire Regis could see the tears on his face. He kept his arm around Regis, steadying him. “I should never have quarreled with you when you were sick.”

“It was I who picked the quarrel, Dani. Can you forgive me?”

He was cruel to Dani out of fear, Regis knew, fear of what he was himself. Perhaps Dyan, too, turned to cruelty out of fear and came at last to prefer cruelty to fear—or to shame—at knowing himself too well.

Laranwas terrible. But they had no choice, only to meet it with honor.

Danilo said shyly, “I kept your porridge hot for you. Can you try to eat it now?”

Regis took the hot pottery pannikin, burning his fingers a little on the edges. The thought of food made him feel sick, but obediently he chewed a few mouthfuls and discovered that he was actually very hungry. He ate the hot unsweetened stuff, saying after a time, “Well, it’s no worse than what we got in barracks. If you ever find yourself a masterless man, Dani, we’ll get you a job as an army cook.”