Traitor's Sun (18 page)

At the other end of the table, Marguerida observed her son and husband, and sighed softly. She wondered what had provoked Katherine’s outburst of merriment. The woman struck her as very serious, but she seemed less angry now, and Marguerida was glad of that.

“I don’t know what Mikhail said, but it is good to hear Kate laugh like that again. I was beginning to think . . . well, no matter.” Herm smiled at Marguerida as he spoke.

“She must be beside herself.”

“Do you know, I have never understood that phrase. How can one be beside themselves? But, yes, she has been very troubled, for which I cannot blame her. When I first met her, she was a young widow, and very sad. From all I can gather, Amaury’s father was a very good fellow, and his sudden death was a great blow. I have often wished I had known him, although if he had still been alive, I would never have had the opportunity to marry Katherine, and that would have been intolerable for me!” He chuckled to himself. “I might have had to challenge him to a duel, or something equally preposterous.”

“You do not strike me as a marrying sort of man,” Marguerida commented.

“You are right on that, though how you could have discerned it after such a brief acquaintance I do not know. I was quite happy in my bachelorhood, until I encountered Katherine, and then the only thing I could think of was to marry her as quickly as possible, before someone else snatched her away.”

“Were there other suitors, then?”

“No, not at all. But I kept imagining hordes of them, lurking in the corners of the ballrooms and drawing rooms. She is so beautiful that I could not help it. And why she agreed to marry me remains a mystery. I know I am not a handsome man.” He gestured at his shining pate. “What ever good looks I had, Robert damaged in a fist fight when we were lads.” He rubbed his nose, which had clearly been broken at least once.

“Robert in a fist fight? Now, that is a remarkable notion, for he has always seemed to me to be the best-tempered of men.”

“He is, but I was a very provoking boy. Not unlike your Rory, I suspect. But, tell me, how did you arrive at the conclusion that I was not the marrying type? My curiosity demands satisfaction.”

“Gisela suggested to me, long ago, that you were a confirmed bachelor. Indeed, I did not even know you had married, let alone were a father, until you arrived. Somehow you never mentioned it in your messages to my father, or in your infrequent letters to your sister. Why did you keep it such a secret? Didn’t you want your father to know he had another granddaughter?”

Herm grunted. “My father and I parted on poor terms,
Domna
Marguerida, and one reason I took the position in the Chamber of Deputies was to escape him. And because it was the chance of a lifetime for me. I had wanted to travel to the stars since I was a boy, all full of the tales told by the spacemen who frequented our home. But, I never wanted to be a spacer at all—the idea of being cooped up in a ship for long periods of time made me cringe. Besides having no talent for the mathematics and other disciplines that are needed. And it seemed that this was the only way to leave Darkover, until Regis decided to appoint me. I jumped at the chance, and, frankly, my father was furious with me.”

“But, why?”

“I suspect it was because he never liked Regis, but I cannot say for certain. All I know is that he went into one of his rages, a drunken fury that had the servants scrambling for cover, and called me a number of things I cannot repeat in polite company.”

Marguerida grinned. “There is nothing you can say that would shock me, and Mikhail can tell you that occasionally my language would shame a drayman. But I appreciate your restraint, since I do not particularly want Rory learning any more choice phrases than he already knows. Do not be fooled by his pleasant demeanor—he was born to mischief.” She glanced at her red-haired son fondly, and Roderick blushed deeply.

“All boys his age are like that, even Amaury.”

Marguerida shook her head. “Not my Domenic. He has always been the best child, so much so that I worry about him. I know it sounds silly, but I have often wished he would get into trouble of some sort. He is just too good sometimes.”

“Do not borrow trouble,
domna
. It is a very dangerous thing.”

“I know. But sometimes I cannot help myself.” She cast a fond look at Lew Alton. “I am, after all, my father’s child.”

To her delight, Hermes Aldaran roared with laughter, making everyone at the table stare at him. “Born to trouble. Yes, I know that one very well,” he chortled.

D
omenic stood at his post outside the Guard’s Barracks and stared at the stonework of the buildings opposite, across the narrow street. A steady stream of foot traffic moved past him, the familiar faces of local merchants and householders, cheerful in the mild autumn weather. Distantly he registered the pleasant smell of woodsmoke, carried by a brisk but not unpleasant breeze. It was coming from the direction of the kitchens of Comyn Castle, so the odors of roasting fowl and baking bread mingled with the smoke. Usually this made his mouth water, but today he had no appetite.

He shifted and stamped his feet, which were slightly cold from standing in the shadows at attention for over an hour. He wriggled his toes in the tips of his boots, trying to restore some circulation. The problem which had troubled his sleep returned to his mind, and he bit his lower lip, trying to find some answer to it. He glared at the white bulk of the Castle to his right, swore unconsciously, making his companion look at him curiously.

“Something the matter,
vai dom
?”

“No, Kendrick. I didn’t sleep well and am feeling rotten, is all.”

“At your age, you should be sleeping like a log, no matter what, lad. Fire or flood.”

“If you say so.” Nico shrugged and turned away. He had pulled his hair back tightly and bound it with a small thong, since Cisco Ridenow, the head of the Guards, did not approve of long hair. The tautness of it was giving him a headache.

Nico wished he knew every aspect of what was bothering him, but he could not pull all the threads together, and that made it all the more maddening. Part of the problem, he knew, was Regis’ sudden death, because that had changed everything for him. He was deeply saddened, but that was not all that was disturbing his mind. It was, primarily, the feeling that he would never have the opportunity to do anything that was not laid out for him by custom and heredity. Funny, that had never made a difference before. And he could not actually think of anything he wanted to do particularly, except not be Domenic Gabriel-Lewis Alton-Hastur. Rory was the lucky one, for he could do whatever he pleased.

He shuffled his feet again and stared at the cobbles under them, trying to sort out the muddle in his mind. He had drunk more wine than he was accustomed to the previous night, under the pleasant influence of Katherine Aldaran, who was the most interesting woman he had ever met, except for his mother. And brave, too, because he could tell she was simply terrified of being around telepaths, but she managed to keep herself in hand. Her quiet steadfastness the previous evening had left him feeling a bit cowardly by comparison. Was this what was disturbing him, and might there be some truth in it? Might he be a coward?

In moments, the thought grew from being a pebble in his mind into a boulder. He wondered if he were brave enough, good enough to be the heir of the Hastur Domain and all that entailed, now that Regis was gone. While Regis still lived, the prospect of ruling had remained distant and remote. And, he admitted to himself, he had very little ambition for the position in which fate had put him. He had assumed that Regis would live for another two decades, at the very least, by which time he would have been a father himself, and his own son could be made heir to the regency. How odd that he had never before acknowledged this fantasy—that he had never really believed that the task of governing Darkover would actually be his.

He knew what Regis would have told him—that if he didn’t want the life he had, he should have arranged to have different parents. He had heard this more than once, but now it failed to make him smile. All he could say for certain was that he felt as if the walls were closing around him, as if he were an animal trapped in some snare, ready to bite his paw off in order to escape. He would be watched over, even more than he already was, and that seemed intolerable. Hadn’t he been a near prisoner in Comyn Castle all of his life? It had not bothered him before—so why now did he have this strange desire to run away, just to walk down the street, into a city he barely knew, despite having lived in it all of his life, and just to keep going until he reached the Wall Around the World. He wondered briefly if his father would change this arrangement—he knew that the Hasturs had not always immured themselves as Regis had—but decided it was very unlikely.

There were dangers on Darkover—he was well aware of that. There were
Terranan
agents around, although they were few and apparently not terribly good at their jobs, if the mess they had made of causing troubles in the city were anything to judge by. There were beasts like catamounts and banshees—except that if he stayed in Comyn Castle he would never know what they looked like. And there were people on the Comyn Council who would do him harm, if they could. His own grandmother, Javanne, occasionally let herself wish him dead. But that was only an unhappy old woman’s foolishness, and he was fairly certain she would never actually try to hurt him.

Domenic shuddered. She would be arriving shortly, for the public ceremony and then to accompany the funeral train of Regis Hastur on its journey to the
rhu fead
. He had never seen that place, and it had an eerie reputation, but it was where the bodies of Darkover’s rulers were laid to rest. And doubtless she would once again bring up the remarkable circumstances of his conception, and suggest that his status was
nedestro
rather than legitimate. If only his parents had been married in the ordinary manner, instead of being wed by Varzil the Good in the distant past. Even though several
leroni
, including his aunt Liriel, had attested to the truth of the experiences that Mikhail and Marguerida had reported, there were still people who chose to disbelieve them. And although he did not like to admit it, even to himself, he sometimes wondered if his grandmother was right. Not that it mattered, now that his father had named him heir designate, but the doubt and suspicion about his conception hurt him more than he cared to confess.

His mother said that once Javanne got an idea in her head, nothing short of a thunder bolt from Aldones could shake it loose, and that pretty much summed it up. And she was bound to make trouble in the Council. He had attended his first meeting of that body at Midsummer, right after he had his fifteenth birthday, and had been startled by the amount of shouting it included. Somehow he had always imagined it was stuffy and boring, but instead it had been a series of arguments about everything from the state of the Towers to the status of the Guilds in Thendara.

Afterward he had asked his father, “Is it always like that?”

Mikhail had grinned ruefully and shaken his head. “This was a fairly orderly meeting, Nico.”

“Then I hope never to see a disorderly one. I thought Francisco Ridenow was going to try to punch Uncle Regis in the nose!”

Part of the argument had been about the lease on the spaceport, which was due to run out in two years. Regis and Grandfather Lew had been in favor of extending it, at a greater fee, and Francisco had been against that. Domenic understood why—the Federation had failed to pay the rent for two years of the past five. They did not particularly need the money, since Darkover had kept her economy as free of Federation dependency as possible, but it was the principle of the matter. For its own part, the Federation had proposed that they be given the spaceport in perpetuity, and without any rents, since they had “developed” it. No one had even entertained that notion for a second—it was almost the only point of complete agreement in the entire meeting.

And who knew what would happen, now that the Federation had dissolved its legislature. They might pull out, which would please people like his grandmother and Francisco Ridenow. Domenic didn’t really care one way or the other, because the few Terranan he had known had not impressed him as either pleasant or particularly clever. He did not include Ida Davidson, who was like an aunt to him, and had even managed to teach him how to carry a decent tune. He thought glumly of the “advisor” who had been foisted off on Regis a few years before, a dry, clerkish man who had asked a great many questions and never given any answers at all. He still wasn’t sure why his uncle and his grandfather had allowed the man into Comyn Castle. It seemed to be one of those grown-up things, some plot that he could not really grasp the purpose of. And where he would, when he had been younger, have asked any number of questions, Domenic now found himself tongue-tied a good deal of the time.