Hastur Lord

  Nauseated at the entire business, he forced himself to respond graciously even as he avoided any appearance of preference. He never danced with the same woman twice and only danced those sets that involved changing partners.

  In one of these, he found himself unexpectedly paired with Linnea. Her gown of pale green silk, cut full around the waist, could not disguise her pregnancy. The color ought to have turned her skin the color of cream against the glory of her hair, but she looked ashen, her eyes huge and dark, almost bruised. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, his heart opened to her. He thought she had never looked so beautiful or so brave.

  They moved through the figures of the dance, passing shoulders, never touching. Her skirts swung gracefully, giving her the aspect of a woodland creature. At the end of a slow spin, she stumbled. He reached out to steady her. His fingers closed around hers, and in that instant, her powerful trained laran rushed into his mind.

  Regis, I must speak with you.

  He sent a pulse of unconditional assent. When? Where?

  Tonight. An hour past the rise of Kyrrdis. Your townhouse.

  Before he could reply, the movement of the dance swirled them away from one another and on to new partners.

  Later, Regis noticed Rinaldo crossing the floor with Javanne on his arm. From what he glimpsed between the patterns of the dancers, Javanne was performing introductions between Rinaldo and Linnea. Linnea inclined her head, the abbreviated acknowledgment of a Keeper who bows to no man, and glided from the room.

  At the appointed time, when the blue-green moon of Kyrrdis swung above the rooftops of Thendara, Regis waited in his parlor, too wrought up to rest and unwilling to dull his wits with wine. Linnea would not have asked for a meeting for any trivial reason. The urgency of her mental communication had made it clear that something was terribly wrong.

  A tap roused him. The coridom swung the door open and stood back for Linnea to enter, then closed it behind her.

  Linnea wore a traveling cloak over her green gown. Droplets beaded the thick wool. She smelled of rain and fresh air and lilias blossoms. The hood, which had been drawn forward to hide her features, tumbled back. In the firelight, her hair glowed like spun copper.

  “Regis! I’m so sorry to impose on you like this—”

  Her words, almost breathless, shook him more than her unexpected plea. With a rush of tenderness, he stepped behind her, unfastened her cloak and laid it aside, took her hands and brought her to the chair nearest the fire. Her fingers were cold. He wanted to warm them between his own, but she pulled away, sitting tall and remote.

  He pulled a second chair next to hers. “Can I get you anything? Hot wine? A blanket?”

  Linnea shook her head. “Thank you, I would rather skip the preliminaries. If I wanted physical comfort, I would have stayed in my own rooms.”

  Regis sat back, praying he would not say anything stupid. He was acutely aware of the trust implicit in her presence. “If you are in distress, I will do whatever I can to help. You will always have a claim on me.”

  “I do not want a claim on you!” With a visible effort, she calmed herself. “Regis, matters between us have been awkward, to say the least. Matters regarding our . . . relationship. I believe we have each spoken in haste.”

  In the fractional pause that followed, a breath only, he said, “And regretted it.”

  Her eyes met his, light-filled gray. She took in his words, nodded. “Yes. For my part.”

  Linnea’s fingers twisted the fabric of her skirts. She noticed and folded them neatly in her lap. “Regis . . . I need your help.”

  Her voice was been so low, so resonant with emotion, that he could hardly believe what she had said. He thought how difficult it must be for her to ask aloud. To ask him.

  “Tell me,” he said.

  “I feel so foolish after the way I rejected you. I—”

  “Just tell me. Whatever it is.”

  She lifted her chin. Something inside her grew very still. “I have heard rumors from sources I trust of a plan to force a marriage between myself and your brother.”

  “How is that possible without your consent?”

  Linnea’s expression turned wry. “Once such things were not uncommon. The Comyn Council approved all such unions and imposed not a few. My wishes mean nothing, and the one protection I might have is no longer available to me.” She meant being a Keeper, for as an ordinary matrix worker, she would be subject to Council decree. Not so long ago, another Keeper, Callina Aillard, had been forced into an unwelcome alliance with Beltran of Aldaran.

  “I’m not sure I understand,” Regis stammered, trying to think. “Oh. Rinaldo was released from his vows.”

  “He may not have any use for a wife, but in order to solidify his position, he needs an heir. If he marries me, he can claim your unborn son as the next Hastur Lord and thus insure the succession.” She paused to let the words sink in.

  Regis was so appalled, he could not speak. He felt like a fish thrown up on a wharf, gasping for the air it could not breathe. Could Rinaldo have hatched such a plot? Condoned it? He did not know, but he had no doubts about Valdir’s willingness.

  He sat motionless while thoughts tumbled through his mind . . . Rinaldo remarking on Linnea’s presence at the Crystal Chamber ceremony, “a very pretty woman.” And then, “Some provision must be made for her, one way or another, for it is not seemly for a mother to be unmarried.”

  Rinaldo had sought her out this very evening . . .

  Rinaldo was interested in women, his desires long denied by his vow of chastity. While he might be able to function sexually—and his comments had suggested to Regis that he could—that did not necessarily mean he was fertile. Linnea’s pregnancy removed that difficulty.

  Linnea’s eyes shifted. In her glance, in the fragile dignity of her posture, Regis saw how she clung to her pride for both their sakes. She could not beg, she could not even ask if he still wanted her.

  The only sure way to place her beyond Rinaldo’s reach was for Regis to marry her himself. But he could not—would not—do so without her full understanding.

  He had botched his last attempt. Now, when honesty and plain speaking was essential, would the right words fail him?

  “Once I asked you to marry me,” he began, praying he would not commit another colossal blunder, “and that offer still holds. I can think of no other—I have never met any other woman with whom I want to spend my life, no woman capable of understanding—”

  No, too dangerous to bring up Danilo so soon. But it must be done.

  “But . . .?” she prompted, fear and hope warring in her voice.

  “There is no but. No hesitation on my part. Only a desire to make sure you understand all the circumstances.”

  Linnea said nothing. The crackling of the fire seemed very loud, or perhaps it was the hammering of his pulse.

  “You know that Valdir Ridenow took Danilo hostage ‘to ensure my cooperation’.”

  She nodded. “Along with Mikhail and your brother.”

  “Who have both since been freed, Mikhail on my abdication. Rinaldo—well, I’m not sure how much of a prisoner he ever was. Valdir thinks to rule him and through him, push Darkover to join the Federation. Rinaldo believes otherwise or at least has his own goals.”

  He paused, gathered himself. Gods, this was harder than he had thought!

  “One of those . . . goals seems to be ridding me of what he sees as my sexual perversion. Rinaldo claims he has the power to free Danilo and that he will do so when I promise to give him up and marry decently.”

  Linnea’s lips soundlessly echoed his last words.

  “If I do not,” Regis went on, knowing that if he stopped now, he could not finish, “he hinted that Danilo will—Valdir threatened—”

  Light and swift as silk unrolling, she reached out to touch the back of his wrist. “I know. I know what Valdir said.”

  With the contact, fingertips soft as a butterfly’s kiss, Regis felt her presence in his
own mind. His normal laran barriers had been shredded by worry and fear. If she would have him, despite everything, she should know what she was getting.

  Oh, my dear, she spoke with her mind to his. My dearest. I have known that from the first time I saw you. How could I let harm come to someone you love as you love Danilo when I have the power to prevent it?

  It was too much, the wave of tenderness and acceptance flooding into him from her mind. He wrenched his hand away, shot up from his chair, and strode to the hearth. He stood, chest heaving, facing away from her.

  The intensity of their psychic rapport diminished but did not disappear. She came closer, carefully not touching him. His body tingled with her breath.

  “Is it possible?” he muttered, as much to himself as to her. “Can you love me—want me—knowing the better part of my heart will always belong to him?”

  Regis felt the slightest pressure, her cheek on his back, not at all intrusive but nonetheless compelling, as if he were a mountain and she a weary traveler, as if he were a straw in the wind and she a sheltering tree. He closed his eyes.

  I have known, from the first time we met, she said telepathically, that your heart was big enough for more than one love. I needed to be sure that it is me you love, for myself, and not a substitute for another.

  At this, he turned to face her. Tears filled her eyes with liquid light. One spilled over, leaving a glistening trail down her cheek. He brushed it away, lifted her chin. Bent to brush her lips with his. She answered him but utterly without demand, without desperation.

  He remembered the moment, years ago, when he had stood desolate at the ruin of his world, aching with grief for his dead children.

  “Regis, I heard—” She had raised her eyes to his, and suddenly they were in deep rapport. “Let me give you others.”

  For an instant, they had stood outside of time, more deeply joined than in any act of love. She had come to him in neither pride nor pity nor ambition for the status that bearing a Hastur child would bring, but a sharing of his most profound emotions. She had sensed how difficult his life had become and through that moment of mental union had simply wanted to ease his burden.

  He remembered thinking that a child of Linnea’s would be too precious to risk . . .

  The image of that child, that daughter who was as fair as a chieri and as filled with grace, rose in both their minds.

  Regis’ arms slipped around Linnea as if she had always belonged there. As he pressed her to him, he felt the softness of her breasts, fuller than he remembered. She took his hand and placed his palm over the small roundness below her waist.

  Our son. Our Dani.

  Linnea drew back, regarding Regis with the inhuman composure of a Keeper. “We will get through this. No matter what happens with Lord Rinaldo Hastur or his Ridenow confederates, they cannot touch what we have together.”

  An emotion akin to gratitude welled up in Regis. He had almost lost her, this woman with all her courage and understanding. She was with him now, and he sensed that never again would there be such a misunderstanding between them. For the first time in longer than he could remember, he began to hope.

  BOOK III: Danilo

  21

  Danilo Syrtis-Ardais roused at the sound of footsteps. He had been in the dark, or at least in the dim, uncertain light of this foul cell, for more days than he could count. His head had stopped throbbing where he had been struck, but the lump on his scalp was still tender. At first, he had been bound like a common criminal. He remembered feeling sick and dizzy, but whether from the blow to his head or from something poured down his throat, he could not tell.

  He had a dim memory of rough hands hauling him upright and prying his jaws apart, then a hot, stinging taste redolent of kireseth. A thought had wavered at the edge of his fracturing consciousness that it was one of the distillations that suppressed laran. They must have forced it into him to prevent him from calling for help with his mind.

  Wildly, as if his heart were straining outward, he reached out.

  Regis . . .

  Almost, he felt an answer. Almost.

  Then the nightmares took him.

  He’d slept uneasily, drifting in and out of such fevered madness that he thought he was once more in threshold sickness, only magnified a thousandfold. Was this what Regis had endured? He could not tell what was real, the stone walls with their film of greasy moisture or the flames of steel-edged glass that rushed at him, only to shatter into crystals of blood. One moment he seemed to be back at Castle Aldaran, the next, deep in the bowels of the Terran Headquarters Building or at the bottom of Lake Hali, struggling to breathe the fuming cloud-water.

  He had screamed until his throat was raw, of that he was certain. Fire had lanced through his chest as if he were breathing, or perhaps spewing forth, the rage of the Sharra matrix. During one of his few lucid moments, he remembered falling down a crevasse along Scaravel Pass, although he could not imagine what he had been doing there. One rib was most likely cracked, and the muscles along his spine burned.

  Someone fumbled with the door latch. It clicked open, making a sound like ice cracking. Danilo slitted his eyes against the bar of brilliance as the door inched open. Acid clawed at his throat. He tried to speak, to beg for help, but the only sound he heard was the abnormally loud wheeze of his breath.

  The world twisted: a hand in his hair, tipping his face back.

  No, don’t—

  A voice reached him in the spinning darkness, a basso growl. “He can’t take much more of this. Our orders are to keep him secure, not turn him into a mewling idiot.”

  Another voice rumbled an incoherent answer. The hand released him. He fell back on the thin pallet . . . fell endlessly between the stars.

  After a time—an hour, a century—his gut settled. He opened his eyes, and the world no longer whirled unpredictably. A low, insistent sound lurked at the edge of his hearing. He should know what it was, that blanketing hum.

  Danilo pushed himself to sitting. His mouth tasted like the inside of a banshee’s nest, all feathers and rotting flesh. His hands were free, although the skin over his wrists was shredded in strips.

  How long had he been here? From the feel of his beard, a tenday at least, most likely two. His joints ached and his muscles felt pasty from disuse, but his vision was clear. He could think.

  He was in a stone-walled room lit by a slitted, unglassed window on one side. With dark-adapted eyes, he made out a pallet, a bucket for waste and one of water. The water looked clean. He washed his face and hands.

  He had been drugged but now was free of it. The humming sound must be a telepathic damper, like those used during Comyn Council meetings. Untrusting folk, the Comyn were so terrified of one Domain using laran to influence another that they insisted on using that infernal device. Still, he reflected as he stood and began to limber his arms and legs, it was better than the kireseth they had forced down him.

  They. As far as he knew, he had few personal enemies, and those would not hold him in this cowardly manner but would challenge him outright. Regis, on the other hand, had many who wished him ill and who would not scruple to use someone Regis cared about against him.

  Danilo paused in his exercises and swore softly. In all the years he had guarded Regis with his life, he had never considered himself at risk.

  Who, then? His spine popped as he twisted slowly from one side to the other. And why?

  Valdir Ridenow, the Pan-D arkovan League, and about a hundred other individuals, for the stance Regis had taken against Federation membership. Any one of the same number of claimants against whom Regis had ruled in the Cortes. The Aldarans, again? Probably not. The Terrans themselves—an agent of the Federation, trying to force Regis to withdraw his opposition?

  Danilo threw himself back on the pallet. It all came down to the Federation . . . or did it? He raked his hair, filthy and too long, back from his face. Although clearer than before, his thoughts moved sluggishly. He was missing something vital, some
thing he ought to know . . .

  Regis would not give in to threats and intimidation. Danilo broke out in a humorless barking laugh at the thought of Regis being intimidated by a mere human, whether Terranan or Darkovan. They were amateurs compared to what Regis had already faced. Dyan Ardais would have spitted them on his sword before breakfast and thought nothing of it.

  The thought heartened Danilo, for he had been the target—he refused to think of himself as a victim—of Dyan’s casual brutality. In the end, honor had won out, no small thanks to Regis. Amends had been offered and accepted. Danilo had mourned Dyan’s death.

  Hold on, he urged himself. Regis will not stop until he finds you. He will come. He will. Nothing will stand in his way.

  When the telepathic damper cut out, Haldred Ridenow appeared outside Danilo’s cell. Danilo wanted to pummel the man senseless. With restraint, he stepped back from the door, hands well away from his body, poised on both feet. He was not in shape to take on a determined assailant, but the stance, drilled into him over years of training, gave him a semblance of dignity.

  Haldred spoke through the slitted window. “I see you’re awake. That’s good. I’ve come to fetch you to better surroundings. You’re to have a bath, a shave, and decent clothes.” His lip curled to emphasize the rank odor.

  “Why?” The word came out as a croak. The screaming had been real, not another nightmare. “What do you want?”

  “Everything will be explained to you in due time. Are you coming? Or have you grown so accustomed to your prison that you cannot leave it?”

  “I will come.”

  “Then I require your word of honor that you will not try to escape or offer any resistance. Not that you could do much in your present condition, but we don’t want you damaging yourself in a futile attempt. And you must submit to a blindfold.”

  Seeing no other choice, Danilo agreed. Haldred bound his eyes with a cloth and then placed one of Danilo’s hands in the crook of his elbow. On uncertain feet, Danilo followed. He had not the slightest trust in his captor’s motives, but it was always better to know the enemy’s intentions. Haldred was indeed his enemy, although Danilo did not understand why.