“Stop! You are getting upset, and you must not.”
She sank back against the pillows, realizing the good sense in what Istvana said. Then Margaret looked down at her left hand, at the blue lines that traced along her skin. It was covered with some soft bandages, but they had slipped, and the strange lines across the palm were visible. She held it up toward Istvana’s face. “What is this?”
“It is a puzzle which will have to wait for another time, chiya. I think you have talked enough for now, and heard more than perhaps you should have.”
Margaret pushed the bandage away, turned her palm toward her eyes, and looked at the lines intently. She felt herself become dizzy, and all the strength started to drain from her limbs, as if she were being sucked into the figure on her skin. The lines felt hot and alive. She tried to look away, and couldn’t.
Istvana shook her shoulder, but Margaret continued to stare at her hand, growing feebler and feebler by the moment. Finally, the leronis grabbed a damp towel that was sitting on the bedstand and threw it over Margaret’s head. The slap of wet cloth hit her cheeks, and energy returned to her body.
She lowered her hand and burrowed it into the bedclothes, then plucked the towel off her face with her other hand. Margaret found Istvana standing next to the bed, tense and alarmed, bending toward her. “’We need to get you to a Tower as quickly as possible. This is beyond my ability to deal with alone!”
“No, I don’t think so. Just get me a glove or something to put over my hand, and I think I can manage. Whatever it is, it is . . . powerful, but only if you give it attention. I think it is her last trap, and I will be damned if I will let her win!”
15
Some days later, Margaret was up and about, and becoming thoroughly sick of being fussed over. She could eat, dress herself, and climb up and down the stairs without becoming exhausted. But everyone insisted on treating her like an invalid, until she felt like a baby chick with a whole troop of hens following her around and clucking. She needed privacy, complete privacy. It was remarkable how difficult that was to achieve, even in a building as large as Castle Ardais.
Part of the problem was her own independence. She had spent too many years being on her own, or at least being Ivor’s assistant, to take to being told what to do easily. The other was that everyone seemed to assume she would let them make decisions for her, that she would be an obedient woman. Istvana and Marilla wanted her to go to Neskaya Tower, and nothing she could say could convince them that she would not. Margaret looked down at her hand, now concealed in a soft leather glove that was not entirely comfortable, and tried to think why she was being so stubborn. It was as if she just knew that she wasn’t going to Neskaya or any other tower. Where else she might go she could not imagine, except back to Thendara and away from Darkover. And that, she knew in her bones, was not her path either.
She had explored the ground floor of the castle, trying to find a bolt hole where she could be alone, and stumbled upon the room which served as a library. The existence of such a place in Castle Ardais pleased her enormously, for books were still her favorite companions. Even though most of her reading at University was from disks on computer, she had grown up with bound volumes. The Thetans made a fine paper from seaweed; there was a small industry devoted to the production of beautiful books for collectors of such things. Margaret had always enjoyed the feel of a book in her hand, for unlike people, books were safe.
As libraries went, it was a pretty sorry one, but she was glad for the quiet of the little room, and the slightly musty smell of books and leather bindings. It felt cozy and secure and familiar, and she found she could think her own thoughts, and not dwell on the overworld and the terror it still held for her.
On one wall, there was a small grate with a fire flickering in it. A single bookcase stood opposite, and another smaller one sat on the wall beside the fire. Aside from the two bookcases, the room was sparsely furnished, suggesting that it was not much used by the inhabitants. There was one large and comfortable chair, where she now sat with a blanket over her legs. The only other place to sit was in the window, on a cushioned bench that ran beneath the panes of glass. It faced the rear of the castle and overlooked a small garden full of flowers and some rather noisy birds. It was good to be able to hear birdsong again without discomfort, and she spent many pleasant hours sitting on the window seat, staring out at the flowers, thinking of nothing in particular. The walls were bare, except for a rather moth-eaten embroidery that hung above the grate, so dark with smut from the fire that its subject was nearly invisible.
From the amount of dust on the shelves and on the forty-some volumes scattered there, Margaret deduced that the Ardais were not great readers. Still, it pleased her to see any reading material, for these were the first books she had found since she arrived on Darkover. When she studied the titles she realized why the books were not used much. Most of the books were translations of standard Terran textbooks of a highly technical sort. This was clearly a working library, not one designed for pleasure. She tried to imagine young Dyan Ardais delighting in Nitrogen Replacement Fertilizers in Temperate Climes by C. J. Bandarjee or Lady Marilla reading the four hundred pages of Midwifery: A Survey, and smiled. Just looking at them made her sleepy. But she found some sort of reminiscence, and she decided that would be good to read.
What she really wanted, she knew, was a concise history of Darkover—or better, a several-volume work with lots of footnotes. Margaret could not quite understand why such a thing did not exist, for she was sure that if it had, Istvana would have told her about it. It wasn’t that the Darkovans had no sense of history, for clearly they did, but just that they hadn’t written it down yet. Or maybe there were records locked up in that monastery, St. Valentine of the Snows, she had heard mentioned a few times. Where was it? Ah, yes, Nevarsin, wherever that might be. There were maps in her bag, but she was too tired to look at them. Still, she reminded herself that she must get them out soon.
Margaret flexed her left hand, now covered by the soft leather glove that Rafaella had given her, sensing the lines on her skin. Both Istvana and Lady Marilla seemed to find those lines intriguing, but worrisome as well. And they agreed that the strange design should be covered, that the lines were related to the matrix crystals they wore, though neither of them would hazard any guess about what it might mean.
She did not want to think about the lines on her hand, or the strange adventure which had produced them, but she had a very hard time concentrating on anything else. She glanced down, and for an instant she could “see” the lines, right through the soft leather. This was troubling, and she wondered if there might be some material that would prevent that. Leather was not the answer, although it allowed her to touch things without disturbance. The palm seemed hot and itchy, and her skin was still very tender.
Margaret forced herself to ignore her hand, and looked down at the page of the book she had finally selected. It was Memoirs of a Vagrant Scholar by Paula Lazarus, and had seemed promising. But it proved to be so dull and stiff that she had only managed to get to page seven after most of an hour. She stared at a paragraph she had already read several times without either pleasure or understanding. Then her eyes went to the moving flames in the small grate, and she let the book fall into her lap. Her eyes itched, even with all the sleep she had gotten in the past few days, and she closed them wearily. She wondered if she would ever feel rested again. Then she drifted off into a light doze.
Heavy footfalls echoing in the corridor roused her abruptly. The door was behind her chair, and she heard it open. A chilly draft swept in as she leaned out of the chair to see who it was. She expected Dyan, or perhaps Mikhail, for both of them had paid her brief visits in the little library, or even Julian Monterey, though his feet were never that heavy.
Three men entered the room, two in uniforms of gray and green. They had the look of policemen everywhere, for their eyes went to the corners, and their backs were straight with purpose and vigilance. The third man was thickse
t, broad of shoulder and strong-thewed, and had the square jaw of one used to imposing his will on all and sundry. Not really fully awake, Margaret wondered if the guards had come to arrest her for practicing unlicensed telepathy or creating a mess in the overworld. She would have been amused at this whimsy, but the seriousness of the three men kept her from enjoying her own thoughts.
The heavyset man stood before her and studied her for a moment. He had rusty red hair, going gray at the temples, and a neatly trimmed beard. His eyes were blue, cold, and penetrating. He studied her very directly, in a way she knew was rude by Darkovan standards, and Margaret had to work to resist the impulse to take an immediate dislike to him. She did not meet his gaze, but looked at the embroidery on her cuffs instead.
“Domna.” He made a half bow, a grudging movement. Look at her—arrogant brat. Just like her father! She fairly reeks of laran, and doesn’t she just know it!
Arrogant? She couldn’t understand why he thought that of her, but the comparison to her father seemed to be at the root of the matter. Odd. She had thought a great many unkind things of Lewis Alton, but arrogance was not one of them. “Vai dom,” Margaret replied as mildly as she was able, mimicking the manners of Lady Marilla while trying to ignore his agitated thoughts. She sensed he was a little afraid of her for no reason she could guess, afraid and hostile. Worse, she suspected that laughter was foreign to his personality.
“Your father is not here? What did he do? Send you to take his place?” I won’t have it! I’ve held Armida for twenty years, and I won’t be ousted by a chit of a girl, no matter who she is.
As she often did when she felt threatened, Margaret retreated into mockery. “He is not hiding under my skirts, for certain,” she replied, and was pleased at the shocked look from one of the uniformed men. She waved a hand toward the bookshelves. “You might seek him among the dusty volumes there, if you like.”
“Did he send you to take his place?”
“I cannot imagine anyone who could take my father’s place, and certainly not me.” She was alert now, her mind clear of sleep, and getting more annoyed by the second.
Arrogant and smooth-tongued as well. Why did Javanne send me on this fool’s errand? Damn all women! “I am your uncle—your only living uncle—Gabriel Lanart-Alton, and I want to know what you intend to do about Armida!” He spoke with effort, laboring under powerful emotions, and Margaret concluded that he was a man of action, not words, and that he was as uncomfortable as she was.
Ah, he was Mikhail’s father, the aged fellow he had assumed she intended to cast out into the snows of the mountains. He was not aged, obviously, nor the least bit feeble. Why had she had the impression that Mikhail’s parents were old? Her resistance to disliking him weakened. “How lovely for you, though I believe Rafael Scott would dispute your claim to be my only living uncle.”
“He doesn’t count,” Gabriel almost sneered. “He’s Terranan.” She is trying to confuse me—this is not going as I planned! She’s probably clever like her father, and I was never that.
“Really? As a brother of my mother, he counts a great deal to me. As for Armida, why should I do anything at all about it? For no reason I can discover, half the people I meet assume I am going to rush over there—wherever it is—and insist on the keys to the pantry immediately.” Behind Gabriel, one of the guards was having a dreadful time keeping a straight face.
“Why else would you come to Darkover—and what the hells are you doing here at Ardais, for that matter?” Gabriel had the harassed expression of a man driven to the edge of his endurance by things beyond his control.
Javanne will have my liver for lunch if she marries Dyan Ardais!
“I came to Darkover as a Scholar of the University, to collect folk music, quite unaware that I was some sort of heiress. As for my presence here at Castle Ardais, I think that is my own business, not yours.” Margaret was beginning to take the measure of this new uncle, and suspected he was not a thoughtful man, but one who bulled his way through things. She also believed that he had a grudge against her father, though she could not imagine why.
Gabriel’s face reddened, and his eyes bulged with barely suppressed frustration. Didn’t know you were an heiress, I’ll believe that when Zandru’s hells melt! What is Lew playing at? He was always up to some mischief! Even when we were lads, and friends together. Why hasn’t he come himself? “As my kinswoman, domna, anything you do is my business. I can’t have you dashing around the Hellers and . . .”
“I have hardly been dashing anywhere, Dom Gabriel. I arrived at Castle Ardais because I was ill and needed medical attention, and it was the nearest place. Lady Marilla has taken excellent care of me, and I am deeply in her debt.”
I’ll just bet she has, all the while putting forward that spineless son of hers. There isn’t a mother in the Domains who wouldn’t want this girl for her son, no matter how ill-born she might be. If only I had not been flat on my back with the fever, all of this might have been avoided. “I have come to remove you to Armida immediately.”
“Dom Gabriel,” Margaret began, attempting to be conciliatory with the man who looked as if he might have a stroke if he became any angrier. “I realize you are accustomed to giving orders and having them obeyed, but I am not someone you can bully into obedience. I had not planned to visit Armida at all, and I see no reason to change my plans.” The idea of getting on a horse and riding off was almost more than she could bear, for she still ached in all her muscles and bones. The guardsman behind him nearly disgraced himself entirely. I never knew anyone to stand up to the Dom but Lady Javanne! If I tell this tale in the barracks, no one will believe it.
“You listen to me, young woman! You are here, and your father is not, and that means that you will do exactly what I say, with no back talk. I am your legal guardian in the absence of Lew Alton.”
They glared at each other for a second. “Precisely how are we related?” she asked mildly.
“My mother was your grandfather Kennard Alton’s sister. What does that have to do with anything?”
“I was just curious. Ever since I arrived on Darkover I have been meeting relatives I never knew I had, a family I never imagined. But I rather doubt that you are my guardian, legal or otherwise. When I saw Lord Hastur, he made no mention of it, so I think you are presuming something you have no right to.”
“I am the holder of the Alton Domain, and that gives me the right.”
“You come in here and demand to know if I am going to claim Armida and throw you out of your home. You don’t want that—no one would. You won’t believe me when I tell you I have no intention of making any claim. You wish me to accompany you there, but you don’t want me there at all. In short, you are behaving very badly, and we are getting off on the wrong . . .”
“Hold your tongue!” He swelled up once again, and Margaret tried to feel sorry for him, but could not manage it.
“I am not a child, nor am I your chattel. Perhaps you can order your wife and daughters around, but I am neither your wife nor am I your daughter.” She felt her shoulders tense with unexpressed fury. The man was maddening, and she wondered how “Javanne” put up with him.
She’s Kennard all over again, as stubborn as a mule. Plus whatever she got from that be-damned mother of hers. Why did she have to return? “As you are my niece, domna, you might as well be my daughter. I will excuse your rudeness because I realize you do not know our ways. Here on Darkover you are still considered a child, since you are unmarried, and you are my child inasmuch as I hold the Domain.”
“Nonsense! Either I am an heiress and the Alton Domain is mine by right, or I am not, but your dependent I will never be. Now go away. You have clearly just arrived, and are likely tired, as am I. I think we should continue this matter at a later time, don’t you?” Margaret was surprised at the strength with which she spoke, a quality of voice she had not known she possessed. It did not seem to be her own voice, but that of another, and she quivered a little. She hoped it was her ima
gination, and not some remnant of Ashara, for she did not want anything of that dreadful woman to remain within her.
To her surprise, he moderated his tone a little. “You cannot remain here at Ardais.”
“As soon as I am fit to travel, I intend to return to Thendara and leave Darkover.” This was a blatant lie, but she was past caring.
“Leave Darkover? You can’t do that!” It would solve my problem for now, but it would be the wrong thing. Damn Lew Alton for creating this mess, and leaving me to clean it up. Where is he? He resigned his post, without so much as a by your leave and . . .
“Just watch me,” she replied savagely.
Gabriel gathered himself, breathing heavily and squaring his broad shoulders. “You don’t understand. You must come to Armida. There are people you must meet.” I have botched this badly, and Javanne and Jeff will be furious. Why couldn’t she have been a sweet girl instead of this flaming vixen!
“Must?”
Dom Gabriel Lanart turned and stormed out of the library, slamming the door so it boomed as he went. He had left his guardsmen, and one of them opened the door and followed him while the other looked at Margaret for a moment and grinned so hard he nearly cracked his face. Then he went, leaving her alone and exhausted.
Perhaps an hour later there was a knock on the door. “Come in,” Margaret answered, expecting it to be Rafaella or Lady Marilla. Instead, Mikhail Lanart-Hastur entered the room, looking hunted. Her heart gave an unexpected flutter as she looked at him, and she chided herself. She was much too old to be moved by a handsome face.
“I hear my old man has arrived to bear you off to Armida,” he began hastily.
Margaret blinked, a little dazed. “Old Man? Oh, you mean Dom Gabriel? Funny. I call my father the Old Man, too. Not to his face, of course.”
Mikhail laughed, and the harried expression on his face faded. This was a shame, because laughter made him even more handsome, and she found herself feeling drawn to him. She felt as if she already knew him, although she knew that was impossible. She felt the familiar coldness within her, a desire not to be close to anyone, to keep herself apart. Istvana had told her that this was part of the spell Ashara Alton had put on her when she had overshadowed the child Margaret, and she bit her lip, because she hated the sense of separation. At the same time, it was safe, and she was accustomed to it now.