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 laranbarriers 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 chieriand 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 laranto 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 kireseththey 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.