“He has only one hand; can he command the Guards as a cripple?”
“Precedent enough for that too,” said Gabriel. “Two or three generations ago, Dom Esteban—who was my greatgrandfather and Lew’s too, I think—commanded the Guards for ten years from a wheelchair after he lost the use of his legs in the Catmen’s War. For that matter, there was Lady Bruna, who took up her sword and made a notable commander, once, when the Heir was but a babe—” he shrugged. “Lew can dress himself and look after himself one-handed— I saw him. As for the rest—well, he was a damned good officer once. And if he wants me to go on commanding the Guards—well, he’s the head of my Domain, and I’ll do what he says. And the boys coming up—and there’s Marius. He hasn’t had military training, but he’s perfectly well-educated.”
“Terran education,” Hastur said dryly.
Regis said, “Knowledge is knowledge, Grandfather.” He remembered what he had been thinking in Council, that it made more sense to have Mikhail, perhaps, instructed under the Terrans than to shove him into the cadets for military discipline and training in swordplay. “Marius is intelligent—”
“And has some unfortunate Terran friends,” said Javanne scornfully. “If he hadn’t involved himself with the Terrans, he wouldn’t have brought out all that business about Sharra today at Council!”
“And then we wouldn’t know what was going on,” said Regis. “When a wolf is loose in the pastures, do we care if the herdsman loses a night’s sleep? And whose fault is it that Marius was not given cadet training? I’m sure he would have done as well there as I did. We chose to turn him over to the Terrans, and now, I’m afraid, we have to live with what we have made of him. We made certain that one Domain, at least, would remain allied to the Terrans!”
“The Altons have always been too ready to deal with the Terrans,” said Hastur. “Ever since the days when Andrew Carr married into that Domain—”
“Done is done,” Gabriel said, “there’s no need to hash it over now, sir. I didn’t see any signs that Lew was so happy among the Terrans that he can’t rule the Altons well—”
“You’re acting as if he were going to be Head of the Domain,” said Hastur.
Gabriel laid down his spoon, letting the soup roll out on the tablecloth. “Now look here, Grandfather. It’s one thing for me to claim the Domain when we had no notion whether Lew was alive or dead. But Council accepted him as Kennard’s Heir, and that’s all there is to it. It’s up to him, as head of the Domain, to say what’s to be done about Marius, but I suppose he’ll name him Heir. If it were Jeff Kerwin I might challenge—he doesn’t want the Domain, he wasn’t brought up to it—”
“A Terran?” asked Javanne in amazement.
“Jeff isn’t a Terran. I ought to say, Dom Damon—he has no Terran blood at all. His father was Kennard’s older brother. He was fostered on Terra and brought up to think he was Terran, and he bears his Terran foster-father’s name, that’s all,” Gabriel explained, patiently, not for the first time. “He has less Terran blood than I do. My father was Domenic Ridenow-Lanart, but it was common knowledge that he was fathered by Andrew Carr. Twin sisters married Andrew Carr and Damon Ridenow—”
Danvan Hastur frowned. “That was a long time ago.”
“Funny, how a generation or two wipes out the scandal,” said Gabriel with a grin. “I thought that had all been hashed over, back when they tested Lew for the Alton Gift. He had it, I didn’t, and that was that.”
Danvan Hastur said quietly “I want you at the head of the Alton Domain, Gabriel. It is your duty to the Hastur clan.”
Gabriel picked up his spoon, frowned, rubbed it briefly on the napkin and thrust it back into his soup. He took a mouthful or two before he said, “I did my duty to the Hastur clan when I gave them two—no, three—sons, sir, and one of them to be Regis’s Heir. But I swore loyalty to Kennard, too. Do you honestly think I’m going to fight my cousin for his rightful place as Alton Heir?”
But that, Regis thought, watching the old man’s face, is exactly what Danvan Hastur does think. Or did.
“The Altons are allied to Terra,” he said. “They’ve made no secret of it. Kennard, now Lew, and even Marius, have Terran education. The only way we can keep the Alton Domain on the Darkovan side is to have a strong Hastur man in command, Gabriel. Challenge him again before the Council; I don’t even think he wants to fight for it.”
“Lord of Light, sir! Do you honestly think—” Gabriel broke off. He said, “I can’t do it, Lord Hastur, and I won’t.”
“Do you want a half-Terran pawn of Sharra at the head of the Alton Domain?” Javanne demanded, staring at her husband.
“That’s for him to say,” said Gabriel steadily. “I took oath to obey any lawful command you gave me, Lord Hastur, but it isn’t a lawful command when you bid me challenge the rightful Head of my Domain. If you’ll pardon my saying so, sir, that’s a long way from being a lawful command.”
Old Hastur said impatiently “The important thing at this time is that the Domains should stand fast. Lew’s unfit—”
“If he’s unfit, sir—” and Gabriel looked troubled—“it’ll be apparent soon enough.”
Javanne said shrilly, “I thought they had deposed him as Kennard’s successor after the Sharra rebellion. And now both he and his brother are still tied up with Sharra—”
Regis said, “And so am I, sister; or weren’t you listening?”
She raised her eyes to him and said, disbelieving, “You?”
Regis reached, with hesitant fingers, for his matrix; fumbled at taking it from its silk wrapping. He remembered that Javanne had, years ago, taught him to use it, and she remembered too, for she raised her angry eyes and suddenly softened, and smiled at him. There was the old image in her mind, as if the girl she had been—herself motherless, trying to mother her motherless baby brother—had bent over him as she had so often done when he was small, swung him up into her arms—For a moment the hard-faced woman, the mother of grown sons, was gone, and she was the gentle and loving sister he had once known.
Regis said softly, “I am sorry, breda, but things don’t go away because you are afraid of them. I didn’t want you to have to see this.” He sighed and let the blue crystal fall into his cupped hand.
Raging, flaming in his mind, the form of fire…a great tossing shape, a woman, tall, bathed in flame, her hair rising like restless fires, her arms shackled in golden chains… Sharra!
When he had seen it six years ago at the height of the Sharra rebellion, his laran had been newly waked; he had been, moreover, half dead with threshold sickness, and Sharra had been only another of the horrors of that time. When he had seen it briefly in Marius’s house, he had been too shocked to notice. Now something cold took him by the throat; his flesh crawled on his bones, every hair on his body rose slowly upright, beginning with his forearms, slowly moving over all his body. Regis knew, without knowing how he knew, that he looked upon a very ancient enemy of his race and his caste, and something in his body, cell-deep, bone-deep, knew and recognized it. Nausea crawled through his body and he felt the sour taste of terror in his mouth.
Confused, he thought, but Sharra was used and chained by the forge-folk, surely I am simply remembering the destruction of Sharra loosed, a city rising in flame…it is no worse than a forest fire—but he knew this was something worse, something he could not understand, something that fought to draw him into itself… recognition, fear, a fascination almost sexual in its import…
“Aaahh—” It was a half-drawn breath of horror; he heard, saw, felt Javanne’s mind, her terror reaching out, entangled. She clutched at the matrix under her own dress as if it had burned her, and Regis, with a mighty effort, wrenched his mind and his eyes from the Form of Fire blazing from his matrix. But Javanne clung, in terror and fascination…