That way I could go mad, too. I said grimly to Andres, “Get me something to eat, find us all some dinner. Then we will take Marius to the chapel at Comyn Castle, and go there for the rest of the Council. The caretakers there will be Alton men; they’ll know me as my father’s Heir. And there’s one more person who has to be told. Linnell.”
Andres’s eyes softened. “Poor Linnie,” he muttered. “She was the only person in Comyn who cared about him. Even when no one else remembered he was alive, he was always her foster-brother. She sent him Festival gifts, and went riding with him on holidays— She had promised him, when they were children, that if he married first she would be his wife’s bride-woman and if she married first he should give her away. She came here last not a tenday ago, to tell him that her wedding with Derik had been set, and they were laughing together and talking about the wedding—” and the old man stopped, quite overcome.
I had not seen Linnell to speak to since I came back. I had thought, when I went to speak with Callina about making the Sharra matrix safe, I would pay Linnell my respects— she was nearer to Marius’s age, but we had been friends, brother and sister. But there had been no time. Now time was running out for us; and I must speak with Callina too, not only as kinswoman but as Keeper.
I too had been sealed to Sharra… they could draw me into that unholy thing, at any moment—
I bent over Marius’s body; took the little dagger from his waist. I had given it to him when he was ten years old; I had not realized that he had borne it all these years. In the years on Vainwal, I had not remembered to wear side-arms. I slipped it into the empty sheath in my boot, startled at how easily the gesture came after all these years.
Before Sharra can draw me again into itself, this dagger will find my heart…
“Take him to the Castle,” I said, and followed slowly behind the small, weary procession through the lightly falling summer snow. I was almost glad for the roaring pain in my head, which kept me from thinking, too much, about Linnell’s face when I must tell her of this death.
Marius rested that night in the Comyn Castle, in the chapel, beneath the old stone arches, the paintings on the wall; from her silent niche the blessed Cassilda, clad in blue and with a starflower in her hand, watched forever over her children. My father had cared little for the Gods, and brought me up the same way. Marius in death was closer to the Comyn than ever he had been in life. But I looked up at the Four Gods portrayed at the four corners of the Chapel—Avarra, dark mother of birth and death, Aldones, Lord of Light, Evanda, bright mother of life and growth, Zandru, the dark lord of the Nine Hells…and, like pressing a sore tooth, felt the burning touch of Sharra somewhere in my mind—
Sharra was bound in chains, by Hastur, who was the son of Aldones, who was the Son of Light—
Fables, fairy tales to frighten children or console them in the dark. What had the Gods to do with me, who bore Sharra’s fires like a raging torrent that might some day burn out my brain… as she had burned my hand away—
But as I went out of the Chapel, I thought: the fire is real, real enough to burn away the city of Caer Donn, real enough to destroy Marjorie, to sear my hand to scars that would never heal; and in the end to destroy me, cell-deep, so that even the child I fathered came forth a monstrous, nonhuman thing… that much is no fable. Something must lie behind the legends. If there is any answer anywhere under the four moons, it must be known to the Keepers, or it will not be known anywhere. As I came out, I looked up at the night sky, which had cleared somewhat, and at the darkness of the Tower behind the Castle. Ashara, oldest of the Keepers on Darkover, might know the answer. But first I would see my brother buried. And I must go and tell his foster-sister, so that she could weep for him the tears I could no longer shed.
Marius was buried two days later. It was a small procession that rode to Hali; Gabriel and I, Linnell, Jeff and Andres; and, to my surprise, Lerrys Ridenow. At my questioning look he said roughly, “I was fond of the boy. Not as you might think, damn you, but he was a good lad, and he didn’t have many kinsmen who’d give him such a kind word as they’d throw to a dog. We needed him as Heir to Alton; he would have had some sense on the Council, and all the Gods know, in these days we can use some plain good sense!”
He said something like that at the graveside, where it was traditional to speak good memories of the dead; words that would transcend grief and give everyone something else to remember of the one who was buried. I remembered my father’s bitterness when my mother had not been buried here; it was almost my first memory. Elaine gave two sons to the Comyn, and yet they would not let her body rest among the children of Hastur. Now, standing by the grave of my mother’s son, who had been accepted in death though never in life, I found myself remembering my father’s dying cry, ripping through my mind; but afterward… afterward, too, I had heard his last thought, the surprised cry of joy; Elaine! Yllana… beloved! Had his dying mind seen a vision, was there that kind of mercy in death, or was there, somehow, something beyond death? I had never thought so; death was the end. Yet, though my father had never believed, either, but in his last moments he had cried out to greet someone, something, and his last emotion had been astonishment and joy. What was the truth? Marius, too, even though his death had been terribly sudden, had looked peaceful.
Perhaps, then, somewhere, in spite of the galaxy of stars that lay between, somewhere beyond time and space, Marius knew that my father’s last thought had been of him….fight for your brother’s rights… or even that now, somewhere, he was with the mother whose life he had taken in birth…
No, this was morbid nonsense, fables to comfort the bereaved.
Yet, that cry of joy, delight…
I thought, cynically, Well, I will know when I am dead, or I will never know the difference.
Lerrys finished his short speech and stepped back. I could not bring myself to speak, save for a brief sentence or two. “My father’s last words or thoughts were of his younger son. He was greatly loved, and it is my sorrow that he never knew it.”
Linnell wore a dark cloak, thick gray, almost too heavy for her slight body. She said, in a voice thick with tears, “I never knew my own brothers; they were fostered away from me. When Marius and I were very little, before we knew we were boy and girl, or what that means, he said to me once, ‘Linnie, I’ll tell you what, you can be my brother and I’ll be your sister.’ ” Even weeping, she laughed through it.
No doubt, I thought, Marius was more a brother to her than that arrogant young scamp Merryl!
It was near noon; the red sun stood high in the sky, casting sharp shadows across the clouds which covered the surface of the Lake of Mali. Here on this shore, so legend among the Comyn said, the forefather of all the Comyn, Hastur, son of the Lord of Light, had fallen to earth, and here he had met with Cassilda the Blessed, and here she had borne the son who had fathered all of the Comyn… what was the truth of the legend? The hills rose beyond Hali, distant, shadowed, and above them a small shadow of moon, pale blue in the colored sky. And on the far shore the chapel of Hali, where rested the sacred things of the Comyn, from the days when the fullest powers of their minds were known… we were a shadow; a remnant; an echo of the powers that had been known in the Seven Domains in the old days. Once many Towers had risen over the Domains, telepaths in the relays had sped messages back and forth more quickly than the mechanical signals of the Terran Empire; the powers of mind allied to matrix had flown air-cars, brought metal to the ground from deep within the core of the planet, look deep within the body and cure disease, heal wounds, control the minds of animals and birds, look deep within the cell plasm and know whether the unborn child would be gifted with laran of a specific kind… yes, and in those days there had been wars fought with strange and terrible weapons, ranging into other dimensions, and of these weapons Sharra was one of the least… somewhere within the white gleaming walls of that chapel were there other weapons, one which could be effective against Sharra…?