Traitor's Sun (41 page)

Marguerida decided she couldn’t put her present task off any longer. She knocked, and heard a voice answering. Marguerida opened the door and stepped into the room. It was a spacious chamber, with several windows facing to the north, and the wan sunlight of autumn spilling onto the stone floor. An easel, sent over the previous day from the Painters Guild, was set up near the windows, with a whitened board on it, ready to be painted. There was a cracked vase with brushes sticking out of it sitting on a small table, tubes of paint laid out on a wooden palette on another, and the unfamiliar scent of turpentine mingled with the more pleasant one of woodsmoke from the small fireplace burning in one wall.

Katherine Aldaran looked at her, then started to stand up from the chair where she had been sketching on a tablet. She was wearing a shabby brown tunic, a divided skirt of dark green, and an apron. Her long fingers were smeared with charcoal, and there was a dark, sooty mark on her high forehead, where she had brushed her black hair back.

“Oh, hello. Have you come to discover what I am doing and make me stop?” Katherine’s question was both playful and a bit hostile. There were dark circles under her eyes, evidence of a poor night’s sleep, and she looked as if she were afraid to hear what might be said.

Marguerida forced herself to laugh at this, and found that she felt better for it. “No, I have not! I would not have intruded at all, since I know how annoying it is when one of the children comes in while I am trying to compose. But I thought you might be worried about Herm, and came to tell you that, as of an hour ago, he was well.”

“The devil take Hermes-Gabriel Aldaran! He is probably having the time of his life, and not thinking of me at all.” The voice was sullen, and the words lacked conviction.

“Katherine, I doubt that very much. Well, I suppose he probably is glad to be out and about, since he struck me as the kind of man who likes to do unusual things, but I am sure he is thinking of you.” Marguerida was not really certain of this, but it was a tactful thing to say.

“Only because I threatened to leave him last night, and I would, only I know that I cannot. He would not tell me anything, except that he was going away for a few days, and I could have strangled him, I was so furious.” There was no tone of complaint in her voice now, just a righteous indignation which Marguerida thought was perfectly appropriate. This was not a woman given to self-pity.

“I know all this is hard for you. It was hard for me when I first came to Darkover as an adult.”

“But you are a telepath, have this
laran
-stuff. I don’t, and I never will.”

“That is true, but it does not make me a different person than I was when I returned to Darkover. In fact, it nearly killed me.”

“Now, that sounds like the start of a story.” Her voice eased, as if she was glad to think about something other than herself, and she looked at Marguerida with guarded but not unfriendly eyes. “I forgot that you have not lived all your life here, but were at University.”

The room was largely unfurnished but there was a stool standing in one corner, and Marguerida pulled it out and sat down a few feet away from Katherine. The other woman picked up the tablet again, settling it over her lap, and Marguerida made a mental note to get a proper worktable moved in as soon as possible. One more thing to remember—she was sure her brain was going to melt if she asked it to do much more.

Katherine had tucked the stick of charcoal into her hair, so it stuck out of the bun at the back of her head, and now she plucked it out, turned to a fresh page, and studied Marguerida. She started to sketch again, not looking at the paper at all, but moving her hand across it while appearing to give Marguerida her complete attention. She wondered how Katherine did it, and got the mental impression that the woman’s eyes gave directions to her hand without any other part of her mind being engaged.

Marguerida forced herself to ignore her fascination with the movement of the fine hand across the paper, and marshaled her thoughts. “Yes, it is. I was born on Darkover, but I left when I was a little girl, and my father and stepmother deliberately concealed my history from me—for reasons that seemed logical to them at the time, but which caused me a great deal of trouble later.” She sighed and then smiled at some of the memories. “The Old Man says he regrets it now, but that at the time it was all he could think of to do. Some things had happened when I was a child that were very bad, and one of them was that I had been overshadowed by a long dead ancestor of mine, which did some things to my mind I still have the occasional nightmare about.”

“Overshadowed by a dead . . . and I thought the stories we had on Renney were fantastic! What is that—overshadowing?”

“Umm. It is hard to describe. This ancestor, Ashara Alton, lived and died over seven hundred years ago. She was an incredibly powerful
leronis,
and she managed not to die entirely when her body failed her. Instead, she left the imprint of her personality in a matrix array in the Old Tower of Comyn Castle. You can still see what remains of it—blackened and broken.” Marguerida shuddered a little, remembering the sight of the ruined structure when she rode into Thendara just before Midsummer sixteen years before. She had gone into the overworld, torn a great jewel from a building that existed only on that plane, and in the process, she had destroyed the link that kept Ashara Alton tied to present-day Darkover. In some manner that no one could explain, she had absorbed the energy of that jewel onto her left hand, and brought across the boundaries between the worlds a matrix that was part of both. She glanced down at her mitted hand, then looked up again.

“Over the centuries, she . . . well, manifested is a reasonable word for it. She would latch onto the energy patterns of someone, and use them to fulfill her will. And she had a very, very strong will,” she finished dryly, reflecting that she had at last reached the point in her life when she could speak of these events without starting to tremble. Marguerida did not feel the need to add that Ashara had a personal grudge against her, that she had foreseen the existence of one Marguerida Alton and had been determined to destroy her. Kate could only take so much information, and besides, she didn’t need to know.

Katherine paused in her sketching and frowned. “Does that happen very often? I mean, do a lot of your people go around and muck in the minds of . . . ?”

“No, it is rare, and considered extremely unethical. What Ashara managed to do to me, when I was still a child and too young to resist her, was reconfigure certain of my brain patterns, so that I did not go into the usual threshhold sickness at puberty. I almost did not go into puberty at all! I came back to Darkover a twenty-eight-year-old virgin, because her interference affected my sexuality.” Marguerida gave a grin. “I have been trying to catch up for years now.”

“That must make Mikhail a very happy man.” There was no bite in the words, and Katherine sounded amused.

“A very tired one occasionally,” Marguerida agreed.

“But when I got here, I had no idea of any of this, and I thought I was losing my mind more than anything else. Then I did become sick, and let me tell you, adult-onset threshhold illness is not a pleasant experience. I nearly died, and I would have except that I was helped by several people, including Mikhail, and miraculously, I survived.”

“I can see that. And your son Domenic said you and Mikhail went into the distant past, too—which I would have found utterly incredible two weeks ago. I keep having the dark suspicion that all of you are playing some trick on me, for reasons I cannot figure out.”

Katherine jumped and the charcoal slipped from her fingers and skittered away across the floor.

“What! How did you . . . what did you just do?”

“Damn! Forgive me, Katherine! I am very tired, and my control seems to be . . .”

“What did you do!” Oddly, there was no fear in the question, just a single-minded rage.

“I possess the Alton Gift, which is the ability to force rapport with another mind, even the mind of a nontelepath. But I did not intend to . . .” Marguerida was ashamed of herself, and very cross as well. She should never have come to see Katherine so soon after encountering Javanne. She was upset, more than she wanted to acknowledge, and that made her careless.

Katherine bent down and recovered the charcoal. “Don’t do it again!” Her cheeks were pale, and she was breathing shallowly.

“No, I won’t—unless necessity forces me to.” One of the things she had learned over the years was never to make a promise that she could not be sure she could keep. “Still, I am curious. Why would you imagine that we would make up stories just to distress you?”

“Herm never told me much about Darkover, and certainly not about this whole
laran
business, Marguerida,” Katherine began, drawing her brows together and looking troubled. “He says he could not have, and this is almost true, because in the Federation now, there are eyes and ears everywhere. They spy on everyone, and everyone is assumed to be up to no good! He dragged me out of bed in the middle of the night, told me to pack, and the next thing I knew, we were on a Big Ship.” She drew a shaking breath.

“That was difficult, but Herm has always been rather secretive, and I just assumed that was his character. Now I discover he really has a secret—one that makes me . . . useless!”

“Useless?”

“Well—what do you call it . . . head-blind? Goddess, what a filthy term!”

“I think you should speak to Ida Davidson.”

“Who?”

Marguerida shifted on the stool. It was hard and uncomfortable, and she added to her list of things to remember to have some nice chairs brought in soon. “The small elderly woman you have seen with me the past two evenings.”

“Isn’t she your nanny or something? There are so many people, and I haven’t really been introduced to most of them—which I do understand, actually. I could have gone a whole lifetime without meeting Javanne Hastur,” she finished rather bitterly.

“Quite,” Marguerida answered dryly. “No, Ida is not a nanny or a servant. She is the widow of my mentor, Ivor, who died shortly after he and I came to Darkover. She is a musician, a fine one, and when she came to Darkover to reclaim her husband’s body, she remained here, because things in the Federation were already becoming difficult. She has no
laran,
and she has felt many of the same emotions I know you must be going through. But she has lived here for fifteen years, and I think she can reassure you much more than anything I can say.”
And it will take some of the pressure off me. I should have thought of it sooner—if I were not so damn tired!

“Doesn’t she mind being . . . how can she not feel like cripple?”

“Ask her.”

“You are probably right—I am being overly anxious.” Katherine swallowed hard. “I don’t like things being out of my control,” she admitted gruffly.

“Who does?”

“There is that, isn’t there? I keep trying to keep my thoughts very . . . small.”

Marguerida shook her head. “I am sorry to tell you this, Katherine, but you are not doing a very good job of it. And that is because you are afraid—fear is like mental yelling.”

“So I should just relax and pretend that everything is wonderful!”

“I did not say that, and I wouldn’t. What I want you to do is get enough information to ease your fears of being . . . examined.”

She shivered all over for a second. “That is exactly it! And Herm wants me to be tested—he thinks I might have some latent paranormal talents or something—when Terése . . . I can’t stand this! I don’t want my little girl to hear my thoughts!”

“But, Katherine, she never would if she were trained properly. And if you really object to being checked out, then no one will force you. Do you know, I think you are actually more afraid of discovering you might have some sort of ability than of being . . . otherwise.” Marguerida was loath to use the term head-blind just then.

“Maybe,” Katherine answered reluctantly. “Herm pointed out how often my portraits have elements in them that I have always thought were from my imagination, but which have turned out to be . . . significant to my subjects. I had never considered that, and, truthfully, I was disgusted by the idea. My Nana did not raise me to be a snoop!”

“I am sure she didn’t.” Marguerida paused, carefully considering her next words. “But does it occur to you that you might be overreacting somewhat because you are afraid you have been inadvertently . . . snooping on your sitters. I mean, if you thought all your life that you were an honest person, and then one day you found yourself in a shop putting a trinket into your purse, you would be horrified, wouldn’t you?”

“Absolutely. You know, Marguerida, you are not doing a very good job of reassuring me right now.”

“Well, perhaps you don’t need reassurance as much as you need forthrightness. Tell me, do you know what empathy is?”

“Of course—it is the ability to share the emotions of others.”

“That is one definition, and valid as far as it goes. But here, on Darkover, it is one of the Gifts, that of the Ridenow Domain, and it is much more than the intellectual capacity to agree with the feelings of another.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“There is a great distinction between ‘I know how you feel’ and ‘I feel how you feel,’ wouldn’t you agree?”

Katherine’s eyes widened. “Yes, but . . . I see now. So that’s it!”

“What?”

The other woman rubbed her cheek, leaving streaks of charcoal along the skin. “When I met Herm, the first thing I noticed about him was that he did not make me feel tired, the way many people do. He was so
restful,
” she went on, shaking her head. “And after we married, it did not change. He made no demands on my emotions, but was just this good man. After a while I realized that he kept a tight rein on his feelings, that he was remote and secretive, but it did not matter because I loved him. He was my safe haven.”