Traitor's Sun (9 page)

“Those are the other bedrooms, and you can choose the one you like,” Rafael answered. It was clear he had a great deal of experience with children, as well as a natural talent with them, despite his own doubts.

Terése’s face lit up. “My own room? I won’t have to share?”

“You are old enough to have your own room, Terése—such a pretty name.” Rafael gave Herm a look which spoke volumes, and he felt mildly embarrassed, even though the sparse living arrangements permitted him on Terra had not given him much choice. But Rafael was right. His daughter was much too old to be sharing a bedroom with a brother.

Herm watched Katherine remove her cloak and look for a place to hang it. At that moment a servant appeared, a rosy-cheeked girl with her hair caught back in a wooden butterfly clasp, and she took it from Katherine. She bobbed a quick curtsy. “Welcome to Comyn Castle,
vai domna. Dom
Aldaran.”

“Thank you.”

“I am Rosalys, and I have been sent to look after you.
Domna
Marguerida told me to come. She said to say that she regrets she cannot come to greet you herself, nor
Domna
Linnea either, and hopes she will be forgiven.”

“Of course,” Herm answered. “We understand entirely.” He gave Rafael a quick glance.
Is Regis really dying?

This last thought made no immediate sense to his fatigued mind, so Herm shunted it aside.
I don’t suppose there is any chance that the Medical Center at HQ could be useful?

Herm became aware that his wife was watching him closely, and realized that she must be aware that the sudden silence between him and Rafael was peculiar. He had slipped into the easy habit of unspoken conversation without thinking—it was easier than talking just now! But his Kate was observant and intelligent, and she had had a decent amount of sleep during the journey, unlike himself. Herm knew she had used sleep to escape the terror in her mind, to still the voices of protest that rose in her throat. He cleared his voice to conceal his chagrin. “I think something in the way of lunch would be right—soup, bread, tea. They gave us a breakfast of sorts just before we landed.”

“I will see to it,
vai dom,
” Rosalys answered quickly. She gave another curtsy, opened the door of the main bedroom for them, then left the suite.

Herm followed Katherine into the bedroom as the children went off to the other side of the suite. She rounded on him, her cheeks red and her eyes glittering. “What the hell is going on, Hermes! Don’t give me that hurt look! You drag me off in the middle of the night, refuse to explain anything except that we must leave immediately for Darkover, and you and that man . . . What were you doing?”

“Doing?” He gave her a hurt look, and tried to appear innocent, his heart sinking down somewhere in the region of his navel. Damn the woman for being so observant!

Katherine audibly ground her teeth. “Just tell me the whole of it.”

“Ah, err . . . Rafael was just . . . informing me of . . .” He did not feel very clever, just exhausted and rather stupid.

“How? Secret hand signals? What were you two up to!” Her voice was uncannily like that of his old nurse in Aldaran Castle, a sound of authority which would not be satisfied until it got to the bottom of the matter. It made him feel small and young and powerless for the first time in decades. “No, not hand signals.”

When he did not continue, she looked into his face, searching it with her penetrating eyes. He looked down at the floor, at the pattern of the carpet, and shuffled his toe around. He had to get the words out now, before he lost his nerve completely, but he feared the uproar that he knew would follow. If only it could have waited until he was more rested. “Well, if you must know, I was having a conversation with Rafael telepathically.” So much, he thought bitterly, for being a cunning man.

Katherine was silent for a moment. “Tele . . . Of all the . . . you really mean it, don’t you?”

“Yes, I do.”

Katherine sank down on the edge of the bed and clutched a handful of the hangings between her trembling fingers. “So, that’s it. I’ve always wondered how you could anticipate me so well . . . I could just kill you, Hermes! How could you not have told me you were reading my mind all these years? All my private . . .” He could sense that she did not really believe him, that her mind wanted to refuse what she had just heard. “Surely I would have sensed . . .” she whispered.

“No, no!” he protested quickly. “I can’t invade your thoughts at will, although there are those on Darkover who can. But I can pick up on your surface thoughts from time to time. Think of all the paintings I have not interrupted,” he begged, trying to deflect her ire.

“But why did you never tell me?” The pain and betrayal in her voice cut him right to the heart.

“If I say it was a matter of policy, you will murder me.” He sighed and sat down beside her. “You know as well as I do that the Federation has ears everywhere, and this was a secret I did not wish to share with them.”

“Why?” Her voice was cold and distant.

“I did not want to vanish into some laboratory, which would have been my fate if I had been discovered.” He held back a sigh, and tried to think of what to say next. “First, not everyone on Darkover is a telepath, and indeed the Gifts occur in only a small part of the population. And of those, few have great powers, although there are enough of these to . . .”

“How many? And how is it that the Federation doesn’t know about this?”

“I don’t know an exact number—maybe two percent of the entire population.” He rubbed the top of his bald head. “As for the other, it is a long tale, and not a happy one. Once, years ago, we agreed to participate in something called Project Telepath. Just in time we realized that the Federation could not be trusted not to abuse our talents, and Lew Alton managed to persuade certain influential scientists that the claims had been exaggerated, that there were many fewer telepaths on Darkover than had been thought, and that it was a rare and inconsistent ability, hardly worthy of pursuit. Then he got the funding for the project cut off. He was afraid, as was I when I took his place, that if it became known that we here on Darkover possessed a population of capable telepaths, we would find ourselves occupied, the way that Blaise II was.”

“But I am your wife! I did not think we had secrets between us.”
No, that isn’t true! I knew there were secrets, and I was afraid to discover what they were! But I never imagined this. . . .

“I am sorry, Katherine. I did try to tell you once, when we were on Renney, but I just couldn’t find the right words to begin.” He paused, aware of how feeble it sounded from him, the glib and clever Hermes Aldaran. “I wish I had kept a mistress and fathered a bunch of illegitimate brats instead of not telling you about this.” He sighed again, deeply this time, and forced himself to tell the whole truth, fearing he would not have the courage another time. “I would have had to soon enough, because there is a high probability that Terése has inherited some of my
laran,
my paranormal capacities. I have no idea what the nature of it might be, but I just have a strong . . .” He wanted to deflect her anger now, to direct her attention away from his folly.

“For a mistress, I would indeed have killed you.” Katherine interrupted, almost as if she could not bear to hear the words he was going to say about their daughter, and tried to lighten the mood with a soft, feeble chuckle. “You promise you have never invaded my thoughts willfully?”

“I swear it, word of an Aldaran! No more than I would read your personal journal, dearest. You must understand that in order for a community of telepaths to continue, we learn to respect the privacy of others from a very young age. We are a very ethical bunch, we Darkovans.”

“You? Ethical?” Katherine went off into a peal of mirthless laughter. “You are the most devious man in the Federation, Hermes-Gabriel Aldaran, and you know it! Nana told me that there was something about you that you were hiding, but I did not believe her. No, I did not wish to believe her!” She gave him a look, a mixture of sorrow and mistrust that wrenched his heart. Then she squared her shoulders and lifted her chin, as if bracing herself to make the best she could of things. “I suppose I might forgive you in a decade or two—but then again I might not. Telepaths! This must be the best kept secret in the Federation.”

“Yes, I suppose it is.”

She was able to hold the stiff posture for perhaps half a minute, then weakly sagged against him. He could smell her weariness and the stink of the ship on her skin. The knot of hair she had made slipped down, and he could feel the silkiness of it brush his hand. “What else? There is something more, isn’t there?”

“Yes, there is. Regis Hastur, who has guided Darkover for two generations, is dying. At least Rafael says he is, and I do not think he would exaggerate such a terrible thing. That is why his consort, Lady Linnea, is not able to welcome us, as she would have under any other circumstances, and why Lew Alton deputized Rafael to greet us.”

“Did you know that he—Herm, what really made you yank us out of our beds and rush here?”

“A vision, my dearest, if hearing voices can be called that. I have what is called the Aldaran Gift, which is the occasional power of foreseeing, although in this case I fore-heard rather than foresaw. I suddenly
knew
that the legislature would be dissolved, and realized what the implications of that were. So I did the best thing I could think of, which was to get us all as far away from Federation territory as quickly as I could.”

“Then you did not know that Regis was sick?”
Nana knew he had the Sight—but this is too much . . . first telepaths and then clairvoyants. I wonder what else he is not telling me. No, I don’t want to know! Not now, not today. I could not bear another revelation.

“I had an inkling, you might say, and while I got both the sense of some terrible thing about Regis and Nagy’s move at the same time, I did not have anything to tell me when. For all I knew, Regis’ illness might be weeks or years in the future, or might have already happened. The Aldaran Gift is not precise, and not all foreseeings come to pass. For instance, I might see that someone would be in an accident—an aircar crash, maybe—but on the day of it, this person decided to stay home instead. I was on fairly firm ground about the dissolution of the legislature, because we had not been able to do any real business in nearly two months, and everyone was sort of holding their breath, waiting for the ax to fall. I suspect that some of my colleagues with no paranormal abilities whatever were anticipating something of what happened to occur. I just had the advantage, if you can call it that, of a little more warning than they did. It was more a leap of faith on my part than anything else—that I believed what I foresaw and acted on it. That is the most I can tell you.”

“Who will take over when Regis is gone?”

Herm chuckled. “My brother-in-law, Mikhail, who is the younger brother of Rafael. I met him just before I left Darkover, when he was in his early twenties. A good man.”

“The younger brother? Isn’t that a little odd?”

“Yes, it is. You see, long ago, Regis named his youngest nephew as his heir, before he married Lady Linnea. Mikhail is the son of his sister, Javanne Hastur. Regis had other children, but they were murdered in their cradles, along with any number of other people, by the World Wreckers—a covert organization run by Terranan. Then he married Linnea, and they have three children: a son, Danilo, and two daughters.”

“But, then, why is this Mikhail going to succeed him?” Katherine let herself be distracted almost unconsciously. She desperately wanted to think about something, anything, but telepaths. It was too much just now. And she had to keep talking, to keep herself from thinking.

“It is a very complicated affair, but essentially Danilo Hastur abdicated the direct succession in favor of becoming the heir to the Elhalyn Domain, through his marriage to Miralys Elhalyn. The Elhalyn have been the kings of Darkover since the beginning of recorded history, but the power of rule has always remained in the hands of the Hastur family. The two families are related, and Regis’ mother was Alanna Elhalyn. . . . Your eyes are glazing over.”

“Are they? I suppose they must be, for my head feels full of buzzing bees. Herm, I am so tired! I slept and slept because I knew you would not tell me what was going on, and it frightened me so much. Every time I was awake, I wanted to strangle you! Yet I feel so wrung out. And afraid, too. What is going to happen to us?”

“Well, the first thing that is going to happen is that we are going to get something to eat, some
real
food, and then we are going to sleep in a real bed.”

“You know what I mean!”

“Yes, I do. I believe that we are here, on Darkover, for the foreseeable future, my dearest. I am sorry that I could not consult you first, but I had to make my decision quickly, or risk ending up in a Federation prison as an enemy of the state. And, as suspicious as the Terranan have become recently, you and the children would probably have been locked up with me.”