I woke up shuddering, crying out with the mingled terror and enchantment of the dream. The Sharra matrix lay shrouded and dormant.
But I dared not close my eyes again that night
Chapter NINETEEN
After Lew had gone away, closing the door behind him, it was Regis who moved first, stumbling across the floor as if wading through a snowdrift, to clasp Dani’s shoulders in a kinsman’s embrace. He heard his own voice, hoarse in his ears.
“You’re safe. You really are here and safe.” He had doubted Lew’s word, though never in all his life had he reason to doubt. What kind of evil was here?
“Yes, yes, well and safe,” Danilo said, then drew a harsh breath of dismay. “My lord Regis, you’re soaked through!”
For the first time Regis became aware of the heat from the fireplace, the hangings sealing off drafts, the warmth after the icy blasts of the corridors. The very warmth touched off a spasm of shivering, but he forced himself to say, “The guards. You are really a prisoner, then?”
“They’re here to protect me, so they say. They’ve been friendly enough. Come, sit here, let me get these boots off, you’re chilled to the bone!”
Regis let himself be led to an armchair, so ancient in design that until he was in the seat he was not sure what it was. His feet came out of the boots numb and icy-cold. He was almost too weary to sit up and unlace his tunic; he sat with his hands hanging, his legs stretched out, finally with an effort put his stiff fingers to the tunic-laces. He knew his voice sounded more irritible than he meant.
“I can manage for myself, Dani. You’re my paxman, not my body-servant!”
Danilo, kneeling before the fire to dry Regis’ boots, jerked upright as if stung. He said into the fire, “Lord Regis, I am honored to serve you in any way I may.” Through the stiff formality of the words, Regis, wide open again, felt something else, a wordless resonance of despair: He didn’t mean it, then, about accepting my service. It was, it was only a way of atoning for what his kinsman had done….
Without stopping to think, Regis was out of the chair, kneeling beside Dani on the hearth. His voice was shaking, partly with the cold which threatened to rip him apart with shudders, partly with that intense awareness of Dani’s hurt.
“The Gods witness I meant it! It’s only … only …” Suddenly he knew the right thing to say. “You remember what a fuss it caused, when I expected anyone to wait on me, in the barracks!”
Their eyes caught and held. Regis had no idea whether it was his own thought or Danilo’s: We were boys then. And now … how long ago that seems! Yet it was only last season! It seemed to Regis that they were looking back, as men, across a great chasm of elapsed time, at a shared boyhood. Where had it gone?
With a sense of fighting off unutterable weariness—it seemed he had been fighting off this weariness as long as he could remember—he reached for Danilo’s hands. They felt hard, calloused, real, the only firm anchor-point in a shifting, dissolving universe. Momentarily he felt his hands going through Danilo’s as if neither of them were quite solid. He blinked hard to focus his eyes, and saw a blue-haloed form in front of him. He could see through Danilo now, to the wall beyond. Trying to focus against the swarming fireflies that spun before his eyes, he remembered Javanne’s warning, fight it, move around, speak. He tried to get his voice back into his throat
“Forgive me, Dani. Who should serve me if not my sworn man . . .?”
And as he spoke the words he felt, amazed, the texture of Danilo’s relief: My people have served the Hasturs for generations. Now I too am where I belong.
No! I do not want to be a master of men…!
But the swift denial was understood by both, not as a personal rejection, but the very embodiment of what they both were, so that the giving of Danilo’s service was the pleasure and the relief it was, so that Regis knew he must not only accept that service, but accept it fully, graciously.