“Foster-mother, I place you in charge of my son. When the roads are safe, you must take him to the Lord Hastur at Thendara, and see to it that he is given the Sign of Comyn.”
Javanne was dropping slow tears, but she said nothing except, “Let me kiss him once more,” and allowed the old woman to carry the child away. Regis followed them with his eyes. His son. It was a strange feeling. He wondered if he had laran or the unknown Hastur gift; he wondered if he would ever know, would ever see the child again.
“I must go,” he said to his sister. “Send for my horse and someone to open the gates without noise.” As they waited together in the gateway, he said, “If I do not return—”
“Speak no ill-omen!” she said quickly.
“Javanne, do you have the Hastur gift?”
“I do not know,” she said. “None knows till it is wakened by one who holds it. We had always thought that you had no laran. . . .”
^ He nodded grimly. He had grown up with that, and even now it was too sore a wound to touch.
She said, “A day will came when you must go to Grandfather. who holds it to waken in his heir, and ask for the gift.”
“Then, and only then, you will know what it is. I do not know myself,” she said. “Only if you had died before you were declared a man, or before you had fathered a son, it would have been wakened in me so that, before my own death, I might pass it to one of my sons.”
“And so it might pass, still. He heard the soft clop-clop-clopping of hooves in the dark. He prepared to mount, turned back a moment and took Javanne briefly in his arms. She was crying. He blinked tears from his own eyes. He whispered, “Be good to my son, darling.” What more could he say? She kissed him quickly in the dark and said, “Say you’ll come back, brother. Don’t say anything else.” Without waiting for another word, she wrenched herself free of him and ran back into the dark house.
The gates of Edelweiss swung shut behind him. Regis was alone The night was dark, fog-shrouded. He fastened his cloak about his throat, touching the small pouch where the matrix lay. Even through the insulation he could feel it, though no other could have, a small live thing, throbbing. . . , He was alone with it, under the small horn of moon lowering behind the distant hills. Soon even that small light would be gone.
He braced himself, murmured to his horse, straightened his back and rode away northward, on the first step of his unknown journey.
Chapter SIXTEEN
(Lew Alton’s narrative)
, Until the day I die, I am sure I shall return in dreams to that first joyous time at Aldaran.
In my dreams, everything that came after has been wiped out, all the pain and terror, and I remember only that time when we were all together and I was happy, wholly happy for the first and last time in my life. In those dreams Thyra moves with all her strange wild beauty, but gentle and subdued, as she was during those days, tender and pliant and loving. Beltran is there, too, with his fire and the enthusiasm of the dream from which we had all taken the spark, my friend, almost my brother. Kadarin is always there, and in my dreams he is always smiling, kind, a rock of strength bearing us all up when we faltered. And Rafe, the son I shall never have, always beside me, his eyes lifted to mine.
And Marjorie.
Marjorie is always with me in those dreams. But there is nothing I can say about Marjorie. Only that we were together and in love, and as yet the fear was only a little, little shadow, like a breath of chill from a glacier not yet in sight. I wanted her, of course, and I resented the fact that I could not touch her even in the most casual way. But it wasn’t as bad as I had feared. Psi work uses up so much energy and strength that there’s nothing much left. I was with her every waking moment and it was enough. Almost enough. And we could wait for the rest.