Momentarily, knowing it would make it worse in the end, I let myself think of the girl Linnea. Terran blood. A sensitive, a telepath. Perhaps I had been too hasty.
Rage gripped me again. So Hastur and my father thought they could manipulate me no other way, now they tried to bribe me with sex. They had bribed Dyan by putting him in charge of a barracks-full of half-grown boys, who at the very least would feed his ego by admiring him and flattering him. And however discreetly, he thrived on it.
And they would bribe me, too. Differently, of course, for my needs were different, but essentially still a bribe. They would keep me in control, pliable, by dangling a young, beautiful, sexually exciting girl before me, a half-spoken agreement.
And my own needs, which my telepathic father knew all too well, would do the rest. I felt sick at the knowledge of how nearly I had fallen into their trap.
The festivities inside the ballroom were breaking up. The cadets had long gone back to barracks. A few lingerers were still drinking at the buffet, but servants were moving around, beginning to clear away. I strode through the halls toward the Alton rooms, still alive with rage.
The central hall was deserted, but I saw a light in my father’s room and went in without knocking. He was half-dressed, looking weary and off guard.
“I want to talk to you!”
He said mildly, “You didn’t have to charge in here like a cralmac in rut for that.” He reached out briefly and touched my mind. He hasn’t done that much since I was grown up, and it made me angry that he should treat me like a child after so many years. He withdrew quickly and said, “Can’t it wait till morning, Lew? You’re not well.”
Even his solicitude added to my wrath. “If I’m not, you know whose fault it is. What in the hell do you mean, trying to marry me off without a word of warning?”
He met my anger head-on. “Because, Lew, you’re too proud and too damned stubborn to admit you need anything. You’re ready, past ready, for marriage. Don’t be like the man in the old tale, who when the devil bade him take the road to paradise, set off on the high-road to hell!” He sounded as raw as I felt. “Damn it, do you think I don’t know how you feel?”
I thought about that for a moment. I’ve wondered, now and then, if my father has lived alone all these years since my mother died. He’d certainly had no acknowledged mistress. I had never tried to spy on him, or inquire even in thought about his most private life, therefore I was doubly angered that he left me no rag of privacy to cover my nakedness, had forced me to strip myself naked before Hastur and disgrace myself before my cousin Callina.
“It won’t work,” I flung at him in a fury. “I wouldn’t marry the girl now if she was as beautiful as the Blessed Cas-silda, and came dowered with all the jewels of Carthon!”
My father shrugged, with a deep sigh. “Of course not,” he said wearily. “When did you ever do anything so sensible? Suit yourself. I married to please myself; I told Hastur I would never compel you.”
“Do you think you could?” I was still raging.
“Since I’m not trying, what does it matter?” My father sounded as weary as I felt. “I think you’re a fool, but if it helps you feel independent and virtuous to go around with an ache in your”—to my surprise and shock he used a vulgar phrase from the Guard hall, one I’d never suspected him of knowing—”then be just as damned stubborn as you want. You’re my son all right: you have no more sense than I had at your age!” He shrugged in a way that indicated he was through with the subject. “Threshold sickness? I have some kirian somewhere, if you need it.”
I shook my head, realizing that something, perhaps just the flooding of my system with violent anger, had dispelled the worst of it.