He felt the explosion of rage and something else—fear? shame?—running up his arm through his fingers, like an electric shock. He drew his hand away sharply as if it had been burned. With a violent, tigerish movement, Danilo thrust Regis angrily away with both hands. He spoke in a strained whisper.
“Damnable—filthy—Comyn, get the hell away from me, get your stinking hands off me, you—” He used a word which made Regis, used as he was to Guard hall coarseness, gasp aloud and draw away, shaking and almost physically sick.
“Dani, you’re wrong,” he protested, dismayed. “I only thought you were sick or in trouble. Look, whatever’s gone wrong with you, I haven’t done anything to you, have I? You’ll really make yourself ill if you go on like this, Dani. Can’t you tell me what’s happened?”
“Tell you? Sharra’s chains, I’d sooner whisper it to a wolf with his teeth in my throat!” He gave Regis a furious push and said, half aloud, “You come near me again, you filthy ombredin, and I’ll break your stinking neck!”
Regis rose from his side and silently went back to his own bed. His heart was still pounding with the physical shock of that burst of violent rage which he had felt when he touched Danilo, and he was trembling with the assault on his mind. He lay listening to Danilo’s strained breathing, quite simply aghast and almost physically sick under that burst of hatred and his own failure to get through to him. Somehow he had thought that between two people, both with laran, this kind of misunderstanding could not possibly arise! He lay listening to Danilo’s gasping, heard it finally subside into soft sobbing and at last into a restless, tossing sleep. But Regis himself hardly closed his eyes that night.
* * *
Chapter TEN
(Lew Alton’s narrative)
Heavy rain after midnight had turned to wet snow; the day I was to leave for Aldaran dawned gray and grim, the sun hidden behind clouds still pregnant with unfallen snow. I woke early and lay half asleep, hearing angry voices from my father’s room. At first I thought Marius was getting a tongue-lashing for some minor naughtiness, but so early? Then I woke a little further and detected a quality in Father’s voice never turned on any of us. All my life I have known him for a harsh, hasty and impatient man, but usually his anger was kept on a leash; the fully-aroused anger of an Alton can kill, but he was tower-disciplined, control normally audible in every syllable he spoke. Hastily I put on a few clothes and went into the central hall.
“Dyan, this isn’t worthy of you. Is it so much a matter of personal pride?”
Lord of Light, it happened again! Well, at least, if I knew that note in Father’s voice, he wouldn’t get off unpunished!
Dyan’s voice was a heavy bass, muted to a rumble by the thick walls, but no walls could filter out my father’s answering shout; “No, damn it, Dyan, I won’t be party to any such monstrous—”
Out in the hall I heard Dyan repeat implacably, “Not personal pride, but the honor of the Comyn and the Guards.”
“Honor! You don’t know the meaning of—”
“Careful, Kennard, there are some things even you cannot say! As for this—in Zandru’s name, Ken, I cannot overlook this. Even if it had been your own son. Or mine, poor lad, had he lived so long. Would you be willing to see a cadet draw steel on an officer and go unpunished? If you cannot accept that I am thinking of the honor of the Guards, what of discipline? Would you have condoned such conduct even in your own bastard?”
“Must you draw Lew into every—”
“I’m trying not to, which is why I came directly to you with this. I do not expect him to be sensitive to a point of honor.”
My father cut him off again, but they had both lowered their voices. Finally Dyan spoke again, in a tone of inflexible finality. “No, don’t speak to me of circumstances. If you let the respect due to the Comyn be eroded away in times like this, in full sight of every insolent little cadet and bastard in Thendara, how can you speak of honor?”