I nodded and he said, “Marjorie is our telepath.” He drew forward the pretty, red-haired girl in blue whom I had noticed at the table. She smiled, looking directly into my eyes in the way mountain girls have. She said, “I am a telepath, yes, but untrained; so many of the old things have been forgotten here in the mountains. Perhaps you can tell us what you were taught at Arilinn, kinsman.”

Her eyes were a strange color, a tint I had never seen before: gold-flecked amber, like some unknown animal. Her hair was almost red enough for the valley Comyn. I gave her my hand, as I had done with Beltran. It reminded me a little of the way the women at Arilinn had accepted me, simply as a human being, without fuss or flirtatiousness. I felt strangely reluctant to let her fingers go. I asked, “Are you a kinswoman?”

Beltran said, “Marjorie Scott, and her sister and brother, too, are my father’s wards. It’s a long story, he may tell you some day if he will. Their mother was my own mother’s foster-sister, so I call them, all three, sister and brother.” He drew the others forward and presented them. Rafe Scott was a boy of eleven or twelve, not unlike my own brother Marius, with the same gold-flecked eyes. He looked at me shyly and did not speak. Thyra was a few years older than Marjorie, a slight, restless, sharp-featured woman, with the family eyes but a look of old Kermiac, too. She met my eyes but did not offer her hand. ‘This is a long and weary journey for a lowlander, kinsman.”

“I had good weather and skilled escort for the mountains,” I said, bowing to her as I would have done to a lady of the Domains. Her dark features looked amused, but she was friendly enough, and for a little we talked of weather and the mountain roads. After a time Beltran drew the conversation back.

“My father was greatly skilled in his youth and has taught all of us some of the skills of a matrix technician. Yet I am said to have but little natural talent for it. You have had the training, Lew, so tell me, which is the most important, talent or skill?

I told him what I had been told myself. “Talent and skill are the right hand and the left; it is the will that rules both, and the will must be disciplined. Without talent, little skill can be learned; but talent alone is worth little without training.”

“I am said to have the talent,” said the girl Marjorie. “Uncle told me so, yet I have no skill, for by the time I was old enough to learn, he was old past teaching. And I am half-Terran. Could a Terran learn those skills, do you think?”

I smiled and said, “I too am part-Terran, yet I served at Arilinn—Marjorie?” I tried to speak her Terran name and she smiled at my stumbling formation of the syllables.

“ Marguerida, if you like that better,” she said softly in cahuenga. I shook my head. “As you speak it, it is rare and strange … and precious,” I said, wanting to add, “like you,” Beltran curled his lip disdainfully and said, “So the Comyn actually let you, with your Terran blood, into their sacred towers? How very condescending of them! I’d have laughed in their faces and told them what they could do with their tower!”

“No, cousin, it wasn’t like that,” I said. “It was only in the towers that no one took thought of my Terran blood. Among the Comyn I was nedestro, bastard. In Arilinn, no one cared what I was, only what I could do.”

“You’re wasting your time, Beltran,” said a quiet voice from near the fire. “I am sure he knows no more of history than any of the Hali’imyn, and his Terran blood has done him little good.” I looked across to the bench at the other side of the fire and saw a tall thin man, silver-gilt hair standing awry all around his forehead. His face was shadowed, but it seemed to me for a moment that his eyes came glinting out of the darkness like a cat’s eyes by torchlight. “No doubt he believes, like most of the valley-bred, that the Comyn fell straight from the arms of the Lord of Light, and has come to believe all their pretty romances and fairy tales. Lew, shall I teach you your own history?”

“Bob,” said Marjorie, “no one questions your knowledge. But your manners are terrible!”

The man gave a short laugh. I could see his features now by firelight, narrow and hawklike, and as he gestured I could see that he had six fingers on either hand, like the Ardais and Aillard men. There was something terribly strange about his eyes, too. He unfolded his long legs, stood up and made me an ironic bow.

“Must I respect the chastity of your mind, vai dom, as you respect that of your deluded sorceresses? Or have I leave to ravish you with some truths, in hope that they may bring forth the fruits of wisdom?”

I scowled at the mockery. “Who in hell are you?”

“In hell, I am no one at all,” he said lightly. “On Darkover, I call myself Robert Raymon Kadarin, s’dei par servu.” On his lips the elegant castawords became a mockery. “I regret I cannot follow your custom and add a long string of names detailing my parentage for generations. I know no more of my parentage than you Comyn know of yours but, unlike you, I have not yet learned to make up the deficiency with a long string of make-believe gods and legendary figures!”

“Are you Terran?” I asked. His clothing looked it.

He shrugged. “I was never told. However, it’s a true saying: only a race-horse or a Comyn lord is judged by his pedigree. I spent ten years in Terran Empire intelligence, though they wouldn’t admit it now; they’ve put a price on my head because, like all governments who buy brains, they like to limit what the brains are used for. I found out, for instance,” he added deliberately, “just what kind of game the Empire’s been playing on Darkover and how the Comyn have been playing along with them. No, Beltran,” he said, swinging around to face my cousin, “I’m going to tell him. He’s the one we’ve been waiting for.”

The harsh, disconnected way he spoke made me wonder if he was raving or drunk. “Just what do you mean, a game the Terrans are playing, with the Comyn to help?”

I had come here to find out if Aldaran was dangerously allied with Terra, to the danger of Comyn. Now this man Kadarin accused the Comyn of playing Terra’s games. I said, “I don’t know what in the hell you’re talking about. It sounds like rubbish.”

“Well, start with this,” Kadarin said. “Do you know who the Darkovans are, where we came from? Did anyone ever tell you that we’re the first and oldest of the Terran colonies? No, I thought you didn’t know that. By rights we should be equal to any of the planetary governments that sit in the Empire Council, doing our part to make the laws of the Empire, as other colonies do. We should be part of the galactic civilization we live in. Instead, we’re treated like a backward, uncivilized world, poor relations to be content with what crumbs of knowledge they’re willing to dole out to us drop by drop, kept carefully apart from the mainstream of the Empire, allowed to go on living as barbarians!”

“Why? If this is true, why?”

“Because the Comyn want it that way,” Kadarin said. “It suits their purposes. Don’t you even knowDarkover is a Terran colony? You said they mocked your Terran blood. Damn them, what do they think theyare? Terrans, all of them.”

“You’re stark raving mad!”

“You’d like to think so. So would they. More flattering, isn’t it to think of your father’s precious caste as being descended from gods and divinely appointed to rule all Darkover. Too bad! They’re just Terrans, like all the rest of the Empire colonies!” He stopped pacing and stood, staring down at us from his great height, he was a full head taller than I am, and I am not small. “I tell you, I’ve seen the records on Terra, and in the Administrative Archives on the Coronis colony. The facts are buried there, or supposed to be buried, but anybody with a security clearance can get them quickly enough.”