I demanded, “Where did you get all this stuff?” I could have used a much ruder word; out of deference to the women I used one meaning, literally, stable-sweepings.

He said, “Remarkable fertile stuff, stable-sweepings. Grows good crops. The facts are there. I have a gift for languages, like all telepaths—oh, yes, I am one, DomLewis. By the way, do you know you have a Terran name?”

“Surely not,” I said. Lewis had been a given name among the Altons for centuries.

“I have stood on the island of Lewis on Terra itself,” said the man Kadarin.

“Coincidence,” I said. “Human tongues evolve the same syllables, having the same vocal mechanism.”

“Your ignorance, DomLewis, is appalling,” said Kadarin coldly. “Some day, if you want a lesson in linguistics, you should travel in the Empire and hear for yourself what strange syllables the human tongue evolves for itself when there is no common language transmitted in culture.” I felt a sudden twinge of dread, like a cold wind. He went on. “Meanwhile, don’t make ignorant statements which only show what an untraveled boy you are. Virtually every given name ever recorded on Darkover is a name known on Terra, and in a very small part of Terra at that. The drone-pipe, oldest of Darkovan instruments, was known once on Terra, but they survive only in museums, the art of playing them lost; musicians came here to relearn the art and found music that survived from a very small geographical area, the British or Brictish Islands. Linguists studying your language found traces of three Terran languages. Spanish in your casta; English and Gaelic in your cahuenga, and the Dry-Town languages. The language spoken in the Hellers is a form of pure Gaelic which is no longer spoken on Terra but survives in old manuscripts. Well, to make a long tale short, as the old wife said when she cropped her cow’s brush, they soon found the record of a single ship, sent out before the Terran colonies had bound themselves together into the Empire, which vanished without trace and was believed crashed or lost. And they found the crewlist of that ship.”

“I don’t believe a word of it.”

“Your belief wouldn’t make it true; your doubt won’t make it false,” Kadarin said. “The very name of this world, Darkover, is a Terran word meaning,” he considered a minute, translated, “ ‘color of night overhead.’ On that crewlist there were di Asturiens and MacArans and these are, you would say, good old Darkovan names. There was a ship’s officer named Camilla Del Rey. Camilla is a rare name among Terrans now, but it is the most common name for girl-children in the Kilghard Hills; you have even given it to one of your Comyn demi-goddesses. There was a priest of Saint Christopher of Centaurus, a Father Valentine Neville, and how many of the Comyn’s sons have been taught in the cristoforomonastery of Saint-Valentine-of-the-Snows? I brought Marjorie, who is a cristoforo, a little religious medal from Terra itself; its twin is enshrined in Nevarsin. Must I go on with such examples, which I assure you I could quote all night without tiring? Have your Comyn forefathers ever told you so much?’

My head was reeling. It sounded infernally convincing.

“The Comyn cannot know this. If the knowledge was lost—”

“They know, all right,” Beltran said with contempt. “Kennard knows certainly. He has lived on Terra.”

My father knew this and had never told me?

Kadarin and Beltran were still telling me their tale of a “lost ship” but I had ceased to listen. I could sense Marjorie’s soft eyes on me in the dying firelight, though I could no longer see them. I felt that she was following my thoughts, not intruding on them but rather responding to me so completely that there were no longer any barriers between us. This had never happened before. Even at Arilinn, I had never felt so wholly attuned to any human being. I felt she knew how distressed and weary all this had made me.

On the cushioned bench she stretched out her hand to me and I could feel her indignation running up from her small fingers into my hand and arm and all along my body. She said, “Bob, what are you trying to doto him? He comes here weary from long travel, a kinsman and a guest; is this our mountain hospitality?”

Kadarin laughed. “Set a mouse to guard a lion!” he said. I felt those unfathomably strange eyes piercing the darkness to see our hands clasped. “I have my reasons, child. I don’t know what fate sent him here, but when I see a man who has lived by a lie, I try to tell him the truth if I feel he’s worth hearing it. A man who must make a choice must make it on facts, not fuzzy loyalties and half-truths and old lies. The tides of fate are moving—”

I said rudely, “Is fate one of your facts? You called mesuperstitious.”

He nodded. He looked very serious. “You’re a telepath, an Alton; you know what precognition is.”

Beltran said, “You’re going too fast. We don’t even know why he’s come here, and he isheir to a Domain. He may even have been sent to carry tales back to the old graybeard in Thendara and all his deluded yes-men.”

Beltran swung around to face me. “Why didyou come here?” he demanded. “After all these years, Kennard cannot be all that eager for you to know your mother’s kin, otherwise you would have been my foster-brother, as Father wished.”

I thought of that with a certain regret. I would willingly have had this kinsman for foster-brother. Instead I had never known of his existence till now, and it had been our mutual loss. He demanded again, “Why have you come, cousin, after so long?”

“It’s true I came at my father’s will,” I said at last, slowly. “Hastur heard reports that the Compact was being violated in Caer Donn: my father was too ill to travel and sent me in his place.” I felt strangely pulled this way and that. Had Father sent me to spy on kinsfolk? The idea filled me with revulsion. Or had he, in truth, wished me to know my mother’s kin? I did not know, and not knowing made me uncertain, wretched.

“You see,” said the woman Thyra, from her place in Kadarin’s shadow, “it’s useless to talk to him. He’s one of the Comyn puppets.”

Anger flared through me. ‘I am no man’s puppet. Not Hastur’s. Not my father’s. Nor will I be yours, cousin or no. I came at my free will, because if Compact is broken it touches all our lives. And more than that, whatever my father said, I wished to know for myself whether what they had told me of Aldaran and Terra was true.”

“Spoken honestly,” Beltran said. “But let me ask you this, cousin. Is your loyalty to Comyn … or to Darkover?”

Asked that question at almost any other time, I would have said, without hesitation, that to be loyal to Comyn was to be loyal to Darkover. Since leaving Thendara I was no longer so sure. Even those I wholly trusted, like Hastur, had no power, or perhaps no wish, to check the corruption of the others. I said, ‘To Darkover. No question, to Darkover.”

He said vehemently, “Then you should be one of us! You were sent to us at this moment, I think, because we needed you, because we couldn’t go on without someone like you!”

“To do what?” I wanted no part in any Aldaran plots.

“Only this, kinsman, to give Darkover her rightful place, as a world belonging to our own time, not a barbarian backwater! We deserve the place on the Empire Council which we should have had, centuries ago, if the Empire had been honest with us. And we are going to have it!”

“A noble dream,” I said, “if you can manage it. Just how are you going to bring this about?”

“It won’t be easy,” Beltran said. “It’s suited the Empire, and the Comyn, to perpetuate their idea of our world: backward, feudal, ignorant. And we have become many of these things.”

“Yet,” Thyra said from the shadows, “we have one thing which is wholly Darkovan and unique. Our psi powers.” She leaned forward to put a log on the fire and I saw her features briefly, lit by flame, dark, vital, glowing. I said, “If they are unique to Darkover, what of your theory that we are all Terrans?”