SHARRA’S EXILE

Marion Zimmer Bradley

heritage & exile 02 - a novel of Darkover

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Contents

Prologue: The Second Year of Exile

BOOK ONE: THE EXILE

1|2|3

BOOK TWO: THE FORM OF FIRE

1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9|10|

BOOK THREE: THE HASTUR GIFT

1|2|3|4|

Epilogue

in DAW editions:

TWO TO CONQUER

THE SPELL SWORD

THE HERITAGE OF HASTUR

THE SHATTERED CHAIN

THE FORBIDDEN TOWER

STORMQUEEN!

HUNTERS OF THE RED MOON

THE SURVIVORS (with Paul Zimmer)

THE KEEPER’S PRICE

SHARRA’S EXILE

DAW BOOKS, INC.

DONALD A. WOLLHEIM, PUBLISHER

1633 Broadway, New York, N.Y. 10019

A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR:

Like all previous Darkover novels, this story is complete in itself and does not depend on knowledge of any other. More than any other Darkover book, however, this one was written by popular demand.

One result of writing novels as they occurred to me, instead of following strict chronological order, was that I began with an attempt to solve the final problems of the society; each novel thus suggested one laid in an earlier time, in an attempt to explain how the society had reached that point. Unfortunately, that meant that relatively mature novels, early in the chronology of Darkover, were followed by books written when I was much younger and relatively less skilled at storytelling; and of all these, the least satisfactory was The Sword of Aldones, perhaps because this book was, in essence, dreamed up at the age of fifteen.

In 1975 I made a landmark decision; that in writing The Heritage of Hastur, I would not be locked into the basically immature concepts set forth in Sword, even at the sacrifice of consistency in the series. After Heritageappeared in print, Sword of Aldonesseemed even less satisfactory—for years, it seemed that everyone I met asked me when I was going to rewrite it. For years I replied “Never,” or “I don’t want to go back to it.” But I finally decided that I had, in Sword of Aldones, developed a basically good idea, without the skill or maturity to handle it as well as it deserved; and that the characters deserved serious treatment by a matured writer. I decided not to rewrite, but to write an entirely new book based on events in the same time frame as Sword. The present book is the result.

—MARION ZIMMER BRADLEY

Copyright © 1981 By MARION ZIMMER BRADLEY

All Rights Reserved.

Cover painting Sharraby Hannah M. G. Shapero.

DEDICATION

To Walter Breen, whose knowledge of the Darkover universe is “extensive and peculiar” and to our son Patrick Breen, who read this page by page as it emerged from the typewriter, sometimes actually reading it over my shoulder as I wrote, in his eagerness to find out what happened next.

Thanks!

FIRST PRINTING, OCTOBER 1981

PRINTED IN U.S.A.

Chapter Two of Book One appeared in a slightly different form, as a short story entitled “Blood Will Tell” in the volume The Keeper’s Price, DAW 1980.

Prologue:

The second year of exile

^ »

This was the home of my ancestors.

But I knew, now, that it would never be myhome.

My eyes ached as I stared at the horizon where the sun sank out of sight—a strange yellow sun, not red as a sun should be, a glaring sun that hurt my eyes. But now, for a moment just before twilight, it was suddenly red and huge and sinking behind the lake in a sudden crimson glory that made me ache with homesickness; and across the water a streak of crimson— I stood staring until the last gleams of crimson faded; and over the lake, pale and silver, the solitary moon of Terra showed the thinnest of elegant crescents.

Earlier in the day there had been rain, and the air was heavy with alien smells. Not alien, really; they were known, somehow, in the very depth of my genes. My ancestors had climbed down from the trees of this world, had lived out the long evolution which had patterned them into human, and had later sent out the seedling ships, one of which—I had heard the tale—had crash-landed on Darkover and settled there, rooting into the new world so deeply that I, exiled from my race’s homeworld and returning, found homeworld alien and longed for the world of my people’s exile.

I did not know how long ago, or for how long my people had dwelt on Darkover. Travel among the stars has strange anomalies; the enormous interstellar distances play strange tricks with time. There would never be any way for the folk of the Terran Empire to say, three thousand years ago, or fifteen thousand years ago, which particular colony ship founded Darkover— The elapsed time on Terra was something like three thousand years. Yet elapsed time on Darkover was somehow more like ten thousand, so that Darkover had a history nearly as long as Earth’s own history of civilization and chaos. I knew how many years ago Terra, in the days long before the Terran Empire had spread from star to star, had sent out the ship. I knew how many years had elapsed on Darkover. And there was no way for even the most accurate historian to reconcile them: I had long ago stopped trying.

Nor was I the only one with hopelessly torn loyalties, as deep as the very DNA in my cells. My mother had been earth born under this impossibly blue sky and this colorless moon; yet she had loved Darkover, had married my Darkovan father and borne him sons and, at last, been laid to rest in an unmarked grave in the Kilghard Hills on Darkover.

And I wish I were lying there beside her…

For a moment I was not sure that the thoughts were not my own. Then I shut them out, savagely. My father and I were too close… not the ordinary closeness of a Comyn telepath family (though that in itself would have been freakish enough to the Terrans around us) but entangled by common fears, common loss… shared experience and pain. Bastard, rejected by my father’s caste because my mother had been half Terran, my father had gone to endless pains to have me accepted as a Comyn Heir. To this day I did not know whether it was for my sake or his own. My futile attempts at rebellion had entrapped us all in the abortive rebellion under the Aldarans, and Sharra—

Sharra. Flame burning in my mind…the image of a woman of flame, chained, restless, tresses of fire rising on a firestorm wind, hovering… rising, ravening… Marjorie caught in the fires, screaming, dying…

No! Merciful Avarra, no—

Black dark. Shut out everything. Close my eyes, bend my head, go away, not there at all, nowhere at all—

Pain. Agony flaming in my hand—

“Pretty bad, Lew?” Behind me I felt the calming presence of my father’s mind. I nodded, clenching my teeth, slamming the painful stump of my left hand against the railing, letting the cold strangeness of the white moon-rim flood me.

“Damn it, I’m all right. Stop—” I fought for the right word and came up with “stop hovering.”

“What am I supposed to do? I can’t shut it out,” he said quietly. “You were—what shall I say? Broadcasting. When you can keep your thoughts to yourself, I’ll leave you alone with them. In the name of all the Gods, Lew, I was a technician in the Arilinn Tower for ten years!”