The tavern was clean enough, and not too dark, though my spine prickled a little as I went into the unlighted room, Dyan behind me. He evidently knew the place, because the potboy brought him a drink without asking. He poured some for me; I put out my hand to stop him.

“Only a little, thanks.” It was more a ritual than anything else; we drank together, and at the back of my mind I thought, if my father knew, he would have been pleased to see me drinking in all amiability with his oldest friend. Well, I could do that much homage to his memory. He caught my eye and I knew he shared the thought; we drank silently to my father’s peace.

“We’ll miss him in Council,” Dyan said. “He knew all the Terran ways and wasn’t seduced by them. I wonder—” and his eyes dwelt on me a moment past courtesy, looking at the scar, the folded sleeve. But I was enough used to that. I said, “I’m not exactly enthralled by the Terran—more strictly, by the Empire ways. Terra itself—” I shrugged. “I suppose it’s a beautiful world, if you can stand living under a yellow sun and having the colors all wrong. There’s a certain—status— in being of old Terran stock, or living there, but I didn’t like it. As for the Empire—”

“You lived on Vainwal a long time,” he said, “and you’re not a decadent like Lerrys, bound on pleasure and—exotic entertainment.”

It was half a question. I said, “I can live without Empire luxuries. Father found the climate good for his health. I—” I broke off, wondering just why I had stayed. Inertia, deadly lassitude, one place no worse than another to me, until I met Dio, and then any place as good as another, as long as she was with me. If Dio had asked me, would I have come back to Darkover? Probably, if the subject had been broached before it became impossible for her to travel. Why had we not come before she became pregnant? At least, here, she could have been monitored, we would have had some forewarning of the tragedy—I stopped myself. Done was done; we had done the best we could, unknowing, and I would not carry that burden of guilt along with all the rest.

“I stayed with Father. After he died, he wanted me to come back; it was his dying wish.” I said it gingerly, afraid the clamor in my mind would begin again, once invoked, but it was only a whisper.

“You could hold Kennard’s place in Council,” he said, “and have the same kind of power he held.”

My face must have flinched, because he said half angrily, “Are you a fool? You are needed in Council, provided you don’t take the part of the Ridenow and try to pull us all into the Empire!”

I shook my head. “I’m no politician, Lord Dyan. And— without offense—I’d like a little time to size it up on my own, before being told what to think by each of the interested parties!”

I had expected him to fly into a rage at the rebuke, but he only grinned, that fierce and wolfish grin which was, in its own way, handsome. “Good enough; at least you’re capable of thinking. While you’re sizing up the situation, try and take the measure of our prince. There’s precedent enough—Council knew my own father was mad as a kyorebniin the Ghost wind, and they took care to draw his fangs.”

They had appointed Dyan his father’s regent, and in one of the old man’s lucid intervals, old Dom Kyril had agreed to it. But I said, “Derik has no near kinsman; isn’t he the only adult Elhalyn?”

“His sisters are married,” Dyan said, “though not, perhaps, as near to nobility as they would have been if we had known one of their husbands might have to be regent of the Elhalyns. Old Hastur wants to set Regis up in Derik’s place, but the boy’s kicking about that, and who can blame him? It’s enough to rule over Hastur, without a crown as well. A crown is nonsense in these days, of course; what we need is a strong Council of equals. And there’s the Guard—not that a few dozen men carrying swords can do much against the Terrans, but they can keep our own people on the right side of the wall.”

“Who’s commanding the Guard now?” I asked, and he shrugged.

“Anybody. Nobody. Gabriel, mostly. I took it myself for the first two years—Gabriel seemed a bit young.” I remembered Dyan had been one of the best officers. “After that it went to him.”

“He’s welcome to it,” I said. “I never had much taste for soldiering.”

“It goes with the Domain,” Dyan said fiercely. “I suppose you would be willing to do your duty and command it?”

“I’ll have to get my bearings first,” I said, and then I was angry. “Which is more important? To get someone who’s competent at commanding the Guards, and likes it, or to get someone who has the right blood in his veins?”

“They’re both important,” he said, and he was deadly serious. “Especially in these times. With the Hasturs gobbling up one Domain after another, Gabriel’s exactlythe wrong man to command the Guards; you should force the issue and take them away from him as soon as possible.”

I almost laughed. “Force the issue? Gabriel could tie me up into a bow for his wife’s hair, and do it with one hand tied—” I broke off; that particular figure of speech was, to say the least, unfortunate. “I could hardly fight a duel with him; are you suggesting assassination?”

“I think the Guard would be loyal to you for your father’s sake.”

“Maybe.”

“And if you don’t take over the Guard? What are you intending to do? Go back to Annida and raise horses?” He put all his scorn into the words. Pain flooded through me, remembering how I had wanted to take my son there. “I could probably do worse.”

“Just sit at home and attend to your own affairs while Darkover falls into Empire hands?” he asked scornfully. “You might as well hide behind Tower walls! Why not go back with Jeff to Arilinn—or did they burn thatout of you too?”

Rage flooded through me. How dared Dyan, under the pretense of kinship and his friendship for my father, probe old, unhealed wounds this way? “I was taught at Arilinn,” I said deliberately, “to speak of such matters only to those who were concerned in them. Are you monitor, mechanic, or technician, Lord Dyan?”

I had always thought that the phrase black with ragewas only a manner of speaking; now I saw it, the blood rising dark and congested in Dyan’s face until I thought he would fall down, stricken by a stroke. Too late, I remembered; Dyan had been briefly in a Tower, and no one, not even my father, knew why he had left it. What I had meant as a freezing rebuke, a way of telling him to keep his distance, had been interpreted as deadly personal insult—an attack on his weakest spot.

“Neither monitor, mechanic nor technician, damn you,” he said at last, his chair going over backward as he rose, “nor power-pole for the forces of Sharra, you damned insolent bastard! Go back to Armida and raise horses, or to a Tower if they’ll have you, or back to the Empire, or to hell if Zandru will take you in, but stay out of Council politics—hear me?”

He turned and strode away, and I stared after him, in shock and dismay, knowing I had made, from a man who had been ready to befriend me, the most dangerous of enemies.

CHAPTER FIVE

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The Comyn Tower rose high above the Castle, part of the great sprawling mass that looked down on Thendara, and yet apart from it, older than any part of it; immeasurably old, built of an ancient reddish sandstone which, otherwise, appeared only in the oldest, ruined houses of the Old Town. Regis had never come here before.

He said to the nonhuman servant, “Will you ask the DomnaCallina Lindir-Aillard if she will receive Regis Hastur?”

It surveyed him for a long moment, the dark eyes alert and responsive; a humanlike form, a humanlike intelligence, but Regis could not dismiss the feeling that he had been speaking to a large and not altogether friendly dog. He had seen the silver-furred kyrriduring his brief training session in Neskaya Tower; but he had never grown used to them. The thing stared at him longer, he thought, than a human would have done. Then it gave a brief graceful nod of its sleek silver head and glided noiselessly away.