“Go to sleep and don’t worry. You’re here with us, and we’ll look after you.”

He left Andrew sleeping, and went in search of Dom Esteban. Rage was pulsing in his mind. Dezi had the Alton gift of forced rapport, of forcing mental links with anyone, even a nontelepath. Andrew, drunk, would be the perfect victim, and knowing Andrew, Damon suspected he had not gotten drunk of his own free will.

Dezi was jealous of Andrew. That had been obvious all along. But why? Did he feel that with Andrew out of the way, Dom Esteban might acknowledge him as the son he would then so desperately need? Or had he had it in his mind to seek Callista in marriage, hoping that would force the old man’s hand, to admit Dezi was Callista’s brother? It was a riddle beyond Damon’s reading.

Damon might, perhaps, have forgiven an ordinary telepath under such temptation. But Dezi was Arilinn-trained, sworn by the oath of the Towers, never to meddle with the integrity of a mind, never to force the wall of another, or his conscience. He had been entrusted with a matrix, with all the awesome power that entailed.

And he had betrayed it.

He had not done murder. Good luck, and Caradoc’s sharp eyes, had found Andrew lying in a snowdrift, partly covered with the blowing snow. In another hour he would have been covered over, his body perhaps found in the spring thaw. And what of Callista, thinking Andrew had forsaken her? Damon shuddered, realizing that Callista might not have lived out the day. Thanks to all the gods at once, she had been deep in drugged sleep at the time. She would have to know — there was no way to keep such things secret in a telepathic family — but not yet.

Dom Esteban heard the story out with dismay. “I knew there was bad blood in the boy,” he said. “I would have acknowledged him my son years ago, but I never quite felt I could trust him. I did what I could for him, I kept him where I could keep an eye on him, but there seemed something wrong with him somewhere.”

Damon sighed, knowing the old man’s bluster was mostly guilt. Secure, acknowledged, reared as a Comyn son, Dezi would not have had to bolster his enormous insecurities with envy and jealous spite, bringing him at last to attempt murder. More likely, though Damon tactfully barricaded the thought from the old man, his father-in-law had simply been unwilling to perpetuate, or take responsibility for, a sordid and drunken episode. Bastardy was no disgrace. For a woman to bear a Comyn son was honor, to her and the child, yet the most opprobrious epithet in the casta tongue was translated “six-fathered.”

And even that could have been avoided, Damon knew, if while the girl was with child, she had been monitored to discover whose seed had kindled her to bear. Damon thought, in something very like despair, that there was something very wrong in the way they were using telepaths on Darkover.

But it was too late for any of this. For what Dezi had done there was only one penalty. Damon knew it, Dom Esteban knew it, and Dezi, Damon could see plainly, knew it. They brought him, tied hand and foot and half dead of fright, to Damon later that night. They had found him in the stables, making ready to saddle and be gone into the blizzard. It had taken three of Esteban’s Guardsmen to overpower him.

Damon thought that would have been better. In the storm he would have found the same justice, the same death he had sought for Andrew, and death unmutilated. But Damon was bound by the same oath Dezi had violated.

Andrew felt that he too would have willingly faced death in the blizzard, rather than the smoldering anger he could feel in Damon now. Just the same, paradoxically, Andrew felt sorry for Dezi when the boy was brought in, thin and frightened, looking younger than he was. He seemed like a boy hardly into his teens, so that the ropes binding him looked like monstrous injustice and torture.

Why didn’t Damon just leave it to him? Andrew wondered. He would beat hell out of the kid and for somebody his age, that ought to be enough. He had said as much to Damon, but the older man had not even bothered to answer. It had been clear, anyway.

Andrew would never otherwise be safe again: from the knife in the back, the murderous thought… Dezi was an Alton, and a murderous thought could kill. He had already come close to it. Dezi was not a child. By the law of the Domains, he could fight a duel, acknowledge a son, be held responsible for a crime.

He looked now at the shrinking Dezi, and at Damon, with dread. Like all men of swift but short-lived anger, Andrew had no experience with the held grudge; nor with the rage which turns inward, devouring the angry man as much as the victim of his wrath. It was this he sensed in Damon now, like a sullen red furnace-glow, dimly visible around him. The Comyn lord looked bleak, his eyes toneless.

“Well, Dezi, I hardly dare to hope you will make this easy for me or for yourself, but I’ll give you the option, though it’s more than you deserve. Will you match resonances with me willingly and let me take your matrix without a struggle?”

Dezi did not answer. His eyes blazed out bitter, hating defiance. Damon thought, what a waste it was. He was so strong. He flinched, shrinking from the intimacy that was being forced on him, the least welcome of all intimacies, that of torturer and tortured. I don’t want to kill him, and I probably will have to. Mercy of Avarra, I don’t even want to hurt him.

Yet, thinking of what he had to do, he could not keep himself from shuddering. His fingers closed, a spasmodic grip, over the matrix in its leather and silk insulation at his throat.

There, over the pulse, over the glowing center of the main nerve channel. Since it was given to Damon, at fifteen, and the lights in the stone wakened at the touch of his mind, it had never been beyond the reassuring touch of his fingertips. No other human being, except his Keeper, Leonie or, during a brief time, in his Tower years, the young under-Keeper Hilary Castamir, had ever touched it. The very thought of having it taken from him, forever, filled him with a cold black terror worse than dying. He knew, with every fiber of the Ridenow gift, the laran of an empath, what Dezi was enduring now.

It was blinding. It was crippling. It was mutilation…

It was the penalty invoked by the Arilinn oath for illegal use of a matrix. And it was what he must, by law, inflict now.

Dezi said, clinging to a last shred of defiance, “Without a Keeper present, it is murder that you do. Is murder penalty for attempted murder, then?”

Damon, though he felt Dezi’s terror in his own bowels, kept his voice passionless. “Any halfway competent matrix technician — and I am rated a technician — can do this part of a Keeper’s work, Dezi. I can match resonances and take it from you in safety. I won’t kill you. If you try not to fight me, it will be easier for you.”

“No, damn you!” Dezi spat out, and Damon steeled himself for the ordeal ahead. He could admire the boy’s attempt to pretend courage, some dignity. He had to remind himself that the courage was a sham in a coward who had misused laran against a drunk and unprotected man, who had gotten him drunk for that purpose. To admire Dezi now, simply because he did not break down and plead for mercy — as Damon knew perfectly well he himself would do — made no sense at all.

He still felt Dezi’s emotions — a trained empath, his laran honed to fine point at Arilinn, he could not block them out — but he steeled himself to ignore them, focusing on the ordeal ahead. The first step was to focus inward on his own matrix, to steady his breathing, let his consciousness expand into the magnetic field of his body. He let the emotions filter through and past him, as a Keeper must do, feeling and accepting them, without entering into them in the slightest.