Damon said, “I don’t know,” and thought suddenly that the old Dom knew. What else could it be, with Callista ill in bed and Andrew going off to get drunk? But one of the strongest sexual taboos on Darkover was that which separated the generations. Even if Dom Esteban had been Damon’s own father instead of Ellemir’s, custom would have forbidden him to discuss this.
Damon searched the house, in all the likely places, then, in growing panic, all the unlikely ones. Finally he summoned the servants, to hear that no one had seen Andrew since midafternoon, when he and Dezi had been drinking in the lower hall.
He sent for Dezi, suddenly afraid lest Andrew, drunk and not yet accustomed to Darkovan weather, should have gone out into the blizzard, underestimating its power. When the youngster came into the room, he asked, “Where is Andrew?”
Dezi shrugged. “Who knows? I’m not his guardian or his foster-brother!”
But at the unconcealable flash of triumph, a momentary glint before Dezi’s eyes evaded his, suddenly Damon knew. “All right,” he said grimly. “Where is he, Dezi? You were the last to see him.”
The boy gave a sullen shrug. “Back to where he came from, I suppose, and good riddance!”
“In this?” Damon stared in consternation at the storm raging beyond the windows. Then he swung on Dezi with a violence that made the boy flinch and shrink away from him.
“You had something to do with this!” he said, low and furious. “I’ll deal with you later. Now there is no time to lose!”
He ran, shouting for the servants.
Andrew woke, slowly, to burning pain in his feet and hands. He was rolled in blankets and bandages. Ferrika was bending over him with something hot. Holding his head, she got him to swallow it. Damon’s eyes swam out of the fog, and groggily Andrew realized that Damon was really worried about him. He cared. It was not true, what Andrew had thought.
Damon said gently, “We found you just in time, I think. Another hour and we could never have saved your feet and hands; two hours and you would have been dead. What do you remember?”
Andrew struggled to remember. “Not much. I was drunk,” he said. “I’m sorry, Damon, I must have gone mad for a little. I kept thinking, Go away, Callista doesn’t want you. It was like a voice inside my head, so I tried to do just that, go away… I’m sorry to have caused all this trouble, Damon.”
“You don’t need to be sorry,” Damon said grimly, and his rage was like a palpable red glow around him. Andrew, sensitized, saw him as an electrical net of energies, not at all like the daily Damon he knew. He glowed, he trembled with fury. “You didn’t cause the trouble. A very dirty trick was played on you, and it nearly killed you.” Then he was Damon again, a slender stooping man, laying a gentle hand on Andrew’s shoulder.
“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.