The Rebellion

Chapter 3

The aged man posted at the city gates directed them to the Guildhall of the Society of Renunciates, who maintained a hospital for travelers. The Renunciates, hard-faced women with cropped hair and gold rings in their ears, wore men’s clothing as if they had no shame or decency. Nonetheless, they took the little girl into their care. Men could not stay within their compound, they said, but Selim might remain, and they would have news of how the child fared on the morrow.

Malik passed the night in the rented stable that was all he could afford.

When he knocked at the Guildhouse the following morning, he was told that the little girl was no better. Not only that, but Selim, too, had fallen ill.

The year before …

On the day his grandmother died, Ban Alton-Lord spent the morning in the solarium of Edelweiss, reading aloud to her. Although bitter cold still clung to the shadows cast by the drifted snow, the little room with its thick mullioned windows stayed bright and warm. The house was unassuming, cozy compared to the great family estate at Armada, with old-fashioned, intimate rooms, lovingly worn furniture, and nooks that still resonated faintly with the laughter of children. Here Jenny had passed the happiest years of her life. When she became gravely ill, with little hope of recovery, her husband had taken her home to Edelweiss, surrendering the management of Armida to his oldest son.

Jenny Nart-Lord lay on a couch, propped up on pillows stitched in a pattern of ice-daisies and kireseth blossoms. Against the colorful embroidery, her skin looked chalky, her lips dry and cracked.

Age and pain had withered her flesh, rendering the hand resting on the blanket as fragile as a songbird’s foot.

Ban sat in his usual place, a high-backed chair placed so that he could readily lift a goblet of water to her lips or stroke her hair if she became agitated. At twenty, he was tall and gracefully built, wiry rather than muscular, with a trace of the exquisite masculine beauty of the Lords in his eyes and mouth. His hair swept back from his forehead like an ebony cascade, unbound as he had always preferred to wear it. His eyes were gold-flecked gray, the irises ringed in black. A book lay open on his lap between his graceful, long-fingered hands. It was one of his mother’s translations of fishermen’s tales and song lyrics from Thetis, chosen because the softly musical rhythms calmed the old woman.

It wouldn’t be long now, Ban thought with a pang. He should tell Dom Jack.

How easy it would have been to miss this time together, Ban thought.

He had every reason to resent his grandmother. From the moment of Ban’s conception, the old woman had set herself up as the enemy of his father, Mikhail Nart-Lord. No member of the family had been immune to her vicious attacks. By the time the leroni at Arilinn had identified the cause of her increasing debility, the damage to her brain was irreversible.

Another outrage to lay at the feet of the World Wreckers, Ban thought. Minute, deadly in their slow insidious action, the tumor-generating particles had lain hidden until it was too late. What other weapons remain, waiting only to be triggered’ ?

At times, Ban could sense a lingering taint in soil and rock. Since his power had awakened during his adolescence, he had been able to sense the subtle changes in the planetary crust. The Gift, he understood from his teachers at Neskaya Tower, was related to the ability to detect precious metals below the surface, used in power mining operations. Ban’s talent allowed him to reach deeper and farther.

Sometimes it seemed that Darkover itself sang to him.

Ban closed the book and brushed his fingertips over his grandmother’s wrist. The featherlight touch brought a rush of power impressions. Her life forces had sunk very low, guttering like a candle in its final hour. Barely a trickle of energy flowed through her channels. Focusing his mind through the starstone that hung on its silver chain, bare against his chest, Ban embraced her with a wave of love and felt the faint, poignantly grateful response.

The impulse that had brought him here had been rebellion, escape from a life of courtly responsibility laid down for him by his elders, rather than any fondness for his distant, critical grandmother. Why should he care, when she had done everything she could to harm him?

And yet…

The first time he sat beside her and silently took her hand in his, something had changed. She had gazed upon him with pain-riddled eyes, and by some grace, some wholly unanticipated insight, he had glimpsed

‘the young woman she had once been, tall and graceful, Gifted with power, pressured by her family and caste to marry aman she barely knew and to bear him a host of children. He saw her wasted talent, her withered dreams, the love she had lavished upon her children, the tiny redemptive moments of contentment. Then had come the slow, creeping doubts, the fears gnawing upon her like leeches of the soul, the moments of shock as her own voice spewed venom upon those she once loved. Finally, her own body had turned traitor, and she fled here to Edelweiss, to the only place she had known happiness.

That moment of compassion had touched a chord deep within Ban.

All his resentment at the demands of his rank, his longing to choose his own path, all these had fallen away. He had seen himself in the mirror of Jenny’s sacrifice and found himself wanting.

A tap on the door drew Ban from his reverie. He set down the book and went quietly to the door.

The Edelweiss c****m stood there, an anxious look upon his features.

“Master Ban, a rider in the uniform of the City Guards has come from Pansia. He insists upon giving his message only to you.”

“I’ll see him,” Ban replied. “Would you have one of the maids sit with my grandmother and call me if there’s any change?”

Ban went down to the ancient wooden gates. Even in the sheltered courtyard, bounded by stables and the stone walls of the house itself, the wind cut like a whetted knife. A Guardsman, his face reddened, stood holding the reins of a lathered horse. The animal pawed at the snow-laced ground.