The Sword of Aldones by Marion Zimmer Bradley Read Free Book Online

room and threw back the bolt, and Dio Ridenow ran into the room.
    Since I’d seen her on the spaceport she had changed into men’s riding clothes, a little too big for her, and she looked like a belligerent child. She stopped, a step or two inside, and stood staring at the boy behind me.
    “You know my brother,” I said impatiently.
    But Dio stood frozen. “Your brother?” she gasped, at last, “Are you out of your mind? That’s no more Marius than— than I am!” I drew back incredulously, and Dio stamped her foot in annoyance. “His eyes! Lew, you idiot, look at his eyes!”
    My supposed brother made a quick lunge, taking me off balance. He threw his whole weight against us. Dio reeled, and I went down on one knee, fighting for balance. Eyes. Marius—now I remembered—had had the eyes of our Terran mother.
    Dark brown. No Darkovan has brown or black eyes. And this—this imposter who was not Marius looked at me with eyes of a stranger, gold-flecked amber. Only twice had I seen eyes like that. Marjorie. And—
    “Rafe Scott!”
    Marjorie’s brother! No wonder he had known me, no wonder I had sensed his presence as familiar. I remembered him, too, only as a small boy!
    He tried to push past me; I grabbed at him and we swayed, struggling, in a bone-breaking clinch. “Where’s my brother?” I yelled. I twisted my foot behind his ankle, and we crashed to the floor together.
    He’d never said he was Marius, it flashed across my mind in a split second. He just hadn’t denied it when I thought so.
    I got my knee across his chest and held him pinned down. “What’s the idea, Rafe?
    Talk!”
    “Let me up, damn you! I can explain!”
    I didn’t doubt that a bit. How cleverly he had discovered that I was unarmed.
    But I should have known. I should have trusted my instinct; he didn’t feel like my brother. He hadn’t asked about father. He’d been embarrassed when I brought him a gift.
    Dio said, “Lew, perhaps—” but before I could answer, Rafe gave an unexpected twist and sent me sprawling. Before I could scramble up, he thrust Dio unceremoniously aside, and the door slammed behind him.
    I got up, my breath coming hard, and Dio came to me. “Are you hurt? Aren’t you going to try and catch him?”
    “No, to both questions.” Until I found out why Rafe had tried, this clumsy and daring imposture, there would be no point in finding him. And meanwhile, where was Marius?
    “The situation,” I remarked, not necessarily to Dio, “gets crazier every minute.
    Where do you come into it?”
    She sat down on the bed and glared at me.
    “Where do you think?”
    For once I regretted that I could not read her mind. There was a reason why I couldn’t—but I won’t go into that now.
    But Dio was trouble, in a pretty, small, blonde package. I was here on Darkover; I had to stay at least a while.
    The social codes of Vainwal—where Dio, under the lax protection of her brother Lerrys, had spent the last two seasons—are considerably less rigid than the strict codes of Darkovan propriety. Her brother had had sense enough not to interfere.
    But here on Darkover, Dio was comynara, and held laran rights in the vast Ridenow estates. And what was I? A half-caste of the hated Terrans—entanglement with Dio would bring all the Ridenow down on my head, and there were a lot of them.
    I would be grateful to Dio all my life. When Marjorie was torn from me, in the horror of that last night when Sharra had ravened in the hills across the river, something had been cut from me. Not clean like my hand, but rotting and festering inside. There had been no other women, no other love, nothing but a bleak black horror, until Dio. She had flung herself into my life, a pretty, passionate, willful girl, and she had gone unflinching into that horror, and somehow, after that, I had healed clean.
    Love? Not as I knew the word. But understanding, and implicit trust. I would have trusted her with my reputation, my fortune, my sanity—my