Traitor's Sun by Marion Zimmer Bradley Read Free Book Online Page A

man, but she thought of him as a friend.
    Yes, this refrain she had introduced was quite good. Either that, or her eyes were filling with tears for some other reason. Marguerida put down the pen, lifted her left hand, mitted in silk, and now soiled with inkstains, and wiped away the moisture. It was really very silly to be moved by one’s own creation. On the other hand, if it brought tears to her eyes, it would likely have the same effect on her audience. Thus heartened, she returned to the copying with fresh enthusiasm.
    But between one stanza and the next something changed. One moment Marguerida was deeply focused on her copying, and the next she felt a chill in her body that made her hand shake violently. The pen sputtered, left several blots, and slipped from her fingers. There was a sharp stab of pain above her left eve, gone so quickly she almost thought she had imagined it. She blinked several times, and the room went from fuzzy to clear at last.
    For a few seconds, she just sat there, too surprised to think at all. It had felt like a seizure of some sort, but she had not had one of those in years. It took Marguerida a minute to realize that what she had just experienced had not actually happened to her, but to someone else. Her first thought was of Mikhail, or the children. Her earlier unease, she decided, was almost certainly one of those unwelcome visitations of the Aldaran Gift of foresight. She did not have them often, and they always seemed to center around events that affected her directly.
    Then, without any clear understanding of how she knew, Marguerida realized what was wrong. She stood up abruptly, banging against the edge of the desk and knocking the inkwell over. Dark liquid flowed across the blotter, the freshly copied pages, and the front of her gown, but she barely noticed.
    Mikhail! The Alton Gift soared from her mind, breaking into the attention of every telepath in the great building.
    What is it?
    Something has happened to Regis!

2

    A blast of cold air struck her face, and Katherine Aldaran gasped. After the heated port building, it was a shock. The fear that had gripped her since Herm had awakened her in the middle of the night and told her to pack for Darkover seemed to loosen its hold on her throat for an instant, and anger rushed into the breach. She would never forget the way he looked in the dimness of their bedroom that terrible night, the way his pupils had been constricted even in the inadequate light. The desperate expression on his usually calm, familiar face had terrified her so that she had not even questioned him but just done as she was asked.
    She had endured her fear in the tiny cabin on the ship, and through the change at Vainwal. Katherine swallowed hard and opened her mouth to demand an explanation at last, but the frigid wind snatched the words away as it pulled her hair from where it had been coiled. She saw that the porter assigned to them was right behind her, and forced herself not to ask the questions that hovered in her mind. Instead, she swore vividly in her Renney patois, releasing the fear and anger in colorful phrases, not caring if her son learned some bad language. “You might have warned me we were coming into a storm!” The words sounded lame to her when compared with those she would have liked to voice.
    Herm watched Katherine capture her long black hair, drawing the strands out like whips around her exhausted face. She had a keen temper, his Kate, and being dragged out of her bed in the middle of the night, then taken halfway across the galaxy with no reasonable explanation had strained her control to its limits. He had caught the questions which rose in her mind a few times—for all telepathic purposes she was practically shouting—and knew what it had cost her to hold them back. Only her own understanding that her diplomat husband was unlikely to speak frankly with the Federation listening had saved him from a grueling cross-questioning thus far.