Zandru's Forge by Marion Zimmer Bradley Read Free Book Online Page A

what has happened.”
    “Where did you get such ideas? Neither your brother nor your sisters can be a tenth as stubborn as you!” Dom Felix raised his hands in mock exasperation. “Was it a fever of the brain that left you willful as well as puny? Was it something I ate on the night I fathered you? Did the forgefolk leave you in place of a human baby when your nurse wasn’t looking?”
    Varzil almost laughed aloud. “Whatever it was, Father, I am as the gods made me.”
    “And what you are is a laranzu of Arilinn, is that what you mean to say? What a ridiculous notion! Wipe it from your mind. The matter is settled. There is nothing more to say.”
    “You are right,” Varzil replied, though his belly trembled. “There is nothing more to discuss. I do not expect you to agree with me, only to accept this is what I must do.”
    “Why must?” Dom Felix’s voice roughened. “Who holds a sword to your throat and forces you do this thing? And since when have you earned the right to tell your father what you will and will not do? I assure you, being sealed to the Comyn Council has granted you no such privilege.”
    Fighting the sting of tears, Varzil said, “Father, please. I’ve always tried to be a good son, but I can‘t—I can’t follow your wishes in this. I beg you—try to understand.” He lifted one hand to his heart. “It is in me. I—”
    “This foolish notion will result in nothing but embarrassment for your entire family. If you cannot behave with proper dignity, then at least think of the rest of us. Nothing good will come of this.”
    “I tried—Father, I tried—”
    Varzil’s voice broke as he remembered the nights he’d lain awake, watching the pattern of colored light from Darkover’s four moons slowly shift across the stone walls of his room. He had struggled not to feel, not to hear, not to respond to the surges of inexpressible energy that left him quivering like the strings of a lute. Some mornings he would awaken with blood on his lips where he had bitten them, his hands aching from clenching into fists. Finally, he understood. It was no use. There was nothing he could do to give back his Gift. He could no more escape his laran than he could tear out his own tongue or put out his eyes.
    For a year now, he’d hoped that the training he received from the Ridenow household leronis would be enough. He tried his best to be the son his father wanted, or a close enough counterfeit. It had quickly become obvious this would never work.
    Varzil had lived in two worlds—the ordinary one of daily work as unofficial assistant coridom and unsworn paxman to his older brother, Harald—and the one which became stronger and more vivid every day. He felt as if he were a single droplet in a vast living river, so that each time the Ya-men howled their secret laments, or the scullery maid stirred awake with a nightmare, or a stallion sensed the rising heat in a nearby mare, the hot, raw sensations ripped though him.
    In his bones, he knew that to go on like this would only drive him mad. He sensed, too, that without his conscious control, his Gift might prove to be far deadlier to those he loved than to himself. The only solution was to master it, to swim as a fish in that surging tide. But how?
    The leronis who had taught him as a child had clearly reached the limit of her ability. He must go to a Tower. And what better Tower than fabled Arilinn?
    If only he could find some way to make father understand!
    “You and your hopeless dreams!” Dom Felix brushed aside Varzil’s explanations. “You always were one for mooning around when there was work to be done, or ranting about chieri singing.”
    “They weren’t chieri. No man has seen or heard of them since the Ages of Chaos. They were Ya-men. And I really heard them.”
    “Ya-men, fairies, demons from Zandru’s seventh hell! It’s all the same. Your whole life has been devoted to one romantic notion after another. This is just the latest one.