Authors: Marion Zimmer Bradley
did not want to go back to Arilinn. More than anything, she wanted to ride west, to
follow Mikhail, to let the Domain and her studies go hang. But dutifully she reined the
horse around, and they headed back in the direction of the Tower, just visible above the
trees.
The stableyard seemed just as they had left it, and nothing appeared amiss. Margaret
dismounted, gave the reins to Martin, and patted Dorilys quickly but perfunctorily on
the neck. "Another day, my pretty. Another day we will have a good run." The horse
nickered in response, and looked at her with great dark eyes, as if she understood every
word.
Then she hurried to the Tower, her heart pounding a little. Her booted feet sped over
the paved walkway, and she passed the bakery and the scriptorium where she had
planned to spend the afternoon. She did not pause at her little house, because the closer
she got to the Tower, the greater was her sense of urgency.
Something had happened, something bad, and her mind began to manufacture all sorts
of things. Dio had gotten out of stasis, or Ariel had gone into premature labor, or
Mikhail had . . . No! Margaret slackened her pace a little and forced herself to stop
theorizing! She was an academic, not a hysterical female who went off the deep end!
She was a Fellow of the University, dammit!
Liriel?
Yes, Marguerida.
There was something sad and guarded in the answer.
What's happened?
Domenic . . .
Oh, .no!
Margaret came to a complete halt on the walkway. She felt her body turn to
ice, to stone.
But he was getting better!
That was not entirely true. Her own quick
actions had saved the boy's life immediately after his accident, but his neck had been
broken, and he would never be able to use his arms or legs again. The Healers had
done their best—and she now knew that their best was, in some ways, as good as any
offered by Terran medical technology—but the real damage was irreparable.
How?
He choked. It happened so quickly that no one could do anything.
Margaret felt her anger rise, and held it back with a great effort. Poor Ariel! If the child
had been taken to a Terran medical center, she knew, they would have put a breathing
tube in his throat, because the greatest danger with a neck broken in the third cervical
vertebra was what had just happened. She had not known that when he had been
injured, but in the ensuing months she had made it her busi-• ness to discover as much
as she was able about such injuries, so that she could do as much as she could to
prevent the very death she had foreseen at Armida months before. If only Ariel had not
been so stubbornly insistent on keeping the child at Arilinn.
Now it was too late, and the boy was gone. She felt tears begin to trickle down her
cheeks, and the vast grief for Ivor that she thought was past returned in full force. But
Ivor had been old, had lived a long and meaningful life. Domenic had been a child of
nine; he had hardly started to live!
Despite the reasons her rational mind offered her, Mar-
garet still felt that if she had just been more persuasive in her arguments, more
insistent, this tragedy might have been avoided. If only, she thought, she had not had
the premonition at Armida, or managed to conceal it better, if Ariel had not gone off
half-cocked, taking a clumsy carriage out in the start of a summer storm. If, if ... it was
all hindsight, and she knew it.
She felt sad, but even more she felt guilty, as if somehow the death of the little boy
were her fault. Margaret felt as if she were some sort of jinx. Ivor had died, and Dio
was dying! She shook herself all over and scolded herself for being a morbid idiot. It
was no one's fault—but she wanted someone to blame, and the best candidate was
always herself. It was not even Ariel's fault. She suspected, however, that her cousin
was in much the same state as she was, looking for a scapegoat.
How is Ariel taking it?
Quite well, under the circumstances. But I would not let her see you right now.
No, that would be pushing my luck. I'll go back to my house for the present.
Margaret turned back on the pathway, and retraced her steps toward the little house
that had been her home for four months. It was made of stone, the inner walls paneled
in polished wood. There were five rooms: two bedrooms, a parlor, dining room, and
kitchen. It was cozy and civilized, and she liked that, after years of enduring
sometimes primitive conditions with Ivor.
When she entered, she could hear her servant, Katrin, a , soft-spoken woman in her
fifties, rattling around the kitchen, banging pots and pans. A nice smell floated in the
air—rabbithorn stew, she thought. Margaret's appetite was gone, but she knew it would
return. Sometimes her need for food seemed like the only constant in her daily life.
The tears-had continued, and now her nose was starting to get stuffy. She found a
handkerchief, a large square of linen embroidered with pretty flowers, and mopped her
eyes and blew her nose. Then she sat down in a large chair beside the small fireplace in
the parlor and let herself grieve silently, her chest heaving with sobs, and tears
obliterating sight. She did not want Katrin to hear her, to try to comfort
her. She wanted to let herself release all the sorrow that seemed to fill her slender body.
The light in the room began to fade, as the bloody sun sank below the horizon. The
handkerchief was now a sodden, disgusting rag, and she didn't seem to have the
strength to get up and find another. Her face hurt from crying, and her nose was red
from repeated blowings. There was a wire around her chest, cutting into her breasts,
and the pleasant smell of horse on her riding skirt was nauseating to her.
Margaret wanted to stop crying, to stop feeling sad, or sorry for herself. She should be
thinking of Ariel, of Piedro Alar, Ariel's patient and long-suffering husband, of the little
boy she had hardly known before he was injured. All she could think of was Dio, and
Ivor.
Then the tears began to slacken, and she started to feel restless and useless, sitting
there in the growing dusk. She wanted to be comforted, but there was no comfort.
Except the music. That never died, or went away to remote places, or said unkind
things.
My, what a morbid mood I am in,
she thought, finding something quite
comforting in feeling wretched. With a great effort, she stood up, went into the
bedroom, and fetched her little harp from where it stood in the corner of the room. She
found another hanky, too, because she suspected she was not really finished with her
crying.
Returning to the living room, she removed the cloth case from her instrument and
started tuning it. Margaret realized she hadn't taken it out in a couple of weeks, that she
had neglected her music in the press of her studies at the Tower. She hadn't recorded
any new music for Dio in almost a month! Not that her sleeping beauty of a stepmother
was going to complain, but if she
could
hear the music, she must be getting tired of it
by now.
Margaret warmed up with a few simple scales, readjusted the tuning, and started to
play randomly. The cascade of notes was sweet to her ears. After several minutes she
found herself picking out one of her favorite pieces, Montaine's
Third Etude.
It had
originally been intended for the piano, and she had adapted it to the harp as part of her
honors program at the University. It was complex enough
to engage her attention, but sufficiently familiar to offer her no real challenge.
Still, after two playings, she started to do some variations, as if the exercise demanded
it. Margaret noticed what she was doing in a distant, abstract way, noting that she had
just turned one of the themes on its head in a way she had never done before. It was
just the sort of play that went on in Ivor and Ida Davidson's house in the evenings.
They always had several students living in the large house just outside the confines of
the Music School. She did not think of the house often, for when she remembered
University, she almost always thought of the .dormitories where she had spent her first
rather miserable year, before Ivor had heard her singing in the library and helped her
find something that gave her life a direction and meaning. It brought back a simpler
time, a happier time for her, when there had been no complications, no death, no
uncertainties about her life.
As she played, Margaret found herself remembering Ivor's funeral in Thendara, and
how many of the members of the Musicians Guild, who had never even met him, had
carried his coffin to the graveyard and offered their songs. She had sung that day, but
now her voice seemed stilled, as if her grief could not be vocalized. Ivor was old and
Domenic had been young. That was the difference.
Her fingers played across the strings, and she found the dirge she had sung for Ivor that
day emerge from the harp. It was a fine piece of music, twenty-eighth century
Centauri. It was a sad thing, but there was a feeling in it of hope that began to ease her
pain a bit.
Barely aware of what she was doing, Margaret stopped playing the dirge and began to
pluck another tune from her harp. After several minutes, she realized that she did not
know the piece at all, that she was making it up as she went along, thinking of the little
boy taken untimely, of all the things he would never experience. It was a strong song, a
piece that moved her even as she was creating it. And it was her own, not borrowed
from another! Her mind, so well disciplined for years, observed the composition and
found it good. Margaret rarely created original work, and she allowed herself to rejoice
in the music that flowed from her fingers, uncritically for once. It had, she noticed,
some-
thing of the sound of the river as she had ridden beside it a few hours before,
something of the rushes waving in the breeze, and the call of some songbird she had
heard without really noticing.
Margaret was so deep in the music that she did not hear the front door open, and was
unaware she had a visitor until she came to a halt and heard the soft sound of a throat
clearing behind her. She turned abruptly to find Lew Alton standing in the entrance to
the parlor, a light cloak draped over his arm. He wore a rather shabby riding tunic, and
his silvered hair was tousled.
"Father! How long have you been standing here?" She searched his face, suddenly
tense, trying to discern his mood as she had when she was a child. Then Margaret
realized that she no longer had to do that, that this Lew Alton was quite a different man
from the one she remembered. He no longer drank himself into despair, nor raged like
a beast. But the habits were long-standing, and it was hard to completely trust the man
she had begun to know in the past few months.
"I have no idea. I was so entranced by your music that I lost track of time. What is it?"
Lew smiled slowly, as if the movement was strange, new to him, and his eyes gleamed
with interest.
"I don't know—I just made it up." '"Well, I certainly hope you can remember it, for it is
quite splendid."
"Oh, yes. I was scoring it as I went along."
"You make it sound so simple," Lew said, setting his cloak aside. "I am always rather
awed that you can remember so much music, but you never told me you could
compose." He sat down across from her, searching her tear-stained face.
"I don't, much. Not like Jheffy Chang, or Amethyst."
"Who?"
"People I knew at University. Jheffy composed all the time, and he and Am used to
have a kind of ongoing contest when I lived at Ivor's house. It was terrific, because
they were completely unself-conscious about it. Music, new music, just seemed to leak
out of their bodies, all the time. I never had that ability, which is a good thing, because
if
I had, I would never have ended up becoming Ivor's assistant."
"Why not?"
"Father, you don't ask a racehorse to pull a plow, do you? Or expect a drayhorse to run
a race?"
"Are you calling yourself a plowhorse, daughter?" He sounded stern, yet playful at the
same time.
"Musically, yes, I am. I am good enough to imitate others, to interpret, but I am not
particularly original or creative. Or, at least, I wasn't when I was studying at
University. And I don't really regret it a bit, because the demands of being an original
composer are enormous. Jheffy was something of a prodigy, and he was very vain and
had the social skills of a marmot. Am was better, because she came from a long line of
musicians, and her family hadn't spoiled her as Jheffy's did him. Not that she was a
pleasant person—she wasn't one bit—but she didn't have to prove herself the best
every second of the day."
"I am sorry that my work in the Federation Senate prevented me from watching you