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nothing you can do!” Violet eyes blazed at him, molten. “Nothing! Because he cannot possibly have contracted this degenerate alien threshold syndrome!” She jerked away from Jason’s hold. “Daniel, tell them !”
    “Tiphani, we’ve been over this—” Dan protested.
    “No!” Ebony tresses whirling around her pale face, Tiphani faced her husband. “This is all wrong! I will not have my own son exposed to those native—those— perverts !” She lunged at Regis as if she would attack him with her bare hands.
    Regis recoiled, not only from her words themselves but from the burst of hatred behind them. Danilo placed himself between Regis and the near-hysterical woman. Danilo had not drawn his dagger, but Regis had no doubt that he was now fully protected.
    Danilo said, in a voice all the more menacing for its calm, “No one speaks in that manner to the Heir of Hastur. No one. ”
    “That’s enough!” Jason said, with all the command of his medical rank. Two nurses, one a woman, appeared in the doorway. “Remove this lady from the room. If she resists, sedate her!”
    “What, and leave my son to whatever devil-sorcery—” Tiphani shrieked.
    “Go with them,” Dan begged. “I’ll stay here and make sure nothing happens. You’ve got to calm down and let the doctor do his work. Please. ”
    “It’s all your fault,” she raged at her husband. “If you hadn’t let him run wild in the gutters, he’d be fine!”
    Regis reminded himself that this mother was almost beside herself with worry for her critically ill child. At such times, people often looked for someone to blame.
    By this time, the nurses had taken her arms. She tensed, ready to resist. She glanced from her husband’s pleading face to Jason Allison’s stern authority, to Danilo’s poised suspicion. Regis held his silence, believing that anything he said would only provoke the woman further.
    As Tiphani disappeared through the doorway, flanked by the nurses, Regis wondered at her reaction. What in Zandru’s Seven Frozen Hells was wrong with her? Surely Dan, who was devoted to Darkover, would have chosen a wife who felt the same.
    Instead, Tiphani had made a poor adaptation to the world her husband loved and served. Had she been so blinded by love that she did not consider what she was committing herself to, a life on a remote, low-technology planet? Or had she thought she could persuade Dan Lawton to relocate elsewhere, perhaps her own world—what was it called, Temperance? That was obviously not a quality it bestowed upon its inhabitants.
    Was happiness in marriage a matter of chance if left to the rages of infatuation? Regis could not help comparing Dan’s relationship with his own. He and Danilo were so many things to one another; bredhin and companions, lovers and lord and paxman. In Linnea Storn, Regis had found a woman of his own caste who was a trained and powerful telepath as well as a loving person. It was too bad things had not worked out, since he did not know if he would ever find such a good match again.
    After a moment of embarrassed silence, Regis bent over the bed. The boy appeared to be eleven or twelve, with the wiry slenderness of adolescence. Reddish tints shone in his brown hair. Sweat covered his skin, which was pale from growing up beneath the crimson sun. He opened his eyes, and Regis thought he looked simultaneously terrified and unaware of his surroundings.
    “Is it threshold sickness?” Dan asked.
    Carefully, Regis lowered his laran shields and touched the boy’s mind. Regis had never studied in a Tower, but over the years he had learned not only to master his own psychic powers but to use them in ways no other living Comyn could. To the best of his knowledge, he was the only bearer of the rare and powerful Hastur Gift, that of being a living matrix in himself.
    His vision shifted, and he saw not only the white-shrouded form of a pubescent boy but also a tangle of mental energies, streams of color, laran