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Then he had been sent from the Tower. No fault of his own, his Keeper had assured him, only that hewas too sensitive, that his health, even his sanity might be destroyed under the tremendous stresses ofmatrix work.

Rebellious but obedient, Damon had gone. The word of a Keeper was law, never to be questioned orresisted. His life smashed, his ambitions in ruins, he had tried to build himself a new life in the Guardsmen,though he was no soldier, and knew it. He had been cadet master for a time, then hospital officer, supplyofficer. And on this last campaign against the catmen he had learned to bear himself with confidence. Buthe had no desire to command, was glad to relinquish it now.

He watched the men ride away until their forms were lost in the dust of the roadway. Now for Annidaand home…

“Lord Damon,” Eduin said at his side, “there are riders on the road.”

“Travelers? At this season?” It seemed impossible. The winter snows had not yet begun, but any day the first of the winter storms would sweep down from the Hellers, blocking the roads for days at a time. There was an old saying, Only the mad or the desperate travel in winter. Damon strained his eyes to make out the distant riders, but he had been somewhat shortsighted since childhood, and could make out only a blur.

“Your eyes are better than mine. Are they armed men, do you think, Eduin?”

“I do not think so, Lord Damon; there is a lady riding with them.”

“At this season? That seems unlikely,” Damon said. What could bring a woman out into the uncertain

traveling of the approaching winter?

“It is a Hastur banner, Lord Damon. Yet Lord Hastur and his lady would not leave Thendara at this season. If for some reason they rode to Castle Hastur, they would not be on this road. I cannot understand it.”

Yet even before he finished, Damon knew the identity of the woman who rode with the little party of Guardsmen and escorts toward him. Only one woman on Darkover would ride alone beneath a Hasturbanner, and only one Hastur would have reason to ride this way.

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“It is the Lady of Arilinn,” he said at last, reluctantly, and saw Eduin’s face light up with wonder and

awe.

Leonie Hastur. Leonie of Arilinn, Keeper of theArilinnTower . Damon knew that in courtesy he shouldride to meet his kinswoman, to welcome her, yet he sat his horse as if frozen, fighting for self-mastery. Time seemed annihilated. In a frozen, timeless, echoing chamber of his mind, a younger Damon stoodtrembling before the Keeper of Arilinn, head bowed to hear the words which shattered his life:

“It is not that you have failed us or displeased me. But you are all too sensitive for this work, too vulnerable. Had you been born a woman, you would have been a Keeper. But as things stand now… I have watched you for years. This work will destroy your health, destroy your reason. You must leave us, Damon, for your own sake.”

Damon had gone without protest, for there was guilt in him. He had loved Leonie, loved her with all thedespairing passion of a lonely man, but loved her chastely, without a word or a touch. For Leonie, like all Keepers, was a pledged virgin, never to be looked upon with a sensual thought, never to be touched byany man. Had Leonie somehow known this, feared that some day he would lose his control, approachher—even if only in thought—in a way no Keeper might be approached?

Shattered, Damon had fled. It seemed now, years later, that a lifetime stretched between the young Damon, thrust into an unfriendly world to build himself a new life, and the Damon of today, in commandof himself, veteran of this successful campaign. The memory was still alive in him—it would be raw till hisdeath—but Damon armed himself, as Leonie drew near, with the memory of Ellemir Lanart, who awaitedhim now, at Armida.

I should have wedded her before ever I came on this campaign
. He had wanted to, but
 
Dom
 
Esteban had felt that a marriage in such haste was unseemly for gentlefolk. He would not have, hisdaughter hurried to her marriage bed like a pregnant serving wench! Damon had agreed to the delay. Hiereality of Ellemir, his promised bride, should now banish even the most painful of memories. Summoningthe control of a lifetime, Damon finally rode forward, Eduin at his side.

“You lend us grace, kinswoman,” he said gravely, bowing from the saddle. “It is late in the year for

journeying in the hills. Where do you ride at this season?”

Leonie returned the bow, with the excessive formality of a Comyn lady before outsiders.

“Greetings, Damon. I ride to Armida, and so, among other things, I ride to your wedding.”

“I am honored.” The journey from Arilinn was long, and not lightly undertaken at any season. “But surely

it is not only for my wedding, Leonie?”

“Not only for that. Although it is true that I wish you all happiness, cousin.”

For the first time, momentarily, their eyes met, but Damon looked away. Leonie Hastur, Lady of Arilinn,was a tall woman, spare-bodied, with the flame-red hair of the Comyn, now graying beneath the hood ofher riding cloak. She had, perhaps, been very beautiful once; Damon would never be able to judge.

“Callista sent me word that she wishes to lay down her oath to the Tower and marry.” Leonie sighed. “I am no longer young; I wished to give back my place as Keeper, when Callista was a little older and could be Keeper.”

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Damon bowed in silence. This had been ordained since Callista had come, a girl of thirteen, totheArilinnTower . Damon had been a psi technician Callista’s first year there, and had been consultedabout the decision to train her as a Keeper.

“But now she wishes to leave us to marry. She has told me that her lover”—Leonie used the polite inflection which made the word mean “promised husband”—“is an off-worlder, one of the Terrans who have built their spaceport at Thendara. What do you know of this, Damon? It seems to me fanciful, fantastic, like an old ballad. How came she to know this Terran? She told me his name, but I have forgotten…”

“Andrew Carr,” Damon said as they turned their horses toward Armida, riding side by side. Their escorts and Leonie’s lady-companion followed at a respectful distance. The great red sun hung low in the sky, casting lurid light across the peaks of the Kilghard Hills behind them. Clouds had begun to gather to the north, and there was a chill wind blowing from the distant, invisible peaks of the Hellers.

“I am not certain, even now, how it all began,” Damon said at last. “I only know that when Callista was kidnapped by the catmen, and she lay alone, in darkness and fear, imprisoned in the caves of Corresanti, none of her kinsmen could reach her mind.”

Leonie shuddered, pulling her hood closer about her face. “That was a dreadful time,” she said.

“True. And somehow it happened that this Terran, Andrew Carr, linked with her in mind and thought. To this day I do not know all of the details, but somehow he came to bear her company in her lonely prison; he alone could reach her mind. And so they grew close together in heart and mind, although they had never seen one another in the flesh.”

Leonie sighed and said, “Yes, such bonds can be stronger than bonds of the flesh. And so they came tolove one another, and when she was rescued, they met—”

“It was Andrew who aided most in her rescue,” Damon said, “and now they have pledged one another. Believe me, Leonie, it is no idle fancy, born of a lonely girl’s fear, or a solitary man’s desire. Callista told me, before I went on this campaign, that if she could not win her father’s consent and yours, she would leave Armida, and Darkover, and go with Andrew to his world.”

Leonie shook her head sorrowfully. “I have seen the Terran ships lying in the port at Thendara,” shesaid. “And my brother Lorill, who is on the Council and has dealings with them, says that they seem inevery way men like to ourselves. But marriage, Damon? A girl of this planet, a man of some other? Evenif Callista were not Keeper, pledged virgin, such a marriage would be strange, hazardous for both.”

“I think they know that, Leonie. Yet they are determined.”

“I have always felt very strongly,” Leonie said, in a strange faraway voice, “that no Keeper should

marry. I have felt so all my life, and so lived. Had it been otherwise…” She looked up briefly at Damon, and the pain in her voice struck at him. He tried to barricade himself against it.
 
Ellemir
 
, he thought, like a charm to guard himself, but Leonie went on, sighing. “Even so, if Callista had fallen so deeply in love with a man of her own clan and caste, I would not impose my belief on her; I would have released her willingly. No—” Leonie stopped herself. “No, not willingly, knowing what troubles lie ahead for any woman trained and conditioned as Keeper for a matrix circle, not willingly. But I would, at the last, have released her, and given her in marriage with such good grace as I must. But how can I give her to an alien, a man from another world, not even born of our soil and sun? The thought makes me cold with horror, Damon! It makes my skin crawl!”

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Damon said slowly, “I, too, felt so at first. Yet Andrew is no alien. My mind knows that he was born onanother world, circling the sun of another sky, a distant star, not even a point of light in our sky from here. Yet he is not inhuman, a monster masquerading as a man, but truly one of our own, a man like myself. Heis foreign, perhaps, not alien. I tell you, I know this, Leonie. His mind has been linked to mine.” Withoutbeing aware of the gesture, Damon placed his hand on the matrix crystal, the psi-responsive jewel hewore around his neck in its insulated bag, then added, “He has
 
laran
 
.”

Leonie looked at him in shock, disbelief.
 
Laran
 
was the psi power which set the Comyn of the Domainsapart from the common people, the hereditary gift bred into the Comyn blood! “
Laran
!” she said,almost in anger. “I cannot believe that!”

“Belief or disbelief do not alter a simple fact, Leonie,” Damon said. “I have had
 
laran
 
since I was a boy, I am Tower-trained, and I say to you, this Terran has
 
laran
 
, I have linked with his mind and I can tell you he is no way different from a man of our own world. There is no reason to feel horror or revulsion at Callista’s choice. He is only a man like ourselves.”

Leonie said, “And he is your friend.”

Damon nodded, saying, “My friend. And for Callista’s rescue we linked together—through the matrix.” There was no need to say more. It was the strongest bond known, stronger than blood-kin, stronger thanthe tie of lovers. It had brought Damon and Ellemir together, as it had brought Andrew and Callista.

Leonie sighed. “Is it so? Then I suppose I must accept it, whatever his birth or caste. Since he has
 
laran
 
, he is a suitable husband, if any man living can truly be a suitable husband for a woman Keeper-trained!”

“There are times when I forget he is not one of us,” Damon said. “Then there are other times when he

seems strange, almost alien, but the difference is one only of custom and culture.”

“Even that can make a great difference,” Leonie said. “I remember when Melora Aillard was stolen away by Jalak of Shainsa, and what she endured there. No marriage even between Domains andDryTowns has ever endured without tragedy. And a man from another world and sun must be even more alien than this.”

“I am not so sure of that,” Damon said. “In any case Andrew is my friend and I will support him in his

suit.”

Leonie slumped in her saddle. “You would not give your friendship, nor link through a matrix, with oneunworthy,” she said. “But even if all you say is true, how can such a marriage be anything but disaster? Even if he were one of our own, fully understanding the grip of the Tower on a Keeper’s body and mind,it would be near to impossible. Would
you
 
have dared so much?”

Damon flinched away from the question. She could not have meant it, not as he thought she meant it.

They were not living in the days before the Ages of Chaos, when the Keepers were mutilated, evenneutered, made less than women. Oh, yes, the Keepers were still trained, Damon knew, with a terriblediscipline, to live apart from men, reflexes deeply built into body and brain. But no longer changed. Andsurely Leonie could not have known… or, Damon thought, he was the one man she would never haveasked that question. Surely it was innocent, surely she never knew. He steeled himself against Leonie’sinnocence, forced himself to look at her, to say in a low voice, “Willingly, Leonie, if I loved as Andrewloved.”

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As hard as he fought to keep his voice steady and impassive, something of his inward strugglecommunicated itself to Leonie. She looked up, quickly and for a bare moment, a second or less. Theireyes met, but Leonie quickly looked away.

Ellemir
, Damon reminded himself desperately.
 
Ellemir, my beloved, my promised wife
 
. But his voicewas calm. “Try to meet Andrew without prejudice, Leonie, and I think you will see that he is such a manas you would willingly have given Callista in marriage.”

Leonie had mastered herself again. “All the more for your urging, Damon. But even if all you say is true,