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Caradoc were playing a board game something like chess that Damon had once tried to teach Andrew. It was called castles and had pawns of carved crystal which were not set in order on the board butshaken at random and moved from the spot where they fell, according to certain complex rules.
 
Dom
 
Esteban took a red crystal piece from the board, grinned triumphantly at Caradoc, then looked withraised eyes at Andrew.

“Good morning, or do I mean good evening? I trust you slept well?”

“Well enough, sir, but Callista is… is a little indisposed. And Ellemir is staying with her.”

“And you’re both staying with them, quite right and proper,” said
Dom
 
Esteban, grinning.

“If there is anything which should be done, Father-in-law… ?”

“In this?” The old man gestured at the snowstorm. “Nothing, no need to apologize.”

Andrew remembered that the old man was also a powerful telepath. If last night’s disturbance haddisrupted Damon and Ellemir even in their marriage bed, had it disturbed the old man too? But if so, nota flicker of the Alton lord’s eyelids betrayed it. He said, “Give Callista my love, and tell her I hope she iswell soon. And tell Ellemir to look after her sister. I have plenty of company, so I can manage withoutany of you for a day or so.”

Caradoc made some remark in the thick mountain dialect about the blizzard season being the right timeto stay indoors and enjoy the company of one’s wife.
 
Dom
 
Esteban guffawed, but the joke was a littleobscure for Andrew. He was grateful to the old man, but he felt raw-edged, indecently exposed. No onewith a scrap of telepathic force could have slept through all that last night, he felt. It must have wakedtelepaths up all the way to Thendara!

Upstairs, food had been brought, and Damon had carried it to Callista’s bedside. Callista was in bedagain, looking white and worn. Ellemir was coaxing her to eat, in small bites as she would have coaxed asick child. Damon made room for Andrew at his side, handed him a hot roll. “We didn’t wait for you. Iwas hungry after last night. The servants probably think we’re having an orgy up here!”

Callista said, with a small wry laugh, “I wish they were right. It would certainly be an improvement overpresent conditions.” She shook her head as Ellemir proffered her a bite of hot bread, spread with thearomatic mountain honey. “No. really, I can’t.”

Damon watched her with disquiet. She had drunk a few sips of milk, but had refused to eat, as if thevery effort of swallowing was too much for her. He said at last, “You’ve taken over the still-room, Callista, have you made any
 
kirian
 
?”

She shook her head. “I’d been putting it off, and there’s no one here who needs it, with Valdir in

Nevarsin. And it’s troublesome to make, having to be distilled three times.”

“I know. I’ve never made it, but I’ve watched it being done,” Damon said, looking sharply at her as she

shifted weight. “You’re still in pain?”

She nodded, saying in a small voice, “I’m bleeding.”

“That, too?” Wasn’t she to be spared anything? “How much before the regular time is it? If it’s only a

few days, it might be simply the shock.”

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She shook her head. “You still don’t understand. There is no… no regular time for me. This is the firsttime—”

He stared at her in shock, almost disbelieving. He said, “But you had turned thirteen when you first wentto the Tower, were your woman’s cycles not yet established?”

It seemed to Andrew that she looked embarrassed, almost ashamed. “No. Leonie said it was a goodthing that they had not yet begun.”

Damon said angrily, “She should have waited for that to begin your training!”

Callista looked away, turning red. “She told me… beginning so young, some of the normal physicalprocesses would be disrupted. But she said it would make it easier for me if I was spared thataltogether.”

Damon said, “I thought
 
that
 
was a barbarism from the Ages of Chaos! For generations it has beentaken for granted that a Keeper should be a woman grown!”

Callista rushed to the defense of her foster-mother. “She told me that six other girls had tried, and failed,to make the adjustments, that it would be easier for me, with less pain and trouble…”

Damon frowned, sipping at a glass of wine, staring into the depths as if he had seen somethingunpleasant there.

“Tell me, and think carefully. In the Tower, were you given any kind of drug to suppress your menses?”

“No, it was never necessary.”

“I cannot think it of Leonie, but did she ever work with a matrix, on your body currents?”

“Only in the ordinary pattern-training, I think,” Callista said doubtfully. Andrew broke in. “Look here,

what is this all about?”

Damon’s face was grim. “In the old days, a Keeper in training was sometimes neutered—Marisela saidsomething like that, remember? I cannot believe—I cannot
 
believe
 
,” he added with emphasis, “that Leonie would have blighted your womanhood that way!”

Callista said, stricken, “Oh, no, Damon! Oh, no! Leonie loves me, she would never…” But her voicefaded out. She was afraid.

Leonie had been so sure that her choice was lifelong, had been so reluctant to release her—

Andrew reached for Callista’s cold hand. Damon said, frowning, “No, I know you were not neutered,of course not. If your cycles have come on, your clock is running again. But it was done sometimes in theold days, when they felt virginity was less of a burden to a girl still immature.”

“But now it’s begun, she’ll be all right, won’t she?” Ellemir asked anxiously, and Damon said, “We’ll hope so.” Perhaps the arousal of last night, abortive as it had been, had reawakened some of those blocked pathways in her body; if she had suddenly matured, it might be that her illness and physical discomfort might be the normal troubles of early development. He remembered from his years in the

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Tower that young women in Keeper’s training, or for that matter any women working with psi mechanicsabove the level of monitor, were subject to recurrent and occasionally excruciating menstrual difficulties. Callista, following his thought, laughed a little and said, “Well, I have handed out golden-flower tea andsuch remedies to other women at Arilinn, and always thought myself lucky that I was immune to theirmiseries. It seems I have joined the ranks of normal women in
that
 
respect at least! I know we havegolden-flower tea in the still-room; Ferrika gives it to half the women on the estate. Perhaps a dose ofthat will be all I need.”

Ellemir said, “I’ll go and fetch you some,” and after awhile she came back with a small cup of somesteaming hot brew. It had a pungent herbal smell, strongly aromatic. Callista’s voice held, for a moment,an echo of her old gaiety.

“Would you believe I have never tasted this? I hope it’s not too dreadful a potion!”

Ellemir laughed. “It would serve you right if it were, you wretched girl, if you hand out such decoctionswith no idea of what they taste like! No, actually, it’s rather nice tasting. I never minded taking it. It willmake you sleepy, though, so lie down and let it do its work.”

Obediently Callista drank off the steaming stuff and settled down under her blanket. Ellemir broughtsome needlework and sat beside her, and Damon said, “Come along, Andrew, they’ll be all right now,”and let him out of the room.

Downstairs, in the stone-floored still-room, Damon began to look through Callista’s supply of herbs,essences, distilling equipment. Andrew, looking at the oddly shaped flasks, the mortars and pestles andthe bottles ranged on shelves, the bunches of dried herbs, leaves, stalks, pods, flowers, seeds, asked, “Are these all drugs and medicines?”

“Oh, no,” Damon said absently, pulling a drawer open. “These”—he gestured to some crushed seeds—“are cooking spices, and she makes incense to sweeten the air, and some cosmetic lotions and perfumes. None of the stuff you can buy in the towns is half as good as what’s made here by the old recipes.”

“What was that stuff Ellemir gave her?”

Damon shrugged. “Golden-flower? It’s a smooth muscle tonic, good for cramps and spasms of all kinds. It can’t hurt her; they give it to pregnant women and to babies with the colic too.” But, he wondered,frowning, if it could help Callista. Such serious interference with the physical processes… how could Leonie have done such a thing?

Andrew picked up the thought, as clearly as if Damon had spoken it aloud. “I knew Keepers underwentsome physical changes. But this?”

“I am shocked too,” said Damon, turning a bunch of white thornleaf in his hands. “It’s certainly not customary these days. I had believed it was against the laws. Of course Leonie’s intentions couldn’t have been better. You saw the alterations in the nerve currents. Some of the girls do have a dreadful time with their woman’s cycles, and Leonie probably could not bear to see her suffering. But what a price to pay!” He scowled and began opening drawers again. “If Callista had freely chosen… but Leonie didn’t tell

her!
 
That
 
is what I find hard to understand, or to forgive!”

Andrew felt an insidious dismay, a physical horror. Why should it, after all, shock him so much? Physicalmodification was not, after all, anything so unheard of. Most of the women who crewed Empire

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starships—they were made sterile by deep space radiations anyway—were spared the nuisance of menstruation. Hormone treatments made it unnecessary for women not actively engaged in childbearing. Why should it shock him so? It wasn’t shocking, except that
Damon
 
found it so! Would he ever get used to this goldfish-bowl life? Couldn’t he even think his own thoughts?

Damon was turning over bunches of herbs. He said, “You must understand. Callista is past twenty.

She’s a grown woman who has been doing difficult, highly technical work as a matrix mechanic for years. She’s an experienced professional in the most demanding work on Darkover. Now none of her previoustraining, none of her skills, nothing is any good to her at all. She’s struggling with deconditioning, and withsexual awakening, and she has all the emotional problems of any bride. And now, on top of all that, Idiscover that physically she’s been held in the state of a girl of twelve or thirteen! Evanda! If I had onlyknown…”

Andrew looked at the floor. More than once, since the terrible fiasco of last night, he had felt as heimagined a rapist must feel. If Callista was, physically, an unawakened girl in her early teens—He felt aspasm of horror.

Damon said gently, “Don’t! Callista didn’t know it herself. Remember, for six years she’s beenfunctioning as an adult, experienced professional.” Yet he knew this was not entirely true, either. Callistamust have been aware of the enormous and ineradicable gulf between her and the other women. Leoniemight have spared her protegeé some physical suffering, but at what price?

Well, it was a good sign that the menstrual cycle had spontaneously reinstated itself. Perhaps otherbarriers would disappear with nothing more than time and patience. He picked up a bunch of driedblossoms and cautiously sniffed. “Good, here we are.
 
Kireseth
 
—no, don’t smell it, Andrew, it doesfunny things to the human brain.” He felt the faint guilt of memory. The taboo against the
 
kireseth
 
, amongpsi workers, was absolute, and he felt as if he had committed a crime in handling it. He said, speakingmore to himself than Andrew, “I can make
 
kirian
 
from this. I don’t know how to distill it as they do in Arilinn, but I can make a tincture…” His mind was busy with possibilities: a strong solution of the resinsdissolved out in alcohol. Perhaps with Ferrika’s help he could make a single distillation. He put the stuffdown, fancying that the smell of it was going to the roots of his brain, destroying controls, breakingbarriers between mind and body…

Andrew paced restlessly in the still-room. His own mind was filled with horrors. “Damon, Callista musthave
 
known
 
what could happen.”

“Of course she knew,” said Damon, not really listening to him. “She learned that before she was fifteen

years old, that no man can touch a Keeper.”

“And if I could hurt or frighten her so terribly—Damon!” Suddenly he was overcome by the horror and revulsion which had gripped him last night. His voice dropped to a whisper. “Do you know what she wanted me to do? She asked me to… to knock her unconscious and rape her when she… when she could not resist.” He tried to convey some of the horror that had awakened in him; but Damon only looked thoughtful.

“It just might have worked, at that,” he said. “It was intelligent of Callista to think of it. It shows she has

some grasp of the problems involved.”

Andrew could not keep back a horrified “Good God! And you can say it like that, so calmly.”

Damon, turning, suddenly realized that the younger man was at the edge of his endurance. He said

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gently, “Andrew, you do know what saved you from being killed, don’t you?”