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Gently Damon laid his hand on the small silk insulating bag around Dezi’s neck. His fingers fumbled tountie the thong. Dezi had begun to moan and struggle again, and his struggles, like a rabbit in a snare,wrenched at Damon with pity, even though the boy’s terror was barricaded now by the damper. Hemanaged to get the bag open. The blue stone, pulsing, glowing with Dezi’s terror, fell into his fingers. Asthey closed over it, he felt the bone-cracking spasm within himself, saw Dezi slump as if felled by acrushing blow. He wondered wretchedly if he had killed the boy. He thrust the matrix within the field ofthe damper, saw it quiet down to a faint pulse, a resting rhythm. Dezi was unconscious, his head lolling toone side, froth on his bitten lips. Damon had to steel himself to remember Andrew, unconscious, in adeathly sleep in the snow, to think of Callista’s agony if she had awakened to find herself abandoned, orwidowed by treachery, before he could harden himself to say “That’s done.”

He thrust the matrix for a few minutes under the damper, saw it fade to dimness, the faintest of pulsinglights. It was still alive, but it had been lowered in strength to where it could not be used for
 
laran
 
.

He cast a pitying look at Dezi, knowing he had blinded the boy. Dezi was worse off now than Damonwas when they sent him for Arilinn. In spite of Dezi’s crime, Damon could not help feeling sorrow for theboy, so gifted, such a powerful telepath, potential higher than many now working in the screens andrelays. Zandru’s hells, he thought, what a waste. And he had crippled him.

He said wearily, “Let’s finish this, Andrew. Hand me that lock-box, will you?”

He had gotten it from
Dom
 
Esteban, who had removed some small jewelry from it. As he thrust thematrix inside, closing the lid, he thought of the old fairy-tale: the giant kept his heart outside of his body, inthe most secret place he could find, so that he could not be killed unless they, sought out his hidden heart. He explained briefly to Andrew as he fiddled with the small matrix lock on the box, thrusting his ownagainst it. He said, “We can’t destroy the matrix; Dezi would die with it. But it is locked here with amatrix lock so nothing but my own matrix, attuned to this pattern, will ever open this box again.” The boxlocked, he put it into a store-room, came back and bent over Dezi, checking the boy’s breathing, hisracing heart.

He would survive.

Mutilated… blinded… but he would survive. Damon knew he would rather have died, if it were he.

Damon straightened, listening to the quieting sound of the storm outside. He drew his dagger and cut the

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ropes binding the boy, thinking that it might be kinder to cut his throat. He wouldn’t want to live. Was his

terrible struggle only a way of attempting suicide?

He sighed, laying some money in a purse beside the boy. He said heavily to Andrew, “
 
Dom
Estebangave me this for him. He’ll probably go to Thendara, where Domenic promised him a cadet commission. He can’t do much harm there, working in the City Guards and he can make himself some kind of career. Domenic will look after him—there’s some sense of family loyalty, after all. Dezi won’t even have toconfess what’s been done to him. He’ll be all right.”

Later, telling Ellemir what he had done, while Andrew watched over the still-sleeping Callista, herepeated it.

“I wouldn’t have wanted to live. When I stood over him with the dagger, to cut the ropes they had tied him with, I wondered if it would have been kinder to kill him. But I managed to live after they sent me from Arilinn. Dezi should have that chance too.” He sighed, remembering the day he had left Arilinn, blind with pain, dazed with the breaking of the bonds of the Tower circle, the closest bond known to those with
 
laran
 
, closer than kin, closer than the bond of lovers, closer than husband and wife…

“I got over wanting to die,” he said, “but it was a long time before I wanted to live again.” Holding

Ellemir close, he thought:
Not till I had you
 
.

Ellemir’s eyes softened with tenderness, then, her mouth hardening, she said, “You should have killedhim.”

Damon, thinking of the sleeping Callista, who had come, not knowing it, so close to death, thought thiswas merely bitterness. Andrew was her sister’s husband, she had been linked to him by matrix during thelong search for Callista, and they had all come together in that brief, spontaneous, fourfold moment ofsharing, before the frightening reflex Callista could not control had ripped them apart. Like Ellemir, Damon too had been linked to Andrew, feeling his strength and gentleness, his tenderness and passion…and this was the man Dezi had tried, out of spite, to kill. Dezi, who had himself been linked with Andrewwhen they healed the frostbite cases, knew him too, knew his quality and his goodness.

Ellemir repeated implacably, “You should have killed him.”

Not for months did Damon know that this was not merely bitterness, but precognition.

In the morning the storm had quieted, and Dezi, taking with him the money Damon had left at his side,his clothing and his saddle horse, had gone from Armida. Damon hoped, almost with guilt, that he wouldsomehow manage to live, to find his way safely to Thendara where he would be under Domenic’sprotection. Domenic, heir to Alton, was after all Dezi’s half brother. Damon was sure of it, now; no onenot full Comyn could have put up a fight like that.

Domenic would look after him, he thought. But it was like a weight on his heart, and it did not lift.

Chapter Ten

«^»

Andrew was dreaming…

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He was wandering in the blizzard he could hear outside, flinging heavy snow and sleet, driven byenormous winds, around the heights of Armida. But he had never seen Armida. He was alone, wanderingin a trackless, houseless, shelterless wilderness, as he had done when the mapping plane went down andabandoned him on a strange world. He was stumbling in the snow and the wind tore at his lungs and avoice whispered like an echo in his mind:
 
There is nothing for you here
 
.

And then he saw the girl.

And the voice in his mind whispered.
 
This has all happened before
 
. She was wearing a flimsy and tornnightdress, and he could see her pale flesh dimly through the rents in the gown, but it did not flutter ormove in the raging winds that tore him, and her hair was unstir-ring in the raging storm. She was not thereat all, she was a ghost, a dream, a girl who never was, and yet he knew, on another level of reality, shewas Callista, she was his wife. Or had that been only a dream within a dream, dreamed while he waslying in the storm, and he would lie there and follow the dream until he died… ? He began to struggle,heard himself cry out…

And the blizzard was gone. He was lying in his own bedroom at Armida. The storm was raging anddying away outside, but the bedroom fire had burned to dim coals. By its light he could dimly see Callista—or was it Ellemir, who had slept at her side ever since the night when the psi reflex she couldnot control had blasted them both down, in the midst of their love?

For the first few days after Dezi’s attempted murder he had done little except sleep, suffering from theaftereffects of mild concussion, shock, and explosure. He touched the unhealed cut on his forehead. Damon bad taken out the stitches a day or two ago, and the edges were beginning to scab cleanly. Therewould be a small scar. He needed no scar to remind him of how he had been torn from Callista’s arms, aforce like lightning striking through her body. He recalled that it used to be a favorite form of torture, inthe old days on Terra, an electrode to the genitals. It hadn’t been Callista’s fault though, the shock ofknowing what she had done had nearly killed her too.

She was still abed, and it seemed to Andrew that she grew no better. Damon, he knew, was worriedabout her. He dosed her with odd-smelling herbal potions, discussing her condition at length in words ofwhich Andrew understood perhaps one in ten. He felt like the fifth leg on a horse. And even when hebegan to mend, to want to be out and about, he could not even lose himself in the normally heavy workof the horse ranch. With the blizzard season, all had come to a dead halt. A handful of servants, usingunderground tunnels, tended the saddle horses and the dairy animals which provided milk for thehousehold. A handful of gardeners cared for the greenhouses. Andrew was nominally in charge of allthese, but there was nothing for him to do.

Without Callista, he knew, there was really nothing to hold him here, and he had not been alone with Callista for a moment since the fiasco. Damon had insisted that Ellemir sleep at her side, that she mustnever, even in sleep, be allowed to feel herself alone, and that her twin was better for this purpose thanany other.

Ellemir had nursed her tirelessly, night and day. On one level Andrew was grateful for Ellemir’s tendercare, there being so little he could do for Callista now. But at the same time he resented it, resented hisisolation from his wife, the way in which it emphasized the fragility of the thread that bound him to Callista.

He would have cared for her, nursed her, lifted her… but they would never leave him alone with her fora moment, and this too, he resented. Did they really think that if they left Callista alone, Andrew wouldfall on her again like a wild animal, that he would rape her? Damn it to hell, he thought, it was more likely

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that he was always going to be scared to touch her even with a fingertip. I just wanted to be with her. They told him she needed to know that he still loved her, and then they acted as if they didn’t dare leave them together for a minute…

Realizing that he was merely going over and over, obsessionally, frustrations about which he could donothing, he turned over restlessly and tried to sleep again. He heard Ellemir’s quiet breathing, and Callista’s restless sigh as she turned over. He reached for her with his thoughts, felt the touch dimly on hismind. She was deep asleep, drugged with another of Damon’s or Ferrika’s herb medicines. He wishedhe knew just what they were giving her, and why. He trusted Damon, but he wished Damon would trust
him
 
a little more.

And Ellemir’s presence too was a low-keyed irritation, so like her twin, but healthy and rosy where Callista was pale and ill… Callista as she should have been. Pregnancy, even though frustrated so soon,had softened her body, emphasizing the contrast to Callista’s sharp thinness. Damn it, he shouldn’t thinkabout Ellemir. She was his wife’s sister, his best friend’s wife, the one woman of all women forbidden tohim. Besides, she was a telepath, she’d be picking up the thought, and it would embarrass hell out of her. Damon had told him once that among a telepathic family a lustful thought was the psychologicalequivalent of rape. He didn’t care a damn about Ellemir—she was just his sister-in-law—it was just thatshe made him think of Callista as she might be if she were healthy and well and free of the grip of thefor-ever-be-damned Tower.

She was so gentle with him…

After a long time he drifted off to sleep and began to dream again.

He was in the little herdsman’s shelter where Callista, moving through the overworld, the world ofthought and illusion, had led him through the blizzard, after the crash of the plane. No, it was not theherdsman’s shelter; it was the strange illusory walled structure that Damon had built up in their minds, notreal except in their visualization, but having its own solidity in the realm of thought, so he could see thevery bricks and stones of it. He woke, as he had done then, in dim light, to see the girl lying beside him, ashadowy form, stilled, sleeping. As he had done then, he reached for her, only to find that she was notthere at all, that she was not on this plane at all, but that her form, through the overworld, which she hadexplained as the energy-net double of the real world, had come to him through space and perhaps timeas well, taking shape to mock him. But she had not mocked him.

She looked at him with a grave smile, as she had done then, and said with a glimmer of mischief, “Ah,this is sad. The first time, the very first time, I lie down with any man, and I am not able to enjoy it.”

“But you are here with me now, beloved,” he whispered, and reached for her, and this time she was there in his arms, warm and loving, raising her mouth for his kiss, pressing herself to him with shy eagerness, as once she had done, but only for a moment.

“Doesn’t this prove to you that it is time, love?” He drew her against him, and their lips met, their bodies molded one to the other. He felt again all the ache and urgency of need, but he was afraid. There was some reason why he must not touch her… and suddenly, at the moment of tension and fear, she smiled up at him and it was Ellemir in his arms, so like and so unlike her twin.