“You can. I won’t open to you, but I won’t betray you either.”
“Has he hurt you? Has he done something you don’t want me to … ?”
“No, Teray. Why should he hurt me?”
“Then what’s happened?”
“I took your advice.”
There it was. All his fears wrapped in four words. He could not pretend to misunderstand her any longer.
“I started out playing a role,” she said. “A hard role. Then …” She faced him, finally, wearily. “Then it got easier. Now it’s not a role anymore.”
Teray said nothing, could think of nothing to say.
“He’s not what I thought,” she said. “I thought his power had made him cruel and brutal, but instead …”
“Iray!” He could not sit still and listen to another woman inventing good qualities for Coransee. Especially not Iray.
She looked at him solemnly, her shielded mind not quite hiding the fact that she did not want to be there with him. She had stilled her twisting hands, but her very stillness bespoke tension, withdrawal.
“Iray … what if there was a way out? For us, I mean. What if you didn’t have to stay with him?”
“Is there?”
“Yes!” He had to trust her. How could he expect
her to believe him if he did not tell her what there was to believe? He had failed her once. Twice. She had reason to be hesitant. He outlined his plan quickly, giving her the assurance that Michael had passed on to him through Amber without mentioning Amber herself. Now was not the time to cloud things further.
Iray took a deep breath and shook her head. “Clayarks,” she said. “All the way to Forsyth. Hundreds of kilometers of Clayarks.”
“Not that bad,” he said. “We could make it. We could
“No.”
He was silent for a long moment. He could look at her and see that she meant it. Instead, he looked at the ground, at a wall of the House. “All right. I can’t really blame you. I almost didn’t ask you because I didn’t think I had the right to risk your life as well as my own. And I don’t have that right, of course. But I said I wouldn’t desert you. I had to ask you if you wanted to take the risk.”
“I’d take it. If I wanted to be with you the way I did once, I’d go.”
He said nothing, only stared at her.
“You couldn’t accept his controls,” she said. “Even though your own freedom wasn’t all that was involved, you couldn’t accept them.”
“Would you have wanted me controlledlike Joachim?”
“No! No, I understand what .you did. That’s why
I never blamed you, never tried to make you change your mind. I knew you’d rather be dead than controlled. You did what you had to do. Then you told me what I had to do. And you were right both times. Well, now I’ve done what I had to do. And it was good, and I’m home. I’m going to stay here.”
There was nothing he could say to her that would not twist back and indict him, too. Even his anger was more at his own helplessness, and at Coransee, than at her. He had thought of her with Coransee, even thought of her corning to prefer Coransee. But he had never really believed she would. In spite of all Coransee’s power and apparent attractiveness to women, he had never let himself believe it.
She touched his arm and he savored her touch for a moment, then moved his arm away. She was still shielding him out and her touch brought her no closer to him. He could have taken more pleasure in Suliana’s touchthe touch of a mute.
Or Amber’s.
“Teray,” she said softly, “I have to tell you” She broke off suddenly as he looked at her. “I’m sorry,” she said. “That can’t mean much to you now, but I am sorry.”
He stood up and started toward the common-room door.
“Wait!” She caught his arm again, this time in a grip that he would have had to hurt her to loosen. He stood still, looking down at her, waiting for her
to let him go.
“Leave soon, Teray, if you’re still going. Soon. I said I wouldn’t betray you, and I won’tnot deliberately. But accidentally … Well, I’m with him a lot now, and sometimes he hears things I don’t mean for him to hear.”
After a moment he nodded and she let him go. But he stayed where he was, watching her, not wanting her to see the pain in his eyes but not able to turn away again. He raised his hand to her face.
She drew back from him sharply, then turned away and hurried past him into the House.
Teray stood still for several seconds longer. Finally he shook his head. He reached out to one of his kitchen mutes. The man whose foot he had healed. Silently, with careful gentleness, Teray gave the man orders. Then he reached a stable mutea mute who was not one of his charges, but who, of course, was obliged to obey any Patternist. He gave orders to the stable mute, then went back up to his room.
Amber was dressed and having breakfast. Teray realized that he had eaten nothing, and at the same time realized that he had no appetite.
“When you get through with that, go get your things together,” he told her. “We’re leaving today. I don’t want to spend another day in this place.”
She looked surprised, but nodded slowly. “All right.”
“And take as little as possible. Put some more clothes on over those or something. We can’t go out of here looking like we’re running away.”
“I know.”
“I’m having a supply of food packed for us and horses readied. And … there’ll only be two of us.”
She said nothing to that. She went on eating.
************************************
They traveled southwest toward the coast and toward the nearest borders of the sector. Teray had decided to take the coast trail south, if he could. The inland route was easier, less likely to be washed out or blocked, but it was also the most-often-traveled route. It was where Patternist caravans passed and where Clayarks lay in wait for them. The inland route was a little shorter, too, because it did not follow the eccentricities of the coast. But it did go straight through the middle of twenty-one Patternist sectors. The little-traveled coast route went through three.
There were some Clayarks along the coast route. But then there were Clayarks everywhere, breeding like rabbits, warring among themselves, and attacking Patternists. Teray hoped to find them only in small family groups along the coast.
Michael, he recalled, had traveled part of his way north along the coast route. Teray had asked a pair of his outsiders about their trip, prying as casually as he could. With his large party, Michael had had little trouble, but he had sensed at least
one large tribe. He had gone into a Patternist sector to escape it. And that was something Teray could not do. He had a better chance against the Clayarks than he would have against a group of his own people who decided to earn Coransee’s gratitude by capturing him. Until he reached Rayal’s House, the only Patternist he could trust was Amber.
She rode along beside him, strangely accepting of his surly mood. But then, she knew the reason for it. He wished she didn’t. She said quietly, “I think we should link, Teray.”
“What?”
“I know it will make us closer than it would make most people, and maybe you don’t want me that close to you right now. But we’d be safer linked. If I sense Clayarks, I want you to know immediatelyeven if you’re sound asleep at the time. If we don’t work together, we don’t have a chance.”
“Oh hell,” he muttered.
She said nothing else.
They rode for several minutes in silence. Finally, without speaking, he opened, reached out to her. Linking was like clasping handsand did not require even that much effort. Now her alarm, her fear, almost any strong emotion of hers, would alert him. And his emotions would alert her. But beyond that, as he had feared, he was too much aware of the linkaware of a strong, ongoing sense of oneness with her.
Normally, a link, once established, became part of the mental background, not to be noticed again until one of the
linked people did whatever the link was sensitized to respond to.
But any kind of contact with Amber had to be different, had to be too close. There was nothing for him to do but accept itand surprisingly, it was not that hard to accept. He felt himself relaxing almost against his will. Felt the anger and the hurt that Iray had caused him ebbing, not vanishing completely but retreating, shrinking so that it no longer occupied his whole mind. And Amber was not doing it, was not reaching him through the link to offer unasked-for healing. It was her mental presence alone that he was responding to. Her presence was eclipsing emotion that he would normally have taken much longer to get over, and he was enjoying it. He should have felt resentful at even this small invasion. Instead he only felt curious.
“Amber?”
She looked at him.
“What does the link feel like to you?”
She grinned. “Smooth. How else could it feel between people as close in the Pattern as we are?”
“And you don’t mind?”
“No. And neither do you.”
He considered that, and shrugged. He was too comfortable for her presumptions to bother him.
He indulged his curiosity further. “All along you’ve known more about me than I have about you. Now I’d like to know something about you.”
There was something guarded, almost frightened, in the way she looked at him. “What do you want to know?”
Her manner confused him. Apparently she had something to hide. But then, who didn’t? “I heard you managed to kill a Housemaster even before your mental abilities matured. You could tell me how you managed that.”
She sighed, and then kept silent for so long that he thought she was not going to answer. “It was an accident,” she said finally. “The result of being a pre-Pattern youngster with no control over what was done to me. Who told you about it?”
“Joachim. He didn’t tell me about it, he told me to ask you about it.”
She seemed to relax. “At least. Well, the Housemaster was my second and he shouldn’t have been. From the beginning, we didn’t get along. And because I was too close to transition to stand mental abuse, he used physical abusebeat the hell out of me whenever he wanted to until one day I managed to push him so that he fell against the sharp corner of a low concrete wall. He hit it with his head. Died before anybody could contact a healer. Of course, my abilities weren’t mature, so I couldn’t help him ”
“But none of that makes sense,” said Teray. “Why didn’t you tell the Schoolmaster that you
didn’t get along with your second? You could have gotten a new”
“No, I couldn’t. Like I said, pre-Pattern children can’t control what’s done to them. Lealthe Schoolmaster knew he had given me the worst possible second. He did it deliberately because he knew I had already chosen my own second. And he did not approve.” She gave a bitter laugh. “He would have seconded me himself if he could haveif he had been strong enough. He wanted to. He wanted a lot of things that a teacher can’t have.”
“You, for instance.”
“Oh, he had me, for a while. For my last six months at school. I didn’t mind. But we both knew he was going to have to give me up once I reached my transition. There was no way that I was going to be a teacher. Not with my ancestry. Leal could accept that, but he couldn’t accept Kai, the second I had chosen. The second whose House I would have gone into. Although he might even have been able to stand that if I had been able to hide the fact that I was already in love with Kai. We met when she came to the school on some other business and Leal was the”
“Wait a minute.” Teray turned to stare at her. “She?”
That’s a good approximation of Leal’s tone when he realized what was happening,” said Amber. “I hope you’re not going to react as badly as he did.”
“I haven’t decided yet,” Teray answered. “Tell me the rest of it.”
She stopped her horse, causing Teray to stop, then spoke very softly. “You’d better decide before we get into Clayark Territory,” she said. “Leal’s reaction almost got me executed. I’m not going to risk my life with anybody else who’s that hostile.”
The link betrayed her hurt. She had taken Teray seriously and was waiting for rejection.
“Do you feel any hostility in me, Amber?”
She looked at him mistrustfully, then read the message the link held for herhis lack of any emotion beyond surprise and curiosity.
She, relaxed and they started forward again. “I’m touchy,” she said. “Leal taught me to be touchy.”
“Why did you tell me that part of it?”
“Because you would have found out anyway. Piece by piece. I would be thinking about it and off guard, and you would pick it up. We’re going to pay a price in mental privacy for our closeness.”
Teray nodded. “Well, Leal had reason to react with jealousy, but I…”
“Jealousy, anger, humiliation. How dare I put him aside for a woman? Poor teacher. He had trouble enough trying to compete with men for the women he wanted.”
“I don’t see why. He was the Schoolmaster. He
should have been able to attract plenty of women.”
“Yes, but not the ones he wanted. He could attract women teachers, but he considered them beneath his notice. He could and did attract older girl students, but they always had to either leave him or become teachers. He had the idea that women from outside the school were better. He tried to attract themand usually failed. But until I met Kai, he had never lost one of his student girl friends to one of them. It was too much.”
“And Kai even had her own House.”
“Leal wouldn’t have hated her for that if she had gone to him instead of to me. Prestige. But since she didn’t, her House just became more fuel for his jealousy. He had always wanted a House of his own anyway, and he knew he’d never have one. He was almost too strong to be a teacher, but not nearly strong enough to be a Housemaster.”
“A stronger man would have reacted more reasonably.” Teray shrugged. “After all, you’re not that unusual.”
“Coransee didn’t react too well.”
He looked at her, startled. “What difference did it make to Coransee? It happened before you met him, and it didn’t keep you from staying for two years with him.”
“But it made a difference. I didn’t tell him. He found out by snooping through my thoughts just a few weeks ago. That was when he decided that I
was more of a challenge than he had thought. That was when he told me he intended to keep me in his Housedeny my independence. Most people don’t try things like that with a healer.”
“Could he have succeeded?”
“Maybe, with his strength. Frankly, I’m afraid of him. That’s why I’d rather run away from him than fight him.”
Teray shook his head ruefully. “He has a habit of trying to domesticate people.”
“What about you?”
“I’m still curious. I want to know how a pre-Pattern child managed not to be executed for killing a person as important as a Housemaster. I’m surprised that his friends didn’t have you declared defective so that you would be destroyed before you gained your adult rights. And I’m curious about you and Kai. But all of that is your business. I don’t want you to tell me because you’re afraid I’ll ferret it out anyway. I won’t.”
“I don’t mind telling you, but that isn’t what I meant.”
No. He knew what she meant. “Last night I asked you what you wanted between us, and you said ‘something good.’ I think there was also the implication of ‘something temporary.’ That’s all right for a start, but I might turn out to be as bad as Coransee. I might try for more, too.”
She laughed. She had a nice laugh. “Don’t do it. One Coransee was enough. Now I’ll tell you the
rest of my story. By the way, are you checking wide for Clayarks? I’ve seen them in these hills.”
“Checking as widely as I can.” They were just getting into the low grassy h
ills that they had to cross to reach the ocean.
“All right. I wasn’t executed because Kai talked, bullied, and bribed some of the Housemasters of the sector council into voting to spare me. She didn’t tell them anything they didn’t already knowjust that the killing was an accident, that I was only days away from my transition and my full rights as an adult, that the man I killed should never have been assigned to me anyway. They knew all that, of course, but they were so outraged, and, I think, so ashamed, that I, technically still a child, had managed to kill one of them … well they were more after vengeance than justice. The lead wife of the man I killed was there to goad them on. Leal was there telling as little of the truth as he could because he knew he was really to blame for the man’s death.
“Kai got me off, but she couldn’t get me all the way off. Instead of killing me, they exiled me from the sector. They meant for the Clayarks to do their killing for them. Kai was supposed to take me to the sector border and leave me there. Instead, she took me to her House. She induced transitionjust a few days early, but early nevertheless.”
Amber drew a ragged breath, remembering. “I swear I’d rather let the Clayarks get me than go through anything like that again. I kept trying to just die and let it be over, and she kept bringing
me back. Did I mention that she was a healer too? Lucky thing. Although I didn’t think so then. She dragged me through all of itstripped away my childhood shield before I was ready to shed it. Left me mentally naked to absorb all the free-floating mental garbage within miles of me. I got other people’s agony, violent emotions, everything, until I could manage to form the voluntary shield that I wasn’t really ready to form yet. I almost killed her while she was trying to save me. I didn’t know what I was doing. And I turned out to be stronger than she was.
“She pulled me through. But that wasn’t enough. She had to prepare me to leave the sectorto use the abilities I barely knew I had. There wasn’t time to teach me or time to do anything but print me with her memories. She gave me her fifteen years of leading her House. She made me assimilate all of it, not just let it sit the way you did with most of your Jackman memories. It was like becoming part of hergetting a whole new past that was only a few years shorter than my real past.
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