I took the covers off the dishes. They had sent in a fried fowl and some vegetable stew. I helped him, saying, “Not very festive, but probably the best they could do at short notice.”

“It’s better than we got on the fire-lines,” Regis said and I grinned. “So you remember that too?”

“How could I forget it? Armida was like home to me. Does Kennard still break his own horses, Lew?”

“No, he’s far too lame,” I said, and wondered again how Father would manage in the coming season. Selfishly, I hoped he would be able to continue in command. It’s hereditary to the Altons, and I was next in line for it. They had learned to tolerate me as his deputy, holding captain’s rank. As commander, I’d have all those battles to fight again.

We talked for a little while about Armida, about horses and hawks, while Regis finished the stew in his bowl. He picked up an apple and went to the fireplace, where a pair of antique swords, used only in the sword-dance now, hung over the mantel. He touched the hilt of one and I asked, “Have you forgotten all your fencing in the monastery, Regis?”

“No, there were some of us who weren’t to be monks, so Father Master gave us leave to practice an hour every day, and an arms-master came to give us lessons.”

Over wine we discussed the state of the roads from Nevarsin.

“Surely you didn’t ride in one day from the monastery?”

“Oh, no. I broke my journey at Edelweiss.”

That was on Alton lands. When Javanne Hastur married Gabriel Lanart, ten years ago, my father had leased them the estate. “Your sister is well, I hope?”

“Well enough, but extremely pregnant just now,” Regis said, “and Javanne’s done a ridiculous thing. It made sense to call their first son Rafael, after her father and mine. And the second, of course, is the younger Gabriel. But when she named the third Mikhail, she made the whole thing absurd. I believe she’s praying frantically for a girl this time!”

I laughed. By all accounts the “Lanart angels” should be named for the archfiends, not the archangels; and why should a Hastur seek names from cristoforomythology? “Well, she and Gabriel have sons enough.”

“True. I am sure my grandfather is annoyed that she should have so many sons, and cannot give them Domain-right in Hastur. And I should have told Kennard; her husband will be here in a few days to take his place in the Guard. He would have ridden with me, but with Javanne so near to her time, he got leave to remain with her till she is delivered.”

I nodded; of course he would stay. Gabriel Lanart was a minor noble of the Alton Domain, a kinsman of our own, and a telepath. Of course he would follow the custom of the Domains, that a man shares with his child’s mother the ordeal of birth, staying in rapport with her until the child is born and all is well. Well, we could spare him for a few days. A good man, Gabriel.

“Dyan seemed to take it for granted that you would be in the cadets this year,” I said.

“I don’t know if I’ll have a choice. Did you?”

I hadn’t, of course. But that the heir to Hastur, of all people, should question it—that made me uneasy.

Regis sat on the stone bench, restlessly scuffing his felt ankle-boots on the floor, “Lew, you’re part Terran and yet you’re Comyn. Do you feel as if you belonged to us? Or to the Terrans?”

A disturbing question, an outrageous, question, and one I had never dared ask myself. I felt angry at him for speaking it, as if taunting me with what I was. Here I was an alien; among the Terrans, a freak, a mutant, a telepath. I said at last, bitterly, “I’ve never belonged anywhere. Except, perhaps, at Arilinn.”

Regis raised his face, and I was startled at the sudden anguish there. “Lew, what does it feel like to have laran?”

I stared at him, disconcerted. The question touched off another memory. That summer at Armida, in his twelfth year. Because of his age, and because there was no one else, it had fallen to me to answer certain questions usually left to fathers or elder brothers, to instruct him in certain facts proper to adolescents. He bad blurted those questions out, too, with the same kind of half-embarrassed urgency, and I’d found it just as difficult to answer them. There are some things it’s almost impossible to discuss with someone who hasn’t shared the experience. I said at last, slowly, “I hardly know how to answer. I’ve had it so long, it would be harder to imagine what it feels like notto have laran.”

“Were you born with it, then?”

“No, no, of course not. But when I was ten, or eleven, I began to be aware of what people were feeling. Or thinking. Later my father found out—proved to them—that I had the Alton gift, and that’s rare even—” I set my teeth and said it, “even in legitimate sons. After that, they couldn’t deny me Comyn rights.”

“Does it always come so early? Ten, eleven?”

“Have you never been tested? I was almost certain … ” I felt a little confused. At least once during the shared fears of that last season together, on the fire-lines, I had touched his mind, sensed that he had the gift of our caste. But he had been very young then. And the Alton gift is forced rapport, even with nontelepaths.

“Once,” said Regis, “about three years ago. The leronissaid I had the potential, as far as she could tell, but she could not reach it.”

I wondered if that was why the Regent had sent him to Nevarsin: either hoping that discipline, silence and isolation would develop his laran, which sometimes happened, or trying to conceal his disappointment in his heir.

“You’re a licensed matrix mechanic, aren’t you, Lew? What’s that like?”

This I could answer. “You know what a matrix is: a jewel stone that amplifies the resonances of the brain and transmutes psi power into energy. For handling major forces, it demands a group of linked minds, usually in a tower circle.”

“I know what a matrix is,” he said. “They gave me one when I was tested.” He showed it to me, hung, as most of us carried them, in a small silk-lined leather bag about his neck. “I’ve never used it, or even looked at it again. In the old days, I know, they made these mind-links through the Keepers. They don’t have Keepers any more, do they?”

“Not in the old sense,” I said, “although the woman who works centerpolar in the matrix circles is still called a Keeper. In my father’s time they discovered that a Keeper could function, except at the very highest levels, without all the old taboos and terrible training, the sacrifice, isolation, special cloistering. His foster-sister Cleindori was the first to break the tradition, and they don’t train Keepers in the old way any more. It’s too difficult and dangerous, and it’s not fair to ask anyone to give up their whole lives to it any more. Now everyone spends three years or less at Arilinn, and then spends the same amount of time outside, so that they can learn to live normal lives.” I was silent, thinking of my circle at Arilinn, now scattered to their homes and estates. I had been happy there, useful, accepted. Competent. Some day I would go back to this work again, in the relays.

“What it’s like,” I continued, “it’s—it’s intimate. You’re completely open to the members of your circle. Your thoughts, your very feelings affect them, and you’re wholly vulnerable to theirs. It’s more than the closeness of blood kin. It’s not exactly love. It’s not sexual desire. It’s like—like living with your skin off. Twice as tender to everything. It’s not like anything else.”

His eyes were rapt. I said harshly, “Don’t romanticize it. It can be wonderful, yes. But it can be sheer hell. Or both at once. You learn to keep your distance, just to survive.”

Through the haze of his feelings I could pick up just a fraction of his thoughts. I was trying to keep my awareness of him as low as possible. He was, damn it, too vulnerable. He was feeling forgotten, rejected, alone. I couldn’t help picking it up. But a boy his age would think it prying.