Thyra’s eyes were cool and amused. Well, sheknew. If she and Kadarin had been working together, no doubt she’d found it out already. I didn’t like her and I sensed she didn’t like me either, but thus far, at least, we could touch one another with easy detachment; her physical presence did not embarrass me. Where, working alone, had she picked up that cool, knife-like precision? Was I glad or sorry that Marjorie showed no sign of it?

“Beltran,” I said, “what can you do?”

“Children’s tricks,” he said, “little talent, less skill. Rafe’s trick with the fire.” He repeated it, more slowly, with somewhat better control. He reached an unlighted taper from a side table and bent over it with intense concentration. A narrow flame leaped from the fireplace to the tip of the taper, where it burst into flame.

A child’s trick, of course, one of the simplest tests we used at Arilinn. “Can you call the fire without the matrix?” I asked.

“I don’t try,” he said. “In this area it’s too great a danger to set something on fire. I’d rather learn to put fires out. Do your tower telepaths do that, perhaps, in forest-fire country?”

“No, though we do call clouds and make rain sometimes. Fire is too dangerous an element, except for baby tricks like these. Can you call the overlight?”

He shook his head, not understanding. I held out my hand and focused the matrix. A small green flame flickered, grew in the palm of my hand. Marjorie gasped. Thyra held out her own hand; cold white light grew, pale around her fingers, lighting up the room, flaring up like jagged lightning. “Very good,” I said, “but you must control it. The strongest or brightest light is not always the best. Marjorie?”

She bent over the blue shimmer of her matrix. Before her face, floating in the air, a small blue-white ball of fire appeared, grew gradually larger, then floated to each of us in turn. Rafe could make only flickers of light; when he tried to shape them or move them, they flared up and vanished. Beltran could make no light at all. I hadn’t expected it. Fire, the easiest of the elements to call forth, was still the hardest to control.

“Try this.” The room was very damp; I condensed the moist air into a small splashing fountain of water-drops, each sizzling a moment in the fire as it vanished. Both of the women proved able to do this easily; Rafe mastered it with little trouble. He needed practice, but had excellent potential.

Beltran grimaced, “I told you I had small talent and less skill.”

“Well, some things I can teach you without talent, kinsman,” I said. “Not all mechanics are natural telepaths. Do you read thoughts at all?”

“Only a little. Mostly I sense emotions,” he said.

Not good. If he could not link minds with us, he would be no use in the matrix circle. There were other things he could do, but we were too few for a circle, except for the very smallest matrices.

I reached out to touch his mind. Sometimes a telepath who has never learned the touching technique can be shown, when all else fails. I met slammed, locked resistance. Like many who grow up with minimal laran, untrained, he had built defenses against tbe use of his gift. He was cooperative, letting me try again and again to force down the barrier, and we were both white and sweating with pain by the time I finally gave up. I had used a force on him far harder than I had used on Regis, to no avail.

“No use,” I said at last. “Much more of this will kill both of us. I’m sorry, Beltran. I’ll teach you what I can outside the circle, but without a catalyst telepath this is as far as you can go.” He looked miserably downcast, but he took it better than I had hoped.

“So the women and children can succeed where I fail. Well, if you’ve done the best you can, what can I say?”

It was, on the contrary, easy to make contact with Rafe. He had built no serious defense against contact, and I gathered, from the ease and confidence with which he dropped into rapport with me, that he must have had a singularly happy and trusting childhood, with no haunting fears. Thyra sensed what we had done; I felt her reach out, and made the telepathic overture which is the equivalent of an extended hand across a gulf. She met it quickly, dropping into contact without fumbling, and …

A savage animal, dark, sinuous, prowling an unexplored jungle. A smell of musk … claws at my throat …

Was this her idea of a joke? I broke the budding rapport, saying tersely, “This is no game, Thyra. I hope you never find that out the hard way.”

She looked bewildered. Unconscious, then. It was just the inner image she projected. Somehow I’d have to learn to live with it. I had no idea how she perceived me. That’s one thing you can never know. You try, of course, at first. One girl in my Arilinn circle had simply said I felt “steady.” Another tried, confusedly, to explain how I “felt” to her mind and wound up saying I felt like the smell of saddle-leather. You’re trying, after all, to put into words an experience that has nothing to do with verbal ideas.

I reached out for Marjorie and sensed her in the fragmentary circle … a falling swirl of golden snowflakes, silk rustling, like her hand on my cheek. I didn’t need to look at her. I broke the tentative four-way contact and said, “Basically, that’s it. Once we learn to match resonances.”

“If it’s so simple, why could we never do it before?” Thyra demanded.

I tried to explain that the art of making a link with more than one other mind, more than one other matrix, is the most difficult of the basic skills taught at Arilinn. I felt her fumbling to reach out, to make contact, and I dropped my barriers and allowed her to touch me. Again the dark beast, the sense of claws …Rafe gasped and cried out in pain and I reached out to knock Thyra loose. “Not until you know how,” I said. “I’ll try to teach you, but you have to learn the precise knack of matching resonance beforeyou reach out. Promise me not to try it on your own, Thyra, and I’ll promise to teach you. Agreed?”

She promised, badly shaken by the failure. I felt depressed. Four of us, then, and Rafe only a child. Beltran unable to make rapport at all, and Kadarin an unknown quantity. Not enough for Beltran’s plans. Not nearly enough.

We needed a catalyst telepath. Otherwise, that was as far as I could go.

Rafe’s attempts to lower the fire and our experiments with water-drops had made the hearth smolder; Marjorie began to cough. Any of us could have brought it back to brightness, but I welcomed the chance to get out of the room. I said, “Let’s go into the garden.”

The afternoon sunshine was brilliant, melting the snow. The plants which had just this morning been thrusting up spikes through snow were already budding. I asked, “Will Kermiac be angry if we destroy a few of his flowers?”

“Flowers? No, take what you need, but what will you do with them?”

“Flowers are ideal test and practice material,” I said. “It would be dangerous to experiment with most living tissue; with flowers you can learn a very delicate control, and they live such a short time that you are not interfering with the balance of nature very much. For instance.” Cupping matrix in hand, I focused my attention on a bud full-formed but not yet opened, exerting the faintest of mental pressures. Slowly, while I held my breath, the bud uncurled, thrusting forth slender stamens. The petals unfolded, one by one, until it stood full-blown before us. Marjorie drew a soft breath of excitement and surprise.

“But you didn’t destroy it!”

“In a way I did; the bud isn’t fully mature and may never mature enough to be pollinated. I didn’t try; maturing a plant like that takes deep intercellular control. I simply manipulated the petals.” I made contact with Marjorie. Try it with me. Try first to see deep into the cell structure of the flower, to see exactly how each layer of petals is folded …