“Probably because you’ve got them yourself,” Regis said. “Matrix work needs training, but it must be possible to learn to control laran, or the techniques couldn’t have evolved. Unless you want to believe all those old stories about gods and demigods coming down to teach the Comyn how to use them, and I don’t.” It was very dark, but he could see Danilo clearly, as if his body were outlined with the pale, pulsing energy flows. Danilo said, “Then maybe we can find out how to keep you from going into that kind of … of crisis again.”

Regis said, “I seem to be in your hands, Dani. Quite literally. I don’t know if I could live through another attack like that one.” He knew that the physical shock Danilo had given him by touching his matrix had revived him, but that he was drained, dangerously weak. “You had threshold sickness? And got over it?”

“Yes. Though, as I say, I had no idea what it was. But finding out about these energy currents helped. I could make them flow smoothly, most of the time, and it seemed that I could usethat energy. I’m not saying this very well, am I? I don’t know the right words.”

Regis smiled ruefully and said, “Maybe there aren’t any.” He lay watching the energy flows in Danilo’s body and had the strange sensation that, although they were both heavily clothed against the cold, they were both, somehow, naked, a different kind of naked. Maybe this is what Lew meant: living with your skin off. He could feel the energy flows in Danilo, too, pulsing, moving smoothly and steadily with the forces of life. Danilo went on, gently searching out the flows, not touching him; even so, the touch that was not a touch stirred physical awareness again. Regis had not heard Lew explain how the same currents carried telepathic force and sexual energy, but he sensed just enough to be self-conscious about it. He gently reached out and held Danilo’s hand away from him.

“No,” he said, not angry now, but honestly, facing it—they could not lie to each other now. “You don’t want to stir thatup, do you, Dani?”

There was a frozen instant while Danilo almost stopped breathing. Then he said, in a smothered whisper, “I didn’t think you knew.”

“So when you called me names—you were nearer right than you knew yourself, Dani. I didn’t know it then, either. But I would rather not … approach you as Dyan did. So take care, Dani.”

He was not touching Danilo now, but just the same he felt the steady currents of energy in Danilo begin to halt, the pulse go ragged and uneven, like an eddy and whirlpool in a smooth-running river. He didn’t know what it meant, but he sensed without knowing why that it was important, that he had discovered something else that he really needed to know, something on which his very life might depend.

Danilo said hoarsely, “You? Like Dyan? Never!”

Regis fought to steady his own voice, but he was aware of the energy currents now. The steady pulsing which had eased and cleared his perceptions was beginning to back up, eddy and move unevenly. He said, fighting for control, “Not in any way that … that you have to fear. I swear it. But it’s true. Do you hate me, then, or despise me for it?”

Danilo’s voice was rough. “Don’t you think I can tell the difference? I will not speak your name in the same breath—”

“I am very sorry to disillusion you, Dani,” Regis said very quietly, “but it would be worse to lie to you now. That’s what went wrong before. I think it was trying so hard to … to keep it from you, to keep it from myself, even, that has been making me so sick. I knew about your fears; you have good reason for them. I tried very hard to keep you from knowing: I almost died rather than let you think of me like Dyan. I know you are a cristoforo, and I know your customs are different.”

He should know, after three years in one of their monasteries. And now Regis knew what cut off his laran: the two things coming together, the emotional response, wakening that time with Lew, and the telepathic awareness, laran. And for three years, the years when they should have been wakening and strengthening, every time he had felt any kind of emotional or physical impulse, he had cut it off again; and every time there was the slightest, faintest telepathic response, be had smothered it. To keep from rousing, again, all the longing and pain and memory …

Saint-Valentine-of-the-Snows, saint or no, had nearly destroyed Regis. Perhaps, if he had been less obedient, less scrupulous …

He said, “Just the same, I must speak the truth to you, Dani. I am sorry if it hurts you, but I cannot hurt myself again by lying, to you or myself. I amlike Dyan. Now, at least. I will not do what he has done, but I feel as he felt, and I think I must have known it for a long time. If you cannot accept this, you need not call me lord or even friend, but please believe I did not know it myself.”

“But I know you’ve been honest with me,” Danilo gasped. “ Itried to keep it from you—I was so ashamed—I wanted to die for you, it would have been easier. Don’t you think I can tell the difference?” he demanded. Tears were streaming down his face. “Like Dyan? You?Dyan, who cared nothing for me, who found his pleasure in tormenting me and drank in my fear and loathing as his own joy—” He drew a deep, gasping breath, as if there were not enough air anywhere to breathe. “And you. You’ve gone on like this, day after day, torturing yourself, letting yourself come almost to the edge of death, just to keep from frighteningme—do you think I am afraidof you? Of anything you could say or … or do?” The lines of light around him were blazing now, and Regis wondered if Danilo, in the surge of emotion blurring them both, really knew what he was saying.

He stretched both hands to Danilo and said, very gently, “Part of the sickness, I think, was trying to hide from each other. We’ve come close to destroying each other because of it. It’s simpler than that. We don’t have to talk about it and try to find words. Dani— bredu—will you speak to me, now, in the way we cannot misunderstand?”

Danilo hesitated for a moment and Regis, frightened with the old agonizing fear of a rebuff, felt as if he could not breathe. Then, although Regis could feel the last aching instant of fear, reluctance, shame as if it were in himself, Danilo reached out his hands and laid them, palm to palm, guided by a sure instinct, against Regis’ own hands. He said, “I will, bredu.”

The touch was that small but definite electric shock. Regis felt the energy pulses blazing up in him like live lightning for an instant. He felt the current, then, running through them both, from Danilo into him, into his whole body—the centers in the head, the base of the throat, beneath the heart, down deep inside his whole body—and back again through Danilo. The muddied, swirling eddies in the currents began to clear, to run like a smooth pulse, a swift current. For the first time in months, it seemed, he could see clearly, without the crawling sickness and dizziness, as the energy channels began to flow in a straightforward circuit. For a moment this shared life energy was all either of them could feel and, under the relief of it, Regis drew what seemed his first clear breath in a long time.

Then, very slowly, his thoughts began to merge with Danilo’s. Clear, together, as if they were a single mind, a single being, joined in an ineffable warmth and closeness.

This was the real need. To reach out to someone, this way, to feel this togetherness, this blending. Living with your skin off. This is whatlaran is.

In the peace and comfort of that magical blending, Regis was still aware of the tension and clawing need in his body, but that was less important. But why should either of us be afraid of that now?

This, Regis knew, was what had twisted his vital forces into knots, blockading the vital energy flows until he was near death. Sexuality was only part of it; the real trouble was the unwillingness to face and acknowledge what was within him. He knew without words that the clearing of these channels had freed him to be what he was, and what he would be.