Later, telling Ellemir what he had done, while Andrew watched over the still-sleeping Callista, he repeated 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 killed him.”

Damon, thinking of the sleeping Callista, who had come, not knowing it, so close to death, thought this was merely bitterness. Andrew was her sister’s husband, she had been linked to him by matrix during the long search for Callista, and they had all come together in that brief, spontaneous, fourfold moment of sharing, 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 Andrew when 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 would somehow manage to live, to find his way safely to Thendara where he would be under Domenic’s protection. Domenic, heir to Alton, was after all Dezi’s half brother. Damon was sure of it, now; no one not 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.

Andrew was dreaming…

He was wandering in the blizzard he could hear outside, flinging heavy snow and sleet, driven by enormous winds, around the heights of Armida. But he had never seen Armida. He was alone, wandering in a trackless, houseless, shelterless wilderness, as he had done when the mapping plane went down and abandoned him on a strange world. He was stumbling in the snow and the wind tore at his lungs and a voice 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 torn nightdress, and he could see her pale flesh dimly through the rents in the gown, but it did not flutter or move in the raging winds that tore him, and her hair was unstir-ring in the raging storm. She was not there at all, she was a ghost, a dream, a girl who never was, and yet he knew, on another level of reality, she was Callista, she was his wife. Or had that been only a dream within a dream, dreamed while he was lying 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 and dying 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 could not 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 the aftereffects 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. There would be a small scar. He needed no scar to remind him of how he had been torn from Callista’s arms, a force like lightning striking through her body. He recalled that it used to be a favorite form of torture, in the old days on Terra, an electrode to the genitals. It hadn’t been Callista’s fault though, the shock of knowing 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 worried about her. He dosed her with odd-smelling herbal potions, discussing her condition at length in words of which Andrew understood perhaps one in ten. He felt like the fifth leg on a horse. And even when he began to mend, to want to be out and about, he could not even lose himself in the normally heavy work of the horse ranch. With the blizzard season, all had come to a dead halt. A handful of servants, using underground tunnels, tended the saddle horses and the dairy animals which provided milk for the household. A handful of gardeners cared for the greenhouses. Andrew was nominally in charge of all these, 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 must never, even in sleep, be allowed to feel herself alone, and that her twin was better for this purpose than any other.

Ellemir had nursed her tirelessly, night and day. On one level Andrew was grateful for Ellemir’s tender care, there being so little he could do for Callista now. But at the same time he resented it, resented his isolation 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 for a moment, and this too, he resented. Did they really think that if they left Callista alone, Andrew would fall on her again like a wild animal, that he would rape her? Damn it to hell, he thought, it was more likely 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 do nothing, 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 his mind. She was deep asleep, drugged with another of Damon’s or Ferrika’s herb medicines. He wished he 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 think about Ellemir. She was his wife’s sister, his best friend’s wife, the one woman of all women forbidden to him. 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 psychological equivalent of rape. He didn’t care a damn about Ellemir — she was just his sister-in-law — it was just that she made him think of Callista as she might be if she were healthy and well and free of the grip of the for-ever-be-damned Tower.