“I think that was more Damon’s doing than mine, sir,” Andrew said firmly. The old man laughed a short, wry laugh.

“And so it is like the fairy-tale, fitting that you two should be rewarded with the hands of my daughters, and half my kingdom. Well, I have no kingdom to give, Ann’dra, but you have a son’s place here while you live, and if you wish, your children after you.”

Callista’s eyes were brimming. She slipped off the bench and knelt beside her father. She whispered, “Thank you,” and his hand rested, for a moment, on her fine, copper-shining braids. Over her bent head he said, “Well, come, Ann’dra, kneel for my blessing.” The harsh voice was kind.

With a sense of confusion, half embarrassment, half ineradicable strangeness, Andrew knelt beside Callista. On the surface of his mind were random thoughts, such as how damn silly this would seem at Headquarters, and when in Rome… but on a deeper level, something in him warmed to the gesture. He felt the old man’s square, calloused hand on his head, and with the still-strange, newly opened telepathic awareness with which he had not yet wholly made his peace, picked up a strange melange of emotions: misgivings, blended with a tentative, spontaneous liking. He was sure that what he sensed was what the old man felt about him; and to his own surprise, it was not too unlike what he himself felt for the Comyn lord.

He said, trying to keep his voice neutral, though he was perfectly sure the old man could read his thoughts in turn, “I am grateful, sir. I will try to be a good son to you.”

Dom Esteban said gruffly, “Well, as you can see, I’m going to need a couple of good ones. Look here, are you going to keep calling me sir for the rest of our lives, son?”

“Of course not, kinsman.” He used the intimate form of the word now, as Damon did. It could mean “uncle,” or any close relative of a father’s generation. He rose, and as he moved away he encountered the curious stare of the boy Dezi, silent behind Esteban, filled with an angry intensity — yes, and what Andrew could feel as resentment, envy.

Poor kid, he thought. I come here a stranger, and they treat me like family. He’s family — and the old man treats him like a servant, or a dog! No wonder the kid’s jealous!

It had been decided that the marriage would take place four days hence, a quiet one, with only Leonie for honored guest, and a few neighbors who lived on nearby estates to celebrate with them. The brief interval allowed just time for word to be sent to Dom Esteban’s heir, Domenic, at Thendara, and for one or more of Damon’s brothers to come from Serrais if they wished.

On the night before the wedding, the twin sisters lay awake late, in the room they had shared as children, before Callista went to the Arilinn Tower. Ellemir said at last, a little sadly, “I had always believed that on my marriage day there would be much feasting, and fine gowns, and all our kinfolk to celebrate with us, not a hasty marriage with a few countryfolk! Well, with Damon for husband I can manage without the rest, but still…”

“I am sorry too, Elli, I know it is my fault,” Callista said. “You are marrying a Comyn lord of the Ridenow Domain, so there is no reason you should not be married by the catenas, with all the festivity and merrymaking you might wish. Andrew and I have spoiled this for you.” A Comyn daughter could not marry di catenas, with the old ceremony, without permission of Comyn Council, and Callista knew there was no chance whatever that Council would give her to a stranger, a nobody — a Terran! So they had chosen the simpler form known as freemate marriage, which could be solemnized by a simple declaration before witnesses.

Ellemir heard the sadness in her sister’s voice and said, “Well, as Father is so fond of saying, the world will go as it will, and not as you or I would have it. In the next Council season, Damon has promised, we shall journey to Thendara and there will be enough merrymaking for everyone.”

“And by that time,” Callista added, “my marriage to Andrew will be so long established that nothing can alter it.”

Ellemir laughed. “It would be just my ill fortune to be heavy with child then, and unable to enjoy it! Not that I would think it ill fortune, to have Damon’s child at once.”

Callista was silent, thinking of the years in the Tower, where she had put aside, unregretted because unknown, all the things a young girl dreams of. Hearing these things in Ellemir’s voice now she asked, hesitating, “Do you want a child at once?”

Ellemir laughed. “Oh, yes! Don’t you?”

“I had not thought about it,” Callista said slowly. “There were so many years when I never thought of marriage, or love, or children… I suppose Andrew will want children, soon or late, but it seems to me that a child should be wanted for herself, not only because it is my duty to our clan. I have lived so many years in the Tower, thinking only of duty toward others, that I think I must first have a little time to think only of myself. And of… of Andrew.”

This was puzzling to Ellemir. How could anyone think of her husband without thinking first of her desire to give him a child? But she sensed that it was otherwise with Callista. In any case, she thought with unconscious snobbery, Andrew was not Comyn; it did not matter so much that Callista should give him an heir at once.

“Remember, Elli, I spent so many years thinking I was not to marry at all…”

Her voice was so sad and strange that Ellemir could not bear it. She said. “You love Andrew, and your choice was freely made,” but there was a hint of question too. Had Callista chosen to marry her rescuer only because it seemed the simplest thing?

Callista followed that thought, and said, “No, I love him, more than I can tell you. Yet there is another old saying, I never knew till now how true: no choice goes wholly unregretted, either way will bring more, both of joy and sorrow, than we can foresee. My life had seemed unchanging to me, already settled, so simple: I would take Leonie’s place in Arilinn and serve there until death or age freed me from the burden. And that too seemed a good life to me. Love, marriage, children — these things were not even daydreams to me!”

Her voice was trembling. Ellemir got out of bed and went to sit on the edge of her sister’s, taking her hand in the darkness. Callista moved, an unconscious, automatic gesture, to draw it away, then said ruefully, more to herself than Ellemir, “I suppose I must learn not to do that.”

Ellemir said gently, “I do not think Andrew will appreciate it.”

She felt Callista flinch from the words. “It is a… reflex. I find it as hard to break as it was hard to learn.”

Ellemir said impulsively, “You must have been very lonely, Callista!”

Callista’s words seemed to come up from some barricaded depth. “Lonely? Not always. In the Tower we are closer than you can imagine. So much a part of one another. Even so, as Keeper I was always apart from them, separated by a… a barrier no one could ever cross. It would have been easier, I think, to be truly alone.” Ellemir felt that her sister was not speaking to her at all, but to remote and unsharable memories, trying to put words to something she had never been willing to speak about.

“The others in the Tower could… could give some expression to that closeness. Could touch. Could love. A Keeper learns a double separateness. To be close, closer than any other, to each mind within the matrix circle, and yet never… never quite real to them. Never a woman, never even a living, breathing human being. Only… only part of the screens and relays.” She paused, her mind lost in that strange, barricaded, lonely life which had been hers for so many years.

“So many women try it, and fail. They become involved, somehow, with the human side of the other men and women there. In my first year at Arilinn, I saw six young girls come there, to be trained as Keeper, and fail. And I was proud because I could endure the training. It is… not easy,” she said, knowing the words ridiculously inadequate. They gave no hint of the months of rigid physical and mental discipline, until her mind was trained to unbelievable power, until her body could endure the inhuman flows and stresses. She said at last, softly and bitterly, “Now I wish I had failed too!” and stopped, hearing her own words and horrified by them.