Our hands were still clasped. Suddenly she colored and tried to withdraw her wrist from my fingers. I tightened them, saying, “I feared to be burned . . . too near the fire. I am very ignorant of your mountain ways. How should I address you, cousin?”
“Would a woman of your valley lands be thought too bold if she called you by name, Lew?”
“Marjorie,” I said, caressing the name with my voice. “Marjorie.” Her small fingers felt fragile and live, like some small quivering animal that had taken refuge with me. Never, not even at Arilinn, had I known such warmth, such acceptance. She said my hands were cold and drew them under her cloak again. All she was telling me seemed wonderful. I knew something of electric power generators—in the Kilghard Hills great windmills harnessed the steady winds—but her voice made it all new to me, and I pretended less knowledge so she would go on speaking.
She said, “At one time matrix-powered generators provided lights for the castle. That technique is lost.”
“It is known at Arilinn,” I said, “but we rarely use it; the cost is high in human terms and there is some danger.” Just the same, I thought, in the mountains they must need more energy against the crueler climate. Easy enough to give up a luxury, but here it might make the difference between civilized life and a brutal struggle for existence.
“Have you been taught to use a matrix, Marjorie?”
“Only a little. Kermiac is too old to show us the techniques. Thyra is stronger than I because she and Kadarin can link together a little, but not for long. The techniques of making the links are what we do not know.”
“That is simple enough,” I said, hesitating because I did not like to think of working in linked circles outside the safety of the tower force-fields. “Marjorie, who is Kadarin, where does he come from?”
“I know no more than he told you,” she said. “He has traveled on many worlds. There are times when he speaks as if he were older than my guardian, yet he seems no older than Thyra. Even she knows not much more than I, yet they have been together for a long time. He is a strange man, Lew, but I love him and I want you to love him too.”
I had warmed to Kadarin, sensing the sincerity behind his angry intensity. Here was a man who met life without self-deception, without the lies and compromises I had lived with so long. I had not seen him for days; he had gone away before the blizzard on unexplained business.
I glanced at the strengthening sun. “The morning’s well on. Will anyone be expecting us?”
“I’m usually expected at breakfast, but Thyra likes to sleep late and no one else will care.” She looked shyly up into my face and said, “I’d rather stay with you.”
I said, with a leaping joy, “Who needs breakfast?”
“We could walk into Caer Donn and find something at a food-stall. The food will not be as good as at my guardian’s table….”
She led the way down a side path, going by a flight of steep steps that were roofed against the spray from the waterfall. There was frost underfoot, but the roofing had kept the stairway free of ice. The roaring of the waterfall made so much noise that we left off trying to talk and let our clasped hands speak for us. At last the steps came out on a lower terrace leading gently downslope to the city. I looked up and said, “I don’t relish the thought of climbing back!”
“Well, we can go around by the horse-path,” she said. “You came up that way with your escort. Or there’s a lift on the far side of the waterfall; the Terrans built it for us, with chains and pulleys, in return for the use of our water power.”
A little way inside the city gates Marjorie led the way to a food-stall. We ate freshly baked bread and drank hot spiced cider, while I pondered what she had said about matrices for generating power. Yes, they had been used in the past, and misused, too, so that now it was illegal to construct them. Most of them had been destroyed, not all. If Kadarin wanted to try reviving one there was, in theory at least, no limit to what he could do with it.