“Why do we need the kind of control we practiced with the flowers, Lew?”
“Well, if someone in the circle gets so involved in what he’s doing that he forgets to breathe, the monitor outside has to start him breathing again without hurting him. A well-trained empath can stop bleeding even from an artery, or heal wounds.” I touched the scar. “This would have been worse, except that the Keeper of the circle worked with it, to heal the worst damage.” Janna Lindir had been Keeper at Arilinn for two of my three years. At seventeen, I had been in love with her. I had never touched her, never so much as kissed her fingertips. Of course.
I looked at Marjorie. No. No, I have never loved before, never…. The other women I have known have been nothing. …
She looked at me and whispered, half laughing, “Have you loved so many?”
“Never like this. I swear it—”
Unexpectedly she threw her arms around me, pressed herself close. “I love you,” she whispered quickly, pulled away and ran ahead of me along the path into the hall.
Thyra smiled knowingly at me as we came in, but I didn’t care. You had to learn to take that kind of thing for granted. She swung around toward the window, looking into the gathering darkness and mist. We were still close enough that I followed her thoughts. Kadarin, where was he, how did he fare on his mission? I began to draw them together again, Marjorie’s delicate touch, Rafe alert and quick like some small frisking animal, Thyra with the strange sense of a dark beast prowling.
Kadarin. The interlinked circle formed itself and I discovered to my surprise, and momentary dismay, that Thyra was at the center, weaving us about her mind. But she seemed to work with a sure, deft touch, so I let her keep that place. Suddenly I saw Kadarin, and heard his voice speaking in the middle of a phrase;
“… refuse me then, Lady Storn?”
We could even see the room where he was standing, a high-arched old hall with the blue glass windows of almost unbelievable antiquity. Directly before his eves was a tall old woman, proudly erect, with gray eyes and dazzling white hair. She sounded deeply troubled.
“Refuse you, dom? I have no authority to give or refuse. The Sharra matrix was given into the keeping of the forge-folk after the siege of Storn. It had been taken from them without authority, generations ago, and now it is safe in their keeping, not mine. It is theirs to give.”
Kadarin’s deep exasperation could be felt by all of us— stubborn, superstitious old beldame! as he said, “It is Kermiac of Aldaran who bids me remind you that you took Sharra’s matrix from Aldaran without leave—”
“I do not recognize his right.”
“Desideria,” he said, “let’s not quarrel or quibble. Kermiac sent me to bring the Sharra matrix back to Aldaran; Aldaran is liege-lord to Storn and there’s an end to it.”
“Kermiac does not know what I know, sir. The Sharra matrix is well where it is; let it lie there. There are no Keepers today powerful enough to handle it. I myself called it up only with the aid of a hundred of the forge-folk, and it would be ill done of me to deprive them of their goddess. I beg you say to Kermiac that by my best judgment, which he trusted always, it should stay where it is.”
“I am sick of this superstitious talk of goddesses and talismans, lady. A matrix is a machine, no more.”
“Is it? So I thought when I was a maiden,” the old woman said. “I knew more of the art of a matrix at fifteen, sir, than you know now, and I know how old you really are.” I felt the man flinch from her sharp, steady gaze. “I know this matrix, you do not. Be advised by me. You could not handle it. Nor could Kermiac. Nor could I, at my age. Let it lie, man! Don’t wake it! If you do not like the talk of goddesses, call it a force basically beyond human control in these days, and evil.”