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 what laran 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.
Some day he would know the trick of directing those currents without making them flow through his body. But now this is what he needed, and only someone who could accept him entirely, all of him, mind and body and emotions, could have given it to him. And it was a closer brotherhood than blood. Living with your skin off.
And suddenly be knew that he need not go to a tower. What he had learned now was a simpler way of what he would have been taught there. He knew he could use laran now, any way he needed to. He could use his matrix without getting sick again, he could reach anyone he needed to reach, send the message that had to be sent.
Chapter TWENTY-TWO
(Lew Alton’s narrative)
For the ninth or tenth time in an hour I tiptoed to the door, unfastened the leather latch and peered out. The outside world was nothing but swirling, murky grayness. I backed away from it, wiping snow from my eyes, then saw in the dim light that Marjorie was awake. She sat up and wiped the rest of the snow from my face with her silk kerchief.
“It’s early in the season for so heavy a storm.”
“We have a saying in the hills, darling. Put no faith in a drunkard’s prophecy, another man’s dog, or the weather at any season.”
“Just the same,” she said, struggling to put my own thoughts into words, “I know these mountains. There’s something in this storm that frightens me. The wind doesn’t rage as it should. The snow is too wet for this season. It’s wrong somehow. Storms, yes. But not like this.”
“Wrong or right, I only wish it would stop.” But for the moment we were helpless against it. We might as well enjoy what small good there was in being snowbound together. I buried my face in her breast; she said, laughing, “You are not at all sorry to be here with me.”
“I would rather be with you at Arilinn,” I said. “We would have a finer bridal chamber.”
She put her arms around me. It was so dark we could not see one another’s faces, but we needed no light. She whispered, “I am happy with you wherever we are.”
We were exaggeratedly gentle with one another now. I hoped a time might come, some day, when we could come into one another’s arms without fear. I knew I would never forget, not while I lived, that terrifying madness that had gripped us both, nor those dreadful hours, after Marjorie had cried herself into a stunned, exhausted sleep, while I lay restless, aching with the fear she might never trust or love me again.