“Yes, we leave within the hour. I haven’t time to argue with your damned Council and I won’t have Lew badgered.” Angry as he sounded, Regis knew it was despair, not hostility, behind Kennard’s harsh voice. He tried to barricade himself against the despairing grief. At Nescaya he had been taught the basic techniques of closing out the worst of it; he no longer felt wholly naked, wholly stripped. He could face Dyan now, and even with Danilo they need not lower their barriers unless they both wished it.
“Uncle, Lew and I have been friends since I was only a little boy. I—I would like to see him to say farewell.”
Kennard regarded him with hostility for some seconds, at last saying, “Come along, then. But don’t blame me if he won’t speak to you.” His voice was not steady either.
Regis could not help recalling the last time he had stood here in the great hall of the Alton rooms, before Kennard and his grandfather. And the time before that. Lew was sitting on a bench before the fireplace. Exactly where he was sitting that night when Regis appealed to him to waken his laran.
Kennard asked gently, “Lew, will you speak to Regis? He came to bid you farewell.”
Lew’s barriers were down and Regis felt the naked surge of pain, rejection: I don’t want anyone, I don’t want anyone to see me now. It was like a blow, sending Regis reeling. But he braced himself against it, saying very softly, “bredu—”
Lew turned and Regis shrank, almost with horror, from the first sight of that hideously altered face. Lew had aged twenty years in the few short weeks since they had parted. His face was a terrible network of healed and half-healed scars. Pain had furrowed deep lines there, and the expression in his eyes was of someone who has looked on horrors past endurance. One hand was bundled in clumsy bandages and braced in a sling. He tried to smile but it was only a grimace.
“Sorry. I keep forgetting, I’m a sight to frighten children into fits.”
Regis said, “But I’m not a child, Lew.” He managed to block out the other man’s pain and misery and said as calmly as he could manage, “I suppose the worst of the scars will heal.”
Lew shrugged, as if that was a matter of deadly indifference. Regis still looked uneasily at him; now that they were together he was uncertain why he had come. Lew had gone dead to all human contact and wanted it that way. Any closer contact between them, any attempt to reach him with laran, to revive their old closeness, would simply breach that merciful numbness and revive Lew’s active suffering. The quicker he said goodbye and went away again, the better it would be.
He made a formal bow, resolving to keep it that way, and said, “A good journey, then, cousin, and a safe return.” He started to move backward. He bumped into Danilo in his retreat, and Danilo’s hand closed over his wrist, the touch opening a blaze of rapport between them. As clearly as if Danilo had spoken aloud, Regis felt the intense surge of his distress:
No, Regis! Don’t shut it all out, don’t withdraw from him! Can’t you see he’s dying inside there, locked away from everyone he loves? He’s got to know that you know what he’s suffering, that you don’t shrink from him! I can’t reach him, but you can because you’ve loved him, and you must, before he slams down the last barrier and locks everyone out forever. It’s his reason at stake, maybe his life!
Regis recoiled. Then, torn, agonized, he realized that this, too, was the burden of his heritage: to accept that nothing, nothing in the human mind, was too fearful to face, that what one person could suffer, another could share. He had known that when he was only a child, before his laran was fully awake. He hadn’t been afraid then, or ashamed, because he wasn’t thinking of himself then at all, but only of Lew, because he was afraid and in pain.
He let go of Danilo’s hand and took a step toward Lew. One day—it flashed through his mind at random and, it seemed, irrelevantly—as the telepathic men of his caste had always done, he would go down, with the woman bearing his child, into the depths of agony and the edge of his death, and he would be able, for love, to face it. And for love he could face this, too. He went to Lew. Lew had lowered his head again. Regis said, “bredu,” and stood on tiptoe, embracing his kinsman, and deliberately laying himself open to all of Lew’s torment, taking the full shock of rapport between them.