Rohana asked her a number of searching questions about her dreams and “hunches,” and finally said, when Magda felt wrung out by the questioning, “It seems to me that your talents are slight, and that you have compensated for them very well. You could, if you wished, probably learn the use of laran with ease, and it would be interesting to see what use a Terran could make of this training. I would like to have the teaching of you; but it seems it would make more trouble than it is worth. You are committed elsewhere; and I have already gone against Lorill’s will as much as seems wise. Yet,” she added, almost wistfully, “if you demand this training, I could not refuse it to anyone with laran; and by law, birth and parentage cannot be used to refuse it to you.”
Magda said firmly, “I think I have quite enough trouble without that!”
. Rohana touched her wrist very lightly, that feather-touch Magda was beginning to guess was peculiar to telepaths among their own. “So be it, dear child. But if you ever have trouble with laran, you must promise to come to me.”
She sat looking intently at Magda for a moment. “If Lorill is wrong-if it can be proved that what he believes about your people is wrong-I do not need to tell you what it will mean for both your world and mine.”
To Magda, with her heightened sensitivity, the force of what she had always called “hunch” raising her perceptions, it seemed at this moment that she caught the very image in Rohana’s mind: a great barricaded door, slowly swinging open between two locked-away worlds, two peoples; opening to give a bright and sunlit view.
Magda thought, We should be one people, not two … I would do anything for that. …
Rohana said, slowly, more as if she were thinking aloud than speaking, and yet Magda knew she was meant to share the woman’s thoughts, “Does it not seem to you, Margali, that there is a design of some sort in this? That of all the Terrans on our world, it should be your friend, who could be so easily mistaken for my son, who should be taken by Rumal di Scarp? I myself, in a quick look, can still be deceived, and must look at their ringers and hands to be certain, until one of them speaks. Does it not seem fantastic to you that of all the Amazons of Darkover, you should fall into Jaelle’s hands, and that the two of you should be so tested that you have become sworn friends as well?”
Magda felt uneasy. She said, “Coincidence, Lady.”
“One coincidence, perhaps. Two, maybe. But so many, like beads strung on a necklace? No, this is more than coincidence, my friend; or if it is coincidence, then coincidence itself is only another word for a design intended by whatever force it is that shapes the fates of man.” She smiled, and seemed to come back to the practical world, saying, “Now I must ask something of you, child. Will you take care in what you say to your friends, and to your superiors in the Terran Zone, at least until I have had a chance to speak with Lorill?”
“Indeed I will,” Magda said, smiling a little at the thought of Montray’s face if She should ever try to tell him about the matrix operation that had healed Jaelle’s wound within a few minutes, or that Lady Rohana had said that she herself had laran. If this was ever to be brought up between Darkovan and Terran, she was quite willing it should be someone other than herself who should do it-and she hoped there would be a more receptive audience than Russell Montray!
Rohana rose, and said, “Go now, Margali. I must think this over and decide what to do.”
Magda hesitated just a moment. “But what shall I tell Lady Alida?”
“Don’t worry about her. I will tell her that I have tested you myself,” Rohana said, and her smile was droll. “Don’t you realize that is what I have been doing?”
The blizzard lasted for another ten days-almost exactly as dom Gabriel had predicted-and when the weather finally cleared, the roads and passes lay blocked with drifts so deep that the three guests at Ardais were readily persuaded to remain for a few more days. Yet Magda had begun to brace herself, mentally, for their departure, and for whatever lay ahead. She could not return to her old life inside the Terran Zone, venturing outside it only in disguise; she knew the disguise had become her truest self. But what she could do instead-that she did not know either.