Lady Alida, at one of the long tables, raised her eyes, looked directly at Magda and beckoned; Magda could think of no polite way to ignore the invitation. The Comyn lady wore a festival gown of pale blue; her red-gold hair was coiled low on her neck. She gestured to Magda to sit next to her, and Magda felt the little prickles of “hunch” touching her again. Alida was a Comyn lady, a leronis, and gifted with psi power. A mere trace of this, in Jaelle, had given Magda away. How could she manage not to betray herself?
For a time, everyone’s attention was on the small delicacies of the table: a clear soup with golden slices of some delicious mushroom floating in it; small, hot savory tidbits of different kinds; spicebread in all sorts of ornamental shapes, gilded and decorated. But as these were taken away, and the servants-in their holiday garments, and joining in the feast they helped to serve-brought the main courses, Alida turned to Magda and said, “While your sworn sister was ill and needed your care, I would not call you from her side, mestra. But now she is well,” and she looked at Jaelle, laughing between Peter and her cousin and obviously teasing them about their resemblance. “I wanted a word with you. Have you never been tested for laran, Margali?”
“No. Never.”
“But surely you were aware of your inborn talent, were you not?”
“No,” Magda said again, and a faint frown furrowed the lady’s high pale forehead.
“But surely … as you know, it wakes normally at adolescence; had you no hint of this gift? Or were you committed so early to the life of a Free Amazon that you did not ask for this testing?”
That would have been a good escape, but the lie was too easily discovered; it was a matter of record that she had only recently been made a Free Amazon. She fell back on the literal truth. “Until the other day, my Lady, I had no idea that I had the faintest trace of laran. It came as a great surprise to me.”
“Well, when Midwinter Festival is over, we must have you properly tested,” Alida said, as if the matter were settled. How, Magda wondered, would she get out of this? With definite relief, she remembered something else. She never would have believed herself capable of putting this forth with positive pleasure. “After midwinter, Lady, my duties commit me to the Guild-house.”
Lady Alida brushed that aside. “Something will be arranged. An untrained telepath is a danger to herself and everyone around her, and that would apply to all your sisters of the Guild-house.” She said no more, politely calling her guest’s attention to the musicians who had come to entertain them, and would play later for the dancing.
But enough had been said to ruin Magda’s appetite. What was she going to do now?
When the meal ended, the older guests gathered around the midwinter-fire for gossip and reminiscence (Magda knew these house parties, held when the weather brought all outdoor work to a standstill, were reunions of friends who often did not meet from year to year) while the younger people descended into the lower hall for dancing. Magda had learned to dance as a child-a girl could not reach her eighth year in Caer Donn without learning to dance, and to dance well- and knew most of these dances.
Although she took part with pleasure when Jaelle and Lori drew her into a ring-dance with a dozen other girls, she did not know what the rules of Amazon etiquette were for dancing with men after the group dances gave way to dancing in couples. But after a time, seeing Jaelle laughing and flirting and dancing with all comers, she grew less hesitant. She accepted the invitations, enjoying it on two levels: the Terran agent making mental notes (But would she ever really be that again?), and, to her own surprise, the young girl she had been in Caer Donn, mingling for the first time with young men. It was, literally, the first time since childhood when she had felt herself actually in the company of her own kind.