“You see?” Damon said. “If I keep you away from her she wants to die. If I let you touch her, the physical stress gets worse and worse. Quite apart from the emotional strain, which is tearing you both to pieces, physically she can’t endure much more. Something must be done quickly, before—” He broke off, but they all knew what he did not say: Before she goes into convulsions again and we can’t stop it this time.
“You know what has to be done, Callista, and you know how much time you have to make up your mind. Damn it, Callie, do you think I want to torment you when you’re in this state? I know you are physically in the state of a girl of twelve, but you are not a child, can’t you stop behaving like one? Can’t you somehow manage to behave like the adult professional you have learned to be? Stop being so damned emotional about it! What we have here is a physical fact! You are a Keeper—”
“I am not! I’m not!” she gasped.
“At least show some of the good sense and courage you learned as one! I’m ashamed of you. Your circle would be ashamed of you. Leonie would be ashamed—”
“Damn it, Damon,” Andrew began, but Ellemir, her eyes blazing, grabbed his arm. “Keep out of this, you fool,” she whispered. “Damon knows what he’s doing! It’s her life at stake now!”
“You are afraid,” Damon said, taunting, “you are afraid! Hilary Castamir was not fifteen, but she endured having her channels cleared every forty days for more than a year! And you are afraid to let me touch you!”
Callista lay flat on her pillows under Damon’s hard grip, her face dead white, her eyes beginning to blaze with a lambent flame none of them had ever seen in her before. Her voice, weak as it was, trembled with such rage that it was like a shout.
“You! How dare you talk to me that way, you that Leonie sent from Arilinn like a whimpering puppy because you had not the courage. Who do you think you are, to talk to me like that?”
Damon stood up, releasing her, as if, Andrew thought, he was afraid he might strangle her if he didn’t. The dull-red furnace glow of rage was around him again. Andrew clenched his hands until he could see blood beneath the nails, trying to keep them all from disintegrating into whirling fields of energy again.
“Who am I?” Damon shouted. “I am your nearest kinsman, and I am your technician, and you know very well what else I am. And if I cannot make you see reason, if you will not use your knowledge and good judgment, then I swear to you, Callista of Arilinn, that I shall have Dom Esteban carried up here and let you try your tantrums on him! If your husband cannot make you behave, and if a technician cannot, then, my girl, you may try conclusions with your father! He is old, but he is still Lord Alton, and if I explain to him—”
She said, white with fury, “You wouldn’t dare!”
“Try me,” Damon retorted, turning his back and standing firm, ignoring all of them. Andrew stood by, uneasy, looking from Damon’s turned back to Callista, white and raging against her pillows, holding to consciousness by that very thread of rage. Could either give way, or would they remain locked in that terrible battle of wills till one of them died? He caught a random thought — from Ellemir? — that Damon’s mother was an Alton, he too had the Alton gift. But Callista was the weaker, Andrew knew she could not long sustain this fury which was destroying them all. He must break this impasse and do it quickly. Ellemir was wrong. Damon could not break her will that way, even to save her life.
He went to Callista and knelt at her side again. He begged, “Darling, do what Damon wants!”
She whispered, the cold anger breaking so that he could see the terrible grief behind it, “Did he tell you it would mean I could not… that he would lose even what little we have had?”
“He told me,” Andrew said, trying desperately to show somehow the aching tenderness that had swallowed up everything else in him. “But my darling, I came to love you before I had ever set eyes on you. Do you think that is all I want of you?”
Damon turned around slowly. The anger in him had melted. He looked down at them both with a deep and anguished pity, but he made his voice hard. “Have you found enough courage for this, Callista?”
She said, sighing, “Oh, courage? Damon, it is not that I lack. But what is the reason for it? You say it will save my life. But what life have I now that is worth keeping? And I have involved you all in it. I would rather die now before I bring you all to where I am.”
Andrew was aghast at the bottomless despair in her voice. He made a move to take her in his arms again, remembered that he endangered her by the slightest touch. He stood paralyzed, immobilized by her anguish. Damon came and knelt beside him. He did not touch Callista, either but nevertheless he reached for her, reached for both of them, and drew them all around him. The slow gentle pulse, the ebb and flow of matched rhythms, naked in the moving dark, closely entangled them in an intimacy closer than lovemaking.
Damon said in a whisper, “Callista, if it were only your own decision, I would let you die. But you are so much a part of all of us that we cannot let you go.” And from one of them, Andrew never knew whether himself or another, the thought wove through the multiplex joining that was their linked circle: Callista, while we have this, surely it is worth living in the hope that somehow we will find a way to have the rest.
Like surfacing from a very deep dive, Andrew came back to separate awareness again. Damon’s eyes met his, and he did not shrink from the intimacy in them. Callista’s eyes were so bruised, so dilated with pain that they looked black in her pallid face, but she smiled, stirring faintly against his arm.
“All right, Damon. Do what you have to. I’ve hurt you all… too much already.” Her breath faded and she seemed to struggle for awareness. Ellemir brushed a light kiss over her sister’s brow.
“Don’t try to talk. We understand.” Damon rose and drew Andrew out of the room with him.
“Damn it, this is work for a Keeper. There were male Keepers once, but I haven’t the training.”
“You don’t want to do this at all, do you, Damon?”
“Who would?” His voice was shaking uncontrollably. “But there’s nothing else to do. If she goes into convulsions again she might not live through the day. And if she did, there might be enough brain damage that she’d never know us again. The overload on all life functions — pulse, breathing — and if she deteriorates much further… well, she’s an Alton.” He shook his head despairingly. “What she did to you would be nothing to what she might do to all of us, if her mind stopped functioning, and all she knew was that we were hurting her…” He flinched with dread. “I’ve got to hurt her so damnably. But I have to do it while she’s aware, and able to control and cooperate intelligently.”
“What is it you’re afraid of? You can’t really hurt her, can you, using — what is it, psi? — on those channels? They aren’t even physical, are they?”
Damon shut his eyes for a moment, an involuntary, spasmodic movement. He said, “I won’t kill her. I know enough not to do that. That’s why she has to be conscious, though. If I make any miscalculations, I could damage some of the nerves, and they are centered around the reproductive organs. I could damage them just enough to impair her chances of ever bearing a child, and she can tell me better than I can myself just where the main nerves are.”
“In God’s name,” Andrew said in a whisper, “can’t you do it while she’s unconscious? Does it matter if she can have children?”
Damon looked at him in shock and horror. “You can’t possibly be serious!” he said, desperately making allowances for his friend’s distress. “Callista is Comyn, she has laran. Any woman would die before risking that. This is your wife, man, not some woman of the streets!”