“No, Terry, no, it’s all right,” he said hurriedly, repeating the words over and over, his arm holding me tightly to him, his mind pouring out compassion and a determination to soothe. I was shivering hard against him, tasting the panic Len had almost drowned in, miles beyond being able to control myself. I had done it again, and I just couldn’t stand it.
It took quite a while before Garth was able to calm me down, before he was able to coax me into turning his hand loose. The warmth of his body had finally been able to melt the ice around mine, but the ice turned out to be the only thing holding me upright. I slumped against Garth’s shoulder, wishing I had fainted, wishing I could stop my mind from thinking ever again.
“Are you all right now?” he asked quietly and gently, his voice nearly a murmur, looking down at me in a way I could feel.
“I’m just great,” I answered dully, shoulder-deep in depression and slipping lower by the minute. “Now there’s another category to add to the list of all things new and wonderful. I think I’ll kill myself.”
“If you jumped out a window, you’d probably discover you can fly,” he said with gentle teasing, his arm tightening around me as his free hand stroked my hair. “Or levitate, which is not exactly the same thing.”
“How can you joke about it?” I demanded, appalled at the thought, pushing away from his chest to stare at him. “Now there are two things I have to try to hide, and Len will never come within half a mile of me again!”
“Three things,” he corrected, reaching out to brush the hair out of my eyes. “And Len was upset, but he’ll calm down and come back. Until he does, why don’t we talk about what’s been happening?”
“If you’ve gone crazy, don’t expect me to join you,” I answered, not understanding how his gray eyes could look—and be!-so calm. “The last thing I want to do is go into it all over again.”
“Now let’s see,” he mused, pretending he hadn’t heard what I’d said, locking his hands behind his head as he lay down on the carpeting. “The first of the three is the ability you’re not sure about, but we’ll count it anyway: the-feeling-you get that certain things have to be done. Have you had that feeling about more than learning swordwork?”
“No,” I said to his gray-eyed gaze, wondering why I wasn’t simply ignoring him. “Isn’t once enough?”
“We’ll put a question mark next to that one, but we’ll leave it on the list,” Garth decided, still not hearing anything he didn’t want to hear. “The second entry is this newest thing you’ve developed, the ability to get through Len’s shield. Does that mean you can look through your own shield? And also work through it?”
“How should I know?” I demanded in exasperation, but the emotion was more for myself. Now that Garth had raised the questions, I found myself suddenly curious.
“Well, we’ll give you a little time to look into that,” he very generously allowed, just short of grinning. “The third item is the ability you’ve been practicing, the ability to change people’s characters. It’s something you can do even if they’re braced against it and resisting, probably because of your increased strength.”
“The character change is no more than the end result of changing the emotional outlook,” I corrected, moving uncomfortably where I sat. “Since your actions always reflect your feelings, changing your feelings changes your actions. If I sat here pulling my hair out, for instance, you’d have to change the insane maelstrom of my feelings before you could get me to stop. You feel up to trying it?”
I wasn’t really starting to cry, but Garth didn’t have to be an empath to be aware of the wide-eyed desolation I was looking at him with. He sat up immediately and pulled me to him again, and held me as tightly as I needed to be held.
“Now, don’t go back to feeling that way,” he soothed, rocking me gently. “You don’t have to face this alone, I’m right here to help you. I don’t hate you, I’m not afraid of you, and I will help.”
“How?” I demanded, not arguing but needing the reassurance. “I don’t know what’s happening to me, or why it’s happening so fast! Unless you can think of a way to stop it, how can you help?”
“Maybe I can help you accept the fact that it’s not something that can—or should-be stopped,” he answered, only dimly aware of the pleasure he was feeling at the way I clung to him. “Maybe I can help you understand that you owe it to yourself to be the very best you can be, in whatever you do. Trying to deny your abilities means you’re trying to deny yourself, Terry, and that’s wrong. You must always be proud of what you are, and that will help you to be proud of what you do—and do things to make yourself proud.”
“How am I supposed to be proud of chaos?” I asked, feeling tired but fractionally less upset. “Things are coming at me too fast, and I just can’t handle them.”
“You still don’t want to handle them,” Garth corrected, gently but refusing to be argued with. “Of course things are coming fast, how else did you expect them to come? When a baby learns to walk, the first steps take the longest; once they do come, though, everything else follows with blinding speed. Striding, hopping, running, climbing—and falling down. There’s no shame in falling down, girl, only in refusing to pick yourself up again.”
“You think my new abilities are normal developments?” I asked with a frown, leaning back again so that I might see him. “How could they be normal developments? I didn’t only just become an empath.”
“In a manner of speaking, you did,” he said, one finger scratching at his cheek as his mind worked. “I hadn’t looked at it that way before we began talking, but now it seems obvious. Before the blank time you spent recovering from the storm damage, you used almost nothing of your abilities even when you were awakened. You began stretching your mental muscles here on Rimilia, but if physical development takes time, why shouldn’t mental? You were hurt by the thunderstorm and the battle you had with that intruder, but once the hurt was healed you were developed enough to go on to bigger and better things. Now you’re ready to hop, skip, jump—and maybe even fly.”
“Flying you can forget about,” I told him firmly, but couldn’t help matching his grin. What he’d said made a strange kind of sense, and also fit in with my own wondering thoughts on the subject. Empaths on Central were taught to use their abilities, but only up to a certain point and were definitely discouraged from experimenting. It wasn’t even possible to think about experimenting unless you knew there was something to experiment with, and being unawakened—which was the way empaths lived on Central-meant the very memory of the talent had been taken away. My people had evidently worked hard to keep me tied up tight, but now I was beginning to slip the leash.
“I don’t think I really blame Central for trying to limit their empaths,” I said after a pause, losing the grin Garth had helped me find. “If what I’ve been running into is a sample of what we’re capable of, they have a right to be frightened.”
“Garbage!” he snorted, riveting my attention to him—and away from my wristbands. “They have the right to demand that you obey their laws, but not to cripple you because of a .suspicion you might not. You don’t back away in fear from something you don’t understand, you try to understand it so you won’t fear it. And some people won’t fear it even if they don’t understand-like Tammad, for instance.”
Those gray eyes were staring straight at me again, obviously not having missed the place my attention had wandered to. I deliberately put my right hand around my left wrist, letting the feel and presence of the band soak into me, its hard strength helping me to ask what had to be asked.