“He doesn’t want an empath, Len,” I whispered, feeling the tears roll down my cheeks. “He said he doesn’t, and you know he never lies. Why did it have to come back?”
I buried my face against my knees again as Len’s arm tightened around me, his mind frantically trying to keep the stricken feeling from reaching me. Len knew as well as I that Tammad didn’t lie, and there was nothing he could say to alter the truth: my life with Tammad was over before it had really started. Garth came closer to reach down and stroke my hair with an empathetic echo of pain in his mind, as helpless as Len to do anything to stop it.
“What do you do near my woman?” a cold voice growled angrily. I felt Len flinch as I raised my head again to see Tammad in the doorway, and then the big barbarian was coming toward us, his left palm touching his sword hilt with a sliding caress that brought a flash of fear to both Garth and Len. They’d learned enough about Rimilian swordplay to really appreciate what level Tammad stood at, which was considerably higher than any they were likely to attain in the reasonably near future.
“Tammad, we have good news,” Garth began, trying for hearty good cheer in his tone instead of nervousness, but he gave up the attempt when it was immediately clear that he was being ignored. Tammad was staring at Len, and the lack of expression on his face was chilling.
“You were told, were you not, that you were not to approach Terril again?” he said to Len, the growl in his voice echoing the anger in his mind. “Now you have not only approached her and put your hands upon her without permission, you have also brought her tears. No man may bring tears to my woman and feel himself safe from my wrath, no man! Stand before me, Lenham, and speak quickly upon what occurs here.”
I was trembling as Len took his arm back and slowly straightened out his crouch, his mind clanging with shock and fear. I felt the fear too, a reaction to the deadliness flowing coldly from Tammad’s mind, a deadliness I’d felt many times before. I knew I had to explain the misunderstanding before he hurt Len, but the trembling fear that gripped me was almost physical in its hold, freezing my throat and paralyzing my will. Len straightened all the way, his eyes widening, and then he pointed a disbelieving finger at Tammad.
“You’re projecting!” Len said hoarsely, the shock still bright in his mind as he stared up into Tammad’s face. “I’ve never had it coming straight at me before, or I would have seen it sooner. No wonder you were able to stand against Terry’s projections—when you’re angry you’re almost as strong as she is!”
“What nonsense do you speak?” the barbarian demanded, frowning at Len in annoyance at the way he was being stared at. For my part I was frozen in shock, staring up in a daze of dumbfoundedness. When the annoyance touched Tammad his anger lessened—and so did the terrible fear I’d felt! What Len said was true—Tammad was projecting!
“And you said you didn’t want anything to do with empaths?” Len laughed, a wild sound to it. “I’ll bet you even receive a little without knowing you’re doing it. Hell, man, you have to, or you’d never be so good with people! You work with what squeezes through that cloud of calm you use as a shield, groping around blindly, but stronger than any untrained empath has the right to be! And now that I think about it, I’ll bet you’re not the only one. L’lendaa have too much control over themselves for it to be an accident. I’ll bet most of you are latents!”
“So that’s why I always found myself drowning in panic when you were mad at me,” I blurted, rising to my feet to stare at Tammad as wide-eyed as Len had been. “You were projecting at me so strongly that I was completely blowed over. If I’d known enough to shield—but I didn’t know enough, not then and not when the men of this world projected desire at me. Unshielded, I couldn’t have resisted any of you in a million years. You forced me with your minds as well as your bodies—every one of you!”
“Wenda, I have no knowledge of what you speak,” Tammad said, his mind filling with confusion and disturbance over the outrage I was showing. “Why do you look at me so—as though I am no longer the man who banded you’?”
“Oh, you’re the same one, all right,” I said, putting my fists on my hips as I looked up at him. “The one who was so nobly proud of never having taken unfair advantage of anyone, and the one who said he couldn’t cope with an empath—and the one who punished me for using my abilities. Well, what about you’? Who punishes you for projecting every time you lose your temper? Which happens a lot more often than you care to admit! Well? Who gets to do the honors?”
I was too furious to really notice that he was actually backing up away from me as I advanced on him, but if I’d stopped to think about it I wouldn’t have been all that surprised. I was projecting the same sort of anger at him that he usually sent toward me, and my projections were still stronger than his. I’d copied that sense of deadliness and thrown that in as well, giving him a taste of what had time and again sent me cringing back from him. He didn’t cringe the way I had but he did back up, shaking his head to throw off the effects of my projection. He was damned sensitive, all right, to know so accurately when someone was projecting at him, but he didn’t get anywhere until that heavy calm swirled back into his mind, blocking off most of my efforts. He used that calm as both a shield and a control on his own emotions, and once he had it in place he stopped backing up.
“That’s a good question Terry just asked,” Len put in, coming up to stand next to me. “The least she ever got for unauthorized projecting was a good whacking on the backside, which is a lot less than what you gave me for doing the same thing to her. Now that we’ve found you doing it, what do you get for it?”
“You may attempt to do to me what I did to you,” Tammad told Len in a mutter, his hand to his head as he fought to throw off the lingering effects of my projection. “You need not even wait till this throbbing abandons me, should the matter touch you strongly enough. I feel no regret for what punishments I gave, for your power was exercised willfully while mine was not. Should this insanity be true.”
His last sentence sent a quiver through his mind, a rippling in the calm that showed how upset he really was. He didn’t want anything to do with empathy, especially from the inside out, and all the anger drained out of me as though it had been blotted up in a giant towel. I used pain control to soothe away the throbbing headache my projection had given him, then turned and hurried back to the windows.
“My thanks, Lenham,” I heard him say with a sigh as I sank down among the cushions. “To give aid rather than seek revenge shows you to be a man of strength.”
“Don’t thank me,” Len denied with a snort of amusement. “I don’t have that sort of strength, character-wise or pain-controlwise. Don’t you recognize the touch of a Prime?”
“Terril?” Tammad said, and I could almost see his incredulity even though I was facing toward the windows. “Her power has returned?”
“That’s the good news I was trying to tell you about,” Garth said, a bemused quality to his mind. “I didn’t know then just how much news there was.”
“That’s what brought us up here,” Len said, his tone wry. “We—ah—discovered that Terry had her ability back and came to congratulate her. You found her crying because she had the foolish idea that you wouldn’t be happy to have her the way she used to be. Now wasn’t it silly of her to believe you wouldn’t want her.”
There was no answer from Tammad to that, and I closed my eyes and put my face in my hands. That rigid calm was keeping me from seeing how he really felt the way it usually did, but I didn’t have to read him to know the truth. He had told me the truth, and he didn’t lie.