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Callista followed that thought, and said, “No, I love him, more than I can tell you. Yet there is anotherold saying, I never knew till now how true: no choice goes wholly unregretted, either way will bring more,both of joy and sorrow, than we can foresee. My life had seemed unchanging to me, already settled, sosimple: I would take Leonie’s place in Arilinn and serve there until death or age freed me from theburden. And that too seemed a good life to me. Love, marriage, children—these things were not evendaydreams to me!”

Her voice was trembling. Ellemir got out of bed and went to sit on the edge of her sister’s, taking herhand in the darkness. Callista moved, an unconscious, automatic gesture, to draw it away, then saidruefully, more to herself than Ellemir, “I suppose I must learn not to do that.”

Ellemir said gently, “I do not think Andrew will appreciate it.”

She felt Callista flinch from the words. “It is a… reflex. I find it as hard to break as it was hard to learn.”

Ellemir said impulsively, “You must have been very lonely, Callista!”

Callista’s words seemed to come up from some barricaded depth. “Lonely? Not always. In the Towerwe are closer than you can imagine. So much a part of one another. Even so, as Keeper I was alwaysapart from them, separated by a… a barrier no one could ever cross. It would have been easier, I think,to be truly alone.” Ellemir felt that her sister was not speaking to her at all, but to remote and unsharablememories, trying to put words to something she had never been willing to speak about.

“The others in the Tower could… could give some expression to that closeness. Could touch. Could love. A Keeper learns a double separateness. To be close, closer than any other, to each mind within the matrix circle, and yet never… never quite real to them. Never a woman, never even a living, breathing human being. Only… only part of the screens and relays.” She paused, her mind lost in that strange, barricaded, lonely life which had been hers for so many years.

“So many women try it, and fail. They become involved, somehow, with the human side of the other men and women there. In my first year at Arilinn, I saw six young girls come there, to be trained as Keeper, and fail. And I was proud because I could endure the training. It is… not easy,” she said, knowing the words ridiculously inadequate. They gave no hint of the months of rigid physical and mental discipline, until her mind was trained to unbelievable power, until her body could endure the inhuman flows and stresses. She said at last, softly and bitterly, “Now I wish I had failed too!” and stopped, hearing her own words and horrified by them.

Ellemir said softly, “I wish we hadn’t grown so far apart,
 
breda
 
.” Almost for the first time, she spokethe word for sister in the intimate mode; it could also mean darling. Callista responded to the tone, ratherthan the word.

“It was never that I didn’t… didn’t love you, or remember you, Ellemir. But I was taught—oh, you can’t imagine how!—to hold myself apart from every human contact. And you were my twin sister—I had been closest to you. For my first year, I cried myself to sleep at night because I was so lonely for you. But later… later you came to seem like all the rest of my life before Arilinn, like someone I had known only in a dream. And so, later, when I was allowed to see you now and again, to visit you, I tried to keep you distant, part of the dream, so that I would not be torn apart with every new separation. Our lives lay

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apart and I knew it must be so.”

Her voice was sadder than tears. Impulsively, eager to comfort, Ellemir lay down beside her sister andtook her in her arms. Callista went rigid against the touch, then, sighing, lay still; but Ellemir sensed theeffort her sister was making not to pull away from her. She thought, with a violent surge of anger,
 
Howcould they do this to her? It’s deforming, as if they’d made her a cripple or a hunchback
 
!

She hugged her and said, “I hope we can find our way back to each other!”

Callista tolerated the gesture, though she did not return it. “So do I, Ellemir.”

“It seems dreadful, to think you have never been in love.”

Her sister said lightly, “Oh, it is not as bad as that. We were so close in the Towers that I suppose, inone way or another, we were always in love.” It was too dark to see Callista’s face, but Ellemir sensedthe smile as she added. “What if I should tell you that when I first came to Arilinn, Damon was still there,and for a little I fancied myself in love with him? Are you very jealous, Ellemir?”

Ellemir laughed. “No, not very.”

“He was a senior technician, he taught me monitoring. Of course, I was not a woman to him, just one of the little girls in training. Of course for him there was no woman alive, save for Leonie—” She stopped herself and said quickly, “That is long over, of course.”

Ellemir laughed aloud. “I know Damon’s heart is all mine. How could I be jealous of such love as a mancan give a Keeper, a pledged virgin?” Ellemir heard her own words and broke off in consternation. “Oh, Callista, I did not mean—”

“I think you did,” Callista said gently, “but love is love, even without any hint of the physical. If I had not known that before, I would have learned it in the caves of Corresanti, when I came to love Andrew. It is love, and it was real, and if I were you I would not smile at it, nor scorn Damon’s love for Leonie, as if it were a boy’s green fancy.” She thought, but did not say, that it had been real enough to disturb Leonie’s peace, even if no one but Callista herself had ever guessed it.

She did right to send Damon away…

“It seems strange to me to love without desire,” Ellemir said, “and not quite real, whatever you say.”

“Men have desired me,” Callista said quietly, “in spite of the taboo. It happens. Most of the time it aroused nothing in me, it only made me feel as if… as if dirty insects were crawling on my body. But there were other times when I almost wished I knew how to desire them in return.”

Suddenly her voice broke. Ellemir heard a wild note in it, very like terror. “Oh, Ellemir, Elli, if I shrinkeven from your touch—if I shrink from the touch of my twin-born sister— what will I do to Andrew? Oh, merciful Avarra, how much will I have to hurt him?”

“
 
Breda
, Andrew loves you, surely he will understand—”

“But it may not be enough to understand! Oh, Elli, even if it were someone like Damon, who knows the ways of the Towers, knows what a Keeper is, I would be afraid! And Andrew does not know, or understand, and there are no words to tell him! And he too has abandoned the only world he has ever

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known, and what can I give him in return?”

Ellemir said gently, “But you have been freed from a Keeper’s oath.” The habit of many years, sheknew, could not be broken in a day, but once Callista freed herself from her fears, surely all would bewell! She held Callista close, saying with quiet tenderness, “Love is nothing to fear,
 
breda
 
, even if itseems strange to you, or frightful.”

“I knew you did not understand,” Callista said, sighing. “There were other women in the Towers, women who did not live by a Keeper’s laws, who were free to share the closeness we all shared. There was so much… so much love among us, and I knew how happy it made them, to love, or even to satisfy desire, when there was not love but only… need, and kindness.” She sighed again. “I am not ignorant, Ellemir,” she said with a curious, forlorn dignity, “inexperienced, yes, because of what I am, but not ignorant. I have learned ways to… not to be much aware of it. It was easier that way, but I knew, oh, yes, I knew. Just as I knew, for instance, that you had lovers before Damon.”

Ellemir laughed. “I never made any secret of it. If I did not speak of it to you, it was because I knew thelaws under which you lived—or knew as much as any outsider can know—and that seemed a barrierbetween us.”

“But you must surely have known that I envied you that,” Callista said, and Ellemir sat up in bed, looking at her twin in surprise and shock. They could see one another only dimly; a small green moon, the dimmest of crescents, hung outside their window. At last Ellemir said, hesitating, “Envy… me? I had thought… thought surely… that a Keeper, pledged so, would surely despise me, or think it shameful, that I—that a
 
comynara
 
should be no different than a peasant woman, or some female animal in heat.”

“Despise you? Never,” Callista said. “If we do not talk much about it, it is for fear we would not be able to endure our differences. Even the other women in the Towers, who do not share our isolation, look on us as alien, almost inhuman… Separateness, pride, become our only defense, pride, as if to conceal a wound, conceal our own… our own incompletion.”

Her voice sounded shaken, but Ellemir thought that her sister’s face, in the dim moonlight, was inhumanlyimpassive, like something carved in stone. It seemed that Callista was almost heartbreakingly distant, thatthey were trying to talk across a great and aching chasm which lay between them.

All her life Ellemir had been taught to think of a Keeper as something remote, far above her, to berevered, almost worshiped. Even her own sister, her twin, was like a goddess, far out of reach. Now fora moment she had an almost dizzying sense of reversal, shaking her certainties; now it was Callista wholooked up to her, envied her, Callista who was somehow younger than herself and far more vulnerable,not clothed in the remote majesty of Arilinn, but a woman like herself, frail, unsure… She said in awhisper, “I wish I had known this about you before, Callie.”

“I wish I had known it about myself,” Callista said with a sad smile. “We are not encouraged to think much about such things, or about much of anything but our work. I am only beginning to discover myself as a woman, and I… do not quite know how to begin.” It seemed to Ellemir an incredibly sad confession. After a moment Callista said softly in the darkness, “Ellemir, I have told you what I can of my life. Tell me something of yours. I don’t want to pry, but you have had lovers. Tell me about that.”

Ellemir hesitated, but sensed that there was more behind the question than simple sexual curiosity. Therewas that too, and considering the way in which Callista had been forced to stifle this kind of awarenessduring her years as Keeper, it was a healthy sign and augured well for the coming marriage. But therewas more too, a desire to share something of Ellemir’s life during the years of their separation.

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Responding impulsively to that need, she said, “It was the year Dorian was married. Did you meet

Mikhail at all?”

“I saw him at the wedding.” Their older sister Dorian had married a
 
nedestro
 
cousin of Lord Ardais’. “He seemed a kind, well-spoken young man, but I exchanged no more than a few dozen words with him. I had seen Dorian so seldom since childhood.”

“It was that winter,” said Ellemir. “Dorian begged me to come and spend the winter with her; she was lonely, and already pregnant, and had made few friends of the mountain women. Father gave me leave to go. And later in the spring, when Dorian grew heavy, so it was no pleasure to her to share his bed, Mikhail and I had grown to be such friends that I took her place there.” She giggled a little, reminiscently.

Callista said, startled, “You were no more than fifteen!”

Ellemir answered, laughing, “That is old enough to marry; Dorian had been no more. I would have beenmarried, had Father not wanted me to stay home and keep his house!”

Again Callista felt the cruel envy, the sense of desperate alienation. How simple it had been for Ellemir,and how right! And how different for her! “Were there others?”

Ellemir smiled in the darkness. “Not many. I learned there that I liked lying with men, but I did not wantto be gossiped about as they whisper scandal about Sybil-Mhari—you have heard that she takes loversfrom Guardsmen or even grooms—and I did not want to bear a child I would not be allowed to rear,though Dorian pledged that if I gave Mikhail a child she would foster it. And I did not want to be marriedoff in a hurry to someone I did not like, which I knew Father would do if there was scandal. So there arenot more than two or three men who could say, if they would, that they have had more of me than myfingers to kiss at Midsummer night. Even Damon. He has waited patiently—”

She gave an odd, excited little laugh. Callista stroked her twin’s soft hair.

“Well, now the waiting is nearly over, love.”

Ellemir cuddled close to her sister. She could sense Callista’s fears, her ambivalence, but she stillmisunderstood its nature.

She has been pledged virgin
, Ellemir thought,
she has lived her life apart from men, so it is notsurprising that she should be afraid. But once she has come to understand that she is free, Andrewwill be kind to her, and patient, and she will come at last to happiness… happiness like mine
 
…
and Damon’s
 
.

They were lightly in rapport, and Callista followed Ellemir’s thoughts, but she would not trouble hersister by telling her that it was not nearly as simple as that.

“We should sleep,
 
breda
 
, tomorrow is our wedding day, and tomorrow night,” she added

mischievously, “Damon may not let you sleep very much.”

Laughing, Ellemir closed her eyes. Callista lay silent, her twin’s head resting on her shoulder, staring intothe darkness. After a long time she sensed, as the thread of rapport between them thinned and Ellemirmoved into dreams, that her sister slept. Quietly she slid from the bed and went to the window, lookingout over the moon-flooded landscape. She stood there till she was cramped and cold, until the moons setand a thin fine rain began to blur the windowpane. With the hard discipline of years, she did not weep.