The Forbidden Circle (49 page)

“But if she is well enough to ask for that, perhaps she is really better,” he said with a glimmer of hope. “Take it to her, Andrew. But,” and he paused, said at last, reluctantly, “don’t touch her. She’s still reacting to you.”

“But isn’t that what we want?”

“Not with the two systems overloading and jamming,” Damon said, and Andrew bent his head, saying in a low voice, “I promise.”

He went past Damon, into the room where Callista lay—and stopped in shock. Callista lay silent, unmoving, and for a dreadful moment he could not see her breathing. Her eyes were open, but she did not see him, and her eyes did not move to follow him as his shadow fell between her and the light. A terrible fear gripped him; he felt a soundless scream tightening his throat. He whirled to shout for Damon, but Damon had already picked up the telepathic impact of his panic and was running into the room. Then a great sigh of relief, almost a sob, burst from Damon.

“It’s all right,” he said, catching at Andrew as if dizzy, “she’s not dead, she’s . . . she’s left her body. She’s in the overworld, that’s all.”

Andrew whispered, staring at the wide-open sightless eyes, “What can we do for her?”

“In her present physical state she won’t be able to stay long,” Damon said, trouble, concern, and hope mingling in his voice. “I did not even know she was strong enough for this. But if she is . . .” He did not say it aloud, but they could both hear what he did not say:
If she is, perhaps it is not as bad as we fear.

 

Moving in the gray spaces of the overworld, Callista sensed their cries and their fear, but dimly, like a dream. For the first time in an eternity, she was free from pain. She had left her racked body behind, stepping out of it like a too-large garment, slipping on to the familiar realms. She felt herself formulate in the gray spaces of the overworld, her body cool and quiet and at peace as it had been before. . . . She saw herself wrapped in the airy translucent folds of her Keeper’s robe, a
leronis
, a sorceress.
Do I still see myself like this?
she wondered, deeply troubled.
I am not a Keeper, but a wedded woman, in thought and heart if not in fact
. . . .

The emptiness of the gray world frightened her. She reached out, almost automatically, for a landmark, and saw in the gray distance the faint glimmer that was the energy-net equivalent, in this world, of the Arilinn Tower.

I cannot go there
, she thought,
I have renounced it
, yet with the thought she felt a passionate longing for the world she had left forever behind her. As if the longing had created its own answer, she saw it brighten, then, almost with the swiftness of thought, and she was
there
, within the Veil, in her own secret retreat, the Garden of Fragrance, the Keeper’s Garden.

Then she saw the veiled form before her, slowly taking shape. She did not need to see Leonie’s face to recognize her here.

“My darling child,” Leonie said. Callista knew it was only a tenuous contact in thought, but so real was their presence to one another in this familiar realm that Leonie’s voice sounded rich, warm, tenderer than ever in life. Only on this nonphysical plane, she knew, could Leonie risk this kind of emotion. “Why have you come to us? I had thought you gone forever beyond our reach,
chiya
. Or have you strayed here in a dream?”

“It is no dream,
Kiya
.” Anger washed through her, like a cold shock bathing every nerve. She controlled it, as she had been taught from childhood, for the anger of the Altons could kill. Her voice cold and demanding, rejecting Leonie’s tenderness, she stated, “I came to seek you, to ask you why you spoke a blessing without truth! Why did you lie to me?” Her own voice was like a scream in her ears. “Why did you bind me in bonds I could not break, so that when you gave me in marriage it was mockery? Do you grudge me happiness, who knew none of your own?”

Leonie flinched. Her voice was filled with pain. “I had hoped you happy and already a bride,
chiya
.”

“You know what you had done to make that impossible! Can you swear that you have not neutered me, as was done in old days to the lady of Arilinn?”

Leonie’s face was filled with horror. She said, “The Gods witness it, child, and the holy things at Hali, you have not been neutered. But Callista, you were very young when you came to the Tower. . . .”

Time seemed to flow backward as Leonie spoke and Callista felt herself dragged back to a time half forgotten, her hair still curling about her cheeks instead of braided like a woman’s, felt again the frightened reverence she had felt for Leonie before she had become mother, guide, teacher, priestess. . . .

“You succeeded as Keeper when six others had failed, my child. I thought you proud of that.”

“I was,” Callista murmured, bending her head.

“But you misled me, Callista, or I would never have let you go. You made me believe—though I hardly felt it possible—that already you were responding to your lover, that if you had not lain with him it would only be a little while. And so I thought perhaps I had not really succeeded, that perhaps your success as Keeper came because you
believed
yourself free of such things as tormented the other women. Then, when love came into your life and you found where your heart lay, then, as has happened with many Keepers, it was no longer possible to remain unawakened. And so I blessed you, and gave you back your oath. But if this is not true, Callista, if it is not true. . . .”

Callista remembered Damon flinging the angry taunt at her:
Will you spend your life counting holes in linen towels and making herbs for spice-bread, you who were Callista of Arilinn?
And Leonie heard it too, in her mind, an echo.

“I said it before, my darling, now I offer it again. You can return to us. A little time, a little retraining, and you would be one of us again.”

She gestured, the air rippled, and Callista was clothed in the crimson of a Keeper, ritual ornaments at her brow and her throat.

“Come back to us, Callista. Come back.”

She said, faltering, “My husband—”

Leonie gestured that away as nothing. “Freemate marriage is nothing, Callista, a legal fiction, meaningless until consummated. What binds you to this man?”

Callista started to say “Love,” and under Leonie’s scornful eyes could not get the word out. She said, “A promise, Leonie.”

“Your promise to us came first. You were born to this work, Callista, it is your destiny. Do you remember, you consented to what was done to you? You were one of seven who came to us that year. Six young women failed, one after another. They were already grown, their nerve channels matured. They found the clearing of the channels and the conditioning against response too painful. And then there was Hilary Castamir, do you remember? She became Keeper, but every month, when her woman’s cycles came upon her, she went into convulsions, and the cost seemed too great. I was desperate, Callista, do you remember? I was doing the work of three Keepers, and my own health began to suffer. And for this reason I explained it to you, and you consented—”

“How could I consent?” Callista cried in despair. “I was a child! I did not even know what it was you asked!”

“Yet you consented, to be trained when you were not yet full-grown and the channels still immature. And so you adjusted easily to the training.”

“I remember,” Callista said, very low. She had been so proud, that she should succeed where so many failed, that she should be Callista of Arilinn, take her place with the great Keepers of legend. She remembered the exhilaration of seizing the direction of the great circles, of feeling the enormous stresses flow unhindered through her body, of seizing and directing the enormous energon rings. . . .

“And you were so young, I thought it unlikely you would ever change. It was pure chance. But, my darling, this can all be yours again. You have only to say the word.”

“No!” Callista cried. “No! I have given back my oath—I do not want it!” And yet in a curious sense she was not sure.

“Callista, I could have forced you to return. You were virgin still, and the law permitted me to require you to come back to Arilinn. The need is still great, and I am old. Yet it is as I said, it is too heavy a burden to be borne unconsenting. I released you, child, even though I am old and this means I must struggle to bear my burden till Janine is old enough and strong enough for this work. Does this sound as if I wished you ill, or lied when I blessed you and bade you live happily with your lover? I thought you already free. I thought that in giving back your oath I bowed to the inevitable; that you were already freed in fact and there was no reason to hold to the word and torture you by the attempt to make you return, to clear your channels and force you to try again.”

Callista whispered, “I hoped . . . I believed I was free. . . .”

She could feel the horror in Leonie, like a tangible thing. “My poor child, what a risk to take? How could you care so much for some man, when you have all this before you? Callista, my darling, come back to us! We will heal all your hurts. Come back where you belong—”

“No!” It was a great cry of renunciation. As if it had reverberated into the other world, she could hear Andrew’s voice, crying out her name in agony.

“Callista, Callista, come back to us . . .”

There was a brief, sharp shock, the shock of falling. Leonie was gone and pain arrowed through her body. She found herself lying in her bed, Andrew’s face white as death above hers.

“I thought I’d lost you for good this time,” he whispered.

“It might be better . . . if you had,” she murmured in torment.

 

Leonie was right. Nothing binds me to him but words . . . and my destiny is to be Keeper
. For a moment, time swam out of focus and she saw herself sheltered behind a strange unfamiliar wall, not Arilinn. She seized the strands of force within her hands, cast the energon rings. . . .

She reached out for Andrew, instinctly shrank away. Then, feeling his dismay, reached for him, disregarding the knifing, warning pain.

She said, “I will never leave you again,” and clung to his hands in desperation.

Nothing binds me to Andrew but words. And yet . . . words . . . words have power.
She opened her eyes, looking directly into her husband’s, and repeated the words he had said at their wedding.

“Andrew. In good times and in bad . . . in wealth and in poverty . . . in sickness and health . . . while life shall last,” she said, and closed her hands over his. “Andrew, my love, you must not weep.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Damon felt he had never before been quite so frustrated as now. Leonie had acted for reasons which seemed good to her at the time, and he could, a little, understand her motives.

There must be a Keeper at Arilinn. All during Leonie’s life, that had been the first consideration, nothing could be allowed to supersede it. But there was no way he could explain this to Andrew.

“I’m sure if I were in your place, I should feel much the same,” he said. It was late at night, Callista had dropped into an exhausted, restless sleep, but at least she was sleeping, undrugged, and Damon tried to find a shred of hope in that. “You cannot blame Leonie—”

“I can and I do!” Andrew interrupted, and Damon sighed.

“Try to understand. She did what she thought best, not only for the Towers but for Callista too, to save her the pain and suffering. She could hardly have been expected to foresee that Callista would want to marry—” He had started to say, “to marry an out-worlder.” He caught himself and stopped, but of course Andrew picked up the thought anyway. A dull red flush, half anger, half embarrassment, spread over the Terran’s face. He turned away from Damon, his face looking closed and stubborn, and Damon sighed, thinking that this had to be settled quickly or they would lose Andrew too.

The thought was bitter, almost intolerable. Since that first moment of fourfold meshing within the matrix, while Callista was still prisoner, Damon had found something he had thought irrevocably lost to him when he was sent from the Tower, the telepathic bond of the circle.

He had lost it when Leonie sent him from Arilinn, to resign himself to live without it, and then, beyond hope, he had found it again in his two girl cousins and this out-worlder. . . . Now he would rather die than let the bond be broken again.

He said firmly, “Leonie did this, for whatever reasons, good or bad, and she must bear the responsibility for it. Callista was not strong enough to get the answer from her. But Leonie, and Leonie alone, may hold the key to her trouble.”

Andrew looked out into the black, snow-shot darkness beyond the window. “That’s no help. How far is Arilinn from here?”

“I don’t know how you would reckon the distance. We calculate it at ten days ride,” Damon said, “but I had no thought of going to her there. I shall do as Callista has done and seek her out in the overworld.” His narrowed lips sketched a bleak smile. “With
Dom
Esteban disabled and Domenic not yet grown, I am her nearest kinsman. I have right and responsibility to call Leonie to account.”

But who could call a Hastur to account, Hastur, and the Lady of Arilinn?

“I feel like going along with you and raising a little hell myself,” said Andrew.

“You wouldn’t know what to say to her. I promise you, Andrew, if there is an answer to be found, I’ll find it.”

“And if there isn’t?”

Damon turned away, not even wanting to think about that. Callista slept restlessly, tossing and moaning in her sleep. Ellemir was doing some needlework in an armchair, frowning over the stitches, her face bright in the oval of the lamp. Damon reached for her, feeling the quick response in her mind, a touch of reassurance and love.
I need her with me, and I must go alone
.