No. Not Brin. This man was more weathered than Brin, more muscular. Even looking at his back, she could feel the difference in his temperament. Leather-tough and capable, she gauged him. She stood up silently, cast about for a stick or a rock. She didn't know why he was angry with her, but she didn't want to face him without a weapon.
'It's all right.' He didn't turn to face her, and at first she didn't realize that he was speaking to her, not Goat. 'I didn't want to stun you. But it was the only way to force you back inside yourself. Before Gotheris died under your onslaught.'
She hadn't found a weapon, and as he turned slowly to face her, she decided she probably wouldn't need one. There was something about his face that was calming. The man seemed to radiate a soothing kindness. She relaxed.
'I'm Dellin, Brin's brother. I came looking for you.'
Ki felt suddenly woozy. She sat down, drew her knees up, folded her arms atop them and leaned her chin on her arms. Her thoughts seemed sluggish and numbed. She asked, 'How did you find us?'
Dellin made a sound between a cough and a grunt. 'As well ask a Human mother how she knew where her screaming child was. Brin had sent me word that the boy would come to me sometime this season.His message stank of distress; I suspected then that something was wrong. Then I heard from Tamshin that some of their folk had seen a Jore-eyed boy on a wagon coming toward Tekum. So, suspecting trouble, I came to meet you. Once I got past Rivercross, it was not hard to find you.' Dellin shook his head slowly. 'The boy has been taught no shielding at all. What was Brin thinking of, to keep him so long? I should have had him ten years ago.'
'Is Goat... Gotheris all right?' The boy lay unnaturally still. His arms were folded on his chest, his legs drawn out straight. Composed like a corpse, she thought, and she shivered in the sunlight.
'I have him asleep, for now. And I've pushed him back mostly inside himself. Poor boy couldn't understand what I was doing, and fought me. Strength such as I never faced before; luckily, he is untrained, and I know tricks he doesn't even suspect. Still ...' Dellin's voice trailed off as his eyes met Ki's. Jore eyes, like Goat's, but more comfortably dark, more Human.
'You're confused. I'm sorry. So Brin didn't even see fit to make sure you understood the nature of the boy. You're not from around these parts, are you?'
'We ... I come from the lands north of here.'
Dellin nodded slowly. 'Then you know nothing of Jores, do you? Never even seen a full-blooded one, I suppose, for they don't willingly come around Humans anymore, even here.'
'Why is that?'
'Humans kill them.' He fixed Ki with a stare that made her feel uncomfortable, almost guilty. 'They always say they don't mean to. But they do it anyway. Humans feel things so strongly, so intensely, and when those feelings become too strong and there is a Jore nearby, they simply empty their pain, or joy, or lust into the Jore.'
'Is that ... is that what I was doing to Gotheris?' Ki asked faintly.
His eyes met hers. 'We were not meant to experience such intensity of emotion. It kills us.'
Ki realized abruptly that this man in his Human form did not recognize himself as Human. He was as different from her as a Brurjan or a T'cheria. As he looked at her she realized the depth of his alienness. The very familiarity of his Human shape suddenly seemed monstrous, a mask of clay and twine to deceive the unwary. She felt herself draw back from him.
'Yes,' he agreed. 'And Gotheris is just as foreign to you as I am, but the poor child does not even know that yet. What Brin was thinking of to keep him, to let him be raised by a Human mother, I do not know. The boy ...' Dellin's voice faltered. His inhuman eyes bored into Ki's, seeking her understanding. 'The boy has no sense of self. He has no personal identity, no idea of where he stops and others begin. He has grown up exposed to a constant flood of emotion. There is no place I can touch him that has not already been scarred over, like a piece of glass abraded by sand until it is opaque.' Dellin's voice became strained. 'He no longer believes what he senses others feeling. You Humans so often act one way when you feel another. He has tried to copy that, and only hurt himself more. Sometimes he ignores what others feel and thus responds incorrectly. And offensively.' Dellin's eyes bored into Ki's as if seeing all she remembered. 'But most often he becomes whatever he is near, greeting anger with anger, distrust with distrust...'
Ki suddenly had an image of colors spilled from paint pots, of their edges merging, of yellow meetingblue and becoming green, and then red leaching into it, and purple, until all bled into murkiness and no true color was left. Goat. His fickle moods, his suddenly strange behavior as he tried to become acceptable by adopting whatever behavior and personality seemed successful. Wanting to be liked for himself, but not even sure who or what that self was. 'Didn't Brin know?' she asked helplessly.
Dellin shook his head slowly. 'I am more Jore than he, even though we are brothers. The Human blood flowed more surely in his veins. He felt no discomfort with his Human mate. When the boy was small, I sensed he would be strongly Jore. I asked for Gotheris then, but they denied me.' Dellin squeezed his eyes shut, opened them again. 'It was the mother more than my brother, I believe. Even then she was abusing the child, loving him with no moderation, giving him no chance to develop his own feelings. I could not stand to watch it, and it caused many quarrels between Brin and me. Finally, he drove me from his home. And I let my own anger persuade me to do a cruel thing; I left Gotheris there.' His voice suddenly deepened. 'This is as much my fault as theirs.'
Ki rose carefully, found she was steady on her legs. The inside of her cheek still leaked blood into her mouth, but it seemed a trifling hurt in light of what Dellin had told her. She moved to stand over Goat. The boy's face was unlined, his eyes closed. She stooped closer to see the rise and fall of his breast. He seemed so like to dead that she put out a hand to touch him.
'Don't!' warned Dellin. 'I have quenched your emotions for you, and pushed him back inside himself. But you have been too long together, and touch strengthens any link. You'd kill him.'
Ki drew back. She sat still a moment, wondering why her own thoughts seemed so slow to her. 'Quenched my emotions?' she said aloud. She groped within herself, seeking for some difference. Vandien was dead. That was sad, horribly sad. She knew it was tragic, but could not feel it. It was an intellectual grieving she felt now, a keen-edged inventory of her pain that somehow did not cut her. She was very still, considering it.
'Muffled, perhaps, is a better word. It is a thing we Jore can do for Humans. A kind of healing, for those whose emotions threaten to overwhelm them. Sometimes a Human feels so intensely that he retreats too far from himself, and cannot find his way out again. Then we Jore can enter him, can deaden his pain and bring him out, or erase the memory that is too painful to live with. It is the Jore healing. Surely you have heard of this?'
Ki shook her head. She lifted her eyes to Dellin. 'What will you do now?'
'Take the boy to Villena with me. Start the training that should have begun when he was a baby. I will have to keep him insulated from others at first, until he learns to shield himself, but after that, he will be fine. I hope.' His strange eyes seemed to pin her confusion down like it was a wriggling insect. 'What will you do?'
'I don't know.' Ki cleared her throat, made a firm decision not to sound so feeble. 'Find my wagon and team and reclaim it. I can't make a living without it. Go back north, I suppose, where I understand the folk and know the roads. Start again.'
'You're lying to yourself. You have no desire to do that.'
She felt her eyes go flat, knew their green had gone grey. 'Nevertheless,' she said quietly.
'What about the man? This Vandien?' She stared at him, feeling plundered. He read her again. 'What I know comes from Gotheris; the poisons I had to bleed from him before I could induce him to sleep. He was full of your images of this man, of your sharings. You have a bond to Vandien, one not easily severed. If he bleeds, you feel the pain, and he takes joy in your triumphs. You will abandon him?'
She touched her tongue to the laceration inside her cheek. Pain. When she spoke, she formed the words carefully. 'He has abandoned me. He's dead.'
Dellin stared at her long. She felt him probing her feelings. I should feel invaded, she thought to herself. I should probably feel outraged and angry. But she could not summon the energy to feel anything. So she stood quietly before his penetrating gaze, which fixed not on her, but on somewhere infinitely beyond her. His touch on her mind was light and oddly soothing, reminding her of Vandien stroking her hair. Vandien. For a second she felt her grief, vibrating like the plucked wire of a harp. Vandien. Echoing off into the distance.
'No.' Dellin spoke conversationally. 'He's not dead.'
Ki felt no patience with his attempt to falsely comfort her. 'I saw the body,' she said in a cold voice. 'Look.
