who’s that hostile.”
The link betrayed her hurt. She had taken Teray seriously and was waiting for rejection.
“Do you feel any hostility in me, Amber?”
She looked at him mistrustfully, then read the message the link held for her?his lack of any emotion beyond surprise and curiosity.
She, relaxed and they started forward again. “I’m touchy,” she said. “Leal taught me to be touchy.”
“Why did you tell me that part of it?”
“Because you would have found out anyway. Piece by piece. I would be thinking about it and off guard, and you would pick it up. We’re going to pay a price in mental privacy for our closeness.”
Teray nodded. “Well, Leal had reason to react with jealousy, but I…”
“Jealousy, anger, humiliation. How dare I put him aside for a woman? Poor teacher. He had trouble enough trying to compete with men for the women he wanted.”
“I don’t see why. He was the Schoolmaster. He
should have been able to attract plenty of women.”
“Yes, but not the ones he wanted. He could attract women teachers, but he considered them beneath his notice. He could and did attract older girl students, but they always had to either leave him or become teachers. He had the idea that women from outside the school were better. He tried to attract them?and usually failed. But until I met Kai, he had never lost one of his student girl friends to one of them. It was too much.”
“And Kai even had her own House.”
“Leal wouldn’t have hated her for that if she had gone to him instead of to me. Prestige. But since she didn’t, her House just became more fuel for his jealousy. He had always wanted a House of his own anyway, and he knew he’d never have one. He was almost too strong to be a teacher, but not nearly strong enough to be a Housemaster.”
“A stronger man would have reacted more reasonably.” Teray shrugged. “After all, you’re not that unusual.”
“Coransee didn’t react too well.”
He looked at her, startled. “What difference did it make to Coransee? It happened before you met him, and it didn’t keep you from staying for two years with him.”
“But it made a difference. I didn’t tell him. He found out by snooping through my thoughts just a few weeks ago. That was when he decided that I
was more of a challenge than he had thought. That was when he told me he intended to keep me in his House?deny my independence. Most people don’t try things like that with a healer.”
“Could he have succeeded?”
“Maybe, with his strength. Frankly, I’m afraid of him. That’s why I’d rather run away from him than fight him.”
Teray shook his head ruefully. “He has a habit of trying to domesticate people.”
“What about you?”
“I’m still curious. I want to know how a pre-Pattern child managed not to be executed for killing a person as important as a Housemaster. I’m surprised that his friends didn’t have you declared defective so that you would be destroyed before you gained your adult rights. And I’m curious about you and Kai. But all of that is your business. I don’t want you to tell me because you’re afraid I’ll ferret it out anyway. I won’t.”
“I don’t mind telling you, but that isn’t what I meant.”
No. He knew what she meant. “Last night I asked you what you wanted between us, and you said ‘something good.’ I think there was also the implication of ‘something temporary.’ That’s all right for a start, but I might turn out to be as bad as Coransee. I might try for more, too.”
She laughed. She had a nice laugh. “Don’t do it. One Coransee was enough. Now I’ll tell you the
rest of my story. By the way, are you checking wide for Clayarks? I’ve seen them in these hills.”
“Checking as widely as I can.” They were just getting into the low grassy hills that they had to cross to reach the ocean.
“All right. I wasn’t executed because Kai talked, bullied, and bribed some of the Housemasters of the sector council into voting to spare me. She didn’t tell them anything they didn’t already know?just that the killing was an accident, that I was only days away from my transition and my full rights as an adult, that the man I killed should never have been assigned to me anyway. They knew all that, of course, but they were so outraged, and, I think, so ashamed, that I, technically still a child, had managed to kill one of them … well they were more after vengeance than justice. The lead wife of the man I killed was there to goad them on. Leal was there telling as little of the truth as he could because he knew he was really to blame for the man’s death.
“Kai got me off, but she couldn’t get me all the way off. Instead of killing me, they exiled me from the sector. They meant for the Clayarks to do their killing for them. Kai was supposed to take me to the sector border and leave me there. Instead, she took me to her House. She induced transition?just a few days early, but early nevertheless.”
Amber drew a ragged breath, remembering. “I swear I’d rather let the Clayarks get me than go through anything like that again. I kept trying to just die and let it be over, and she kept bringing
me back. Did I mention that she was a healer too? Lucky thing. Although I didn’t think so then. She dragged me through all of it?stripped away my childhood shield before I was ready to shed it. Left me mentally naked to absorb all the free-floating mental garbage within miles of me. I got other people’s agony, violent emotions, everything, until I could manage to form the voluntary shield that I wasn’t really ready to form yet. I almost killed her while she was trying to save me. I didn’t know what I was doing. And I turned out to be stronger than she was.
“She pulled me through. But that wasn’t enough. She had to prepare me to leave the sector?to use the abilities I barely knew I had. There wasn’t time to teach me or time to do anything but print me with her memories. She gave me her fifteen years of leading her House. She made me assimilate all of it, not just let it sit the way you did with most of your Jackman memories. It was like becoming part of her?getting a whole new past that was only a few years shorter than my real past.
