“You, for instance.”
“Oh, he had me, for a while. For my last six months at school. I didn’t mind. But we both knew he was going to have to give me up once I reached my transition. There was no way that I was going to be a teacher. Not with my ancestry. Leal could accept that, but he couldn’t accept Kai, the second I had chosen. The second whose House I would have gone into. Although he might even have been able to stand that if I had been able to hide the fact that I was already in love with Kai. We met when she came to the school on some other business and Leal was the—”
“Wait a minute.” Teray turned to stare at her. “She?”
“That’s a good approximation of Leal’s tone when he realized what was happening,” said Amber. “I hope you’re not going to react as badly as he did.”
“I haven’t decided yet,” Teray answered. “Tell me the rest of it.”
She stopped her horse, causing Teray to stop, then spoke very softly. “You’d better decide before we get into Clayark Territory,” she said. “Leal’s reaction almost got me executed. I’m not going to risk my life with anybody else 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 girlfriends 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.
“She made me eat and took away my weariness and healed the bruises and sprains I had gotten thrashing around during my transition. Then she gave me supplies, put me on a horse, and told me to run. I got out just ahead of the group of Housemasters that had finally—twelve hours too late—realized what was happening.”
Amber stopped talking and they rode along in silence for a while, urging the horses faster as they came to a stretch of level ground, then slowing to climb another hill.
“She loved you,” said Teray finally.
“It was mutual. She almost lost her House because of me.”
“Only almost?”
“She would have if it hadn’t been for Michael. That’s where I knew him from. She had called for help from Forsyth when I was first charged. Michael was in our area on other business but he had C
layark trouble on his way to us.
“He arrived and looked at my memories—I was allowed to come back into the sector to be heard. He looked at the truths the Housemasters had ignored, then decided in Kai’s favor. He didn’t make them take me back, but at least he made them leave her alone.”
“It was too late anyway. You couldn’t have gone back to her then.”
“I know.”
“With you stronger than she is and possessing so much of her knowledge and experience … I don’t think she would have dared to take you back.”
“I’m glad she didn’t have to decide.”
Teray changed the subject abruptly. I think I’ve spotted some Clayarks.” He hadn’t had to say it. She was already looking off in the direction of the Clayarks. They were not visible, but there was definitely a group of them ahead, moving toward Teray and Amber. They were just beyond the next hill.
“Only a small group,” said Amber. “About twenty. They might go around the hill and pass us by.”
“Yes, and then they might notice our trail and follow us while one of them goes for reinforcements. Best to kill them.”
“All right. You take it.”
She opened to him as no one had since school, giving him access to and control over her mental strength. It was the way people who were close in the Pattern fought best. The way Joachim’s House fought, the way everyone fought in war when Rayal used the power that he held. But only Rayal could pull all the people together, funnel all their strength through his own mind, focus it on Clayarks anywhere from Forsyth itself to the northernmost Patternist sector. Lesser people grouped when they could with whomever they could—with whomever they trusted not to try to make the control permanent.
Inexpertly, Teray channeled Amber’s strength into his own. Then, almost doubly powerful, he reached out to the Clayarks.
The new strength was exhilarating, intoxicating. He almost had to hold himself back as he reached the Clayarks. Within one of them he located a large artery that led directly from the heart. He memorized its position so that he could find it quickly in the other Clayarks, then he ruptured the artery. The Clayark stumbled to the ground, clawing its chest.
Instantly the other Clayarks fled, scattering in all directions, but Amber, otherwise inactive, kept track of them, focusing and refocusing Teray on them until all were dead or dying.
Several minutes later they began riding past bodies. Amber was closed again—as closed as she could be while they were linked—and Teray had returned to her control over her mental strength. That strength was temporarily lessened, of course, as was Teray’s, but the lessening was slight. One of the dangers of lending mental strength to another person was that the other person might use too much of it, might drain the lender to exhaustion and death. But neither Teray nor Amber was anywhere near death.
Teray stared at the bodies sprawled over the hillside, saw the expressions of agony on many of the Clayark faces, and did not know whether to feel sick or triumphant. Not one Clayark had had time to fire a shot or even get a look at the enemy who killed him. Still, Clayarks too were known to do their killing from hiding. It was strange fighting, repelling somehow.
“You’ve never done that before, have you?” asked Amber.
“No.” Teray rode past a Clayark female, dead, with arms outstretched toward a smaller, completely naked version of herself. A relative perhaps. A daughter? Clayarks kept their children with them to be raised by the natural parents, Teray looked away from the pair, frowning. They were Clayarks. They would have killed him if they could have. They were carriers of the Clayark disease.
“I wanted you to handle it because I thought you hadn’t done it before.”
He turned to look at Amber almost angrily.
“I wanted to see you fight in a situation where there was no immediate danger,” she said.
“Did you think I hadn’t learned what to do back in school?”
“No, I was afraid you had. And unfortunately, you have.”
“The Clayarks are dead, aren’t they?” He was letting his disgust over what he had had to do spill over onto her and he didn’t care. What was she complaining about, anyway?
“The last couple of them almost got away.”
“Almost, hell! They’re dead.”
“If there had been just one or two more of them, we would have missed them. They would have been out of range before you could kill them. And sometime tonight or tomorrow, they would be back with all their friends.”
“You’re saying …”
“I’m saying you’re too slow. Way too slow. A big party of Clayarks would swallow us before you could do anything about it.”
“You could have done better?” Cold anger washed over him but his tone was mild, quiet.
“Teray, I’d be a little more diplomatic if it weren’t for the chance of our meeting an army of Clayarks over the next hill. But to put it bluntly, school methods just aren’t good enough out here. Will you let me teach you some others?”
“You want to teach me others?” he said in mock surprise. “Not handle the fighting yourself from now on?”
“Yes. You ought to have a chance to survive this trip even if something happens to me, or if we separate.”
“And I won’t without your teaching?”
“That’s right.”
“The hell with your teaching.”
She sighed. “All right then, you owe me this much. The next Clayarks we meet, let me handle them.”
“So you can show me how good you are at it. And I can change my mind.”
“No, Teray, so I can be sure of us living at least that much longer.” She spoke wearily, her words reaching him both through his ears and his mind. She was open again. And with his mind, he could not help but be aware of her absolute belief in what she was saying. In spite of her manner, she was not boasting. She was afraid. Afraid for him.
He felt the anger drain out of him to be replaced by something else. Something he could not quite name but that was far less comfortable than even the anger had been.
“Could you make it, Amber? Alone, I mean, from here to Forsyth.”
“I think so.” She was closed to him again.
“You know so.”
She said nothing.
“You’ve done it before.”
She shrugged. “I told you I was an independent. We travel.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Why should I have? The fact that I’ve done it before doesn’t insure that we’re going to make it now.”
“Especially not with me acting as a brake.”
Again she said nothing.
“We’re about the same age,” he said. “I’m the son of the two strongest Patternists of their generation, and I’m strong enough myself to succeed the Patternmaster. Yet here you are with your fifteen years of someone else’s memories and your four or five years of wandering. …”
“Would you rather travel with somebody who was deadweight?”
“I just don’t like feeling that I’m deadweight myself.”
“Don’t worry. With your strength, you aren’t. I would never have invited myself along with you if I had thought you would be.”
He looked at her sharply.
“No, that’s not the only reason,” she said, smiling. “You’ve got a few other good points.”
He sighed, and gave up without quite realizing that he was giving up.
“Like your tractable nature,” she said. “Open and let me show you how to kill Clayarks quickly.”
He obeyed, watching her with the same mistrust that she had shown for him earlier.
Chapter Six
YOU SEE,” AMBER WAS explaining, “we can’t afford to waste our time and strength punching holes in the Clayarks. That’s what they’re trying to do to us with their guns. Fight them on their own terms and sooner or later they’ll get you. There are just too many of them. In a large attack you’d have some of them blasting you apart while you were trying to pu
nch holes in others.”
Teray only half listened. His ears were full of the unfamiliar sound of the surf. He had spent all his life no more than a day’s ride from the beach, yet he had never seen the ocean through his own eyes. He had seen it through the eyes of others in the learning stones he had studied, but that was not the same. Now, as he and Amber rode down toward the oceanside trail, he gazed out, fascinated, at the seemingly endless water.
He could see tiny rocky islands offshore. Nearer, the waves broke against sand and rocks with a noisy vigor that sometimes drowned out what Amber was saying. But that did not matter. She was only emphasizing the information she had already given him mentally. Mental communication detracted from their awareness of the land—and possibly the Clayarks—around them. Thus she was repeating, summarizing aloud.
“I can do it,” he told her.
“Try it as soon as possible.”
“The next time we meet Clayarks.” But he was not eager to try her method of killing, or any method of killing again soon. In his mind’s eye, he could still see the Clayarks he had already killed. Maybe it would be easier if they were not human-headed or if he had not had a conversation with one. But she was right. He would not only have to get used to killing them, but he would have to kill more efficiently, in the way that she had shown him, if the two of them were to survive. He recalled the memory that she had given him of herself on foot, alone, running for the safety of Redhill two years before. She had been wounded but she had kept going. Her healer’s skill had kept her alive and conscious. And she was still killing, limiting the area of her perception to a long narrow wedge, sweeping that wedge around her like a hand of a clock. The Clayarks she touched in the deadly sweep convulsed and died. By the time they were dead, she had swept over six or seven more. They had managed to shoot her by firing from beyond the range of her sweep. But such long-range shooting required marksmanship that not all of them—not enough of them—possessed.