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breaking and thattears were flooding her eyes, “I would not want to live, Leonie.”
    “So…” Leonie looked at her for a long moment, with a dreadful, remote sadness. “Does he understand
    how hard it will be, child?”
    “I think—I am sure I can make him understand,” Callista said, hesitating. “He promised to wait as long
    as we must.”
    Leonie sighed. After a moment she said, “Why, then, child… child, I do not want you to be unhappy. Even as I said, a Keeper’s oath is too heavy to be borne unconsenting.” Deliberately, a curiously formalgesture, she reached out her hands, palm up, to Callista; the younger woman laid her hands against theolder woman’s, palm against palm. Leonie drew a deep breath and said, “Be free of your oath, Callista Lanart. Before the Gods and before all men I declare you guiltless and unloosed from the bond, and I willso maintain.”
    Their hands slowly fell apart. Callista was shaking in every limb. Leonie took her kerchief and dried Callista’s eyes. She said, “I pray you are both strong enough, then.” She seemed about to say somethingmore, but stopped herself. “Well, I suppose your father will have a good deal to say about this, mydarling, so let us go and listen to him say it.” She smiled and added, “And then, when he has said it all,we will tell him what is to be, whether he likes it or not. Don’t be afraid, my child; I am not afraid of Esteban Lanart, and you must not be either.”

    Andrew waited in the greenhouse which stretched behind the main building at Armida. Alone, he lookedthrough the thick and wavy glass toward the outline of the faraway hills. It was hot here, with a thickscent of leaves and soil and plants. The light from the solar collectors made him narrow his eyes till he gotused to it. He walked through the rows of plants, damp from watering, feeling isolated and unfathomablyalone.
    It struck him like this, now and again. Most of the time he had come to feel at home here, more at homethan he had ever felt anywhere else in the Empire; more at home than he had felt since, at eighteen, the Arizona horse ranch where he had spent his childhood had been sold for debts, and he had gone intospace as an Empire civil servant, moving from planet to planet at the will of the administrators andcomputers. And they had welcomed him here, after the first few days of strangeness. When they heardthat he knew something of horse-breaking and horse-training, a rare and highly paid field of expertise on Darkover, they had treated him with respect, as a highly trained and skilled professional. The horses from Armida were said to be the finest in the Domains, but they usually brought their trainers up from Dalereuth, far to the South.

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    And so, in general, he had been happy here, in the weeks since he had come, as Callista’s pledgedhusband. His Terran birth was known only to Damon and   Dom   Esteban, to Callista and Ellemir; theothers simply thought him a stranger from the lowlands beyond Thendara. Beyond belief, he had foundhere a second home. The sun was huge and blood-tinged, the four moons that swung at night in thecuriously violet sky were strangely colored and bore names he did not yet know, but beyond all this, ithad become his home…
    Home. And yet there were moments like this, moments when he felt his own cruel isolation; knew it wasonly Callista’s presence that made it home to him. Under the noonday glare of the greenhouse, he hadone of those moments. Lonely for what? There was nothing in the world he had been taught to call hisown, the dry and barren world of the Terran HQ, nothing he wanted. But would there be a life for himhere after all, or would Leonie snatch Callista back to the alien world of the Towers?
    After a long time, he realized that Damon was standing behind him, not touching him—Andrew was usedto that now, among telepaths—but close enough that he could sense the older man as a comfortingpresence.
    “Don’t